Sell your S.F. street parking spot for $20?
blog.sfgate.com
blog.sfgate.com
What might happen though is that if a car is about to leave and a non-paying car pulls up to get in, the leaving car might decide to stay a bit longer until a paying car gets first into queue.
"What might happen though is that if a car is about to leave and a non-paying car pulls up to get in, the leaving car might decide to stay a bit longer until a paying car gets first into queue."
Yeah good luck with that. I've seen near brawls break out when two or more people thought they had "dibs" on an opening spot based merely on proximity and some ill-defined rules. Introduce a money component into this and that just raises the stakes on the rage response.
If I arrived at a spot where it was clear someone was ready to leave and realized he was waiting longer for a "paying" replacement to arrive to take the public parking spot, unless I absolutely had to be somewhere immediately I would queue up behind the leaving guy and block out the paying party and wait them out just out of spite for the whole concept of this model.
Money is only buying something here because someone, i.e. the previous parker, is getting it for less than it is worth and can now monetize the difference.
Perhaps you meant 'business district parking'. I always felt it is a huge mistake to have a 'cover charge' for shopping downtown. What is it supposed to do? It certainly discourages customers.
In my town, the businesses ask for it for this reason.
Most healthy business districts have few available parking spaces, so charges are appropriate. Not-being-able-to-find-a-space-because-they're-all-taken also discourages customers.
What's bad about that model, is the people looking for parking spaces are likely to get very aggressive about taking one that is opening up.
The City actually installed the technology to set prices dynamically in a network with predictive systems so that prices can rise to keep those free spaces open.
But the city insists on charging so little at the meters that the very chance to pay such a low rate is worth $20. Let's have market rate parking in The City so drivers can always find a place to park. The money they pay for the privilege could be used to make MUNI less awful.
http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/03/20/contrary-to-ed-lee-reco...
Bottom line, it's a market problem but the market is dysfunctional. The app is not disruptive, it's simply exploiting market failure.
In general, I think lesser paid people would be more willing to wait in their cars for a few minutes to make a few dollars. So, I would expect money to flow towards them.
Having said that I think this service is immoral, and should be forbidden. What's next? Renting out seats in the subway? A picket line on he street where you pay $1 for the right to pass? Paying someone a monthly fee for not seeing your customers intimidated/beaten up?
If this becomes illegal then police can track down sellers using same app so things are flaky at that point. However I would doubt if selling information about available parking lots can be made illegal.
For those of you "troubled" by this, get this: Pretty much everything in life with short in supply is essentially an auction. When you reserve dinner at restaurant, they have adjusted their price such that their supply meets the demand. In Essence they sold the spots to highest bidders. This is not limited to private properties. When try to buy a house in the same area as great public school, same thing happens - you get priced out of the area and the goods goes to highest bidder.
The short supply is due to a market failure; the city underprices the parking spots it owns relative to demand, increasing congestion and making it impossible to find a spot. This is to the point that people are theoretically willing to pay 20 dollars (or whatever Monkeypark will charge) in order to get an underpriced parking spot. It makes no sense to distribute foregone gains from underpriced city land to random squatting motorists, instead of just raising pricing and having that benefit accrue to the owner of the land (the city). It's the same concept behind not allowing people to sublet my rent-controlled apartment for market rates; the price distortion issue isn't with the sublet policy, it's with the rent control in the first place.
In short, not all business decisions are about extracting the most money possible at the present time. There are often other longer-term considerations.
Another negative is this would encourage a few people who have their own garage/private spot to now park on the street to make a few $ (even if it is not economically worth their time people are not always rationale)
I thought of this while struggling to find a parking spot in Paris. Traffic jams and parking spot searches are great moments to have ideas.
Just because transit is slightly better in SF than in Atlanta or Antarctica doesn't make it other than broken.
Even third world cities the size of SF can build reasonable subway capacity with a real city-wide network, busses than run regularly with short lead times, affordable tickets without bizarre subsidies, BRT and some lines of fast commuter rail.
Also, $20 is too little for people who don't have things to do.
People camp out all night to save a few bucks on Black Friday, this is probably a better "deal".
