Plot | Devpost

Inspiration

One of the teammates, Prabvir, was recently gifted his brother's car, and he was struggling just to find parking in Madison, especially during the summertime, since there were many open parking spots behind his house. Since a property management firm owned them, he couldn't use them because they didn't commercialize their usage. This is a lot of deadweight loss. We'd want to eliminate all this deadweight loss. There are too many parking permits or parking permits that need to be used. We could devise a system to rent out these parking permits because it's a win-win-win. The parking operator gets money, the leaser gets money, and then someone gets to find parking at a convenient location that's close to them and they're willing to pay.

What it does

The prototype is very simple. It just allows someone to create a listing of their own parking spot. We're focusing on individuals with houses with driveways or even businesses that could use this. Another person will be able to search the listings based on some criteria like range, how close it is, the price, and when they need it. Then they'll be able to see all the available bookings and then reserve one. Then it will no longer be available to anyone else.

How we built it

Our fronted is done in React, which has all the authentication information(login/registration), listing inventory and etc. Our middleware(API) is constructed using express.js and typescript, which make requests to a MongoDB database with 2 specific collections, one for users, and one for listings.

Challenges we ran into

Odd bug with express: a request would work on a single machine, but the request wouldn't work anywhere else. We figured out that it was an encoding issue and how we were sharing it, and it wasn't an issue in the end(but it did hamper our time). It was also kind of challenging to serialize the date ranges in a uniform iso

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of seeing the whole vision coming together and making the functionality come true, especially when it all started with a dream and a whiteboard sketch.

What we learned

Have fun, take risks, and don't be afraid to fail because without failure, success would be impossible.

What's next for Plot

We want to put this prototype into use by asking people during high-demand days(game days) if they would be interested in joining our platform! We also want to digitize parking permits and make them non-fungible in the future!