Hanna Jung

For some urban dwellers, the closest they come to competitive sport is finding a parking place.

What if there was a way to find private parking spaces easily? That's where ParkNego, a project developed by Hanna Jung (MSI '11) for the annual student expoSItion comes in.

"When there are large events in Ann Arbor, most drivers have difficulty finding a parking space because public parking or meter parking on streets is not available," she says.

ParkNego is a concept for a private parking search engine that allows sellers (owners of parking lots or spare spaces) and buyers (drivers looking for parking) to privately negotiate for a parking spot on the fly.

Jung says a seller who has spare parking spaces could report the location, choose a date and time which it would be available for buyers, and add or edit the parking scheduler before an event.

Buyers (the drivers in need) could either find parking nearby or search available parking by destination. The driver could also see the availability, price, and rates of parking spaces from other buyers.

Hanna suggests that a service like PayPal could be used to safely transact the payments.

After testing, Jung found that sellers could easily report their spare parking spaces and have the opportunity to earn some extra money. Buyers could easily find parking spots when public parking or meter parking were not available.

As a bonus, drivers could keep track of their parking spaces, as that information might be useful in the future.