time of entry into the lot entry and the duration of stay in the lot stay these individual vehicle variables combine with the fixed information of the capacity of the lot to provide information on space availability in the lot data collection and manipulation using a computing means will follow the procedure depicted in fig4 the computing means is not depicted but it would be any computer capable of storing the information and processing the information using the guidelines disclosed below the variables of interest for system algorithms are id vehicle identifier entry time of entry stay duration of stay in the lot reported or assumed time time of inquiry into lot usage taken parking spaces taken at the time of inquiry capacity parking lot capacity avail parking spaces available at the time of inquiry for vehicles that have arrived at the lot actual time of arrival entry and the intended stay reported by the driver stay will be entered into the database for analysis as an assumption needs to be made for vehicles arriving at the lot after the current time but before the time of interest in lot use this assumption could come from vehicles passing a checkpoint in which case the assumption might also come from historical data in which case times of entry and expected stay would be entered based on computations and analysis from the database or spreadsheet a query such as the following structured query language sql query will determine the number of vehicles.