in Ontario, Startups, Toronto |

stopfinder.com – Should you take transit or take the car?

stopfinder_small.pngThere have been a handful of Parking-Finder map sites lately. They were all neat, but seemed to lack that extra bit of information I wanted to know: How much is this going to cost?

As you would have it, I have a meeting today up in the hinterlands that is Young and St. Claire. Because it is pouring rain I thought about taking the car. Because I don’t know the area, StopFinder popped in to my head. The founder of the site, Michael DiBernardo emailed us a couple of days ago to let us know that it launched.

Stopfinder offers a huge amount of information, but it is all presented incredibly clearly. Subway and Bus stops are placed with nice big markers, and parking lots are easy to spot.

With StopFinder you enter the address of where you are going and the time you will arrive, as well as how long you will be staying. StopFinder then calculates the closest parking lots, how much they cost in total, and which is the best combination of distance and cost from your final destination. Pretty cool, but what I love is that it also shows you public transportation options for getting there as well. In this case, we are basically right beside a subway stop. So I will do the right thing, leave the car in the garage and jump on the subway. That’s fine by me. I hate driving.

Michael pointed out two kinds of pain that StopFinder helps solve:

StopFinder finds the closest, cheapest parking lots and the surrounding TTC stops for a Toronto destination. This eases two kinds of pain:

(a) There aren’t many good ways to figure out how to get where you’re going on the TTC right now. We think StopFinder beats what is out there.

(b) When planning a get-together, some guests will come by car and others by transit. You can provide everyone with a single link that helps them get there.

I am pretty happy with this service so far. The amount of data they seem to have aggregated is incredible. They also have an API that other developers can use to access their data.

StopFinder might not have the largest audience yet, afterall it is Toronto-centric, but they are solving a real problem. Finding parking was never the problem for most of us, it turns out that it was knowing when to take a car and when to take transit. Even I didn’t know that until I experienced the solution, but I can tell that StopFinder will become a part of my toolkit from now on.

Give it a try and let us know what you think. Post in the comments below.

co-founder of Startupnorth.ca

Published

13 Comments

  1. Great site, Jevon, looks like it will be useful. Although any *real* Torontonian would know that there’s a subway stop at Yonge and St. Clair, and that 21 St. Clair West is right beside the subway since numbering of east/west streets starts at Yonge. :)

  2. Great site, Jevon, looks like it will be useful. Although any *real* Torontonian would know that there’s a subway stop at Yonge and St. Clair, and that 21 St. Clair West is right beside the subway since numbering of east/west streets starts at Yonge. :)

Comments are closed.