App by BTech students to help cars find parking spaces in Kolkata

Kolkata: It promises to come up with an economic solution to a social problem. Kolkata-based tech start-up “Park 24x7”, founded by Avishek Tarafdar and Milind Shethia, two engineering graduates, is a platform that gives real-time parking availability information, which helps drivers book a space to park their car. 

It connects drivers searching for parking slots with anyone who has one, whether in a private driveway or a parking garage. Drivers can park at unused parking spaces for hotels, hospitals, stores, pubs, schools, public parking spaces or on street parking zones. 

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has commissioned Park 24x7 to do a pilot project on some of the busiest streets in the city. Piloting is also on in pockets of Mumbai, Bangalore, Ranchi and Bhubaneswar. 

The start-up, according to its founders, is in talks with authorities of six other cities to start operation there by the year end. The app aggregates unused parking spaces at hotels, hospitals, schools, pubs, stores, etc. and lists them. 

“All the users have to do is to type in their desired location for parking with the date and duration of booking. The platform then searches for nearby private parking spaces available in their database. Once the user selects his or her preferred parking space and confirms his booking, he or she is given a booking id.

The user has to show the booking id at the destination to get the parking slot to avail the reserved parking. The users can even buy parking coupons for on-street parking or public parking from the app and can use them at any point of time. It saves time. This is how we are solving the end-point connectivity,” said Mr Tarafdar, a computer engineer (B.Tech) from Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata and founder of Park 24x7 Technologies Pvt Ltd.

The app offers several features, both for parking-space owners and car drivers or owners. For the first group, the platform lets you rent out space, manage spaces and manage booking, chat with customers, integrate with the existing system, generate parking slips from the system etc. 

Car divers or riders in turn can search for nearby places, filtering them with available amenities or with nearby hotspots, booking a space for limited hours or  for multiple dates. They can also book on a space on monthly basis, for events.

They can buy parking coupons at a discounted rate by scanning QR code from parking signs installed outside of the parking space, calling space owners, tracking where you have parked your car, tracking when your pollution check or insurance is due, explained Mr Tarafdar. 

“We are charging a commission from space owners as we are increasing their revenue from bookings,” he added.