gaoag / dude-wheres-my-car

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Dude, where's my car? (and my parking spot, and my high density housing, and my...)

Android app to facilitate parking in Berkeley.

What's in the repo:

1. Android app files (download and load with AndroidStudio to run it on an emulator or a phone)
2. A summary of the project
3. Readings on urban spaces/cities that nobody asked for

Project Summary

Owning a car in Berkeley sucks. The permits are expensive, there isn't much parking, and the rules are pretty confusing. Every driver has an expensive parking permit code A-N that corresponds to a set of very illogically placed parking locations. The parking locations themselves have unintuitive rules and hours. If you mess up, you get fined quite a lot. So, what's a bear to do?

Take public transit!... and in the absence of good transit, use this app, I guess.

(AC Transit is actually pretty good, credit where credit is due. We love the 51B. We also love and support BART, it is trying to be better :') )

This app

• Tells you what zones are available for you to park in
• Does validation of your current parking spot to see if you can park there
• Tells you what fines you face for going overtime/parking inappropriately
• Displays your parking spot so you can get back
• Lets you know how much time you have left in your spot, and how long it would take you to walk back

I created this app to learn android and learn some basic UI design stuff. For now, it's a prototype - it's not fully integrated with city data sources, and there's certainly some debugging to be done. However, the basic functions work, and it was a fun exploration of Android. Hopefully more is incoming!

Urbanism?

• Read things on the NUMTOT facebook group once in a while (google it). It's not the best, but a lot of interesting conversations happen there and there are many rabbit holes to go down.
• citylab.com is a Cool Site for Cool Cats (like yourself). I really like how it discusses the breadth of issues that cities face. From environmental impact to urban design to tax policy to cultural dynamics, it really covers how complex - and how alive - this urban space we take for granted is, and how we can make it better.
• Skateboarding and the City, by Iain Borden. On one hand, skating helped me experience the city in a whole new way, from seeing new possibilities in spaces to appreciating even the smallest bumps and cracks in the pavement. On the other, skateboarders often appropriate public space in ways that other people, with equivalent claims to that space, don't want. Anyways, cities are cool. Skateboarding is cool. I like both of these things, and this book is cool.

Try to hit up an article or two on CityLab, at least. This isn't really about me soapboxing the "right way" to design cities (I am eminently unqualified to make such judgments). It's just about knowing that new possibilities exist. What's important to me is that people recognize the possibility of change, the reality of fluidity rather than rigidity. When we discover more degrees of freedom in the world around us, new levers and buttons to push and pull on, new ways to make things better, we become invested in that exploration rather than simply taking the status quo as granted.