Cars are incredible as long as you are riding them. But once you reach your destination, they can be a major nuisance if you can’t find a parking space nearby. While that may not be an issue in residential areas or suburbs, anyone who often visits business districts knows exactly what we are talking about. And this isn’t just a matter of convenience but a very complicated problem owing to constraints like:
- Everyone can’t just buy a parking space as they tend to be quite expensive. The costliest parking spot clocked close to a million dollars!
- You can’t afford a parking ticket every day. Not only do they cost anywhere between $50-$100, but may eventually cost your driving license as well.
Now if you can’t buy a parking space and getting a parking ticket every day is not an option, what do you do? You simply look out for available spots! And as astonishing as this may sound, studies indicate that almost 30% of the traffic in an average city consists of vehicles searching for nearby parking spots. That’s an incredible waste of time and energy.
You might be thinking why don’t they build enough parking spaces? But like most of us, you are mistaken. The problem isn’t the shortage of parking spaces- a good portion parking spaces lie vacant even during the peaking hours. The problem is the mismatch. That’s where parking space finder apps step into the picture. They are the perfect antidote to all the three problems and if implemented well, can be a very lucrative business.
If you are looking to build a parking app, there are numerous possible ways of which three of the most popular include:
By geography
This is the most common approach to booking parking space by mobile apps. The application simply asks the location and offers a list of nearby parking spots that can be booked from within the app.
By time
Another approach to booking a parking space is to factor in time as well. For instance, office goers need parking space for an entire day and thus it makes sense to show them only tho parking space that has no booking for the entire day.
On-the-go
Both the above approaches work best for planned visits. But what if someone is just driving by and needs to park somewhere. For that parking, applications can use a mix of consumer location and geo-fencing to show available parking space in real-time.
It is worth noting at this point that the three approaches we have mentioned above aren’t exclusive but overlapping in nature. You can use any or a mix of all approaches to build your parking spot finder app that best suits the market you are serving. Once you have a basic structure on place, there are also a few additional measures that you must take into account:
Navigation
Any parking finder app shouldn’t just book parking spaces but also lead their customers to it. For that, you would need to integrate location-based services to navigate users to their booked parking spot.
Alerts
For bookings done on an hourly basis, the parking finder app should automatically send alerts when their time is closing to an end and even given them the option to extend it for another hour or two.
