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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.
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.
The company is based in Italy and does not target San Francisco specifically. I don't think San Francisco has standing to sue them.
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.
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!
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).
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).