Park Earn

Providing cheap parking and putting a little something in your wallet

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The problem

When people say they are solving something, they generally mean fighting cancer, world hunger, poverty, pollution and more. But, there is one structure which causes problems for urban communities. Yes, the problem is parking spots.

Why? Basically speaking parking lots take up a lot of space and they have to since laws mandate there should be enough parking for customers when they come to shop. This is why usually parking lots are mostly empty just like this twitter user describes as the most full: Alt text

What parking lots like these create is the sheer area used up and thus increases traffic as well as carbon emissions since cars have to travel the extra distance.

Besides this, as a driver parking may or may not be available on the street since the driver may park somewhere close or far away from his destination. Slap on ever rising expensive parking fees and this creates expensive parking in and around the shopping centres / hubs.

With new laws and regulations trying to cut down the number of parking, the number of parking spots would decrease around busy hubs and centres meaning it would take much more time finding one and would become more expensive as a result.

Inspiration

While looking at a map, a busy shopping centre and malls are surrounded by residential areas which are 1-2 min walk away and with all the hustle and bustle in the middle of these areas, so why not let people living close to these areas rent out their driveways during the time when they are away at work (or when they don't have a car) so the drivers can book a parking beforehand and don't have to worry about finding a parking spot while the renter makes a bit of extra income during the times they specify to rent the driveway out.

Data available from the Melbourne city council also allows to find parking bays in the CBD which also shows more parking for the driver who wants to find a parking space as soon as possible. This would also mean that drivers can start coming in and start parking which would give time to slowly grow and allow more people to rent out their driveways to create much more parking spaces in and around the suburbs as well.

How we built it

It was namely built using react and node.js using different api's such as firebase as a database and twilio to send out an SMS message to notify the booking / reminder that a parking is coming up. We used all sorts of technologies during the competition: tinycolor2 for consistent colour throughout our application, calendar-month-array for a custom 7-day availability UI element we built during the hackathon, mapbox-gl for displaying where the driveways are on the map, csv-parse for parsing and displaying the Melbourne City open parking sensor data, and echarts for the dashboard visualisations.

Challenges we ran into

We had some issues getting the twilio API working due to cross-domain errors, and some frontend and backend work took quite some time. We eventually decided to do all data and database storage on the client using sql.js, so that we could eliminate potential security issues and focus on our interface. Authentication was an issue which took some time to figure out. Dynamic routing as used in a react app with something like react-router was challenging due to differences in development versus production URLs. Geocoding controls were tricky to implement due to reliance on external mapbox code.

We had multiple issues running our application on different systems due to some of the technologies being of differeng versions. We fixed these errors by changing our config files according to the systems and then updating our repo with those changes. There were also challenges due to us having conflicts when all contributing to the shared GitHub repository, but we were able to successfully resolve these.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Something that we’re very proud of getting the proof of concept application ready and working in the space of a weekend. We have worked very hard and tirelessly to translate what we think is a brilliant idea into an application that solves a great problem faced by millions around the world.

What we learned

We have learnt a lot about developing applications in React, Node.js, Firebase and full-stack development in general and this has definitely helped improve our technical skills. But the most important bit is that we have worked together as a team and learnt skills such being flexible and result oriented, being able to transform user requirements to the final product, identifying risks and reducing defects as well as performance and concurrency testing. We’ve also communicated very well among our members to deliver this product and learnt to take ownership of our tasks and look at the bigger picture.

What's next for Park Earn

About 40% of all melbourne parking spaces are left unused and reducing this would mean there would be more public buildings, homes and offices and thus more people having using the application either to find a cheap parking or have an extra source of income.

Also having a large driveway for the disabled would also be advantageous since it would give a bit more support for the drivers coming in to park who would require a bit more space to get in and out of a car.

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