Parking Startups Are Cashing In On America's Traffic Surge (bloomberg.com) 14
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: During the depths of the U.S. coronavirus pandemic, cars sat idly in driveways, city streets were deserted, onetime commuters worked from bed -- and it was much, much easier to find a parking spot. All of which was devastating news for the small cadre of tech startups dedicated to helping people find and reserve places to park. For SpotHero, which makes an app that helps drivers locate parking spaces, business was down 90% in April 2020 compared with February. The company laid off half its employees. "It was a really hard time for us," Chief Executive Officer Mark Lawrence says. Now, at last, drivers are back, and so is the familiar American pastime of hunting for a parking spot. In the U.S., traffic was up 55% in April from a year earlier, according to the Federal Highway Administration. And although urban roads were slower to refill than their suburban counterparts, traffic in such cities as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C., finally touched pre-pandemic levels again in June, according to Inrix, which analyzes mobility data.
The result has been a wave of new customers for SpotHero and companies like it. SpotHero bookings started to come back in January, then accelerated. "It was slowly, then suddenly," Lawrence says. Now the startup is profitable for the first time in 10 years, he says, thanks in part to a surge in car ownership spurred by people avoiding public transit. At FlashParking, which makes two spot-finding apps and helps event companies and garages coordinate availability, demand is higher than it was before the pandemic in some cities. Meanwhile, SpotAngels, which uses crowd input to create maps of nearby open spaces, says monthly revenue since its previous high in February 2020 had tripled by May 2021. "It's interesting to see how dark it was, and can get," SpotHero's Lawrence says, "and then have such optimism now."
Before the pandemic, the industry was in crisis, says Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking. The rise of such ride-sharing services as Uber and Lyft had meant that many parking garages at stadiums and the like were forced to retrofit their spaces for other uses, such as mini-distribution centers for packages. Post-pandemic, though, parking companies are benefiting from a renewed love of personal space. "I do think right now there's a little bit of a psychological issue with taking public transit or taking Uber," Ben-Joseph says. He also thinks parking apps in particular may be benefiting from the lack of desire to touch kiosk screens or hand over cash to an attendant.
The result has been a wave of new customers for SpotHero and companies like it. SpotHero bookings started to come back in January, then accelerated. "It was slowly, then suddenly," Lawrence says. Now the startup is profitable for the first time in 10 years, he says, thanks in part to a surge in car ownership spurred by people avoiding public transit. At FlashParking, which makes two spot-finding apps and helps event companies and garages coordinate availability, demand is higher than it was before the pandemic in some cities. Meanwhile, SpotAngels, which uses crowd input to create maps of nearby open spaces, says monthly revenue since its previous high in February 2020 had tripled by May 2021. "It's interesting to see how dark it was, and can get," SpotHero's Lawrence says, "and then have such optimism now."
Before the pandemic, the industry was in crisis, says Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking. The rise of such ride-sharing services as Uber and Lyft had meant that many parking garages at stadiums and the like were forced to retrofit their spaces for other uses, such as mini-distribution centers for packages. Post-pandemic, though, parking companies are benefiting from a renewed love of personal space. "I do think right now there's a little bit of a psychological issue with taking public transit or taking Uber," Ben-Joseph says. He also thinks parking apps in particular may be benefiting from the lack of desire to touch kiosk screens or hand over cash to an attendant.
Bike! (Score:2)
Use bicycles.
Re: (Score:1)
Fuck that.
Get creative and park at the McDonald's.
Re: (Score:2)
I prefer to not get killed by a motor vehicle that didn't see me.
Re: (Score:2)
" I get in my car and I drive to places, 99.9% of which have adequate parking that's free. Which I consider...normal?"
That's because you don't live in a city. In the suburbs, usually every new store/etc is required to have enough of their own parking. That's impossible in a city.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on the suburb. A lot of cities and towns are reducing their parking requirements so developers are building more. A parking lot is seen as an expense because it results in unsellable or unleaseable area - the parking spaces could better be used as more shops or larger shops or a combination of the two.
Though, some other areas have turned it
Cheap tunnels (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not that cheap. It's easier just to dig a hole and build a structure over it. This is how most parking garages under buildings are created if I understand right. First dig the hole, then build the main support for the building at the lower levels, and eventually just put concreate over it. to create the ground floor of the building.
psychological (Score:1)
"I do think right now there's a little bit of a psychological issue with taking public transit or taking Uber," Ben-Joseph says.
The pandemic was hardly psychological. It finally dawned on a lot of people that the kind of city life being pushed on us has a lot of undesirable aspects. For very concrete reasons.
LA is about to have a real problem with this (Score:3)
When I visited the city last month, I was impressed by the vast amount of new outdoor dining that restaurants all over town have claimed from what used to be public space. Every eatery has built fancy, permanent decking over the former parking spaces in front of it, usually with a canopy above it. Although the tables on this deck are now sandwiched between the sidewalk and the remaining street, each of them was filled with diners.
So where in hell is everyone parking?
Re:LA is about to have a real problem with this (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know but obviously dining area is more valuable to restaurants than parking spaces!
Yes, they'll complain when you take away "their" parking, but only because they got it for free and felt entitled to the subsidy.
No shit. (Score:1)