Reserve ahead to reduce stress and circling time.

Offset high costs of city living.

Rest assured with hardware sensors.

Improve the urban environment for everyone.

Overview

PARK is a mobile app that allows drivers to locate and reserve available parking spaces meeting their needs.

• Filter by indoor/out, distance to destination, lighting, accessibility, etc.

• Reserve and pay for through mobile application

• Navigate directly to your space

PARK allows people to earn value from their extra or empty parking spaces.

• List your spot’s amenities and availability schedule.

• Earn money towards your bills or PARK credit to use for your parking needs. 

Process

The team of four:
Defined the problem and investigated solutions,
Created wireframes, users stories and feature lists, and
Developed a business model to assess sustainability of possible solutions. 

Problem Definition & Solution Ideation

Parking in an urban area can be frustrating, time-consuming and stressful.

• Users must navigate congested terrain looking for spots while constantly re-evaluating the price to pay for a spot.

• A 16-city study found that the time individuals spend searching for free parking contributed to over 8% of total traffic (Shoup, High Cost of Free Parking, 2006). 

Meanwhile, privately owned off-street parking spots sit empty for large portions of the day.

• Could these be leveraged as additional parking options for urban drivers?

• Could the owners of those spots offset their high urban housing costs by offering their parking space as a short-term rental?

PARK aims to connect these customer segments (drivers and spot owners) by using a multi-sided matchmaking platform.

• Like other for-rent-by-owner systems, an app-based database will contain all spots for rent and their specifications in a map with filters.

• The app will pair the driver with an available spot in the area with the features requested.

• The driver will be able to reserve a spot, and navigate directly to it using the app, reducing stress and environmental impact.

Revenue Model Study — Seattle Launch City (2016 estimates)

Street parking in Seattle is $1 to $4 per hour, and garages can range from $3 to $50 daily. If Spot Owners set their rates to compete with this average, PARK can make approximately $0.25 per spot per hour by charging a ten percent mark up fee.

• PARK will earn $2 per spot per day for someone renting the spot during an 8-hour business day.

• Assuming that about half of PARK’s customers are parking for a full day, and half for shorter appointments, meetings, or social activities, further estimates will be based on earning $1 per parking customer per day.

There are approximately 288,000 single-family housing units, and 70,000 cars that come into the city each day.

• If PARK captures 10%* of parking needs for cars entering Seattle, revenue would reach $2.5 million in year five.
  (*based on Uber’s displacement of 10% of taxi services in its first five years.)

Relatively simple upkeep by leveraging of other services (Paypal, Google Maps) will require two full time software developers, a marketer, insurance, and materials, including the hardware sensors.

• Standard salaries, insurance rates, and RFID stickers at $0.50 a piece put annual expenses at approximately $500,000.

• Projected revenues sufficiently cover these with a margin for unforeseen additional expenses.