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San Francisco Bans Parking Spot Auctioning App
A couple months ago, we discussed a new phone app being used in San Francisco to auction off parking spaces to the highest bidder. The city has now ordered the app makers to cease and desist, and threatened motorists with a $300 fine for each transaction. City Attorney Dennis Herrera said,
Technology has given rise to many laudable innovations in how we live and work -- and Monkey Parking is not one of them. It's illegal, it puts drivers on the hook for $300 fines, and it creates a predatory private market for public parking spaces that San Franciscans will not tolerate. Worst of all, it encourages drivers to use their mobile devices unsafely — to engage in online bidding wars while driving. People are free to rent out their own private driveways and garage spaces should they choose to do so. But we will not abide businesses that hold hostage on-street public parking spots for their own private profit.
Banning this is communism!
This is the free market at work.
Hey, I've got an app that for $300 you can park anywhere in san francisco! Even someone else's driveway! For $3000 we'll even sell you parking on the bridge!
It's based on holding public space hostage.
Another venture capital fail. Back to the unemployment office for the staff and their stock options...
Specific practices like driver using phone while driving, or curb parking time limits can certainly be regulated. But not the basic fact of people exchanging money for information. Dislike it all you want, but people have freedom to do as they want.
I can see this type of service continuing on.
1: Parking spaces are in demand.
2: People are willing to pay cash for one.
3: Other people want money.
All that needs to happen is that the server gets moved offshore, and the app be made as a Web app so it survives being pulled from Apple's store.
I remember this exact same thing happening at a place I worked at when in college. They were such sticklers about being on time for shift that a second late on the phones meant a six month denial of promotions, and being late for any reason three times is an automatic termination. So, people from the neighborhood would fill this place's parking lot up about an hour before shift changed and demand cash... and the employees of this firm would pony up to a C-note in order to get a place, drive a car about a half mile from the office and park in a seedy neighborhood, or be late and stuck on the phones for another half-year with a freeze on raises.
I applaud SF banning this app, but in reality, it won't help, and this is just the start of it. I won't be surprised to see a black market for parking spaces, with people sitting for hours to "sell" theirs, happening soon. Especially home games in university towns or other places where people go for an event.
San Francisco was not getting a cut of the action.
Does this mean I can run over those douchebags that stand in a space in an attempt to hold it for someone else?
So it is also illegal to offer somebody money, in person, to let you know when they leave their spot so you can park closer? Technically speaking, you're not paying for the "public" spot, you're paying for the opportunity to park in a more convenient location for a period of time, at which point you leave.
First, it's not a DCMA issue so their orders do not have the weight of law.
Second, only a court can levy a fine, and only if there is a violation of law.
This is yet another example, more proof of government overreach.
I think this may fall under the free exchange of information (about parking places in this case) that the courts found was legal when it came to the "flash your headlights to indicate a cop hiding behind the truck" thing. It's not up to the government to tell people what they can share or how much the information costs. Of course, I presume it's the information that's being bidded on, not the space itself - after all, only the government that we fund with our taxes can be insolent enough to rent public property to the public that owns it.
Will understand that this app is a solution, not a problem. It's much safer to drive to a parking spot that you know will be available and sufficient to fit into than circling blocks for half an hour while paying more attention to the curb than traffic and pedestrians. It's city's fault for not designing streets for both residents and expected number of visitors. They shouldn't scapegoat the app for providing a service that people want.
The company is based in Italy and does not target San Francisco specifically. I don't think San Francisco has standing to sue them.
You're being optimistic - I park on the street in San Francisco fairly regularly - I much prefer paying for parking in a garage. This incentivizes people occupying desirable spots for the sole purpose of reselling them, which will lead to hard to park areas becoming even worse. The city needs to build more garages.
They have the SF Park system with smart meters. They've shut down the sensors but are still doing some congestion pricing. If they just turned the sensors back on and continued to roll out smart meters to the whole city, this app would become a non-issue. The fact that it exists at all is simply an indication that parking spaces aren't priced correctly. SF Park was a huge success. They just need to keep pushing it.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The fact that this app exists means that parking spaces are mispriced. If they were priced correctly, there wouldn't be a black market for them.
