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In SF: an App For Auctioning Off Your Public Parking Spot
trbdavies (979982) writes 'Only in San Francisco' used to refer to issues like whether public nudity should be restricted to certain hours of the day. Now I hear it most often in connection with the interplay between the city and tech companies. SF Weekly reports on one such development: 'Anyone who's visited San Francisco for 35 minutes knows that easy parking is a rare find. Enter Paolo Dobrowolny, an Italian tech bro who decided San Francisco was the perfect spot to test out his new experiment. Here's how it works: You find a parking spot, revel a little, let Monkey Parking know where you're located, and watch the bidding begin. Finally, give your spot to the wealthiest victim willing to pay the highest price for your spot. Drive away that much richer.'" Update: 05/08 15:52 GMT by T : I suspect that Dobrowolny's a tech pro, rather than bro, or at least that's what I suspect the Weekly meant to say.
"Tech bro"?
Go home, Slashdot, you're drunk.
Dog is my co-pilot.
You pay your parking fee to park there.
You are not entitled to resell that right. Only the townhall can.
And finally, I just need to locat the bidder, go there with my car first and wait for the parking fee(s) to expire.
As soon as the car moves away, I get the spot. All legal!
Ah!
I love this idea!
It helps to connect the rich cunt demographic with the thieving cunt demographic.
Leaving less cuntiness in the world for non-cunts.
badly.
Hording a public thing you do not own and then scalping it won't go well, and will be banned by the courts.
And when you get in your car to leave, and I stop to get the spot, I sure as hell will not move just because you want to sell something you do not own to someone else. So there is a logistic issue.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Or public transit, like a really civilized country.
I for one wholly endorse this newfound libertarian dystopia and have devised a competitive service called turd auction. Heres how it works: i leave a bathroom stall at a public stadium or park, and users logged into my site then meet up and fight eachother to the death in mortal combat to determine who can then prostitute their children to raise enough money for the half roll of shit tickets left in the stall.
Good people go to bed earlier.
We're talking SF here, not civilized countries.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
High-speed parkers provide liquidity, you insensitive clod!
You misread. Public doesn't mean state-owned here... it's a privately owned first-come-first-serve system that's getting abused. Same thing happens at the stock market sometimes... it's a "you wanted this, but I'm buying it first and then will sell it to you... PROFIT!"... but usually quickly destroyed by new laws or market rules.
The city can't do a damn thing about them, since each reservation is under a different name......
There must be more to it than that. Either there is some restriction in the local laws preventing them implementing measures against this or they can't be bothered and are claiming they can't to shift the blame to someone else.
One obvious measure to make this much harder for example would be to require users bring ID that matches the name under which the booking was made preventing post-hoc sales of bookings.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Some people are willing to pay the extra costs of living in order to have access to an immense amount of culture. NYC has several orchestras, a world-class opera and theatre scene, and readings by prominent literary figures nearly every night of the week. If you like fine dining, you have a vaster range of choices there than elsewhere.
You have to truck in everything and truck out everything,
The suburbs also have to truck everything in and out: it's not like local farmland and local factories provide even a tiny percentage of the goods and foodstuffs used there.
Rural areas also have to truck most things in and out, for mostly the same reasons. The way the world economy is structured, pretty-much EVERYTHING is trucked in and out from somewhere else. It's a myth that non-urban areas somehow are less reliant on the "outside" than urban areas.
More to the point, there is a massive economy of scale in cities. New brings in goods in bulk, which then require minimal internal redistribution compared to, say, strip malls in suburbia.
All of that aside, cities are where basically all jobs are. Why would anyone start a company that requires skilled workers in a place with a small talent pool? How many coders or engineers live in any rural town, or even within a day's commute of one? How many live within walking distance of a building in New York?
Look at the job listings in any small town, and then look at the job listings in New York or Boston or San Fran. There's nothing to do in exchange for money in small towns and rural places for most of us. There's no career path at all.
