Recently, I was driving in NYC and, as expected, when I got to my destination I could not find parking. I ended up paying for parking, but it reminded me of an idea I had years ago. A parking app that allowed users to share open parking spots. It was one of my first app ideas that I worked on years ago, called the Parking App. The idea is that a a user will share when they saw an open car spot or if they plan to leave a parking spot, they share it too. It would go based off a honor system and allow people to see places where there might be parking.
Today, it reminds me a lot of the waze app, where users are able to report police, items in the street, cars on the side of the road, etc. Imagine having an app that shows open parking spots in some of the largest cities. It even shares hydrants or places where you can't park! It would be great and save so much time.
I remember when I was building the app, I ran into a lot of questions some included:
Why would people use this app? What are the top incentives? I was thinking about a point system where if a user shares a spot they get points that will give them more opportunities to see spots. If you never contribute to the app, you wont see spots or may not see as many spots. It would make people want to share more so that they can have more chances of seeing free open parking spots.
Security. We want to make sure a user is unable to know a persons location. For example, we don't want someone to say a place has an open parking spot and be waiting for someone to park there.
Should people be able to save spots. Right now, it's just a trusting honor system, but what if people began to save spots for people. For example, if they knew they were leaving soon. Add it and give a countdown for someone who needs a spot in the area.
Hmmm, these are all just thoughts. I still love this idea and hopefully one day I can pick it back up again. I would need more IOS and Android developers, but it would be a fun open source project to work on. If you have any ideas to add or if you are interested in this idea. Comment below!
As always thank you for reading!
Top comments (1)
Hi Brittany, I think your idea of building an open-sourced parking app is awesome! I live in NYC too and I know how frustrating it can be to find a spot. I’m curious about how you plan to collect and update the parking data. Do you have any resources or tutorials on how to build a parking app that you can share? I would love to learn more and maybe contribute to your project. 😊