Anyone who drives in San Francisco is a masochist and probably a moron, fixed that for you.
One massive problem with scarce parking and no smart system to distribute it is that a lot of vehicles spend a lot of time driving in circles looking/waiting for a spot to turn over. If there were a system that was essentially a free lottery, it could avoid a lot of wasted time and pollution. You'd have to incentivize the occupant somehow though.
something like this:
1. Occupant is about to leave and sends an alert of near term availability.
2. N subscribers get the alert and enter the lottery, lottery executes, winner is selected, and winner is notified that they get the spot, no charge. The lottery could be weighted by karma, say the number of times that lottery participant has yielded a spot to others.
3. Occupant yields their spot to winner, and receives parking karma for next lotto.
4. Society benefits by less traffic, pollution.
I've yet to see downtown parking in any city that wasn't already predatory and a scam. Usually, however, that's perpetrated by the city, not some app.
The city intentionally zones and permits businesses to concentrate tax revenue within a small area.
Buildings get taller, roads get narrower...
Then the city complains about congestion, charges insane fees for parking, trys to charge to even bring a car downtown.
I know! Bycycles will fix it! So they take away the parking lane and turn it into a bike lane... Now the bike racks are full. Better start charging for bike parking to!
These issues are directly caused by the city governments themselves. I've no sympathy at all for them. Stop concentrating population density, let it spread out. I know you get a lot of tax revenue because of it. But how much is it costing?
That sounds like a great response from the police...
And what exact public law is being broken now?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I wonder if someone could aggregate and sell realtime information about empty parking spaces.
It's not as powerful (or sleazy) as holding parking spaces ransom, but it's probably a lot harder for SF to fight, due to First Amendment issues.
City parking authority claims the moral high ground?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
So much misuse of Technology has been due to simple lack of common sense. This is absurd, why can companies not see legal issues before going public? Even consideration of the golden rule would help. The point in this example could apply in general terms to many oops due to not considering even local & international laws. Privacy and various freedoms are taken away without consideration of rights of individuals etc. Recent example in US is review of companies not allowing general public to take pictures or video while common areas are being videoed by the company. This places undue burden on consumers when litigation happens due to lack of video evidence of incident. Simple common sense would evade the possibilities of mass lawsuits due to these policies. C'mon companies, this waste of money hurts everyone and cuts productivity while adding costs. How much will San-Francisco spend on this incident, & how much will companies and users spend as well while tying everything up in knots for how long???
Whenever I have lived in a city, I use public transportation.
I find cars to be such a burden - financially (payments, taxes, insurance, maintenance) and the hassles of parking, registration, maintenance, etc ...
The automobile gives the illusion of freedom while making us a slave to the insurance, banker, and tax man/government.
When I think about it, I'd be more than happy to be taxed a bit more and have great European style mass transit than a car.
Also, it's a regressive expense. Meaning, automobile costs - even if you have the cheapest shitbox you can find - is still a much larger portion of a poor person's budget than a rich person who has the top of the line Mercedes or BMW.
And then there's the environmental: Autos are rolling toxic waste dumps. Antifreeze, oil, gas and all the solvents necessary in their making and mainenance. And of course the air pollution.
Then there's the political. Our addiction to the automobile and the petroleum has financed evil people with petro-dollars.
Less face it, the automobile is one of the most evil creations of man.
You are wrong. The car that would have taken the spot the instant it was available is now circling the block for half an hour instead of the person who used the app. And don't forget that using the app means a parked person stays in the spot longer than normal, which adds to the parking problem. It is bad in every possible way.
Yes - damn the city planners of the 1870's for not anticipating the conditions of 2014.
Instead of banning the band-aid, why not actually fix the wound?
They may not be able to do much to the company if it has no US assets, but they can certainly monitor the parking spots up for sale and catch people in the act.
Normally I am against government interference, but in this case the government is
stepping in because there are assholes trying to sell things they DO NOT OWN,
and that is wrong and these assholes deserve to be punished.
