find_parking
Read-onlyIdempotent
Parking near a place, a coordinate or along one motorway: lorry parks, car parks, P+R and disabled-badge bays, with total spaces, stated amenities (WC, shower) and published free spaces. Use when asked where to park or leave the car for the train ("Parkhaus in Köln", "Rastplatz A3", "P+R"). Do NOT use for fuel (find_cheapest_fuel) or EV charging (find_charging_station). Radius ≤ 25 km, ≤ 10 sites per list; ODbL and CC BY-SA sources are separate lists (up to three). No "free now" means no published count, not full. No prices: for "was kostet" say so, no call. Show each source's attribution.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| lat | No | Latitude in WGS 84, e.g. 48.137. Use with lon when the caller already holds coordinates; otherwise use place. | |
| lon | No | Longitude in WGS 84, e.g. 11.576. Use with lat; otherwise use place. | |
| kind | No | Which kind of parking: "car_park" = public car park (Parkhaus/Parkplatz), "park_and_ride" = P+R beside a station, "truck" = lorry parking, "any" = all of them. Default "any". "disabled_badge" = on-street bays reserved for a disabled parking permit (Behindertenparkplatz, Schwerbehindertenparkplatz), where a municipality publishes them, with a sensor's free/occupied where one is fitted — pass it only when such a bay was asked for; it is never part of "any" and takes place or lat+lon, not road. Rest areas are NOT a kind we can filter: no source we hold classifies them, so for "Rastanlage"/"Raststätte"/"rest area" leave kind out ("truck" when lorry spaces were asked for); "rest_area" is still accepted and answered as "any", with a sentence saying why. Pass a kind only when the person named one — a lorry driver asking for a break wants "truck", someone leaving the car for the train wants "park_and_ride". A camper, a caravan or a coach is none of these: leave the argument out rather than filtering a tourist into lorry bays. | any |
| road | No | A single motorway number to list parking along, e.g. "A3" ("A 3" and "a3" are the same road). Use this when the person named a road and no town — "Rastplatz auf der A7". Give road OR place OR lat+lon, never two of them: a road is a 900 km line and a place is a point, so the two answer different questions. When the question names BOTH — "Parkhaus in Köln an der A3" — use the place: a person parks at a point, and the radius already covers the motorway beside it. A road list is in name order and cannot follow a direction of travel: for "A4 Richtung Görlitz" ask with place for the destination or the next town on the way instead, which answers nearest first. | |
| limit | No | How many facilities to return, nearest first (1–10, default 5). | |
| place | No | Where to look, as free text: a city ("München", "Munich"), a district or Kreis ("Kreis Fulda"), a Bundesland, a station or stop ("Hamburg Hbf"), a motorway junction ("AK Neufahrn"), or a street address with a house number ("Bahnhofstraße 12, 36037 Fulda"). A motorway number alone ("A7") resolves to the road, which has no single point — name a town or junction on it instead. Use this instead of coordinates whenever the person named a place. An address needs its town or postcode — a street and a number alone exist in many towns. A place or lat+lon is required (unless the tool names another way in, such as a road): when the person named neither, ask them for a town, a postcode or their position before calling. Given both, the answer is about lat+lon with the place as its label, and is refused only when the two lie further apart than the search reaches. | |
| language | No | Set this on every call to the language the person is writing in: "en" if they wrote English, "de" if they wrote German. Do not leave it out: it defaults to German ("de"), which is only the fallback when the language is genuinely unclear, so an English question sent without it is answered in German — a wrong answer. Place names, station names and road numbers are never translated in either language; in English the German term is kept in parentheses so the person recognises it on signs and in local apps. | de |
| radius_km | No | Search radius around place or lat+lon in kilometres (1–25, default 10). Ignored when you pass road, which covers the whole motorway. Start small in a city and widen if the answer is empty. | |
| facilities | No | Keep only sites whose own publisher states ALL of these amenities: "toilet", "shower", "restaurant", "snack", "cafe", "shop", "fuel", "charging", "drinking_water", "picnic", "playground", "wifi", "security", "accessible_toilet". Pass it only when the person asks for one — "Rastplatz mit Dusche an der A7" → road "A7", facilities ["shower"]; "car park with a toilet near Köln Hbf" → facilities ["toilet"]. Many publishers state no amenities, so the filter can narrow the answer to little; an amenity nobody stated is unknown, not absent, and the answer says how many sites state any. A toilet, restaurant or charger merely NEAR a site (listed beside it, from OpenStreetMap or the charging register) never satisfies the filter. Leave it out otherwise: every listed site already carries its amenity line. | |
| only_with_free_spaces | No | Set true only when the person asks whether spaces are free right now. It keeps just the facilities whose operator publishes live occupancy AND currently reports a space, and the result says how many were dropped for publishing nothing — most German parking publishes no occupancy at all, so true usually narrows the answer to very little. Default false. |