ParkWise

Help drivers find parking spots easily and improve the utilisation of car parking resources by sharing.

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Inspiration

The inspiration of ParkWise is from our team members’ terrible parking experience when going to CBD or campus during hours, and the good experience to book sharing house by using Airbnb.
So ParkWise aims to help drivers find a parking spot easier and improve the utilisation of car parking resources, which can also contribute to less traffic issues and a better world.
Nowadays, it is not convenient for people to find a parking spot in CBD or university campus. And it worsens traffic congestion when people are struggling for finding a parking spot in rush hour. However, some parking spaces of houses are vacant when their owners drive to work during daytime, which causes a waste of resources.
Therefore, we came up with our idea to solve such problems. Our aim is to tell people how many parking spots are available and allow them to book one parking spot in advance. We collect all of three parking resources, including street parking area, private car park, and residents who are willing to rent out their parking spots. Consequently, ParkWise can help city council to relieve traffic jam, attract more customers for private car parks, reduce the cost of traffic infrastructure and help residents earn more money.

What it does

ParkWise is an online platform that connects parking resources and drivers. There are two main functions in ParkWise. Firstly, people can browse the real-time parking spots status in certain area so that they can spend less time in parking. Secondly, people can book a parking spot on ParkWise app in advance so that they can plan their schedule precisely. Furthermore, when booking a park spot, they have many choices, street parking spots, private car parks and sharing parking spots with different booking fee. Lastly, residents who have spare parking resources are encouraged to rent out their parking spot on ParkWise so that they can get profits and reliviate shortage of parking resources.

How I built it

The demo was designed by react-native which support cross-platform compilation, so it is easy to build an iOS app or Android app. It includes functions of parking resources status display, parking spots searching and booking.
The backend consists of an expressjs app and mongodb as database as they can provide fast development. All are host on google cloud compute engine, which can easily be scaled.

Challenges I ran into

• The profit model of our initial plan is not clear enough. Initially we set ParkWise as a free software that provides information on available parking spaces. Through communication with our mentor, we found that our project does not have a clear profit model and we change it into a final fee-sharing model with private parking lots and owners of sharing parking spaces.
• We brainstorm too many features that are difficult to choose or abandon. The ideas that we had raised up and finally disregarded including: credit mechanism for rewarding of reporting empty parking spaces and the telephone payment function for the elderly. These ideas were screened after pain point analysis which were taught on the workshop of Design Thinking.
• We are faced with technical implementation issues, including: how to achieve synchronization adaptation in Android and iOS systems, and how to monitor vacant parking spaces in real time. In the end, we used the react-native platform to develop and solve these problems by connecting with Google Maps, government metre data, and private parking data.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• Our idea of "parking space sharing & booking" fundamentally solves the problem of insufficient parking spaces.
• We help drivers find parking spaces easily, which makes it easier for them to control their driving plans than ever before, and obviously give them a better driving experience.
• To a certain extent, we helped the government solving the problem of urban traffic congestion and air pollution.

What I learned

Through this implementation of the business plan, we learned the importance of clear user needs and visible profit models for entrepreneurial vision. At the same time, we found that before choosing a business idea, it is necessary to fully estimate the implementation costs and development cycle.

What's next for ParkWise

• ParkWise will gradually expand to more big cities, starting from cities with high density of workers in the CBD, such as Sydney and Melbourne, and gradually cover the whole Australia.
• At the same time, ParkWise will encourage more private car park, sharing parking spaces and government public parking spaces to get involved in ParkWise.
• For longer-term goals, ParkWise will add more features in the app and consider the hardware and software development of the parking monitoring system as well as the comprehensive parking management services.

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