1. Reserve all the conference rooms in the building for the next 10 years
2. Build an app to auction conference rooms
3. $$$ Profit!!!! $$$
xx
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
A counter-example to this would be the parking situation at the newly constructed Levi stadium for the SF 49'ers. They don't have enough game-day parking spaces for the stadium and they were assuming that some of the surrounding office complexes would be willing to become pay-parking lots on Sunday-gamedays... Sadly, only a few of them "bit" on this opportunity. The purported reason for this is the increase in liability insurance and maintenance (e.g., cleanup costs) involved would not make it worth the hassle to operate as public-parking lot for 8 days a year.
Despite sounding like a good idea, apparently in real life the margin on parking is so low that you can't really do it on a part time basis and make it worth your while. It's not that they are doing it wrong, their business model is to simply privatize the profit and socializing the liability and risks (e.g. city maintenance and self-insurance costs) not unlike a big-bad-bank...
You can't sell something you don't own. But what you could do is sell information, which you do own. In exchange for a set fee of $1, you can state the exact location you just vacated. No 'guarantee' of getting the spot, so you are not selling the spot. Instead you are selling the location data that is time sensitive. Specifically that means, if someone else comes along and takes the spot before your buyer arrives, the buyer is out of luck.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Uh oh, now Hipsters Caleb and Donovan will have to drive around in their Prius even longer, clutching their decaf soy lattes, desperately and despondently searching for a parking spot...
If there's that much demand for parking, why don't they just create more parking spaces?
But we will not abide businesses that hold hostage on-street public parking spots for their own private profit.
So, they are going to make car carriers unload on dealer's lots?
Too bad. I had a great business plan for a shipping company that needs no loading dock space because we were going to load and unload in the middle of city streets.
Have gnu, will travel.
If they are holding the space, and properly paying for it until somebody who has offered them sufficient money for that space arrives, then aside from encouraging people to use their phones while driving, which is generally considered an unsafe practice, what are they doing wrong, exactly?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The city should re-assess the value of each spot, increase the metered rate to nearly 100% of the land's rent, and distribute a portion of the revenue to each resident so they can actually afford the spots. If they're close enough to the spot's "true" value, transaction costs will outweigh the potential profits from squatting.
Henry George is spinning in his grave.
Alternate One: Get close to your destination. Pull out your phone,run into someone while futzing with your phone...
The place to pull over to use your phone to look for a parking space is called a parking space.
In Seattle, I once pulled into an empty parking place near the University of Washington. Before I left, someone rushed out from a nearby ice cream cafe. He offered me free ice cream if, before I left, I dropped by so they could move the store's van in my place.
Why all that interest? I'd already found out why. That particular parking spot had a meter that would not take coins and was stopped with some time left on it. It was free parking in a neighborhood filled with pricey meters.
Yet according to SF's hysteria-prone city attorney, I was engaging in a "predatory private market" and holding "hostage" that innocent and broken little parking meter.
How I pity those who live in SF. A great climate, but a rotten government. When the hippies left, the Brownshirts moved in.
and we slashdotted the bloody attorney site or is it just me not being able to click properly???
This isn't exactly the same, but it reminds me of the restaurant seating problem that happens when patrons, upon seeing that there's limited seating, have members of their party camp on a table before they've ordered. It exacerbated the problem. People who have just got their food can't find a seat because table-campers have what would be empty seats.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
I have three points to make:
First, a city does not have the authority to regulate the conduct of persons within its boundaries (and even outside as SF seems to be claiming) however it wants. Sure, it can regulate the class of people who occupy parking spaces, and it can tax the people who use them. What it cannot do is (1) regulate the conduct of persons outside of its bounds who want information about those parking spaces, (2) regulate what applications people run on their devices and the commerce they engage in without a clear public interest in doing so, (3) stop them from expressing themselves where there is no criminal conduct or civil obligation involved (a.k.a. "free speech"), and (4) pass ordinances that are beyond the scope of the authority granted to them by the state (I doubt the State of CA has granted its cities the authority to regulate software). There's four strong reasonings available to the offender when the city tries to enforce this ordinance.
