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Comment by llampx | Hacker News Reader

Parking is even more of a hassle in their core market, dense urban Europe. I live in Berlin and have been hit with an unforeseen parking fine due to the hard-to-read parking signs.

I think it has more to do with the fact that most people in America own cars and only rent if they need a car long term.

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Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite a bit).

Recently, I tried to return a car only to see the parking space being taken up by an unauthorized car (all the more aggravating as my car was electric and should have been recharged overnight). I was advised to find a legal parking space where I could leave the car for 12 hours or so — which turned out to be a significant hassle. I was essentially unable to find a spot and ended up parking in my own driveway.

> Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite

Zipcar in the US does this for awhile now. It's ok, but means you can't do point to point as easily. So if you drive somewhere, do something for hours, you have to hold the reservation the whole time and then drive back when you're done.

It's useful for many things, but the pricing doesn't work for everything.

I think they'd need quite high density before releasing your reservation makes sense - after all, how are you going to get home if someone else has taken the car?

But you never get a situation in Germany where parking is allowed Mo-Wed-Fr during the day but not on Tue-Thu-Sat from 8am till 12am, which was driving me crazy in the US.

Yes you do. For example we have bus lanes that are parking lanes outside rush-hour.

this is actually quite common in Germany

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