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AEIdeas

Coming from a college, Dartmouth, that ranks horribly across the board in access to parking, I can understand the appeal of an app that helps ease parking struggles. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Christopher Mims comments on the promise of startup companies like the parking app Haystack:

The idea behind Haystack and its competitors was simple: Provide an incentive for people to let others know when an on-street parking spot is open. In Haystack’s case, it was $3 in Baltimore or $5 in Boston.

Unfortunately, cities like Boston and San Francisco chose to focus on the potential abuse that could arise from such a system, particularly individuals simply hunkering down in public parking spaces and selling them off for a quick profit.

Mims argues that cities are already regulating parking, including charging “higher rates on parking meters at times of high demand, to try to keep more spots open.” This sounds an awful lot like Uber’s surge pricing policy that has garnered a lot of controversy recently, yet cities are free to continue the practice in the name of protecting a public good.

Most of the problem seems to revolve around cities remaining unwilling to work with companies like Haystack, choosing instead to squash the movement before it can really get started:

Christopher Koopman described it to me like this. ‘We should be allowing people to innovate and enter into transactions and then adjust on the margins as issues actually arise.’ In the case of Haystack, regulators took a different approach—imagine the worst-case scenario, and move to block it before there’s any evidence it will come to pass.

Banning the app does nothing to solve the parking issue, however, and other, pricier options such as valet services via an app have filled in the gap left by potential innovators like Haystack. Had cities worked with the company (which Haystack offered to do) rather than take it down, they could have joined together to take on the problems presented by public parking congestion while, as Mims points out, also asking the company not to let its customers exploit spots.

Instead, city-goers will continue to circle blocks and blocks in an effort to avoid expensive parking garages – a sign of a major loss. Mims argues it best:

In an age of ever cheaper and more accessible smartphones, why shouldn’t we figure out a way to eliminate parking-related congestion at a price that, arguably, almost everyone driving in the dense urban core of a city could afford?

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