I was in Leighton Buzzard earlier on the day I spoke to Arta, doing what every rider does. I knew there must be a bay somewhere nearby. There always is. But you don’t know where it is, you don’t know what the council allows, and you end up looking it up on your phone instead of just parking the bike.
Arta is the founder of SoloBay, a UK app that maps motorbike bays, car parks, garages, MOT centres, petrol stations and bikers’ cafés, then navigates you to them. It was only about a month old when we spoke. We spoke on a call, and what follows is mostly Arta in his own words, because the story of how SoloBay came about is best told by the person who built it.
One thing to say up front. Motorcycle Grounds has teamed up with SoloBay, and the cafés I write about on this site now appear in the app’s café section. I explain how that works at the end of this story. The rest of it is the conversation, including the awkward questions about cost.
I made it for literally all my problems I ever have with the bike, and I assume there’s other people.
Arta, founder of SoloBay
A rider first, a founder second
Arta rides a Ducati Monster and an MV Agusta F4. He works in operations, and he still does, so SoloBay is not a day job that took over. It started as something he needed for himself.
I still work in operations. I just built this for fun, because I needed something that would fix my problems. It’s a continuous problem. Every day I’m driving my bike. When I was driving in London, I’d have to try finding a bay where I’m going. This way I can just know where I’m going to park before I even get there.
Arta
He also works in tech, on the image-diffusion side of AI, which is mostly Python. SoloBay, he told me, is built as a web-based app, and “quite easy to build and use”.
The third parking ticket
I asked whether there was a specific moment he decided to build it. There was, and he did not need long to think about it.
I think it was after my third parking ticket.
Arta
The context is the change that hit riders in much of London this year. Arta named Westminster and Camden, and said three other boroughs started charging as well. Motorcycles used to park free in those bays. Then, from February, they did not.
With a bike, you never had to pay until February this year. And now you have to remember to pay. I would park when I’m going to the gym, be in a hurry and forget to pay. So many times I forgot to pay.
Arta
His first sign of trouble was a warning in February, not a ticket. He looked at the sign and realised the rules had changed. It is a fixed fee, he said, and usually paid through RingGo. I wrote about the Camden side of this myself, in Camden’s new motorcycle parking charges: what riders need to know, so I knew exactly what he meant.
The feature that came out of those tickets is the arrival reminder. It is the part of SoloBay that Arta clearly cares about most, because it is the one that fixed his own problem.
The app reminds you as soon as you park. Especially if you save a bay as one of your regulars, it will literally remind you the second you’re there: have you paid? And then five minutes later, have you paid? Then ten minutes later, have you paid? Just to really make sure you don’t forget to pay for your parking.
Arta
Making a reminder work when the app is closed turned out to be the hard part. He tested it where the problem was, on the trips to the gym that had cost him tickets in the first place.
It took me a month of just going to the gym back and forth, because it would always have glitches on it. So I had to go with my laptop sometimes, just to debug. I also gave it to the other person who bikes to the gym. He does it all the time, and neither of us have had a ticket since using the app.
Arta
A caveat he was upfront about: it will definitely work on an iPhone, and less so on Android. To run with the app closed, the reminder needs permission to use your location all the time. And the one thing that does not exist on Android is live notifications, the larger banner that shows how far away you are from something.
More than a parking map
Parking was the starting point. The rest of the app came from the same habit of noticing what does not work when you ride a bike and use a general-purpose map.
In London, if you search for a motorbike garage, it comes up with car garages no matter what you do. And then it’s, okay, which of these garages are actually for motorbikes? They don’t just sell some motorbikes. And then which of those also do MOTs.
Arta
Cafés came next, “because of course you love the motorbike cafés”, and then petrol stations. Fuel is where his own bikes come in. The MV Agusta, like a lot of older machines, cannot run on E10.
Especially if you drive older bikes, you can’t use E10, you have to use your E5 fuel. So which petrol stations have E5? And then prices, of course, for all of them.
Arta
I had read that around one forecourt in six sells no E5 at all, so I asked whether older bikes were what made him call it out separately. “Because of the MV Agusta I can’t use E10, so I needed it,” he said. He is not shy about the bike either. Ask him about the brand and he will tell you it is the most beautiful bike there is.
Where the data comes from
I had read that the app opened with around 3,400 council bays, and I wanted to know where they came from. The answer is the least glamorous and most useful part of the story.
It’s all publicly available government data. So I do all the council bays. And then I also decided, let me add parking lots, because sometimes you don’t want to park outside.
Arta
Car parks, he said, are often the better bet for a rider. Here is his experience of them.
There are just no bays, but you should still be able to find somewhere to park, and usually car parks just don’t even charge for motorbikes. That’s what I found. It ends up being cheaper to just go to a car park. As long as it’s not an ANPR one, they don’t ticket you. They’re literally like, oh, you just park here where the bicycles are. It’s fine.
Arta
That is Arta’s experience rather than a rule, and car parks vary, so read the signs. It is a tip I recognise, though. At Level Ground in Letchworth Garden City I ignored the nearby car park and tucked the bike in beside the push bikes by the outdoor seating.