Hell, there's also just NOTHING TO DO. We live in New York because we can walk to one of two dozen brunch places on Sunday morning. We can see opera, musical theatre, the symphony, an off-broadway play, slam poetry, a puppet show, or basically anything we want any day of the week. Want to play an obscure German board game? Thousands of people live basically next do and also want to do so. How many people would be interested in that kind of game in a town of 2000 people?
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Massive cities are, by all measures, more efficient than suburban life or rural life. Distribution of resources scales very, very well with population density. Trucking in and out food is orders of magnitude greener than producers sending out 1000 smaller trucks much farther across sprawling rural areas, then everyone trucking themselves around to the grocery store 10-20 minutes away. Wiring power to a 30 floor apartment building is much more efficient than stringing copper to an equal number of suburban homes. Heating a large building with a huge steam boiler, when divided out, is much more efficient than heating the equivalent in suburban homes with electricity, gas, or any theoretical technology! Thermodynamics are just plain working against you!
You seem to just be trolling for replies early in the article so I'm not going to waste time pulling up links. I'm sure others in the community have plenty handy. But if you are being earnest, just think about it for half a second. You might find the way of life unpleasant. That's ok. Many people do. It falls in and out of style over time. But come on, man.
I thought San Francisco already had dynamic parking prices to try to use market forces to keep parking available. They have devices to monitor parking utilization. The goal is to typically have one on-street parking spot open per block; somewhere around 85% utilization. If the block is consistently above that, the price increases. If it's below, the price lowers. They adjust the prices by $.25 every month.
From the talk on this that I saw, they generally improved the availability of parking though the dynamic pricing. Employees who park every day would find the cheaper blocks to park on, leaving the busier blocks open for customers.
Maybe the program isn't working as well as they claimed. Maybe the program isn't covering enough of the city, and the approach in the article is of more use in other parts.
Nonsense! Let's analyze:
Assuming they're paying for parking and not staying longer than they're allowed to, how is it "hoarding"?
You're right there... hoarding is the process of taking too many. But that doesn't match the article. The story here is that they're taking the last one, then offering to move on for money... but that's also known as "scalping".
And how is it "scalping"? They're merely offering to delay leaving their spot if someone pays them to do so. Basically they're selling their time.
You got that backwards... they're not delay leaving, they're threatening to keep there to the point it causes a time-sensitive worker a problem like job loss.
Ultimately I think the app would need to give the general location to everyone, but the exact spot should only go to the individual selected by the person leaving the spot.
No, the app has to identify where the spot is so people can determine how valuable it is... but wait, it isn't their property. It's a space their renting, with the purpose of reselling. Check the back of the ticket. If it doesn't have a contract or TOS on the back... what kind of ticket is it?
Sorry, we "Yuropeans" (what's that?) don't like rust. But we like spelling, grammar, busses, trains, (and economic cars), disarmed people, welfare, public healthcare, and everything else sane that scares America. Thank you.
Cities ate not more efficient than suburbs by every measure; if they were, it would be cheaper, not more expensive, to live in cities. There are diseconomies of density which result in groceries, electricity, etc costing MORE in cities, not less.
I lived in Boston for a while and the parking is just as bad there as it is in SF. For those of you that have not visited the fine city of Boston, allow me to enlighten you. Boston is an historical city and, as such, has numerous historical buildings. Buildings that cannot be knocked down in order to widen roads. The road that Paul Revere travelled on is just as wide now as it was then.
Lots of one way streets and lots of one hour parking. The cops there would ride around with little bits of chalk. The first time through they would put a chalk mark on the tires of the cars in the one hour parking zone. An hour later they return and any car there with chalk on the tire gets a ticket. So of course it became a game of cat and mouse - cop puts chalk, car owner rubs it off.
When it snows it's worse because the snow plows can't get through so you would have to park on alternate sides of the street depending on the day of the week. If you're caught on the wrong side when the snow plows come through they just tow your car.
The moral of the story is that if you live in Boston, or SF for that matter, take public transportation whenever you can. Driving and parking in either of those cities is a pain in the ass and is to be avoided at all costs.
One of the reasons I left Boston was the traffic and parking. I got sick of it.
Naturally, this app is going to get banned. You don't own the land you are parking your car on. The owner of the parking lot sets the price, not the person renting the spot.