Second, there's no practical way the city will be able to enforce this. Hell, most places don't enforce speeding and traffic laws because its too bothersome/costly to the police to do so. How is the city going to detect illegal activity, when it can't snoop on wireless traffic without a warrant?
Third, the city is the cause of this market in the first place. If the city would oversee the parking situation such that there was sufficient parking, then there wouldn't be a market for this application to exploit. The city should provide more parking &/| transport, not try to punish people for getting around.
Fourth, their city council is stupid for doing so: they are dissuading people from coming into their city where they would be spending money & paying more in sales and other taxes. But then we're talking about CA: the land where original idiotic laws are common...
But we will not abide businesses that hold hostage on-street public parking spots for their own private profit
On the other hand, it's okay when we do it!
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
We're not getting any money out of this.
*BANNED*
Ok, then the city should implement it and maintain a queue. Then they just need to install a sensor on all the spots which only allows the correct user to plug the meter (or simply activates a sign marking as "Occupied" if cost free) when the correct cell phone is identified to be proximal to it.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Though some allowances might need to be made for drivers lacking cell phones.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
...what are they doing wrong, exactly?
Ummm, squatting on a public parking space and demanding money to move?
Take BART/Muni. I never drove to work once in SF.
It's city's fault for not designing streets for both residents and expected number of visitors
No, it's the visitor's fault for not taking public transit. San Francisco has some of the best public transit in the country. BART is ~$4 round trip, runs past 1 AM and parking at the stations is free on the weekend. And now the rent is higher than NYC, any spare space should be devoted to housing.
It's vastly more efficient use of space to park your car outside the city and make the city navigatable with transit (see Tokyo, Berlin, Prague, etc).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Change the app so that a "seller" isn't demanding payment, he just makes it known that if, say, $20 shows up in his account from some generous donor, he'll be so anxious to spend his windfall that he'll drive away immediately. The "buyer" would wait until he was right there, transfer the money via cell phone, and pull in the spot. The "seller" doesn't know who his benefactor is, it could have been anyone. Think of it as a variant of the Amazon wishlist. Since there's no direct quid pro quo, no laws were violated.
...how the city can ban an app. Presumably, the app could be used in any city, not just San Francisco. What apps I run on my cellphone is my business, not that of the losers in SF city hall.
If they don't want people in SF using the app, all they really need to do is have the cops monitor and respond to offers for parking spots. When they get there, arrest the seller and impound his vehicle. A few days of stories like that hitting the local news will put a real damper on the use of the app.
Is that people have figured out a way around their "environmentally friendly" programs: http://www.sfenvironment.org/c...
"What's more, commuter benefits encourage people to walk, bike, rideshare and take transit to work. This helps relieve traffic congestion and improve air quality, making our cities and regions better places to live." SF gets a subsidy from the feds, SF doesn't have to provide so much parking because they promote walking, biking, ridesharing, etc.
It seems to me that this black market is a result of inadequate planning. SF would rather point their finger at people smarter than they are...
I think this could be made legit with a simple modification: company pays owner of parked car for information on when he'll leave that spot (probably with updates either manually or via GPS tracking). Driver pays company for information on which parking spots will be vacated soon in a given area at a given time. Net result should be a small gain in the city's efficiency (less pollution, fuel, traffic, wasted time), albeit reduced by the opposite effects on people who don't use the information. Still a net positive as can be seen by considering what would happen if everyone used the information Could be non-commercialized by using karma transfers instead of money.
Also, since most apps these days track you via GPS, slightly inferior information could be automatically gathered and sold.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I thought of the solution!
Just be a good person and work hard wherever you live. That way, you, your kids, and your friends won't want to move to a fuck-all overcrowded megapolis and scratch out a living in a hyper-competitve environment just to try to 'get ahead'. Simple. No more parking problems.
It is wrong on many levels.
First on the personal responsibility to the community level it is subverting the arrangement made to provide parking. The parking is for a purpose other than ad hoc sub letting by some random user.