Bays come from councils. Everything else came from a lot of work with a bot, and then a lot of work without one.
Garages was the hardest to map, because a lot of them just don’t have good websites or anything to be able to see. I had bots scraping the internet and it was inconclusive on a lot of stuff. For the ones that couldn’t be scraped, I did it manually, or just called them up to see whether or not they did it, so I can make sure my data is accurate.
Arta
The cafés were a different story. He did not curate them. A bot did the work.
That was just scraping the internet for as many cafés as possible, every single café. I just left the bot running for two days, and then I had another bot review its data to check that anything was invalid.
Arta
I will come back to that, because it explains why a list picked by a person who has actually sat in the café is worth having alongside it.
I also asked about the 905 bays that the app lists as signed locally with no published tariff, and why it is so hard to find out what a bay costs. His answer was that many of them simply do not charge.
Those ones just don’t have fees. In London, some of the councils are still opposed to paid parking, or the people just oppose it enough.
Arta
What he thinks councils get right, and wrong
Arta has strong views about how bike parking is run, and he was happy to share them. These are his opinions and his figures, and councils and payment companies may see things differently.
His favourite policy is Westminster’s. He says the council has the fairest system, and that most riders do not know about it.
They have the best policy. If you pay for one bay in Westminster, you pay for all. Most people don’t know this. It’s the same code across every single bay. That was due to members of the public saying, if you’re going to charge us, make it fair. And I feel like all councils should copy that.
Arta
What he likes less is what happens at the point of payment. A friend who goes to the gym with him was paying £1.50 every visit, and Arta’s point was that the friend did not need to.
You’re not paying for hours. You just pay for the whole day whenever you pay for your bay. So you don’t need a reminder of when your parking is going to end. And it’s like they force it on you every single time you go to pay. They’re just trying to take these extra fees.
Arta
Westminster says they’re only meant to charge you £1 for parking, but all the payment processes add a fee on top. So there is no £1 parking for motorbikes. It’s £1.30 or something. It’s a small amount, but amongst all the bays.
Arta
His curiosity went further than complaining. He has put in freedom of information requests to councils to see what they charge and what they have received over recent months, and he has not decided whether to publish the results.
I was curious how much the payment processors are making from each of these bays, when they shouldn’t be charging more than the fixed amount.
Arta
I asked whether councils treat bikes as an afterthought. He agrees, and he thinks the reason is money.
I agree that they see it as an afterthought, because there’s almost no money in it, unless they’re ticketing. They give the same-price ticket for a bike as for a car, but the volume of a bike compared to a car is marginal. The price for paying your fare for the whole day is £1.50, but they still charge you £60 if you pay early, or £120 if you pay late. That’s the same as a car in Westminster or wherever. They should reduce the ticket price based on the volume of the vehicle.
Arta
Keeping it accurate
Councils change rates and close bays, so I asked how he keeps the map right. He was straightforward about how early it is.
I’ve only had the platform for a few months, so there’s not been much to update. But I’ve got it community driven, in the sense that if there’s roadworks and they close a bay, and people take a picture showing that until the closure date, you get a month or a week free, depending on what you’re publishing.
Arta
Every feature has a way for riders to contribute, he explained, and a scraper runs once a month to check whether councils have published anything new. In practice, very little of the map comes from riders.
None of it really is rider sourced. The only thing that’s rider sourced is temporary closures, because a permanent closure gets published and a temporary closure doesn’t.
Arta
Only one closure report has come in so far, and every upload has to be approved by hand. That is where his day job comes in. He plans to automate the checking.
I’m going to try and automate it, because I can use an image diffusion model, or image reading, to check whether that image matches the bay, and the location, and the dates that they’ve mentioned.
Arta
He has also added a menu upload feature for cafés, so riders can see what they will get before they arrive. The same story applies: nobody has used it yet, and he approves each upload himself.
What is free, what is Pro, and why
Finding bays and navigating to them is free. Pro costs £4.99 a month or £19.99 a year and adds extras such as street-level photos and search. I asked how he decided where the free tier ends, and his answer was a cost one, not a business-model one.
It’s based on what I have to pay for. I literally have to pay for every query that someone makes on the search feature. I have to pay for every street view. If I didn’t have to pay for it, I would make it free, because why not? It’s a feature that I don’t think people should have to pay for.
Arta
He could have used open-source map data and avoided the charges. He chose not to.
I didn’t want to use open-source data, which is really inaccurate at times. You can’t search businesses, it’s not as up to date as Google. Google’s map search function is just the best. There’s no trying to compete with it.
Arta
In practice, the free version lets you drag around the map and tap a bay. Pro lets you type in where you are going and see every bay near it, with street view of each one. That also covers garages and petrol stations.
If you’re on the premium, you can literally search where you’re going to go. It will show you all the closest bays at that same point, and it will show you the street view of what all those bays look like. Just so you know what you’re going to be looking for when you get there.
Arta
The free version carries ads. I asked how he balances that against a rider standing in the cold with a helmet on, and he was confident they are not in the way.
