Project Story
Inspiration
Driving personal vehicles is bad enough with carbon emissions and the stress of being stuck in traffic during long commutes. Even worse is the time wasted looking for parking, especially at busy events with limited spaces or in high-density urban areas. We have all spent over an hour looking for parking, only to leave us frustrated or even worse, end up having to turn around and go home. Even when attempting to use park and ride for public transportation, parking lots and garages often get so full that people are unable to park. Personally, I have experienced going to the Angle Lake parking garage for the Seattle Link Light Rail. The parking garage is huge and has 6 levels, yet often gets full before 9am and prevents people from being incentivized to park and use greener forms of transportation. Yet, with hosted parking in people’s driveways or in private business parking lots, parking will be expanded to allow situations like these to be prevented and prevent the stress of having to search for parking.
What it does
Park Spotter is an app that connects drivers to hosted parking locations. Individuals or businesses can host any extra parking space they have, and drivers can pay to park in the spaces.
How we built it
After lots of brainstorming, analyzing existing INRIX data, and narrowing down our idea, we started with figuring out how to display the geographical map on the front end using Flutter and Dart. Later on, we moved on to placing markers on the map based on latitude and longitude. With the backend, we were able to use a Python API to retrieve data from the INRIX Off-Street Parking data. We could then parse through to find all the open parking spots within a specific radius at a given location with their coordinates. Eventually, we connected the front end and the back end, to take these coordinate values and then run them through to display them on the map in the app.
Challenges we ran into
We got stuck for a while on how to start implementing our idea. Most of us had only coded in Java and a little bit of Python, and none of us had used APIs before. We asked many mentors for help before we were able to start coding, but we found our path in the end.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to formulate an idea after brainstorming various options for transportation solutions, and that we were able to design a working front-end and back-end, and combine them together. As first-time hackathons, we also learned a lot during these 24 hours.
What we learned
We learned how to add a map and markers onto a screen on Flutter, what an API is and how to integrate it into code, how to code in Python, how to use tokens, and how front end/back end integration works. We also learned how to formulate a working idea and create a whole project from that within 24 hours.
What's next for Park Spotter
Our app has far more potential than what we were able to code for during this Hackathon. As we expand, we would want to include more specific parking recommendations by accounting for both price and distance from the desired location. We also would have separate tabs for finding both event parking and personal/daily parking. Additionally, we would want to create member profiles for all users of Park Spotter, so both users and hosts can be given ratings for their parking/spots. We would also expand our marketing efforts, so the market of hosts providing parking increases, and so people know about the helpful service we provide.
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