$20 might not be a lot to you, but for a lot of people it is, especially if it's just side cash for a few minutes of work.
I get that parking is bad there, whenever I'm silly enough to stay in the city, I get to enjoy $40 a day in overnight parking fees, but while this arguably obviates the pain in a way that probably wouldn't cause any pain, there's almost certainly some law that prohibits this, or something close enough to this that it probably applies.
My real question is how you ensure that the person who bought the spot is the one who paid for the spot. What is currently stopping people from just jumping in open spots as they become available now?
in response to your musings, the person leaving is supposed to wait for the person buying the spot. you can sort of say 'i am getting ready to leave', and then you get a buzz when someone wants your spot and you kind of arrange spending about 2-5min swapping out.
the idea is novel, but while i enjoy uber, i worry that things like uber and this parking app that make it impossible to navigate street-level resources without an active, connected smartphone become a sort of mandatory augmented reality.
some balance will need to be struck, but i suppose it might be better than circling a block ten or fifteen times to just pull off to the side [though probably in the _Fucking_ bike lane] real quick and see if anyone around is about to bail.
i dunno, i've always said anyone who drives regularly in sf is kind of.. eh.. yanno.
That aside, the citation is here[1]. In context, the most relevant bit is:
> (a) No automobile or other motor vehicle shall
> occupy any portion of an apartment house or hotel
> except in a garage which meets the requirements of
> the Building Code and other provisions of the
> Municipal Code.
> (b) Use. Private and public storage garages in
> apartment houses and hotels shall be used only for
> storage of automobiles.
Justifications for the law are numerous, I"m sure. If you have a garage, and are parking on the street instead, then surely you're contributing to curbside congestion. Beyond that, there are likely justifications from preventing hoarders, meth labs, etc.
Still, as written, it seems a little onerous.
[1] - http://housing.sanfranciscocode.org/6_603/
[2] - http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/A-push-to-abolish-ridi...
Your citation [1] says that it's only illegal to do that in an apartment house or hotel, which is a far cry from your original claim.
And your citation [2] says even that is a little-known, completely unenforced law that appears to be on its way out.
As for point 2, that it's little known and/or unenforced has, I think, no bearing on the discussion. Whether or not a law is enforced does not relate to whether or not the law is on the books. Clearly, it is. If you have evidence that it's "on the way out", that I'd be happy to hear. I'm not a California resident, so that's news to me, and I don't see that in the second citation (though I do see that they're attempting to have it repealed, but that doesn't mean that they'll be successful).
Have you double-negatived yourself into an inversion of not incorrectness there?
But I researched it myself, and the answer is:
It is a law, but it only applies to buildings with three or more dwelling units, including residential condominiums and hotels.
I don't have the numbers to back it up, but disregarding hotels and apartment complexes, where anything-other-than-vehicles would be weird, I'd guess that most people with private garages are in the clear.
So, while it was not written in error as I wondered, it isn't completely correct either. Sorry if my question appeared snarky, it wasn't intended so.
Yes, raldi pointed out that the 'apartment houses' provision, which does render my claim incomplete, at best. That said, I thought it was more wide-spread than that, and it's possible that the portion of the code I cited is only applicable to those types of dwellings, and there may be another such provision elsewhere in the code that applies to other types of dwellings. I dunno, and honestly, I'm not going to search all of San Francisco building codes to find out, so let's assume I'm wrong there.
The point I was making wasn't to insert some nefarious agenda into the workings of SF government as much to point out that San Francisco is crowded, and there have been at least some attempts to mitigate the problem of traffic through legislation, so it would surprise me if there wasn't some other law on the books that exist to mitigate the same problem.
I've had various garages in SF, and always kept vehicles (the 4-wheeled ones anyway) on the street, so I had a bit of a Richelieuian curiosity.
Elsewhere in the code, it defines a garage as "A building or portion thereof in which a motor vehicle containing flammable or combustible liquids or gas in its tank is stored, repaired or kept.".
Electric vehicles would also appear to be exempt, then.
I know that legal definitions, by their very nature, can end up being confusing, but I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during the reading of that bill and its discussion.