It’s not intrusive, the ads at all. If you try it, you’ll see, when you open it, it’s just a tiny bar at the bottom. And if you want to use Street View, there’s just a video you have to watch. You can just press watch while you start driving towards the bay, and by the time it’s done, you’re near the bay.
Arta
You do not need to log in to use it at all. Subscriptions, he says, are doing well, with new subscribers every day. What surprised him was where they are coming from.
Mostly on iPhone, which I’m actually surprised by. I thought I would get a lot of Android users, because the UK is very Android dominant, whereas North America is like 99% iPhone users.
Arta
The crime layer, and what riders actually use
One feature I had been curious about is the crime layer, which is switched off until a rider asks for it. I asked what made him switch it off by default, and whether there was a debate about including it at all. His reason is practical.
It’s hard to see the map when you put the crime layer on, and it only works when you’re zoomed in. Otherwise, if you look at London, it’s just a big blob of red. Once you’re zoomed in, you put the crime layer on, it pulls from police data on vehicle crime, and then you can see, oh, this bay literally has no crime around it. This is probably the smarter bay to use out of your options.
Arta
I asked which features riders were using that he had not expected. The app was too new for a big surprise, but one feature has taken off.
The MOT reminder, everyone seems to be typing their bike reg into. So you can now literally just remember when to book it. And because you can see which garages do MOTs, you can click on any and book it.
Arta
Before launch, there was no beta group and no early adopters. There was Arta, a friend, and a month of riding around London with the app on.
Literally just my friend that bikes with me. I asked him, can you test it and give me opinions? I used it for a month throughout London, just to make sure I was happy with it. I wouldn’t push something that I was not happy with. We were both finding issues, and I’d fix it, try the next version, try the next version.
Arta
Now that it is public, he is posting in biker groups and collecting feedback, and he is clear that he is not building it only for himself.
That’s why I tell everyone, please try it. Please tell me what to do, because I’ve made this for me. But everyone is not me.
Arta
The goal: take the payments
I closed by asking where he wants SoloBay to be in a year. He did not talk about downloads. He talked about payments.
I want it to be the one that takes the payments. That’s my goal. It would mean I could also make a lot of the paid functions free, because the payments for parking would offset my costs for the search functions and the street view. I don’t want to operate at a loss on an app that’s trying to be community driven, because I want it to be something that everyone that has a bike in the UK can use.
Arta
Until that happens, he says, he cannot make the paid features free, because he would simply be running at a total loss. He has approached most of the councils, and finds some more open than others.
Westminster seems to be the easiest, because they don’t want a monopoly by one app. They literally say, if you can take the payments and you can process it, we will let you do so. Camden, on the other hand, only want to use one platform, which I think goes against the British idea that you shouldn’t have a monopoly.
Arta
His argument is not just about SoloBay. He thinks a single payment provider per council gives one company too much control over rider data, and that smaller UK businesses should be allowed in, provided they handle data correctly.
All councils should allow every app to exist, because that means you don’t have a monopoly. It would be nice to have more smaller businesses be able to take the parking, as long as they function and process data correctly.
Arta
It was the last thing he said that stayed with me, because it is the sentence of a rider, not a founder.
It would be nice for the bike bays to be managed by a biker, rather than again by the same apps used for cars that can’t even distinguish between car and bike bays.
Arta
Where Motorcycle Grounds fits in
Earlier, Arta told me how SoloBay found its cafés: a bot left running for two days, scraping everything it could find. That gives riders breadth. What it cannot tell you is whether the coffee is good, whether the owner is worth meeting, or where you will actually park once you get there.
That is the gap this site fills. I visit every café in person, photograph it myself, and sit down with the owners to find out what makes the shop different. Each story carries a note on where to park a motorcycle. Those cafés now appear in SoloBay, marked as picked by me, with a link back to the story. There is a Curator picks filter in the app’s café tab that shows only the cafés from this site, and tapping through opens my profile page there. Arta tells me the filter is built to grow. The plan is for it to carry picks from a handful of riders he trusts, each with their own profile and their own tag on the cards. I am the first one in, and right now the filter is entirely mine, so anyone using it right now sees my 30 cafés.
If you would rather see them without the app, every café, with its address and parking notes, is on one page: motorcycle-friendly cafés, the Motorcycle Grounds picks. At the time of writing it lists 30, and it grows with every new story.
I said at the start of the call that I would download SoloBay and try it, and I meant it. I interviewed Arta a month ago and I’ve been using it on all my rides. It’s a massive time saver and my favourite feature is the “show me the closest parking” option which is right there when you open the app. Arta and I have kept in touch and the recommendations I’ve made so far have made their way into the app. His responsiveness is impressive and I have no doubt he’ll continue to make improvements based on any feedback he receives.
If you ride in the UK, it is free to use, you do not need an account, and Arta wants to hear what you think. His request was simple, and it is a fair one to end on.
Any feedback, I appreciate it, just so I can make sure it’s better, because I ride bikes.
Arta
