Parking Dude – Hoboken Residents helping each other own a car and park it easier and less costly. The Dude helps residents and visitors of Hoboken, NJ navigate every aspect of the strenuous parking situation that currently exists. With a grid that was specifically built for the city of Hoboken with every street parking spot characteristic (visitor or resident side, street cleaning day and times) already inputted, the Parking Dude creates an application where each user can easily identify where to park safely and how to avoid being towed, booted, or ticketed. The application will smoothly and quickly identify your geographic location on the grid and permit the user to select which parking spot is being parked at.
This first release of the Parking Dude acts as a friend who helps users;
1. identify what the parking rules and guidelines are for all on-street parking spots (residents, visitors, and meter parking)
2. guide a visitor with step-by-step directions to a recently parked car or remind a resident where he or she happened to park if forgotten.
3. share parking location with a friend or family member via email
4. helps a user avoid costly street cleaning and parking violation fines by alerting you the night before, the morning of, and a few hours before street cleaning occurs
5. have their car shoveled out during the Winter and washed clean during the Summer by simply letting the Dude know via a button on the app. The Dude will know where the user’s car is parked and will send a street team to the car with either shovels in the Winter or soap, water, and rags in the Summer.
*** Once a large percentage of users have downloaded the first release we will activate the Hoboken Live Parking Grid which will indicate green pins (available parking spots) and red pins (taken spots) with a detailed heat grid so residents can be steered to available on-street parking instead of driving around aimlessly for 45 minutes looking for a spot. ***
The Dude will also be able to alert residents if a temporary no parking sign has been posted in an area where their car is parked and when to move a user’s parked car when snow is approaching and snow plows will be moving in the area. Each month the Dude will send out a newsletter which will include hot parking trends and city parking heat maps for each day and time of the week for each part of the city. With future updates, the app will identify handicapped parking as well as local parking garages to pay for parking. Our website parkingdude.net will include a forum for residents to share parking ideas, frustrations, and tricks to help one another fix this parking problem. The Dude is focused on showing the city of Hoboken that together we can fix the parking problem and stay clear of those unnecessary parking fines that the city loves to hit us with.
In the future with more advanced updates to the app, Parking Dude will be able to allow users to message each other about parking spots that will be freeing up as well as set specific day and time alerts of when a parking spot will be free. Users will be rewarded for consistent use with Hoboken coupons to be used at restaurants, coffee shops, and shopping. The more consistent of a user you are with the Parking Dude, the more friendly the Dude will get with you rewarding those users with first look alerts on parking spaces that free up. In future releases the Parking Dude will automatically be able to identify your parking location, set that parking spot in your app, and without you manually doing anything the app will unpark you from that same spot once you pull away using the internal accelerometer technology. Within the first year of release our Parking Dude VIP Service will meet you at your residence, go park the car for you, and bring the key directly to your doorstep. This will allow families with baggage and carriage to head directly inside and leave the stress of parking the car to us.