A computer-implemented method, system, and computer-readable medium is disclosed for determining an estimated available parking distance for a vehicle via vehicle side detection in one or more image frames from an operational video. The operational video can be acquired from a fixed parking occupancy video camera and can include a field of view associated with a parking region. The method can include obtaining operational video from a fixed parking occupancy video camera; detecting, within a region of interest (ROI) of the one or more image frames from the operational video, a side of one or more vehicles parked in a parking region facing a traffic lane using a trained classifier that is trained to detect the side of the one or more vehicles; and determining an estimated available parking distance based on the side of the one or more vehicles that are detected.