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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.
It's based on holding public space hostage.
It occurs to me that knowing where a parking space is available would reduce time spent driving around, itself reducing pollution, excess expenditure on additional fuel, the clogging of streets, and other issues associated with tons of traffic driving in circles throughout the city.
These people are providing the city the great and valuable service of a functional smart parking grid operating when parking congestion is high.
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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.
But not the basic fact of people exchanging money for information.
It falls back to 'holding a public space hostage' the moment the seller stays in his spot any longer than he would have without the application in order to get said money/allow the buyer the spot. I believe that the application amounts to being worthless if the seller doesn't hold the space for the buyer, because in my experience somebody will pull into the spot less than a minute later without any intervention.
This leads to less efficient use of space due to lingering, which is what the city wants to avoid.
I don't read AC A human right
"People have the freedom to do as they want."
Your opinion will change when you grow up.
You completely missed the point.
People would deliberately find prime parking places and park there, then use the app to get money to relenquish their parking spot. It turned a public resource, something paid for by tax dollars, into something you had to pay an individual to get access to.
It's the same as domain name squatting. It was a completely fucked up and greedy concept.
Please use your brain and actually think about things before posting.
It still has some use, but they're just not doing it right. The City admitted that people can rent out their driveways or private garages as parking spaces, so I could easily see a revision of this app that works sort of like Uber but for parking spaces.
People who have parking spaces to spare (apartment blocks, businesses, private homeowners) sell their driveways or parking lots as parking spaces. The people buying pay the property owner a given amount, and a percentage of that comes back to the company as a "finder's fee". You could even have businesses buy parking spaces in people's driveways nearby that are only valid for that business, ie;
Business A has a parking lot that isn't big enough to meet customer capacity at peak hours. They're in a position that would make it very difficult to expand their parking ,but there are nearby homes that have large, unused driveways. Business A can rent some of those driveways and mark them as specifically for use for their customers, so that their customers now have a place to park during peak hours.
I bet you could still make some pretty good money with it, since I'm sure apartment owners would love to get money for letting people use spaces that would otherwise go unused. The only real problem would be enforcement, but I'm sure there's some way around that.
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.
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.
No, it's illegal to squat on a public parking space and demand money to move. Get the difference?
Oops... I meant croquet.
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.
It is illegal to exchange money for all kinds of information. Credit card and Social Security numbers, for example. Insider trading, for another. It continually amazes me the degree to which crackpot libertarian ideology is so consistently blind to extremely common legal practice. Do you people spend all of your time in the basement?
Furthermore, a law banning the parking app would be trivial to enforce. Just have police answer the ads, find the douchebag who is blocking the spot in order to charge for it, tow their car, and give them a nice big ticket. Can't happen soon enough.
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.
Who's going to prevent the fistfights when someone spots you getting into your car and waits for you to leave the space - and you just sit there. If I'm waiting for you to move and somebody else pulls up who insists on taking the space 'because he paid for it', it's not going to be pretty.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
These people are providing the city the great and valuable service of a functional smart parking grid operating when parking congestion is high.
And all they need to accomplish this great service is sell rights to property they don't own. I wonder how much cell reception in your neighborhood would improve if I sold verizon the rights to demolish your house and put a cell tower in it's place?
You think the same people are both buying and selling spaces? I envision a person driving around looking for spaces all day and pulling into them, bringing up the app on their way back from the newsstand to re-sell the space as soon as they have secured one for free/with some delay so as to promote some appearance of not being a plain old squatter abusing the commons and rent-seeking with free public resources. A second person with more money than time enables him by installing the app and buying the space from him, because it's easier than driving around looking for their own space during prime-time parking hours. Especially now that we have this app!
At no point did I imagine anyone buying a space who has enough time to wait around for someone else to buy it back from them later.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
To a 3rd party observer there is no difference. Person A gives money to Person B who moves their car so A can take their spot. How are you going to prove B would have moved earlier if not for A? Reading their mind?
I lived in a town home in a college town. Our landlord rented our parking lot out during football games. The landlords made big bucks, but residents had to prove they lived there in order to avoid the parking fee.
I think stealing is a little incorrect here.
I am currently legally occupying a place, because I've paid the parking meter or am still within the period I can be parked for free.
What I'm selling you is the information that, for the next 20 minutes, the opportunity for you to get dibs on legally occupying the same space is up for grabs.
Now, understandably, if you had a whole bunch of people who camped out on these spots first thing in the morning and sold the spot to the highest bidder then nobody could ever find anything on their own. Because then as soon as they sell a spot they start looking for new ones and keep doing it all day long.
But, as far as selling things you don't own ... well, companies trade in your personal information all the time. Some of us disagree that they 'own' it, they've just laid claim to it.
So, how is me selling the location of a parking spot I can make available to you any different than Google and Facebook exploiting your personal information to make money?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I wonder what you think of occupy movement and all the other protests, which are especially common in San Francisco?
Complicated. Keep in mind that the situations varied by different locations. Still, on average I believe that they enjoy more protection simply by being explicitly political/non-monetary in nature. For that matter they probably had those locations more highly populated/used than normal.
