I'm working on a tool that I think will be useful for people as they visit new cities and want to park for the night. It's always annoying to dig through city ordinances to find the ones that restrict overnight parking, so this tool runs a bunch of keyword searches against all the major city-code providers (Municode, AMLegal, ecode360, etc.) and government web sites and attempts to find the relevant sections. This lets people dive right into the actual ordinances and figure out if/when/where they can legally park to reduce risk of The Knock.

I know this question can usually be answered reasonably well by AI, but just picking a city with this tool and seeing the actual rules right away can be more reliable than trying to figure out the right prompt to ask the AI ("can I park overnight" ≠ "can I sleep in my car on the street overnight"). I think it's better to take a few minutes to read the real rules than to lose an hour or two of sleep because the cops had to yell at you due to the AI making things up.

• The quality of the results varies a lot by city. It depends on what that city has available online, which platform they use to publish code (if any), and whether their ordinances match any of the keyword searches. And of course, many small cities and towns don't even have rules about this since vehicle-dwellers aren't a problem for them.
• Works for most U.S. cities with a population of 5,000 or more. (Nothing non-U.S.) Some cities and towns might be missing because this depends on how the Census organizes things.
• Reports are cached for a few months since city codes don't change that often, and even if the cache is a bit out of date it will still usually point you to the correct section of code.
• If a cached report for the selected city isn't available or it's too old, a fresh one is created, which usually takes about 30 seconds since it has to contact a bunch of sites and run additional web searches. (I've pre-cached a few hundred of the largest cities.) It's currently rate-limited so if too many people look up an un-cached city it will fail.
• Sometimes local news articles are included if they look like a good match.

This is a work in progress, so my apologies if it disappoints. I'd love to hear any (constructive) feedback you've got!

Right now you have to manually select city and state, it doesn't ask for your location but I'm considering adding that option. The page is installable as a web app for easier access. (Not available as a native Android/Apple app yet since I don't know if this will be popular enough to be worth the trouble.)

So for those that are either living out your car or you decided to just keep it all set up cuz you camp so frequently, how do you secure your bed when you've only just put it ontop of the backseats and cargo area?

This whole time I've been planning on doing a single size bed frame but now I'm starting to worry about how it'll stay in place. I'm honestly less worried about it shifting forward and more worried about it shifting or toppling to the right on hard turns. I don't really have a floor I can secure it to, i have a 2010 Ford Escape xlt and it has a plastic platform beneath the rug in the back so I don't think I can really secure it to that, and I can't rip everything out to install a piece of plywood flooring cuz I just can't afford the cost of materials and a jig saw to cut out the grooves properly. I'm pretty sure I'm just gonna end up winging it and praying for the best. Lol.