The reason parking is priced the way it is is because it is a public good. The only thing "efficient" pricing would do is give wealthy people a massive advantage over the consumption of that good. You might like to live in a world where only rich people can afford public parking - I don't.
That's exactly why the SF government is taking an issue with these startups: they skew the game in favor of those who have money. For the usage of private property, such as houses, this may not be a huge deal. But public parking by definition belongs to the public: everyone should have an equal chance at consuming it. Fairness trumps inefficiency.
Sadly it doesn't work right now because the program ended, but while it existed, realtime data was even accessible to third party developers. The potential was huge.
http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/the-sensors/
If someone wants to disrupt something, it should be by helping the SFMTA to bring sensors back along with upgrading the rest of the city's meters to the smart, credit card accepting, remote pay enabled, pricing-based-on-demand system that only some of the meters use.
This is not really relevant in the context of San Francisco. The city has been running a pilot program since 2010 to change meter pricing based on demand. Interested startups could have worked within this program and with SFMTA to help. All Monkey Parking et al. have been doing is screwing with this program which has been actively adjusting prices and rolling out to more areas.
Are people actually using these "jerkTech" services though? If you've got the SFPark app, why would you bother with Monkey Parking? I get the feeling that they're all enjoying the free hype/hate which is being doled out right now as it's probably steering more users their way.
Ultimately though there is no way any of these services will be viable. If you face a $300 fine for renting out your parking space (as is the case in SF) and Monkey Parking makes it easy for law enforcement to track you down with their app, not a lot of people are going to want to bother.
It's a similar thing for making restaurant reservations. If restaurants start getting hit with a ton of no shows to the point where they're losing money, it doesn't take long to figure out that it's listed and file a cease-and-desist order.
> It's a similar thing for making restaurant reservations. If restaurants start getting hit with a ton of no shows to the point where they're losing money, it doesn't take long to figure out that it's listed and file a cease-and-desist order.
Trying so hard not to rage here. I own a restaurant. Reservationhop guy could have spent literally a few more seconds taking his idea to the logical conclusion that he should work with restaurants - just like EVERY OTHER service involved including the ones in his defensive blog post. Nope. It's like all he saw was "oh, something like ticket scalpers for concerts!" and ended there.
Not sure why they jumped to the stupidest option possible instead of taking a look at seriously starting something in the big, generic, terribly done to date foodservice needs area (everything from reservations to POS systems) or becoming the Airbnb of privately owned parking spaces. You'd think they'd see the nonviability of their ideas sooner.
Here's an idea, slightly based on Alinea's ticket system:
Charge a relatively low deposit. Say if I make a reservation you charge my credit card with 20$ (or whatever). If I cancel (it does happen) up to three hours (or 6, or 24, or whatever) in advance the charge is reversed and the transaction is at no cost to me.
If I show up the 20$ are fully credited and deducted from the bill.
This would certainly only work for restaurants that can generate the necessary demand. Then again those are also the victims of those DoucheScalpers.
As a patron I really wouldn't mind guaranteeing my reservation with a small, up front payment. Especially when I can cancel within a reasonable time frame, no hassle and get fully refunded.
On a off topic side note: I actually cancel reservations if I don't need them. It seems to me just common courtesy and the right thing to do. It may enable somebody else to use the table and I strongly suspect that it doesn't hurt my karma with the restaurant for next time I want to book a table.
The gross thing about some of these startups was that they were looking for people to hire to squat on parking spaces. Not just the one-off space, but literally, your job was squatting until someone paid for the space. It's unbelievable. I hate parking here but not enough to screw around with other people looking for a parking space or to pay for a service like that. I would not shed a single tear if cops started using the apps in question to write the people selling spaces $300 tickets for breaking local laws.
Really not sure why all these "disruptors" can't just channel their energy into improving public transit and working on better (but slower and still imperfect) approaches to the parking problem just like sfpark. "Let's find you an available space and let's make it frictionless for you to pay for parking" if not just "let's fix the problems you have with taking Muni" is better in the long term than "let's create an app to auction off _public_ parking spaces".
