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The Best Parking Apps You've Never Heard Of and Why You Haven't
I casually asked a couple of my friends in Seattle -- where street parking is often unavailable, and parking garages vary widely in price -- if they'd ever heard of an app that would let them find the cheapest available parking garage, based on the time they wanted to enter and the time they planned on leaving. (Street parking is usually cheaper if you can find it, but the app would be useful for times that you can't find any.) Most of my friends said that they'd never heard of such an app, but they'd definitely use one if it existed. I also looked up parking apps on Google but the small subset that I randomly tried out, didn't do what I needed. So I thought about writing a "Somebody-with-more-time-than-me-should-go-and-do-this-thing" article, similar to the ride-swapping piece, when one of my friends casually mentioned the BestParking app.
Well, I tried it and it worked. (Lest I be accused of undue favoritism, ParkMe does the same thing just as well, although I didn't find it until later.) In both apps, you bring up a map centered on your current location, or scroll the map to where you plan on looking for parking later. You enter the time that you'll be entering and leaving, and the app shows a map with each parking garage represented by an icon showing the dollar amount that it will cost to park for that time. Without these apps, comparing rates is an annoyingly complex process to do by hand, in a crowded city like Seattle with many garages with different rates (and different times when their "evening rates" kick in -- usually 5 PM, but ranging from 4 to 7 PM), but the apps factor all of that in to give you the cheapest garage for the given time range. You can tap the individual garage icons for more information (if you plan on returning by 11 PM but you're not sure, you'd probably prefer a 24-hour garage instead of one that locks up at midnight). Also, if you're sitting at your computer and you already know the neighborhood where you'll be parking later, you can do the same search on each of their websites. (Although if you are on your phone, please don't do this from a moving car, duh. In Seattle there are plenty of 3-minute spots where you can pull over and do a search.)
So, I've been quite happy with both apps -- but I thought it was interesting that almost none of my friends had ever heard of them. I threw a quick survey up on Amazon's Mechanical Turk website, which I've used before for crowdsourced surveys and other experiments. I polled 50 people, offering them 25 cents apiece to answer these questions:
Would you use these apps? Section A: Parking garage app
Suppose a website and/or smartphone app existed where you could specify a neighborhood of a city, and enter a start and end time for when you wanted to park, and the app would automatically find the cheapest parking garage for that time range (assuming its too hard to find street parking).
1. Are you aware of any such apps/websites that already exist? If yes, whats the name of the app? (No need to do a web search -- only answer "Yes" if you already know of such an app or website.)
2. Would you use such an app/website if it existed? (Or, if youre aware of such an app that already exists, do you use it?)
Yes/No Section B: Spare room rental app
Suppose a website and/or smartphone app existed where you could list a room in your house as a temporary rental, and visitors to your city could rent it out for a single night, or more.
3. Are you aware of any such apps/websites that already exist? If yes, whats the name of the app? (No need to do a web search -- only answer "Yes" if you already know of such an app or website.)
4. Would you use such an app/website if it existed? (Or, if youre aware of such an app that already exists, do you use it?)
Yes/No
The second section, about a spare room rental app, was thrown in as a control in the experiment -- I knew the answer to that question (AirBnB), and I thought a large portion of the survey-takers would too, so I wanted to make sure they weren't just filling out the survey with blow-off answers to get the 25 cents as fast as possible.
Of the 50 people who filled out the survey, 14 of them said they had heard of using AirBnB, Couchsurfing, or Craigslist for the purpose of renting out a room or finding one to rent (almost all of them mentioned AirBnB specifically). But of the same 50 respondents, only two of them mentioned any parking apps that they had heard of, and only one of them mentioned one of the two that I'd found which actually worked. (The other person mentioned an app called ParkWhiz, which, when I tested it out, only displayed one $17 parking garage in a neighborhood where I know of several $5 garages, which BestParking and ParkMe did list correctly.)
This seems to confirm the anecdotal evidence from my survey of my Seattle friends -- there is a great deficiency in awareness of these apps, relative to how useful people would find them if they knew about them.
