Street Cleaning Parking is an app that helps you remember when to move your car to avoid street cleaning tickets. Park, tap set reminder, and customize your reminders to get notified.

To see this product live, download the Street Cleaning Parking App. We were featured in the San Francisco Standard!

The problem

Pablo and I bought a car together in 2023 and we soon realized how easy it was to get a ticket in our neighborhood. With no garage space, we parked outside on different streets in our busy neighborhood, but each street had different rules for when you needed to move your car for street cleaning. It was hard to keep track of, and making a mistake was $90.

Below is a visualization of our violations.

Low fidelity explorations

We had one goal: to reduce our tickets in 2024. Some wireframes below. Step 1: Select your street on the map, step 2: modal pops up, step 3: notification is set.

MVP designs

Our MVP designs were simple consisting mainly of a map screen and a bottom pop-up modal. The user flow was to park, set a reminder, and then a banner at the top appeared telling you a reminder was set. Two notifications were automatically set: 1 hour before the street cleaning time and ten minutes before the time. Why? We initially wanted the act of setting a notification to be automatic so there was little actions a user had to take. Later on we would add custom notification to address feedback on this.

Feedback

After releasing the app to a small beta group of 300 users, we collected feedback through a google sheet. The google sheet allowed us to gather as much feedback as we could quickly.

We made decisions based on the data we collected from our beta testers, but also on how easy/ fast we could act on the improvements. The three themes are below:

Here's what our final app screens looked like with more custom notifications, calendar integration, and search.

App store

Before we added Street Cleaning Parking to the app store we questioned whether it should be free or a paid subscription. We decided to try out a paid version to see if the problem was big enough that people would want to pay for it.

We decided to off a free trial though, below is the free trial flow I designed.

We simplified the flow and cut it back to just one page with some information about who the app is for and why.

Waiting for Apple to get back to us on our app submission was brutal but after four weeks Street Cleaning Parking got accepted to the iOS app store, a huge win! It is now available for download and has a free trial.

Impact

So far in 2024, Pablo and I have gotten 0 tickets. 448 people have downloaded the app and it has been helping San Franciscans avoid tickets since January. We are using any profits from the app to make it better, and we hope people continue to download it and avoid tickets.

Future considerations

One thing I'd love to play with in the future is gamifying the app. Incentivizing users to avoid tickets through "ticket streaks" would up-level the experience. Getting an idea of how much money you've saved through streaks would be interesting to test.

We have also gotten requests to create family accounts so that a couple or a family can be logged into one account through different devices to keep track of the same cars. It could also be interesting to explore having Street Cleaning Parking in multiple cities. For now, we're sticking to SF until we collect more data.

Promotional materials

We made a web page so people could see some data on their ticket history.

We also made some fake tickets for promoting the app!