You do realize that this app meant the city is not charging enough (market rate) for parking right?
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.