So how is it that people are finding -- or not finding -- these apps? In a Google search for "parking app", the first result was an ad for ParkWhiz. BestParking and ParkMe did show up in the results, but so did another one called Parker, as well as a Mashable article by Kate Freeman listing "7 City Parking Apps to Save You Time, Money and Gas". Of the apps listed in the article, the only city-specific one that worked in Seattle (PrimoSpot) has been discontinued, and of the non-city-specific ones, only Parker is still around. (The article doesn't even mention BestParking or ParkMe, although I don't know if they existed when it was written.) Finally, a friend in my survey told me about an app called Parkopedia, which has over 100,000 downloads on Google Play (the same as BestParking, and more than ParkMe).
So even if it did occur to you to look for a parking-garage-finding app, the problem is that if you randomly picked one of the five most popular parking apps (BestParking, Parker, ParkMe, Parkopedia, and ParkWhiz), you might accidentally pick one of the three out of five that is a fail:
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ParkWhiz, as noted above, only showed one $17 garage in a neighborhood full of other, cheaper garages.
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Both ParkMe and Parkopedia display their results as a map with an icon marking each parking garage -- but with no price information. Simply having a map of parking garage locations isn't too useful, since you could get that by searching Google Maps for "parking" anyway. In both apps, you can click on parking garage icons to bring up a window showing their rates, but in Parker most of the listed garages just said "Contact facility for current rates". Parkopedia did usually display the rates for different garages -- but it's a pain to click on each of a dozen parking garage icons looking for the cheapest one. A typical area of downtown Seattle will have one garage where you can park for $5 for the evening, surrounded by garages where parking costs $10 or more, but Parkopedia doesn't make it easy to find it. And neither app lets you specify a start and end time for your parking so that you can find the cheapest garage for that time range.
So it seems odd that according to the Google Play store, Parkopedia has more downloads than ParkMe (100,000+ vs 50,000+), even though ParkMe seems a lot more useful. Meanwhile ParkWhiz, the one that found only one overpriced parking garage in a neighborhood full of cheaper ones, has fewer downloads but a slightly higher star rating in the app store than ParkMe. Of course in my parking-app survey of friends and Mechanical Turk users, the far-and-a-way winner was simply not knowing that any of these apps existed at all.
And here's why it matters to you even if you ride a granola-powered bike to work: I think this is a confirming instance of what I've been arguing for years, that the marketplace for ideas, inventions, and intellectual property is far less efficient than most people think it is. Every day a huge amount of human capital is squandered by people trying to jostle their competitors out of Google search results, or even just trying to raise the capital to advertise their products to people who would find them extremely useful, but will never find out about it if the venture capitalists don't come through with the money to advertise it. All of that is time and effort that could have instead gone towards making the products better.
I've suggested an algorithm based on "random-sample voting" as an antidote to some of these market inefficiencies, such as stopping people from buying votes on Digg, promoting the best ideas on Obama's "We The People" petition website, or even deciding whether J.K. Rowling is the world's greatest author or just lucky. Basically, in each scenario, the competing entities -- whether apps, or songs, or ideas for improving U.S. government policy -- would be rated by a sufficiently large random sample of qualified raters. ("Qualified raters" might mean economists in the case of the White House policy-petition website, or it might mean music consumers in the case of an algorithm to find the best new songs.) Each entity would receive an average rating from those raters, and then the entities with the highest average rating would be the ones promoted to the widest audience (at the top of Google search results, for example). It sounds deceptively simple, but it's far less amenable to "gaming the system", because you can't rope in your friends to vote for your app, or pay voters to rate you highly on Digg. The only way to win in this system is to make your song, idea, or app, the best that it can be -- which means your human capital is being channeled productively, instead of being wasted hiring an SEO company to try and knock your competition out of the top spot on Google.
If competition between parking apps worked this way, then all the current users of Parker, ParkWhiz and Parkopedia, would switch to BestParking and ParkMe, saving themselves a lot of hassle in the process, and those second-rate apps would have never even gotten on the ground unless they got their act together and implemented the same features. More broadly, if competition in the marketplace of ideas worked this way, then there wouldn't be so many users who really wish they could have an app like this, without realizing that the apps exist!
