parkanywhere.online

Logo
UI Mockup (Find spots near you)
UI Mockup (Book a spot)
UI Mockup (Park and ride)

Inspiration

Congestion is a serious problem across major cities across the world and it has been a complex issue to solve; in fact, humanity has yet to develop a solution to completely solve congestion. As a team, we want to develop a creative solution to indirectly ease the issue of congestion and the environmental impact of extensive congestion using the advantages provided by a mobile app format.

What it does

During peak hours, people spend a long time trying to drive around the street and find a vacant parking spot in popular areas; the "driving around" part, when multiplied, is a significant contributing factor of congestion on collector and local roadways. Indeed, parking is often hard to find and the process of searching for a parking spot is a main contributing factor that causes long congestion and delays across the entire world. parkanywhere.online is an app that solves this problem by removing that process. It provides the ability for end-users to search and pre-book empty parking slots close to a specified location, which the parking slots are made available by other end-users on the platform whether they are residential, commercial, or industrial.

How we built it

The main application was built using Java and Android Studio, with additional data stored in Google Cloud Firestore. We also created and deployed a backend server with expressJS and Heroku that hosts our domain parkanywhere.online, and to perform additional tasks that are not convenient to perform in the front-end.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we have run into during this hackathon are mainly technical since all of us are experimenting and troubleshooting with technologies that we may have never heard about prior to development. Due to everyone in the team having drastically different skill sets, we have also run into communication problems that required us to rewrite some of our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we are able to pair up a team of four with us being complete strangers, come up with an intuitive project idea and a plan, and actually making a sort of working prototype in a short time span of 36 hours.

What we learned

Integrating a mobile app with third-party APIs
Integrating a mobile app with a database store
Managing and deploying applications with Google Could Platform

What's next for parkanywhere.online

We are looking forward to implementing features that potentially promote higher transit usage, by working with transit agencies and potentially opening up more "park and ride" facilities, which allows users that don't live within a walking distance to transit to access transit more easily. We could also extend the idea of renting a spot beyond cars, and perhaps add other types of space such as bicycle storage, or EV charger.