In SF: an App For Auctioning Off Your Public Parking Spot 427
trbdavies (979982) writes 'Only in San Francisco' used to refer to issues like whether public nudity should be restricted to certain hours of the day. Now I hear it most often in connection with the interplay between the city and tech companies. SF Weekly reports on one such development: 'Anyone who's visited San Francisco for 35 minutes knows that easy parking is a rare find. Enter Paolo Dobrowolny, an Italian tech bro who decided San Francisco was the perfect spot to test out his new experiment. Here's how it works: You find a parking spot, revel a little, let Monkey Parking know where you're located, and watch the bidding begin. Finally, give your spot to the wealthiest victim willing to pay the highest price for your spot. Drive away that much richer.'" Update: 05/08 15:52 GMT by T : I suspect that Dobrowolny's a tech pro, rather than bro, or at least that's what I suspect the Weekly meant to say.
Re:Not Just Parking.... (Score:4, Informative)
The city can't do a damn thing about them, since each reservation is under a different name......
There must be more to it than that. Either there is some restriction in the local laws preventing them implementing measures against this or they can't be bothered and are claiming they can't to shift the blame to someone else.
One obvious measure to make this much harder for example would be to require users bring ID that matches the name under which the booking was made preventing post-hoc sales of bookings.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Reminds me of Boston (Score:5, Informative)
I lived in Boston for a while and the parking is just as bad there as it is in SF. For those of you that have not visited the fine city of Boston, allow me to enlighten you. Boston is an historical city and, as such, has numerous historical buildings. Buildings that cannot be knocked down in order to widen roads. The road that Paul Revere travelled on is just as wide now as it was then.
Lots of one way streets and lots of one hour parking. The cops there would ride around with little bits of chalk. The first time through they would put a chalk mark on the tires of the cars in the one hour parking zone. An hour later they return and any car there with chalk on the tire gets a ticket. So of course it became a game of cat and mouse - cop puts chalk, car owner rubs it off.
When it snows it's worse because the snow plows can't get through so you would have to park on alternate sides of the street depending on the day of the week. If you're caught on the wrong side when the snow plows come through they just tow your car.
The moral of the story is that if you live in Boston, or SF for that matter, take public transportation whenever you can. Driving and parking in either of those cities is a pain in the ass and is to be avoided at all costs.
One of the reasons I left Boston was the traffic and parking. I got sick of it.
Naturally, this app is going to get banned. You don't own the land you are parking your car on. The owner of the parking lot sets the price, not the person renting the spot.
Re: "busses"? (Score:2, Informative)
It's not incorrect so much as outdated. http://grammarist.com/spelling/buses-busses/
Re:"Tech bro"? (Score:5, Informative)
While I hate the term, the SF Weekly assuredly did use "tech bro" intentionally. You can see that it's not the first time they've used it [google.com], nor are they the only ones using it. The term usually refers to the SOMA, app-of-the-week startup crowd that's more interested in pitching VCs than building something useful.