One striking thing about looking at a map of downtown parking garages, is how wildly the rates vary from each other, with $15 garages situated right next to the $5 ones. In theory, in a competitive marketplace, such rates should stabilize around a single price, for goods that are roughly comparable. But the $10 lots do still manage to get some customers who don't know any better, because it's just not practical to criss-cross a grid of several dozen city blocks looking for the cheapest garage. BestParking and ParkMe help people deal with this inefficient marketplace. So it's ironic that they're being held back by a marketplace for ideas that operates just as inefficiently in its own way.
Because when I have to go somewhere that parking is tricky, I'm always on two wheels. And there's always somewhere to park it.
Plus it's often quicker in busy cities, cheaper, gets you fit(If you don't have an engine) and above all, is fun!
This is filler spot on daytime tv news sad.
Why does anybody read anything by Bennett?
Bennett, I like all of your stuff and this is well-written but...
These apps are just going to increase mass neurosis. We don't need our heads filled with this crap. We need to spend more time thinking about important issues, not the trivia.
"Western man is externalizing himself with gadgets" - William S. Burroughs
WOAH! I'm goin' to the movies!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Who the flip is Bennet Haselton and why is he allowed to have verbal diarrhea on Slashdot?
Use a jetpack, problem solved!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Nuh uh! His mommy says he's the smartest boy in the world!
but it depends on how close you are to a local attraction or work site. i had to drive into manhattan today and parked in the $25 garage because it's the closest one to where i work. sure i can find a cheaper spot but then it's a 10 minute walk for me
and it's not my money. i get pre-tax parking benefits from my employer and pay with a special credit card
Please at least sign up for a WordPress account. Please?
Did you not glance at the recent Slashdot poll that shows that an overwhelming majority of your readers don't buy apps?
"And here's why it matters to you even if you ride a granola-powered bike to work: I think this is a confirming instance of what I've been arguing for years, that the marketplace for ideas, inventions, and intellectual property is far less efficient than most people think it is."
Duh. As much as people hate MBA’s around here, this is something that business people understand that engineers/scientists/developers do not: building a better mousetrap is not a guaranteed path to success; never has been and never will be. The economy is littered with the corpses of great products that failed to educate the market about it’s existence and died in obscurity.
Remember the Slashdot meme:
1) Build a great parking app
2) ???
3) Profit
I’ve always found that hilarious. ??? = good marketing. The ones you’re referring to that are so good but fail in the market are not that.
The market actually works exactly as it’s described to: in a perfectly efficient market the buyers and sellers are fully informed individuals aware of all options in the marketplace. The reality is that fully informed is nearly impossible, and it’s that uninformed buyer where marketing folks and business folks come into play to ensure success, or to take advantage of the inefficiency and make money.
Now some will argue the latter is more often the case. That is true: markets are dynamic, not static. When an inefficiency arises, someone takes that opportunity, and ideally in so doing informs the market of the opportunity, correcting out the inefficiency.
So now I need an app to help me park with as little butthurt as possible. It could be that people haven't realized how thoroughtly nickle-and-dimed our lives have become. It's pretty sad. Any everytime I try and think of something sadder, its already been done.
I can park just fine without an app. Not sure why this is even on here. Go blog that shit.
can we all pitch in $5 a month and get this bennett guy his own blog? (and punt him the hell off slashdot?)
if I go to Seattle, I will use the bus and subway system. well, i don't have a driver's license. lol
Stop this.
Seriously.
Just stop.
At least this one didn't include whining about Burning Man in it. That's a narked improvement.
Wasn't beta supposed to have a BH filter?
Why, why, why does this dreck keep getting posted?
This random sample voting idea is already in use on Google play. It came into effect a few months ago. If you open Google play on your Android device you will see a widget that invites you to vote for one of your recently installed apps.
I don't know how well this could work even if done perfectly. The ultimate measure of the quality and appeal of a product is whether or not you will recommend it to someone explicitly (and not just implicitly by liking it on Facebook or G+ or what not). I doubt Google has a way to measure that. Maybe they're working on it.
D'oh!
I thought the summary was for a pranking app, rather than parking app.
I could use a pranking app.
I think the issue is the Parking apps are targeted at a very small subset of people. the only real audience are people who occasionally park in a city. I suspect that most people in that subset rely on their hotel or destination parking suggestion and leave it at that.