On the level of resposibility to yourself it is wrong. People who subvert public arrangements typically don't play well with others. This scheme is fragile and has the obvious potential to result in strife where you are stuck in a space with two arguing people blocking you. I don't see this being worth the time and effort to verify the "right" person is entering the space much less getting in a mess with frustrated drivers. If a person has something bad happen to them while trying to make money from this scheme do we feel sympathetic or consider it self inflicted by a selfish abusive opportunist?
On the legal level it is extracting payment by misusing public property. You are extorting and misappropriating public property. Doing things that owners do such as charging for access when you are not the owner is theft. The city provides the spaces so you can park in them not so you can charge for access to them. That people miss this is a stunning window on the how social interaction has been abused to the point where people can't understand conditional use. If you swerve while driving and a cop pulls you over and asks that you stay in your lane then I quess you are thinking " My Lane...MY LANE? I'll put the couch over there and get some drapes...conditional use. Conditional use usually involves something that you don't actually own. You let your neighbor in to use the phone. Your neighbor strips and starts to get into the shower. You didn't let him in the house for that. Is conditional use really that hard to comprehend? To not grasp this is a gross intellectual failure involving a rather simple and very common concept.
Perhaps you missed the point I said where the person holding the space is actively paying for the use of that space until a person that they are willing to surrender it to (because enough money has been offered) arrives at the location.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What this parking app (and there are a couple of others too) does is encourage people to drive into town and make money by parking in spots, auctioning it off, then driving to the next one and repeating the process.
Just guess how much chaos this will cause when a lot of people start doing this professionally.
I see every spot taken by a car with someone in the driver's seat. I see this escalating into organized groups doing this, and then those groups start fighting over territories.
"ParkModo, which appears poised to launch later this week, according to recent employment postings on Craigslist, will employ drivers at a rate of $13.00 per hour to occupy public parking spaces in the Mission District."
Uh huh. Assholes gaming a system. I see the next revenue source for tweakers.
from the article:
"ParkModo, which appears poised to launch later this week, according to recent employment postings on Craigslist, will employ drivers at a rate of $13.00 per hour to occupy public parking spaces in the Mission District. As with Monkey Parking and Sweetch, ParkModo then plans to sell the on-street parking spots to its paying members through its iPhone app"
What a bunch of arseholes, getting a park in SF is bad enough without pricks like these exploiting the system. Does anyone know who's behind the ParkModo app. I want to blacklist whoever works there from being hired from any company in the SF area. Arseholes.
>Yes - damn the city planners of the 1870's for not anticipating the conditions of 2014.
I know, right? It's not like all of San Francisco ever got hit by a massive earthquake and fire or something.
Actually, they did have their chance to rebuild the city right - they knew their layout was shit and considered it - the trouble was figuring out how property rights would work when you moved all of the lots around was too much of a nightmare for the city, especially given that they'd lost all their records in the fire. So they were basically forced to allow everyone to rebuild right where they were before, using a city layout that would make old European cities cry from dysfunction.
Not "right" by the OP's definition, no. Even in 1906 they could not have reasonably predicted the conditions of 2014.
The city wishes they had thought of it first.
Can someone familiar with the NYC concept of "key money," a wad of cash handed over for the right to assume a lease on an apartment (that's what I've read, not necessarily the whole story) comment on the similarity or difference between that cash transaction and this one?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
>Not "right" by the OP's definition, no. Even in 1906 they could not have reasonably predicted the conditions of 2014.
They wanted to widen and straighten the streets. This would have made a pretty significant impact on the road conditions in SF, even today.
Could you imagine what London would be like today if they didn't remodel a bit after 1666?
The topic under discussion is parking - which is sensitive to the *length* of the streets, and only in unusual conditions sensitive to the *width*.
That, is outright censorship. If you want to target the users for using it to do something entirely questionable, fine, but leave the developers alone...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Are you seriously suggesting that SF public transit is friendly to visitors unfamiliar with the city? Please explain to me how do I take BART to sunset district.