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> Thankfully the city of San Francisco is fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking with cease-and-desist orders. The city of San Francisco should be fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking by cutting out the middleman and drastically raising their parking fees.
They could also use sensors that detect when a parking spot is free, and upload that information to an app or the web.
As for parking, the sooner cities get rid of hidden car subsidies the better. Artificially low priced street parking and building codes mandating garages are some of the more insidious subsidies that make everyone pay for those who drive. If the spots went for market rate, these apps wouldn't exist and the extra money could be used to improve public transit.
The reservation is obvious bullshit, but I just don't see a problem with selling your parking spot.
The reservation is obvious bullshit, but I just don't see a problem with selling your parking spot.
The problem is it's not your parking spot, but public property.
EDIT: Probably down voted because of length, but I'm pointing out that this is an opinion lots of people have, and there's a reason it exists as a truism. If you pass a law against apps like this, how could you possibly enforce it? The seller's car is already in the spot, and police can't get a real time notification that he's using the app. By the time they realize what happened (if ever) the spot has been sold.
I completely agree with this article, but wonder if it's inevitable for someone to jump in and try to make profit off of services for the public good if there are people out there willing to pay for it. For example, if we had sufficient parking in the city, these startups would never even cause a blip. Someone must have been driving around for half an hour looking for parking and then thought to themselves that, at t…
In contrast, there are plenty of startups that are actually making the parking problem better. City CarShare and ZipCar are reducing the number of cars in the city by having cars available on demand. GetAround and RelayRides are upping the number of drivers per car. Uber and Lyft (and taxis and transit) let you get somewhere without having to park at all. Parking Panda and Park Circa are turning unused private parking spaces into publicly available inventory. Even Amazon is helping: part of what makes happy to do without a car is the fact that they will make almost anything I want show up in a couple of days.
The restaurant issue I'm somewhat conflicted about -- I don't know enough about the business so some of my thoughts maybe impossible for various reasons. If people are willing to buy reservations, why not just charge more for the food until there is no waiting list? Or just charge for reservations (or at least those at preferred times) and keep the money for the restaurant? Whats the inherent reason that reservations…
The restaurant one is dodgy though. I could approve of a system where they've paid the restaurant in order to sell on a reservation (so the restaurant gets something even if there are no takers) but as it stands it's just a con.
Whenever I hear about these I always wonder what the people that found them are thinking. I mean, what type of person would you have to be to decide to try and screw over the restaurant industry (which already has historically low margins) just to make a buck? I can't even imagine how many fake reservations they would need to create to make that idea worthwhile for them. And what investors would give them money to do…
> Thankfully the city of San Francisco is fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking with cease-and-desist orders. The city of San Francisco should be fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking by cutting out the middleman and drastically raising their parking fees.
And anyway, this could be a temporary spike in demand. Once places like ZipCar and Uber get ahold of self-driving cars, I expect there will be a big decrease in car ownership.