I did try out several apps (and web sites) during a recent weekend trip to Boston. Several were next to useless, a couple were good. I ended up saving about 50% vs what my hotel valet service would have been - but I did have to walk a half mile from the garage to the hotel.
Burning Man... narked... I see what you did there.
* Parking rates vary.
* The best app isn't always the highest rated app.
If engineers were left to design a parking app, they'd make it work for all forms of paid parking in at least one country. Instead, we're saddled with a fragmented market.
Well, for one they only seem to really work for US locations and I'm quite a ways from there. ParkMe did find some nearby results but the information was wildly wrong.
...did he try them in any other city than his?
How well do those work in LA? Boston? New York?
How we do the ones he panned work there?
Short-sighted drivel.
Yeah, I made a typo when typing on my phone keyboard.
When I rode the train in to work this morning, the app failed miserably when I tried to find the best place to park it in the rail yard. Also, the conductor's goons stopped me from getting to the locomotive.
#DeleteChrome
will not allow it. They know that transit and parking is regressive since the poor and minorities pay a higher percentage of their income for it so they will not allow us the ability to save money one it. They have ruled this city with an iron first for decades. They are in the process of more than decimating the bus system. They are destroying 15% of it! Also, they have stopped the new transit tunnel, and are fighting against allowing light rail to expand. In addition, they are going to steal the two express lanes from I-90. They recently got the plan approved to disallow buses from using them. They have fucked this city almost to the point of no return. They've even destroyed the South Lake Union area. They hate the SLUT (South Lake Union Transit), and are doing every thing they can to destroy it. Seattle used to be such a nice place It’s sad to see what Republicans have done to us.
I would pay money for a parking app that can tell me which towing company tows cars from there. Where I live, car theft is 100% legal if you are a towing company - it has been demonstrated repeatedly on camera and in court - and some companies are far more frequent offenders than others. I am willing to pay more to park in lots that are not patrolled by certain crooked towing companies.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Works very well for me.
I have noticed that motorized scooters have been granted a status in some places of "absolutely magical". It is apparently legal to park them at no cost at bicycle racks, even if they prevent actual bicycles from parking there. They are, by association, legal to ride (or at least, push) on the sidewalk as well. You can carry whatever or whoever you want with you on it, seldom need a proper helmet, and if you have enough power you can go ahead and drive on the freeway as well. They generally need less insurance and registration to boot.
Why bother with a bicycle at that point? We don't really embrace fitness in this country anyways.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
He's got a bad case of verbal diarhea and a love of hearing himself write. He is not insightful; he's a blow-hard.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Let's say hypothetically a slashditor (let's call him "Supnezmas"), when not posting duplicate articles from 2 days before, has a major erection for some web commenter (let's call him "Notlesah, Ttenneb").
How could I edit my settings so that worthless shit articles from "Supnezmas" referencing this "Notlesah, Ttenneb" were somehow downrated to oblivion so I don't see them anymore, ever? Is there a filter I can apply?
Can I "foe" an editor based on context?
-Styopa
> my friends in Seattle -- where street parking is often unavailable
Because the Republicans are fuckwads. As the PI noticed, nearly 90% of downtown parking is owned by Republicans. They don't want to see minorities in downtown so they artificially raise prices. Also, the early bird specials are make to screw over minorities. The rich white people that work "normal" hours get huge discounts, but they demand I pay three times as much as my white-collar workers because I work in a restaurant. They hate us.
I tried both of them on their respective website version. I tried to look for a parking place close to a venue where I would normally attend for annual events. Unfortunately, neither of the sites would list this particular parking garage. It would have been much closer and much cheaper.
W. T. F.
On the other hand, I've been a user of Parkopedia and I found this parking garage mentioned above several years ago. They even have an Android app (not sure about other platforms) for those on the go.
Honestly, I am not impressed with the article. I'm glad I did not waste my time reading the entire thing.
One striking thing about looking at a map of downtown parking garages, is how wildly the rates vary from each other, with $15 garages situated right next to the $5 ones. In theory, in a competitive marketplace, such rates should stabilize around a single price, for goods that are roughly comparable. But the $10 lots do still manage to get some customers who don't know any better, because it's just not practical to criss-cross a grid of several ....
and it goes on.
