A group made up of students from the Agora Lledó International School of Castellón and senior citizens in the area worked together to consider and define a social innovation project, which intends to solve the problems that the disabled face when finding parking places in cities. This initiative is framed within the European ComeON! project, promoted in Spain by the Fundetec Foundation with espaitec’s collaboration.

This microproject, called Parking management for disabled people in cities, intends to solve disabled people’s parking problems, who can find very few parking places, are hard to locate, and are often taken by vehicles driven by people who are not disabled.

On the one hand, this proposal to solve these problems consists in providing indoor car parks with a system that allows people with limited mobility to justify their condition using a key word which will provide them access to park in certain places, identified by sensors lit up in a different colour. Likewise, the participants suggested developing an app for mobile phones which would allow available parking spaces to be geopositioned and to book parking places in advance.

On the other hand, the participants suggested creating exclusive parking places for the disabled in previously indentified unused areas by negotiating with the agents involved (public municipal management agents, owners and builders).

This initiative developed by year 3 secondary education students and citizens aged over 55 considers evaluating the costs incurred by fitting informative sensors and panels in indoor car parks, developing the app, treating the ground of unused areas to convert them into public car parks, and designing a business model for owners.