Street Cleaning Parking iOS App

Intro

Street Cleaning Parking is a mobile app to help people in San Francisco avoid street cleaning tickets. It uses your bluetooth location to tell you the street cleaning schedule and allows you to setup notifications to remind yourself to move your car.

The Problem

Pablo and I purchased a car in 2023 and struggled with varying street cleaning rules in our neighbourhood. Each street had different street cleaning hours, and because the streets were so busy with cars, we’d often have to park two or three streets away from our home. This made it difficult to remember what the cleaning schedule was for each street, and getting a ticket was $90.

MVP Designs

The first version of the app featured a map and a way to setup automatic notifications. Because we wanted to first understand if this would be useful to build, we allowed two notifications to be setup: one hour before you needed to move your car, and ten minutes before you needed to move your car.

Improvements

After releasing to 300 beta users, we collected responses via Google Sheet and identified three key themes for improvement: custom times for notifications, calendar integration to add a reminder to your calendar, and search functionality (so users could plan out parking before arriving at an address).

Along with these updates we also improved the UI to make setting up reminders clearer. Adding a calendar UI to the customize reminders page allowed users to visualize when the cleaning was happening.

Onboarding

I created a fun animation for our onboarding screen to teach people how the app worked on the first page.

We considered a paid subscription model versus free access and ended up going with a free trial to begin, along with $4.99 monthly thereafter.

Website + Brand

I established some basic brand guidelines for us to use and Pablo created a simple landing page to advertise the mobile app. We also experimented with a web page for showing off user parking ticket stats.

Advertisements

We created some paper ads that looked like tickets and put them on cars in our neighbourhood. Then it rained and people were not happy. Lesson learned: don’t put advertisements on cars!

Impact

By 2024, we almost avoided tickets entirely (we just got one). The app reached 448 downloads and has helped San Francisco residents since launch!

We got on the news

Somehow word got out and we were featured in an SF Standard article here and on ABC News (below).

Future Considerations

Potential features include gamification through “ticket streaks,” family account sharing, and expansion to additional cities.