See, the $5 lot fills up first. The $15 lot next door now gets the overflow business for folks who want to park in that area and are unwilling to drive around or park further away. See? And i you have your numbers down, you can actually make MORE money with the $15 lot even if you have plenty of spaces left - and that maybe why the other lots charge $10 instead of $15: their max is at that price - excuse me, "price point" or as I put it to sound REALLY important: the "profit maximization equalization singularity".
It would be nice to have this for every category of thing.
Of course, if we did it on a regular basis, it would be coopted or corrupted by businesses in some way.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Guys, why all the vitriol for this article? Slashvertisement? It doesn't matter. He went out of his way to point out two different apps and an experiment that he did, where he shared the results.
The topic, for the TL;DR people is essentially why are good apps unseen while poorer ones are popular. He cited ParkMe and BestParking as his basis of research.
It's a questions that would apply to nerds want to popularize an app, but don't understand the phenomena that encourage apps to spread regardless of feature set.
Personally, I use BestParking for my trips to New York City, but agree that it is rarely discussed, so I guess it is rarely known. Maybe it is the nature of parking. Many people who park want to park and move on. They don't think about it after the act, so don't want to think about it much earlier either. It is not a long, drawn out thing (like finding a place to live) where you often plan. Additionally, you can't easily use the app while driving, which is what you are doing when you most think of needing to use the App. So maybe this one is the nature of the activity itself. People don't think about it, so it never gets enough buzz to become a topic of conversation so the knowledge of it doesn't spread.
In Marietta, GA - the Square - there is only 2 hour parking and not enough of it. The parking behind businesses and alleyways are taken up by the owners and managers. The hourly staff has to find parking on the street.
So, one has to get there 30 minutes early in order to clock in on time. You may get a spot right away or it'll take you 30 minutes to get one.
Then, while you are working, if you can't get out there fast enough to move your car, you get a ticket for an amount that costs a day's wages - maybe more if you're working in a restaurant as wait staff.
Do the local business owners try to lobby the city to change that? Or to get employee parking passes so the meter people leave them alone?
Hell no!
The way poor people are nickle and dimed, it's almost impossible to stay afloat.
Of course, our society treats poor people as if they have a character flaw - after all, people with decent characters have no money issues!
Yeah, tell that to the guy whose job was off-shored and cannot get another one.
We have become a soulless lizard brained society. Might makes right; money makes you right and smart; and if you're poor, well too bad! You obviously made the "wrong" decisions and it sucks to be you (like people wake up one morning and think,"I'm gonna make wrong decisions and fuck up my life!"). Now go away and die!
Honestly that's the main reason why tech people need to get MBA's to run their business. It's not that hard to figure out how to manage and do back office stuff passably well. Oh sure, you might pay too much in taxes, but it's not that big a deal.
What is a big deal is the ability to get the word out - to tell people about your product.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Almost all marketplaces are broken. Getting eyes on your website, users to download your app, people to watch your commercial, etc. are all not meritocracies. That's why there are whole categories of professions to handle them (advertising, SEO, etc.). Everyone that makes products knows that if you want to make a ton of money, don't put your money into making a better product, put your money into advertising your currently crappy product.
I got ripped apart a few days ago for making the comment that programming is currently at the equivalent maturity to medicine back in the blood-letting days. This is more proof that we haven't created adequate solutions for common problems like search yet. Sure Google was better than everyone before them and there has been a lot of advancement, but we have a very long way to go yet.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.uk.ringgo.android
Also available in the AppStore.
One of those two apps runs only on iOS 7.0 or greater, and the other requires at least 6.0. Anyone who's had their phone for more than a year and is tight for space can't install these. I use the San Francisco specific "Parkola" app which will run on my 5.1 16GB device that is packed to the gills with essentials. At least those in the area where the tech industry is know that if you did an upgrade every time you got the offer, all you would ever be doing is upgrading.
Don't most people who complain about mods get metamodded to smitherines? This guy is complaining about moderation (being in the form of popularity and talk) about something.
I'd get metamodded to shreds, he gets a front page post.