Where I start drawing the line is where they start causing damage.
Since the buyer also has the app installed, he/she will have incentive to leave sooner, during prime time, to make the money back.
It also gives incentive to be a professional parking-keeper if the rates are high enough. Drive around looking for a spot. Take it, immediately list & sell. Move on and find another. Hell, it could probably be done on foot or scooter.
I don't read AC A human right
They aren't making the exchange of info illegal. You can still say "For $30 I'll tell you where a perking spot is.." it's the "and I'll hold it for you until you arrive ..." that is illegal. I think the city is justified in this position.
Absolutely. People cannot sell things they do not own. That is public space they are trying to sell.
And before some wag tries to write "If it's public space, I own it.
I suggest that person try to build a house there.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There seems to be an unwritten premise behind your claim that the space would be unused if it were not for this app. In fact, the reverse is true -- likely the driver "selling" the space will remain in place longer than necesssary so that he/she can sell the parking space. Without the ability to sell a space, it will be vacated more quickly and then immediately filled by another driver who happens to be driving by (because there is a shortage of parking).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If you have a parking space for renting there, I'm pretty sure that would be illegal. Same if they decided to rent your bedroom to a tourist as a B&B. Your rental agreement provided you with your place (I'm guessing an apartment) and a parking spot. The landlord is not able to then legally rent out to someone else what you are already renting.
ianal, but damn, there are some things that are pretty bloody obvious and well documented to even the public.
I pay taxes that are used to build and maintain roads including public parking, why on earth would I allow a third party to make money off public parking if it's not re-invested into the road system (hopefully to address problems with parking).
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.
No, the city already has parking motion detectors on their parking meters that can detect when a street parking space is vacated and the city also makes available a free real-time api that third party developers can use for republishing that information (for free, or even for a profit if those third party desire). There are already several apps on the market that do this (that the city has no problem with)
What this particular app encouraged was to keep parking spaces occupied, until a particular ransom was paid. This meant that cars with disabled placards (which are not required to pay anything, and not required to move by a certain time) would have the incentive to hold a parking space indefinitely until they got paid. And this also meant that some business storefront owners could hold spaces by placing junk/furniture/pots of flowers on a parking space, so that no other car could pull into it unless they got paid off as well.
Unfortunately, holding parking spaces illegally is already a common practice in San Francisco (even before that mobile application came on the market). Regularly, business owners are caught painting the curb of their sidewalks in front of their store with green, yellow, or red, without having the proper city permits to do so (those illegal markings can be distinguished because they're not stamped with the usual SFPD and the red markings around storefronts/private driveways usually extend far more than they're supposed to).
As long as voters can still vote and elections aren't terribly rigged/diebolded, I don't really consider protests that hold public spaces hostage a good thing. It's fine if they rented out a public space (stadium or field) for their "event".
If you want to protest publicly you could wear a particular hat, shirt, colored item, etc as a sign of protest and move about without preventing others from going about their normal daily lives. Causing massive disruption does not endear me to your cause. If you let random bunch of people start disrupting stuff, you cause problems for everyone else - and another bunch of people might start to do similar or _worse_ things if they disagree with the first bunch.
There are additional/alternative ways of communicating and spreading your message. Many people claim social media is useless -tweets, facebook shares, etc. But there are a number of governments that don't think so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And looking at various "campaigns" social media can actually be useful.
It's a different case if people don't have other options- they can't vote and communications are blocked/censored.
Or they need better public transportation so people don't have to drive their cars everywhere.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
...and preventing access to public property is illegal in San Francisco. You're agreeing with the person you're arguing with.
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...
I got a tetanus vaccination last week so that my constant work in the garden won't lead to my unpleasant not-quite-death. And all I needed was a poke in the arm, which was extremely unpleasant, but oh well.
Here are your options:
Default: drive around for hours on clogged streets, not able to get anywhere. Get close to your destination, spend 20 minutes circling the surrounding 3 blocks twice, determine this isn't getting you anywhere. Spend 10 more minutes getting further out. Park, walk for 20 more minutes. Get to your destination 50 minutes after you've first reached it, itself after 20 minutes of battling traffic to get close in the first place. This is down town Baltimore City.
Alternate One: Get close to your destination. Pull out your phone, find a parking spot, purchase. The streets are less clogged due to people parking more quickly, thus fewer cars on the road, thus you reach your destination in 5 minutes. Park, pay. Cost including reservation and any parking meter costs will be lower than the $15-for-the-first-four-hours cost of the surrounding parking lots and garages (on saturday nights, I get $8 plus a VAT for the night, 8pm to 1am only, out by 5am, from ONE parking garage; the rest are charging $8 to get in plus $2/hr, so $18 to stay out from 8pm to 1am).
Alternate Two: Have the city install a smart grid. Reserve parking spot remotely and pay city an additional fee on top of usual parking costs, additional taxes, or both.
Alternate Three: Have the city install a smart grid. No reservations; pay additional taxes to constantly race to where a parking space will hopefully still be.
