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Comment by mft_ | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that this solution bubbled up.

I've struggled with similar issues before - when travelling, or out in a city, where to do some quiet work, or take a call, or speak to a group of colleagues?

I've explored short-term (i.e. hourly) office space rentals, but IME the low headline rates ("from...") become a lot higher when you dig into the specifics and have minimum spends. I'd happily pay $<=20-30 for a convenient small quiet office for an hour, but not $80+. I've also never found a service that offers anything like the low friction that (from the article) unlocking a car remotely would offer.

I wonder if this area is ready for some disruption...?

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You mean disruption like: "park" a large number of trailers in cities, containing small office rooms, small apartments, hotel rooms, rows of lockers...whatever. Then rent out those and undercut other market participants which actually need to pay for the buildings and properties in which they operate, while you just "park" your relatively-cheap custom trailers in areas where this is free of charge.

Not that many places near a city you can park a trailer free of charge - and if there were, you can bet this scheme would accelerate charging for them.

I suppose the next phase would be electric self-driving vehicles, circulating endlessly on the roads while the occupants sleep or study. That would probably force the city to implement tiered congestion pricing to force them out.

I've seen advertising boards on trailers parked by the side of roads in public parking spaces. Angled to face into the traffic, so probably not parked temporarily.

If they already have the parking capacity and use it for rental cars and then realize people just want to sit in box I don’t see anything particularly bad about buying cheaper, more practical boxes for that purpose instead of buying more expensive impractical boxes?

How is this different from food trucks?

Building based businesses serve the baseline demand, and mobile businesses serve the surging and peaking demand. They are in competition, but neither can capture 100% of the other's market share, because they are not perfect substitutes for each other.

In theory, co-working spaces should be able to supply this option. But the ones I've seen are barebones at best - temporary setups made out of plywood in old office buildings that would otherwise remain empty, big open spaces where you can rent a desk but only if you do it for at least a month, etc.

While IMO they could just as well divide the place up into smaller offices. Probably cost prohibitive though. As in cost for the end user, not for the co-working space.

A coffee shop / cafe with library style tables, or cubes would greatly appeal to me.

I could sit in relative peace and solitude while I get my work done.

"Coffee and Cowork Space"

"Tea and Teamwork Space"

A quiet, peaceful place with library-style tables. Like...a library.

More seriously, companies like Spacious are doing what you're describing. Much cheaper than WeWork. You work out of an off-hours restaurant, but it's a designated quiet/work zone and they have free coffee. I'm not affiliated, and I actually didn't enjoy it, but it might interest you.

Phone calls especially.

In theory you can make a phone call anywhere nowadays, but often you want privacy to discuss something sensitive or a quiet background for professionalism's sake.

I'd love to see businesses have phone booths you could rent by the minute, although I don't know how viable that would be as a use of space in a major city.

The ninehours capsule hotel chain in Japan does offer desks in some of their locations for a rather reasonable price of ¥300 (about 3 dollars) per hour.

See https://ninehours.co.jp/kamata for example.

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