Smart Park: IoT Parking & Spot Reservation Apps

Smart Park is a smart-mobility platform that helps drivers find parking faster and helps operators run their lots. It has two synchronised mobile apps: a Driver app for discovering, reserving and paying for spots, and an Operator app for attendants and lot managers. The apps connect to IoT slot sensors and entry gates through a cloud broker. I built the React Native clients and worked on the Node.js and Express.js services behind them.

Drivers lose time circling for parking, and operators struggle with manual check-ins, cash handling and no live view of occupancy. Sensors, gates and payments all have to agree on one booking, and attendants often work in basements with no signal.

• Spot discovery

  a Google Maps view with marker clustering shows multi-storey and street parking with live status of Available, Limited or Full.

• Advance booking

  drivers reserve standard, EV or accessible bays with an arrival grace period and a five-minute checkout countdown.

• Guidance

  Google Directions routes the driver to the lot, then switches to bay-level guidance once they cross the lot's geofence.

• Touchless exit

  fees are calculated from entry and exit times and paid in the app through UPI, Google Pay, Apple Pay, cards or wallet, with FASTag linkage where supported.

• Plate scanning

  attendants scan number plates with on-device ML Kit OCR for walk-in or unregistered vehicles.

• Operations

  Bluetooth thermal printing for slips, gate triggering, manual check-in and override, cash reconciliation and a live dashboard of occupancy, turnover and cash versus digital revenue.

• Slot status flows from ultrasonic sensors through an MQTT and WebSocket broker into the apps, so occupancy updates arrive as pushed events with no polling.
• On entry the driver app presents a dynamic QR code or a BLE handshake, the backend verifies the booking and the gate is triggered.
• Redux Toolkit and RTK Query keep active booking sessions separate from cached map markers so map activity does not disturb the booking flow.
• The Operator app stores tickets and manual check-outs in local SQLite and syncs them when connectivity returns.
• Geofencing uses native boundary triggers, with high-accuracy GPS switched on only when the driver is close to the garage.

• 1

  Double bookings

  two drivers could claim the same spot at once. Optimistic locking in the app, backed by server-side locks and a five-minute checkout timer, prevents that.

• 2

  Battery drain

  significant-motion and native boundary triggers start precise GPS only when the driver is within about 500 metres of the garage.

• 3

  No signal in basements

  the Operator app issues tickets and logs checkouts offline, then syncs automatically.

• 4

  Dense parking layouts

  map clustering and custom overlays keep multi-level lots readable and responsive while panning.

Drivers can find, reserve and pay for parking in one app, attendants can run a lot from their phone even without signal, and managers get live occupancy and revenue figures. Frontend performance was also improved with lazy loading and Redux state management.