find_parking
Finds parking near a place, coordinate, or motorway: rest areas, car parks, park-and-ride, and truck stops, with total spaces and live availability. Use when asked where to park, stop, or rest.
Instructions
Returns parking near a place, a coordinate or along one motorway: rest areas with lorry spaces, car parks and park-and-ride sites, with total spaces and, where published, how many are free now and that reading's age. Use when someone asks where to park, stop, rest or leave the car for the train ("Parkhaus in Köln", "Rastplatz A3", "P+R"). Do NOT use for fuel — call find_cheapest_fuel — or for charging an electric car — call find_charging_station. Radius ≤ 25 km, ≤ 10 sites. No "free now" means the operator publishes no count, not that it is full. Every answer carries 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: "rest_area" = motorway rest and service area (no feed we ingest classifies this category at all, so an answer filtered to it says so and names the parking we do hold), "car_park" = public car park (Parkhaus/Parkplatz), "park_and_ride" = P+R beside a station, "truck" = lorry parking, "any" = all of them. Default "any". Pass a kind only when the person named one — "Rastanlage"/"Raststätte" is "rest_area", 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 the five: 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. | |
| 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 ("A7"), or a street address with a house number ("Hauptstraße 12, 36037 Fulda"). 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. Give either place OR lat+lon, never both. | |
| 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 because it has a default — the default is only the fallback when the language is genuinely unclear, and an English question answered in German is 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. | |
| only_with_free_spaces | No | Set true ONLY when the person insists on somewhere with free spaces 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. |