Just use the app, find the spot, then park behind them
I think here we have the very definition of "unclear on the concept".
If there ever WAS parking behind them, they wouldn't be able to sell the spot now would they?
That spot behind them was claimed last week...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What I loved aout Europe was there wasn't a need for a car - unlike here in the most of the States. Not having to worry about parking or getting booted or towed or feeding the meter or .....
People bitch about European taxes. Well, take you car payment, insurance, maintenance, gas, registration, emissions testing and eliminate them.
You now have how much left per month? $400 - $500 - more?
And let's mention the reduction of stress from having to deal with all the chores associated with that car. I have to make time to go and get my car checked for emissions - and it'll pass - but I have to do it for the "privalege" of driving - even though it IS a nessessity here in the States.
Back to taxes...
Add in a single payer medical system - not this Obamacare crap - and those high European taxes do not seem so bad.
They are not perfect, but they have solved some social problems a bit better than we have.
The only thing that really rises up cost of living in cities is supply vs demand. People who live in cities want to live close by stuff, almost by definition, and they pay a premium for it. That raises up land price, which trickles all the way down to things like groceries (can you imagine the cost of the land to build a large grocery store in SF/Boston/NYC? yeah...).
That explains almost all of the cost difference. Not all of it, but almost.
Culture is the guy who PLAYS the violin. People that scurry around in ovecrowded cities arguing over parking spots and the regulations thereof is... something else.
What if I want to go mountain biking? What if I want to go hiking? What if I want to plant a large garden? What if I want to launch high power model rockets? What if I want to ride my motorcycle without traffic? What if I want to rebuild an old car?
It all depends on what you want to do. Opera? Not really my thing? They symphony? Yes but I can do that with a 30 minute drive and minimal traffic where I am at. Theater? The same.
Of course I am not in a town of 2000 people but a town of 200,000 just 25 minutes from Palm Beach which is one of the richest cities in the nation so we get a lot of high end stuff. Did I mention that the crime rate is also very low and the air and water quality is very high?
The ideal location depends on the person. Take a look at the job openings in Melbourne Florida, the Palm Beach area, and Fort Lauderdale. The company that I work for even has it's own fab.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Public transportation is Communism, pure and simple. Oh, it all starts innocently enough -- one day, you're just riding the bus to work. But before you know it, the zombified corpse of Josef Stalin is running amok across the country, nationalizing our industries and forcing our children to learn about evolution and heliocentrism.
No thanks. I'll stick with my armored three-ton Humvee for my ten-mile commute to work.
It's not incorrect so much as outdated. http://grammarist.com/spelling/buses-busses/
Well, the labor theory of value is long dead for good reason. I could spend months spitting into a barrel and filling it up, but nobody would pay me a value commensurate with my effort. There's a place in the world for arbitrage. And of course, if enough people engage in that arbitrage, the profit from the arbitrage opportunity becomes pretty minimal.
It seems like a few things are going on here:
1) We're clearly charging far less for public parking spaces than the market will bear. This is not good because it encourages overconsumption and contention for spaces.
2) Any place where the "scalper" price is high is likely to be chronically full. That is, in general, you should expect to be unable to find parking during busy times at those locations. That means that if we ban this practice, more often than not, the people who you describe as desperately needing those spaces won't get them at all.
3) We rage at people who are willing to vacate a space for a price when somebody else desperately needs the space, but we don't rail at people who occupy that space for unimportant stuff (hanging out a coffee shop) when somebody desperately needs the space.
4) In a perfect world, the people who need the space the most will get it. The closest approximation of that would be an auction system. The only reason it's a problem is that the auction is being conducted by a middle man rather than by the city directly.
A much better system is a smart meter system like SF Park. It gives you the "good" properties (people who needs the spaces badly are almost certain to get them) without the "bad" properties of a middle man getting a cash windfall.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
SF used to have homeless people selling parking spaces. You'd see guys standing in empty parking spaces, waving you in, and expecting to be paid. That's been stopped; it's extortion.
So is this.
Unless, of course, the cities massively subsidize the suburbs. Then all bets are off.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.