Welcome to the new StopFinder!
In addition to the new look, we’ve added: Mobile phone access, Embeddable stopfinder maps for web designers, and
easy sharing links so you can paste links to our maps in emails and Facebook events.
Try it out and let us know what you think! We hope you like it!
We’ve had many people request a mobile version of StopFinder, and we’ll admit that there have been more than a few times that we wished for StopFinder on the go ourselves.
We’re happy to say that the wait is almost over! We have a preliminary version of the StopFinder mobile site running, and we’re looking for people who want to try it out!
If you’d like to test the new mobile service, give Debo an email at debo@stopfinder.com and we’ll get you set up ASAP.
The StopFinder team has been hard at work on the new features that have been suggested to us by our users. However, that’s not all we’ve been up to! Our goal was to have more than 200 lots available by the end of April, and we’ve cleared that mark by a long shot — as of right now, we have 226 lots on record.
Most of the lots we’ve added recently are in the downtown core. We’re going to start focusing on other regions of the city next.
In the meantime, enjoy the new deals we’ve found for you!
The team would like to thank all of those who have sent us tips about parking lots and transit stops so far! Since we’re trying to make your lives easier, we’ve dedicated ourselves to finding as much parking lot rate information as we can on our own. However, we’d of course really love any help that we could get!
So, we’d like to ask all of you parkers out there to keep an eye on the amount you’re paying when you park! We’ll take any information we can get, so even if you can only tell us about the rate that was in effect when you parked there (and perhaps the hours that the rate is in effect) that would be awesome!
Also, we’ve tried to keep it simple and easy to send us parking rate information by just having you write an email to us or use the feedback form. Would you like to see something more specialized for this purpose?
If you’d just prefer that the StopFinder just do all the investigating ourselves, it would be helpful to know that too.
Let us know!
The StopFinder team was at TransitCamp on Saturday, and as we expected, it was predictably awesome.
I’ve been to many events like this in the past, but the great thing about the TransitCamp crew is that the emphasis is definitely on fixing problems instead of just airing them. There is the very strong impression that people are going to leave the meeting and immediately start working on concrete projects that are meant to address the problems discussed throughout the day.
To get an idea of the scope of the issues that were discussed on Saturday, check out the TransitCamp wiki. I attended four sessions in total, and they were extremely diverse. However, the one overarching theme that I was able to take away was this: If we want to work on solving any complex problem that has a number of stakeholders involved, we need to be able to understand and effectively communicate what it means for a design to be of high quality. This became clear to me in a session on walkable communities, as we were talking about how many suburban landowners tend to cringe away from the word ‘density’, even though a high-quality suburban community will be designed with a specific density in mind (so that transit options, community cohesion, proximity to services, etc. can be sustainably supported).
This is certainly a theme that the our team holds dear, and one that we’ll continue to emphasize as StopFinder evolves.
We’re looking forward to the next TransitCamp, and we encourage our users to get involved if they can! Check out http://metronauts.ca to see how you can participate.
The StopFinder team is going to be at TransitCamp on Saturday, and we’re looking forward to contributing to the event in whatever way we can.
One of our main topics of interest is obviously the idea of unifying and presenting transit and driving information in order to help people make effective decisions about transportation. However, there are tons of other ideas being tossed around that are extremely interesting to us as well, so it promises to be a great time!
For those of you who are attending — we’ll see you there!
StopFinder has officially been live for eight hours now, and we’re already getting lots of great feedback from people. Thanks to all who’ve gotten in contact with us!
I was asked today about the concrete ways in which StopFinder is going to help improve mobility in Toronto. I have multiple answers to this question, but here’s a really obvious one.
I discovered Bern Grush’s blog this morning through the metronauts website, and saw that he had posted this Time Magazine article on traffic congestion. In a survey of a gridlocked area of New York, 45% of drivers interviewed stated that they were on the road because they were looking for a parking spot. Now, if you do some homework before you leave the house, we feel like you’re much more likely to quickly find a spot when you arrive, yes?
Before StopFinder came along, there really wasn’t an especially good way of finding a Toronto parking lot on the web. With StopFinder, you can find one in less than a handful of seconds. So, now you have no excuse 
And that’s one simple way in which we think StopFinder is going to help out.
Here you will find the latest news and updates about what we’re doing with StopFinder.
Also, for the techies in the audience, we’ll be posting some articles and how-tos about the technologies and techniques used to build StopFinder.
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