A little help when parking in London

Yellow Line Parking is an iOS app that aims to help you park in the urban jungle of London. It’s a spectacularly impressive attempt at a very complex subject, and we reckon it’s going to go down a storm.

Packed with clever features

Obviously, Yellow Line Parking’s main aim is to help you find a parking space. In a city beset by parking restrictions, congestion zones and a whole lot of people, a little help is virtually essential.

To achieve this, Yellow Line Parking offers a number of different options. It’s integrated with Google Maps and uses your phone’s geolocation features, so it knows exactly where you’re looking.

Once it has identified your location, it lets you know the status of the kerb around you, informing you of restrictions, road markings, time limits and more. You can also search a theoretical time and location in the future, so you can plan ahead.

Yellow Line Parking has more nice features once you’ve parked your car. You can mark it on the map and then set an alarm, so your phone can warn you when your time is up or your meter is running out. It will also provide a variety of routes to get back to your car, so when it’s time to go, you won’t waste time looking on the wrong road.

This app is also packed with other features designed to make London parking a little less terrifying. Thre are parking tips, golden rules, explanation of parking laws, and a borough-by-borough rundown of parking regulations. These (and the options) aren’t yet complete, but there is plenty of information in there as things stand, and when it’s finished, it’s going to be a humdinger.

You’ll soon get the hang of it

Yellow Line Parking looks a bit chaotic when you open it first, but it won’t take long to get a hang of all the icons and buttons. Bear in mind that as well as the map, clicking on the icon in the upper left corner will take you to the Alarm, Borough Info, Golden Rules and more.

If we’re being strict, we found Yellow Line Parking’s controls to be a little imprecise. You sometimes have to press or swipe several times to elict a reaction. We also noticed that upon exiting a menu, the app threw us back to our current location, which was not where we were looking for spaces. On the move, this won’t be a problem, but it you’re trying to plan ahead, it could get irritating.

Decent quality that could be improved

This app is pretty good, and everything works more or less how it should. As we mentioned above, however, we thought some areas of the app were a little shoddy, with menus that looked odd-sized and controls that didn’t respond quickly. We’re confident that these are teething problems though, and are pretty sure that future versions will be much smoother.

An awesome app that could get even better

Yellow Line Parking is the kind of app that doesn’t come around very often. It’s useful, well-planned, packed with features and easy to use. Even if you only occasionally drive in London, you should install Yellow Line Parking, and if you drive frequently, well, frankly we’re impressed that you’ve survived this long without it!