How Zippark works
What Zippark is
Zippark is a free, live map of parking availability across NSW, focused on Sydney CBD. It shows you where parking is and how busy it looks right now, so you can pick a spot before you get there.
The map, the rules, reports, timers and saved spots all work with no account and no sign-up — you just open it and use it. There is no booking and nothing to pay for parking. It works in a browser, and as an app. There's an optional paid tier, zippark+, which adds alerts, synced saved spots and no ads.
Where the map comes from
Around 29,000 parking locations across NSW are seeded from OpenStreetMap — car parks, parking stations and kerbside areas. It's reference data: locations, and where available, details like capacity or whether it's paid. Locations are refreshed periodically rather than fetched live.
How busy each spot is
- Plenty of spaces
- Limited spaces
- Full
- Unknown
These colours come from reports left by other drivers. A report counts for 45 minutes, and then the spot goes back to “unknown”. More recent reports carry more weight — a report loses half its influence every 15 minutes — and each person counts as one vote per spot, so repeat-tapping can't skew it.
Report a spot in a tap
Open any spot and say whether it has plenty of space, is limited, or is full. It takes a second, and it's what keeps the map live for the next person. There's light rate-limiting so one person can't flip a spot back and forth.
Live Park&Ride occupancy
A separate layer shows real-time occupancy for Transport for NSW Park&Ride and Metro commuter car parks, straight from the TfNSW Open Data Hub — actual bay counts, not crowdsourced.
These facilities are suburban — the nearest is roughly 11 km from the CBD — so it's a distinct layer from the CBD street map, toggled from the toolbar.
Finding and getting there
Search a destination, or tap “Find a park near me” to use your device location and centre the map on you. Pick a spot to see a route preview, then hand off to Google Maps (or Apple Maps on iPhone and iPad) for turn-by-turn navigation. You can save spots and see recently viewed ones — those stay on your device.
What Zippark is not
- It doesn't reserve, book or pay for parking.
- A green spot is a recent report from another driver, not a guarantee a bay is free when you arrive.
- It isn't affiliated with Transport for NSW, Mapbox, OpenStreetMap or any parking operator.
- Always follow posted signs, meters and restrictions — they override anything shown in the app.
The app is early, and coverage will be patchier in some areas than others.
Privacy and contact
The free app has no account and doesn't ask who you are. An account is optional and exists only for zippark+, the paid tier; it asks for an email address and nothing else, and you can delete it from inside the app. Your device location is used on your device to centre the map and isn't stored on Zippark's servers.