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Select_A_Spot Project Proposal
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Select-A-Spot
01.19.2017
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Seth Kear
Tristan Spakes
Brian Friend
Jonathan Anderson
Introduction
Motivated by our frustration with the parking lottery on campus every morning, our group will be creating software to represent and manage available space in a parking garage. Our first task will be modeling parking availability with a database framework that can represent different tiers (e.g. Student, Staff, Electric, etc.), easily keep track of per-tier and per-floor availability at each modeled garage, and that can easily extend itself to different types of garages with different layouts and tiering systems. While keeping track of availability is not itself incredibly novel, it has not been integrated into the University’s parking procedures. In an attempt to implement and optimize this idea, our second goal consists of pairing this functionality with a webpage where a user can check (per-garage, per-tier, and per-floor) parking availability, reserve a specific parking spot, and then “check in” at arrival. The check in process would consist of a barcode emailed to the reserver, or a printed out ticket if a parking spot is reserved at the entrance of the garage.
As this can suffice for the typical parking garage in your local area, this application can also be utilized throughout the business world including specific locations such as: airports, high frequency city streets (New York City, San Francisco, Atlanta), and larger venue locations.
Customer Need
Among University of Tennessee Knoxville commuters, finding parking in a timely manner is a well-known issue. On a typical weekday morning, it can be challenging to locate a parking spot in UT’s multi-level garages. This problem is further escalated by periods of new freshmen entering the college or days when inclement weather has caused top levels of garages to be blocked off. When a student enters a garage, they have no way of ascertaining where an open spot may be, or if there are any spots open at all. They may spend 20 minutes driving around a full garage with only the hope that another student who is done for the day will be leaving and pull out in front of them.
For example, the 11th Street Garage across the bridge from MinKao has high levels of morning traffic. When someone enters the garage, they can see cars entering and leaving but not if the exiting cars are leaving because there are no parking spaces. Before entering the 11th street garage, if there existed a way to know the number of parking vacancies available, this issue could be significantly mitigated. Students would be able to save crucial time that could be spent driving to another, less full, garage instead of wasting it in a full one.
In addition to the issue of wasted time, safety is also at risk. Students often feel the need to “fight” for their parking, meaning that if a spot opens and another moving car is in close proximity, they have to be assertive and quickly drive into the spot before the other person does. This usually operates on the assumption that the other individual will be less assertive than them and can result in a car accident. This could cause injuries or create an obstacle within the garage that takes a considerable amount of time to remove. Students may also feel encouraged to traverse through garages at unsafe speeds and ignore stop lines when threatened with being late to class. The pressure to acquire parking encourages dangerous behavior with potentially disastrous effects.
The need of knowing a garage’s availability has been met in Knoxville’s Market Square Garage with an electronic sign indicating if it is full. This has demonstrated that the need exists in other places in Knoxville other than UTK and that it functions well enough for the service to be maintained.
Proposed Solution
With the addition of Select-A-Spot, the customer can now reserve a spot in advance prior to driving through the busy city streets in crowded environments. This benefits the customer in a couple of ways, one of which will be time management. As you are planning your busy evening, you can now deduce the time it takes to find a parking spot, as it will be just the time it will take you to drive to the parking garage of your choice. The emotional appeal of this application will cut down on road rage as you can always be knowledgeable of when and where you can be parking in the near future. Additionally, this application will give you a birds-eye view of where there are fewer spots available on a day with large amounts of traffic.
Implementing Select-A-Spot into our daily lives will decrease the amount of time the typical person utilizes to find parking and also increases the amount of time vehicles will be spent within spot, thus, increasing the profit for the owners of the parking garage. Not only can this used during a high traffic night, but also this can be an essential tool for the typical college student running from class to work, and back to class again. This gives the customer an opportunity to fully utilize their time at work efficiently not worrying about if they will then be able to find parking on their way to class. Select-A-Spot also gives the everyday lunch run more efficient for everyone. Grab a spot near your favorite restaurant or food truck and get back to work with no problems.
The website will be user friendly and will give the customer the option of which parking garage to park in, along with which spot, given that the spot is currently open. Immediately you can be the owner of a given spot for a certain, which will be waiting the arrival of your vehicle. Multiple types of personnel and business will be able to use this including: busy commuters, airports and large corporations adjacent to busy city streets.
Technology
Using Visual Studio and other tools to make a webpage with an ASP.NET format along with multiple languages like C#, Javascript, NodeJS, and even Bootstrap for page sizing. These tools will be used in making a homepage that allows the user to easily check availability of a garage and will be user friendly to even someone with limited skills. We will be using these these languages along with Git to do our building and development so that everyone in the group can get quality experience working in a development environment with higher level languages and different interfaces so we can be ready for professional development.
For this project we will be using a mySQL database to store the information of the parking garage and the users themselves. The database can be as small as one parking garage or up to a hundred. So, if the webpage service becomes popular then garages can be added onto the website and the user can select from multiple parking garages in the area and check the availability and request a spot. The database will be responsible for storing the users information so that they can receive a receipt for the transaction via email.
In order to make this possible we will be using Visual Studios as our IDE to build the website and to present our site. This tool will allow us to further practice our version control among the group. In addition to the version control experience, we will be connecting the project to the database so that the database/webpage can be updated accordingly.