First I couldn't find it in the Google Play store. When I searched for it on the desktop, I found the app is "not compatible with any of your devices". Ho-hum.
I tried searching for local parking on the developer's site. They have data for maybe 10% of car parks in central Birmingham, UK; and even then the prices are denoted in US dollars. I don't know whether $4 = £4, or if some exchange rate is being applied.
If I search on Parkopedia, despite the slightly clunky interface not only is every local car park that I know of listed with prices, there are also details of the city street parking zones and their times of operation.
I would suggest that there may be more than one reason a particular parking app is more popular than another.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
If you simply go to google and search for "cheapest parking", the first result is bestparking.com.
Don't limit yourself by searching for "apps". The world existed before "apps" came along. Good old fashioned websites that you find with a google search are just as viable now as they were years ago.
I don't need an app to help me find on-street parking, though it sure is handy being able to plug the meter by phone.
https://paybyphone.com/
I use it all the time.
It's difficult to focus on the concepts presented when the author employs such over-used, abused, and ultimately meaningless phrases as "marketplace of ideas" and "intellectual property".
There's a new app, called ParkApp (www.parkapp.es, only available as a beta in Spain for now), that is the bees knees; it will let you see what parking lots have available spaces, and also book, enter, leave and pay your stay, all with your phone. They also have something going on for bikes, because driving in a busy city sucks.
Right, it's spelled "narc'ed".
I now know about a very handy parking app for DC. And I DID actually look for one and as the article suggests I found crap. Now I'm happy and his "textwall" not withstanding I have no baggage with this Bennett person so all I can say is "Thanks"
If you can't be good, be good at it!
Every person using a smartphone or computer are getting apps or programs in a semi-random way looking at ratings and hoping it delivers, but mostly missing out on what exists and is possible.
I know a lot of apps and devices that a truly helpful and cheap yet overlooked or underestimated and thus most people have lots of unnessary trouble; no windows users have any idea of the possibilities by the myriad of time-savers built into mac os, and most mac users only find out after months or years, how many know that using a mobile browser without advertisements will save both time and money - yes, theres an app for that!
Apple shot themselves in the foot dealing with TomTom instead of Garmin (when dropping Google maps), maybe they were thinking TomTom maps were good based on biased reviews or marketing? The apple app market is a confused jungle of look-alikes, and even the magazines dedicated to sorting out the best apps gets half-hearted results.
There are a lot of ingenious ideas and apps getting drowned out in the shouting of the big ones, and the more work is being done on apps instead of store-bought programs the more the confusing is likely to cause harm and make the dinosaurs eat the small people.
Comparing the usefulness, userfriendlyness and efficiency of office packs, photoediting programs or dslrs will show absolute clear winners when you take into account the price, and the big ones are absolutely the least efficient and least value for money.
Of course i cannot tell my experiences here since that would be advertising, so you still have to do the research yourselves, maybe someday there will be a functioning way to inform about the things that are worthy of it:)
I'm not sure why you would use 'app' as a search keyword. It's pretty much guaranteed to generate nothing more than noise. When I typed "parking garage" into Google Play, the first result that came back was the supposedly unfindable "Best Parking" app... and it was the *only* app on Bennett's list that actually made it into the top ten (the only other app actually related to finding parking was Parknav, not listed in the article.) If I refine that by changing the search term to "cheapest parking garage", "Best Parking" still shows up in first place, Parknav comes in at #2, and ParkMe comes in at #6 -- and the noted inferior apps don't place at all. (Some of the other results were games about parking. The things that people find entertaining boggle the mind.)
Given that 'app' is a discardable generic term, expecting mind-reading results from effectively searching for apps related to 'parking' isn't reasonable ("I wanted an app about parking domain names!"). If you do use reasonable terms, the results appear fairly decent. I don't have an iPhone to try this on, so maybe the Apple results are worse, but I'd be somewhat surprised.
As for why these apps aren't famous, if I hadn't gotten curious about the results being as bad as were claimed it would never have occurred to me to actually search for an app to do price comparisons on parking garages. I don't live a lifestyle where that's remotely relevant to me, and I suspect that it isn't a common problem except in very specific regions.
The point is valid, but not that helpful. Yes, our current system for finding useful apps is imperfect.
