App parking system shuts down in San Francisco
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
But on-street parking in crowded urban areas with good public transportation? Absolutely not. Why should I take the subway or bus, yet have my tax dollars subsidize a select few who want to park on the street for free, or park for less than a market-clearing rate?
This app is great because it highlights how much money the city, and therefore taxpayers, are losing. I agree the app should be shut down, but only because the city should build its own so it can take the money directly.
At least in downtown, "public parking" is rented by the city at the rate they set. You may claim the rate city sets is too low, yes. But that doesn't actually entitle you (or anyone else) to lay claim to parking spaces and auction them as you please - since, well, they don't actually belong to you.
This doesn't really have much to do with "publicness" actually. Rental car companies would be equally upset if people developed an app for car renters to extract a surcharge for handing a rental off to their "friends".
The poor can't afford smartphones. If your plan were implemented, how would they find parking? If they aren't able to participate in your system, then that will add a lot of time to their daily commute.
Poor people are already penalized for being poor due to overdraft fees, predatory credit, etc. Taking an extra hour of their life each day just so the wealthy can find parking more easily doesn't seem best.
For cities that haven't switched to shared muni-meters, the existing parking meters seem like the natural place to add hardware that checks for availability. If the meters are network connected then at the very least they could report back whether or not they are in use or "expired". A lot of the newer meters allow for credit card payments so I'm assuming they have some kind of network connectivity.
It'd be awesome if a city provided this data to the public. Then anybody could just make an app/website[3] that shows the closest place you can park. Forget trying to make a buck off of reselling your existing spot, the savings on traffic, pollution, and frustration would justify it (less needless circling).
[1]: All spots would be even better but I'm assuming a spot that doesn't have a meter isn't going to have any hardware there that could tell whether a car is present.
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muni_Meter
[3]: Or even better integration with your smart phone's existing maps/nav app.
http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/open-data-page/
"As of December 30, 2013, the parking sensors in the street will be turned off and their data feed will no longer be available as parking sensor batteries have reached the end of their useful lives. This means that the real-time information on parking space occupancy will not be available for mobile apps and similar uses. The SFpark data feed and app will continue to show meter parking rates, as well as real-time space availability and rates at parking garages."
It is a really great solution.
MonkeyParking is not located in San Francisco. MonkeyParking is not even in the United States (the company is based in Rome, Italy). The founders aren't US citizens. If the mayor of some random Iranian town demanded an American app shut down, because locals were using it to coordinate protests against Islam in violation of Iranian law, there's no way in hell an American software company would listen. Do US courts simply claim that their laws apply to everyone, everywhere?
The right to speech and free expression is protected in the U.S. (for the most part) whereas the right to affordable parking is an arguable point. The primary issue San Francisco had in this whole episode is that they didn't come up with it first. This was all about revenue.
The real issue is whether a judgment in another country can be enforced. If MonkeyParking has any physical U.S. presence (bank accounts, servers, etc.), San Francisco could try going after those items. They're an iPhone app, so SF could certainly go after Apple. Assuming none of those options are available to SF though, SF would have to go to an Italian court and ask that court to enforce the U.S. judgment. At that point, whether the decision is enforceable would hinge on international treaties and Italian law.
In your Iran hypothetical, Iran could certainly claim jurisdiction over an American software company for intentionally violating Iranian law. But the American First Amendment prohibits American courts from helping Iran enforce that judgment.
Maybe I also didn't fully understand how this app works. I thought it was one person camping out in their parking spot until the "buyer" arrives. If they are merely selling the information that their spot is now available, it's probably the same in practice, but the essence of it feels subtly different. Law is fascinating like that.
San Francisco: Only we can have a predatory market for public parking spaces.
The status quo is obviously broken. The question is if there is an easy and effective way to improve fairness.
The main issue with designing a reservation based system is how efficient it is with regards to spots being continually filled, along with the constraint that it be considered fair by all participants. It seems like a design challenge but the current greedy algorithm probably sets the bar pretty low. It would be interesting to simulate.
The most important effect is that the incentives that might have favoured innovation to improve the efficiency of the use of the good and offer affordable alternatives are distorted in favour of incentives which favour unscrupulous competition for arbitrage gains.
http://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/if-you-wa...
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Though the library may appear to be free, the truth is quite different; it is not that the library borrower is getting things for free, it is that they have already paid. Libraries are the result of a community pooling resources (often gathered through taxes) for the funding and purchasing of materials that are then made available to all members of that community.
... Just as a community invests in infrastructure like roads, bridges and water management systems – a community invests in a library. Libraries, if you will, represent educational and intellectual infrastructure. A recognition that just as a road makes it easier to reach your destination, so too does access to information enable one to complete a journey of another sort.
... what occurs in a library is the development and maintenance through the economy of a genuine structure for sharing. Numerous people contribute a little and from this are able to get a lot, but the value they extract from their investment is not in the form of a sack of money with a dollar sign on it, but a larger social value. It is a value that would be diminished by turning it simply into a profit-generating scheme.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/arts/design/public-library...
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In a striking about-face, the New York Public Library has abandoned its much-disputed renovation plan to turn part of its research flagship on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street into a circulating library and instead will refurbish the nearby Mid-Manhattan Library, several library trustees said
.. This shift is something of a defeat for the library, which had already paid the British architect Norman Foster $9 million in private funds for his firm’s work on the plan for the flagship, a 1911 Beaux-Arts landmark.
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Marginal cost of a non-fully -occupied library is approximately zero.
* The existence of the app in no way demonstrates that the city doesn't charge market rate. The people who "sell" their parking spaces in the app don't have the same cost structure as the city since, among other things, they don't actually own these parking spaces and are simply engaging in a scam.
The city may not be charging you think is most to it, but hey, the city probably isn't concerned with what lone hackers somewhere think, why should it be.
SF would be a lot easier if everyone didn't have a garage. I would be willing to bet a good percentage of people with a garage might not have a car.