Parkcessible

Parkcessible is a small app designed to improve discovery of accessible parking for users with mobility needs.

The Story Behind Parkcessible

The starting point was a short conversation at childcare pickup.

A dad, who uses a wheelchair, started talking about his parking painpoints in a very lived, practical way: how unreliable parking information is, how stressful it becomes when you depend on very specific conditions, and how strange it is that there still isn’t an app you can actually trust for this.

At some point he half-jokingly asked:

Do you know anyone who could actually build something like that?

I said: I can.

The First Requirement

I asked him for something simple: “If this app existed tomorrow, what would it absolutely have to do?” The answer was immediate and very clear:

If I go somewhere by car, I want to know whether there is a dedicated handicap parking space at my destination.

While waiting for my daughter to get dressed, I opened v0 on my smartphone and started building immediately. Five minutes later, I showed him the first extremely rough draft:

• A map centered on my current location
• Random placeholder markers
• Click/tap showing dummy content

His reaction was instant—completely mind-blown. Exactly what he had in mind. He immediately had more Ideas.

Users should be able to add places themselves and I’d need navigation to the spot with one tap.

Letting the Product Evolve

I continued iterating using v0 and later Cursor, building a second rough version that included:

• Login
• Address search
• Custom markers for discovered handicap parking spaces
• One-tap navigation via the user’s preferred navigation app

The product wasn’t getting prettier but we discovered the core challenge: finding and adding already existing parking spaces. We uncovered an anxiety and high cognitive load for users dependending on reliable accessibility information.

Since official data alone wasn’t sufficient, we opened the system for user-contributed parking spots. To get up usage we reduced the formal structure of spots and reduced it to the address, info how many spaces are available and a free text field to add any constraints or additional information. The goal here was not a perfectly correct map, but a useful one for the start.

From Prototype to Product

For a productive version, I intentionally moved away from the prototyped Supabase setup and implemented:

• A self-hosted, secured SQLite database
• A small but controlled PHP-based backend and frontend Not the typical highclass elegance stack but exactly the right reliability, effort and complexity at this stage.

Results & Impact

• The City of Erlangen expressed interest in supporting the idea for broader reach
• Handicap representatives at Siemens Erlangen also showed interest in backing and promoting the concept The problem clearly resonated beyond the initial conversation. :)

Key Takeaways

• Never underestimate how hard it is to get real-world POI data right
• Community-based approaches are powerful—but difficult to sustain without incentives, recognition, or gratification
• Building first exposed constraints and truths that no upfront concept would have revealed