Every economic advance will hurt someone. The invention of the car left a lot of buggy manufacturers unable to feed their families. Your startup is probably mak

Every economic advance will hurt someone. The invention of the car left a lot of buggy manufacturers unable to feed their families. Your startup is probably making someone financially miserable. The job of a responsible economist is to look at how the implications of a change are distributed across everyone in the population, over the long run. This change would hurt those rural folks visibly, but as outlined in the article, many more people would benefit, often in less directly visible ways. Currently, those people's parking fees are coming out of someone else's wallet. Make the drivers pay the cost and externalities of their own decisions. If the market determines that these people are producing economic value, then they will be ok. (Maybe their employer will recognize that the employee needs a parking spot and subsidize it.) If not, then sooner or later people need to figure out a way of living that is economically sustainable.