For the past few years, street parking spaces are being reduced due to two principal reasons: The raising awareness about pollution and the construction of pedestrian areas.  

There are many people who live in the outskirts of big cities like Barcelona because life is cheaper and more peaceful. Therefore, many people have to commute to the city every day using public transport or their private car. Those who come by car, encounter the problem that there is no place to park and that private parking is becoming increasingly expensive.  

Our solution to this problem consists of developing a mobile and web platform. This platform will offer two different services: 

• The owners of parking spaces in Barcelona that do not use their parking spot for a certain amount of hours will be able to publish it on the platform so that someone can park there while the place is not occupied. In return, the owner will receive compensation for “renting” their parking space. 
• People who drive to Barcelona from close-by cities using their private car will be able to offer a carpooling service. Car-owners/drivers will publish their trips from the cities in the metropolitan area of Barcelona to Barcelona (and vice versa), and people doing the same itinerary will be able (for a small fare) to come or leave the city faster than if they use the public transport.  

To find out if our business idea is viable, we have interviewed people in our target audience.  

We asked the following questions: 

• From your point of view, do you think that parking shortage in Barcelona is really a problem? 
• Have you ever had this problem? 
• If so, how did you try to solve it? 
• Do you think it is important to solve this problem? 

• Do you think our solution could be useful to solve it? 
• Do you see any issues in our business idea? 
• If our business idea were implemented in the future, do you think you would use it? 

We have interviewed several people who live in the periphery of Barcelona and inside the city. All of them believe it is indeed a big problem affecting them directly (if they are drivers) or indirectly (if they are tagging along in somebody else’s car).  

Our interviewees think that people most affected are students and workers because they need to commute daily. All of them strongly support finding ways to solve this problem, because public transport can increase the duration of the journey by more than one hour and the price of private parking spaces has skyrocketed in recent years. 

During the interview, when we discussed about possible casuistries, all the clients agreed it would be a great tool to try and fix the parking problem and confirmed they would be more than willing to use it if in the future it comes to the market. Nonetheless, when we asked them if they saw any potential issues with our plan, they pointed out the following:  

• If the owner of the parking slot has an urgency and needs to go home for any reason, they will find their parking space occupied. 
• If a person rents their parking space for a few hours, it will be difficult to give the keys to the “tenant”, since he probably will not be at home. For this reason, we need to think about how to solve the exchange of parking keys so that everyone can access without problems. 

To conclude, we can affirm that our business idea seems to be attractive but, we have to take into account the problems we will have to solve.  

You can listen the interviews here.