I'm not even going to approach reservationhop because I also own a restaurant. I could write a wall of text about that....
edited in: [1] So I addressed this in other comments, but the sfpark program also involved installing per-spot sensors in over 8k meters in the city (along with credit card-supporting meters and remote pay). There was an official app (and third party dev access!) that showed you which _exact spaces_ were available near you. Imagine the ability to just discover that there's a space open 2 blocks away at half the price of the area you were searching in. Now that's the kind of technology I could get behind that would have a chance of destroying Monkey Parking and the likes on its own. I'm hoping SFMTA brings that back soon.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/05/smart-parking-...
edit: tl;dr the extra time gets wiped out when your car leaves the spot.
The point isn't that it can't be solved, the point is that if it need solving, it's probably a problem, and companies are supposed to solve problem, not to deport them from their paying customers to non-paying third-party.
The first one, Reservation Hop, is simply indefensible because it relies on fraud. It's deceiving restaurants into thinking the person asking for a reservation is a real person. Not only does it involve lying, but it's fundamentally different from scalping a ticket because if no one "buys" the reservation, the restaurant gets nothing and was perhaps force to turn down legit customers, whereas the scalper actually paid for the ticket (though it may have been inefficiently priced, see below for more on that). It also creates no-value-added intermediary in the process. It's just a dick move all around. I do suspect that a trade group for the restaurants could get Reservation Hop cease-and-desisted, but the general solution here is for restaurants to take a credit card as part of the reservation process.
The parking ones are a bit different, in that they're taking advantage of inefficiently priced parking. Ever notice how it's really hard to find a spot on a street full of first-come-first-serve, inexpensive parking? It's for the same reason there are long lines and empty gas pumps before a storm with anti-gouging rules in effect, or in stories about the Soviet Union. You can park there for long periods of time even though you may not have a pressing need for the spot, whereas people who have such a need can't get one. Normally we manage such supply and demand issues through prices, so if you need a spot badly enough you might be willing to pay for it and one will be available because most people aren't. [1] What happens almost inevitably when you have an inefficiently distributed good is a secondary market or some sort of cultural mos, both of which are usually ethically dubious. In Boston, people "reserve" spots by putting cones or lawn chairs in "their" spots and expect you to respect it less you get your car keyed, thus compounding the inefficiency. There are places where you can pay for people to "hold" your spot, and I've had someone try to sell me theirs once. These companies are filling in exactly there, except with technology. To be clear, I think these companies are pretty crummy. But my point is that they're the almost inevitable consequence of a pretty terrible system for allocating resources. I.e. if we want to fix this, the best way to do it is to fix the underlying problem rather than shaming businesses like this. EDIT: to be clear, I'm not against shaming them if it makes you feel good; I just think it's not the solution to the problem.
Even though that description overlaps in places with the article, I like my framing a lot better. The article is coming from this place where entrepreneurs are expected to be these angels descended to Earth to fix all the "common man's" problem through innovation. Then we immolate ourselves because the community/scene turns out to be full of non-special people who are sometimes kinda shady and take advantage of bad policy and lax enforcement to make money, just like people in all other walks of life. (In an age where so much relies on technology, I don't even think it's reasonable to think of "startup tech stuff" as a scene or a space or a community at all.) Maybe it's fun to wring your hands about it and I can see a publication like TC likes to see things through that lens, but I don't think it's a very helpful way of approaching these problems if your real goal is to solve them.
[1] An important question here, given the context, is doesn't this just help the rich get parking at the expense of poor people? Well, yes, it kind of does. On the other hand, if you can't find a spot, it doesn't help poor people much, except insomuch as poor people may be willing to spend a longer time trying to park (in which case, we're making them pay for it with their time, which doesn't seem good either). But more importantly, if we want to make things easier for poor people, we should give them money so that they can do what they want with it (including parking!). That's way better than making parking artificially cheap, because a) it's a lot more flexible from the poor person's perspective and b) it distorts the allocation of resources way less.