4 ms·
> Thankfully the city of San Francisco is fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking with cease-and-desist orders. The city of San Francisco should be fighting Sweetc
by MBlume 12y ago
> Thankfully the city of San Francisco is fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking with cease-and-desist orders.
The city of San Francisco should be fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking by cutting out the middleman and drastically raising their parking fees.
- vellum 12y agoThey could also use sensors that detect when a parking spot is free, and upload that information to an app or the web.
- zevyoura 12y agoThey're actually doing both of those things, though not on a spot-by-spot basis: http://sfpark.org/ http://sfpark.org/
- silencio 12y agoActually, they used to do it on a spot-by-spot basis to generate info about demand to change pricing, as the prices are often different depending on which block you park on (!). My original reason for using the sfpark iPhone app was that it could tell you where to go for the nearest currently-open street parking spot. They even had a publicly available data feed for this for other app developers to use: http://sfpark.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/SFpark-parking-sensor-data-feed-specifiation_2012-07-20.pdf http://sfpark.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/SFpark-parking-... Unfortunately they stopped providing sensor data about half a year ago with the end of the pilot program. But the sensors are still physically around, and SFMTA (hopefully) are looking into improving sensor technology to upgrade, and seeing if it makes sense to release this data again. Personally between that availability info and that SFMTA has not been afraid to tinker with pricing changes - definitely a big FU to Monkey Parking et al. Not sure why they didn't work with private lots and home garages or something instead - that would make a lot more sense than messing with something that's already in the works.
- wpietri 12y agoThey're doing some of that. But there's a problem with that: plenty of people who live here can't afford a sudden major bump in living expenses. In the long term, correct pricing is part of the solution. But in the short term, it'd be unfortunate to solve the problem by screwing poorer people. And anyway, this could be a temporary spike in demand. Once places like ZipCar and Uber get ahold of self-driving cars, I expect there will be a big decrease in car ownership.
- rahimnathwani 12y agoYou could do it in a revenue-neutral way by distributing the additional parking fees directly to poorer people. This could make allocation more efficient whilst redistributing money from richer drivers to poorer non-drivers, whilst being neutral for poorer drivers and richer non-drivers.
- MBlume 12y agoPolitically impossible, but my blanket response to "how will this affect poor people" arguments is "give them money" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
- icpmacdo 12y agoThis concept is basically becoming a meme.
- mjmahone17 12y agoSo is legalize weed.
- wpietri 12y agoYeah, that's an approach I'd be happy with, although getting the levels right is certainly tricky. Another approach is to spend the revenue raised in ways that help, like improving transit. If they put connected meters on all the news spots, we could also give people who live nearby income-based discounts.
- 12y ago