The cheapest and most effective solution is Alternate One. The other two require building more infrastructure, paying more fees and taxes, and maintaining the infrastructure. Alternate One provides near-parity with much lower investment and maintenance costs. Costs are direct--not hidden in taxes or reduction of other city services--and are bounded by the cost of parking at readily-available higher-tier parking garages (i.e. you won't pay $45 to park a block away from the $12 parking garage).
Economics.
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You're assuming a secret offer from B to A and secret acceptance from A to B. But B has published their offer on the app -- which can be shown to the third party observer -- and no mind reading is involved.
The legal basis for regulating this out of existence is, quite simply, keeping the peace.
Person C can deny person A the right to take the spot from person B. Easily. Person C can use the app to locate the parking spot, drive to it, and then refuse to move away in order to let person A assume the spot. To avoid blocking traffic, person C could even drop a passenger off at the spot to occupy it the moment that person B actually leaves, thus securing the spot for person C. Anyone can be person C simply by using the app and refusing to pay.
Oh the battles that would generate... so we don't let it. Publishing the offer to move is against the law. End of story.
It occurs to me that knowing where a parking space is available would reduce time spent driving around, itself reducing pollution, excess expenditure on additional fuel, the clogging of streets, and other issues associated with tons of traffic driving in circles throughout the city.
Ah, but you are being logical and not ecological. It has been official policy in SF for years to "get people out of their cars" by any means. This includes intentionally removing parking places (more, more), and even preventing new construction from having more than one parking space per unit.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Not that familiar with their public transportation situation, but if selling access to parking spots is anywhere near profitable and worth your time, I would say there exists at least a bit of a problem with "too many cars". If you can afford to pay for the parking spot, and afford to own the car to occupy the spot, plus have the free time to vacate the spot reasonably quickly when somebody has bought it makes it seem unlikely that somebody could do this for profit. Most people probably just use it to make back a little bit of the money they had just spent on parking. If spots really are that scarce, upon selling the spot, you wouldn't be able to find another one to occupy to make a second sale.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I've had parking spots that I claimed (blinker was on!) stolen from me. I didn't call the cops.
Jamaica Man Killed in Gun Battle Over Parking Space
Miami Barber Shot, Killed Over Parking Spot
Man Sentenced in Shooting Over Parking Space
Man critically hurt in Gold Coast shooting over parking spot
People are insane. Never forget this.
Yes, the cop can arrest you for anything he wants. That doesn't make it a lawful arrest.
The cop can ask you to leave but that doesn't make it a lawful order.
Sitting in a legally parked car would make it very difficult, under otherwise normal circumstances, for a police officer to issue a lawful order to leave.
See: Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham. This was a 1965 case that found, generally, that a police officer's order to "move on" had to be related to another function and made legal as it related to that other function; i.e., the officer is directing traffic and you're interfering with that traffic or, as an example, you are blocking pedestrian traffic on a sidewalk.
Otherwise, as the Supreme Court said, "...the literal terms of this ordinance are so broad as to evoke constitutional doubts of the utmost gravity." When addressing an ordinance that stated that it is "unlawful for any person to stand or loiter upon any street or sidewalk...after having been requested by any police officer to move on," the Supreme Court said, "The constitutional vice of so broad a provision needs no demonstration. It 'does not provide for government by clearly defined laws, but rather for government by the moment-to-moment opinions of a policeman on his beat."
Voluntarily giving personal rights over to police powers aids the continual erosion of those rights.
Here are some questions about your so called solution:
How do people without access to the auctioning app get access to what is essentially public parking?
Why should someone pay a third party to have a chance to use public parking?
There are other solutions available to the city of San Francisco that doesn't require the use of an auctioning app.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Even if it comes at the cost of congestion and extra pollution while people loiter around looking for spaces? Even if it's in everybody's best interest for more people to use public transit? Are we really going to cause massive inefficiency and gridlock because we're worried about people who drive their own cars into the city but are too "poor" to afford a few extra dollars to park them?
It's also worth remembering that with congestion pricing, there were plenty of places where parking was really cheap because it wasn't very congested. I'm having a hard time shedding a tear for somebody who doesn't take public transit, doesn't want to park where it's cheap, and then complains that they don't have the money to park in the city.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
How do people without access to the auctioning app get access to what is essentially public parking?
The same way anyone else does: don't try to park when people want to go out. In the current situation, it's extremely likely that you'll leave on Friday or Saturday night at 7pm, show up at 7:30, and drive around until 8pm or even 9pm trying to find a parking spot within half a mile of the night life joints. Public parking is inaccessible because it's scarce; this scarcity also denies access to public roadways. This solution frees up some access to roadways, and lets you find out how much parking is being opened up--you can then decide if it's worth looking for a public parking space or just go to a parking garage, or take public transit.
Why should someone pay a third party to have a chance to use public parking?
Because the third party currently has rights to that public parking by writ of using it at the time. Otherwise I'd just call a tow truck to remove the Ferrari parked in my spot.
Seriously, though, it's information. The city could provide a similar service, and you'd pay for it in fees, and you could try to make the same argument. To me, the difference is that third parties are more efficient in this system than public-sector initiatives, and therefor better.
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