Sometimes when you invent a better mousetrap, the world doesn't figure it out and beat a path to your door. It would be great if the best ideas always win in the marketplace of ideas, but sometimes they don't.
And, if you can solve this general problem, you will be very popular.
I think social media can help a bit, but it's no panacea. (TFA noted that the voting for apps doesn't favor the best apps, and the voting system is arguably a form of social media.) Sometimes I hear about cool stuff on Facebook or whatever, but marketers try to spam us even on Facebook and its signal-to-noise ratio is degrading.
P.S. I live near Seattle. I went to Emerald City ComiCon again this year, and I arrived too late to get one of the spaces in the convention center parking. I wound up getting a good space using the BestParking app. So, it worked well for me the one time I tried it.
I found this app by doing Google searches for parking the night before, and finding the bestparking.com web site, which advertised that they had a mobile app.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I was talking with a fairly large group of tech-savvy friends here in Austin the other day, and it was nearly unanimous - the last thing we ever want is another damn app to download, constantly whine for updating, and try to find among the other 200 crap apps on our phones or tablets. We coined this rising level of disgust "App Fatigue"...
Web apps could conceivably be a decent alternative, but only if someone gives me Settings option checkboxes labelled,
[ ] Never, ever, show me the crippled mobile version of any website at all, as long as I live., (preferred) or maybe,
[ ] Always lie to web servers so they think this is a desktop computer with a real browser. Because it's more powerful than my desktop computer, and has a real browser.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
there are a lot of free places to park that this thing doesn't list... useless.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Incompatible with a Nexus 5? *plonk*
ParkMe:
There are 5 apps by this name I can find in the Play Store. But the one I think you're talking about shows up in the "related apps" for those, and looking closer, it gives the same message as above.
So to answer your question as to why noone is using your apps, make them compatible with phones people are using first!
Sure, if you consider TGI Fridays a great place to eat and people watch.
I would and do use BestParking when traveling to other cities. However, what these apps do not indicate is that many vendors in the area will validate your parking. So the cheapest (usually city parking) is not always the best if you can get your ticket validated.
I am a scooter rider. In most places in the US, the following rules apply:
For scooters that are less than 50cc and cannot go faster than 35 mph:
* You may park in the bike rack like a bike. In some places, you can even park on the sidewalk (!!) as long as it isn't obstructing pedestrian traffic.
* Do not require a motorcycle or even a driver's license, but if you have a prior DUI, some states won't let you ride a scooter until your license gets reinstated.
* Some states require you to register and title your scooter, some do not
* You may or may not need a helmet and/or eye protection (in my state, you need both, and both are a good idea unless you like getting a rock or sand in your eyes while you're trying to drive).
* May not go on the freeway, and you must drive them in the right lane unless you are turning left.
* May not use bike paths, bike lanes, or any other resources designated for bicycles.
* Do not require insurance
Any scooter that is 50cc or more, or can go over 35mph is a motorcycle. For a motorcycle:
* You need a motorcycle license
* You need to register and title your motorcycle and get any required inspections
* You may not park in the bike racks nor engage in any other scooter "magic". The "magic" is for the under 50cc crowd.
Here's the gotcha of scooters: some people derestrict them, but this can be a bad idea, because let's say you derestrict your 50cc scoot and are going 45 in a 35mph zone. If caught, you are violating the following laws: speeding, driving without a license (assuming you have no motorcycle license), driving an unregistered motor vehicle, driving an uninspected vehicle, operating a motorcycle without a helmet/eyewear (if applicable). Is a cop really going to throw the book at you like that? Not likely, but it's still a big risk if the officer is behind on his or her monthly quota!
As for me, I have a derestricted 50cc scoot for the parking "magic", but I also have a motorcycle endorsement and registered my scoot, and I wear a helmet/eyewear, and I have insurance (it's super cheap, and scooter theft is rampant). So if I'm caught speeding, it's simple speeding and I guess I don't get it inspected, but that's a compliance ticket (if you get it inspected, then the ticket is dismissed). Technically, I shouldn't park in the bike rack because my scoot goes faster than 35mph, but the meter maid doesn't know that.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Verbosity is not a virtue