The Problem
Have you ever had to park your car in Singapore on a street-side lot or an old carpark with no electronic gantry? Then you would have experienced paying with this:
Yes, the dreaded, incovenient, troublesome, time-consuming and messy parking coupon.
Why are we still paying with parking coupons in 2016?
What it does
ParkOff is a convenient carparking payment app to be used for street-side parking or carparks without an electronic gantry.
Carparking Payment
Once a driver has parked their car: Instead of punching out a long parking coupon, the driver simply has to get out, open up ParkOff:
The user can then use the app to scan a QR code of the their parking lot, which can be conveniently found near the parking lot.
The app will then inform the user of their parking address and lot no., and prompt them for their selected duration for parking.
Once confirmed, the booking status with start and end time is then shown. Payment is only made when the user chooses to leave the lot.
When the user wants to leave, they simply end the booking. The app informs the user of the total price and the user can then make the payment with a card which they could have already previously stored.
This makes the whole process of parking and payment much simpler,easier and faster.
Extending your booking
Often, we have to extend our carparking timing and rush back to our cars to punch out a new coupon and have it in place.
With ParkOff, if the need arises, we can extend our booking timing from anywhere.
The app will prompt the user for duration to extend:
The extension is made and the driver can continue to do what they were doing peacefully.
Finding Parking Availability
With the new system in place, we now have a database to track individual parking lots and their booking statuses.
ParkOff uses this information to help the user search for any free parking lots, from anywhere.
Driver's can now decide if they want to drive to their popular street-side restaurant, and whether there will be parking available there.
How we built it
ParkOff is built with the Ionic Framework (http://ionicframework.com/).
We have also integrated a barcode scanner plugin(https://github.com/sitepoint-editors/Cordova-QR-Code-Reader).
Challenges and Learning Points
All of these technologies were new to us and the biggest challenge was to learn how to get them all working together. While our app can definitely be made more robust and even include some more features, we believe we've done our best in the 24hrs given.
What's next for ParkOff
Features to be added:
- Reminders, through notifications, when booking period is coming to an end.
A change in the parking pricing plan, which could allow per-minute payment.
This would allow users to end their booking any time and only pay for the duration they have stated
Law Enforcement
Currently, LTA sends its officers to check through carparking lots to ensure coupons have been punched and payed for. With the ParkOff system, a camera could be installed to view the carpark lots, and one can then check the online database to see if a car that is parked has actually made its payment. For LTA's officers, this can be done from anywhere.
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