Philly bans 'jerktech' parking-spot auction apps

“Parking in my neighborhood is tough!” says a smiling young woman in an ad for the parking app Haystack. She and several friends appear to be drinking water in a coffee shop. “I know the street spot I have right now is in high demand. I’m about to leave here, so I use Haystack! With a simple tap, I let my neighbors know where I’m parked, and that I’ll be leaving soon,” she says. But that’s not all: “I even get paid when it’s taken!”

Cut to a bearded dude, driving around bemoaning how much he hates circling the neighborhood looking for parking, wasting time and burning fuel. He uses the Haystack app to bid $5 to $20 to call dibs on Smiling Woman’s parking place. As Bearded Dude pulls up behind Smiling Woman’s car, the two wave, then she pulls out and he pulls in. Smiling Woman and Haystack split the money. “For a couple bucks, I got the perfect space, while saving time and money,” enthuses Bearded Man. “And together, we did our part to make our neighborhood a little greener!” says Smiling Woman. Fin.

Not shown: Frustrated 63-Year-Old, who, without the benefit of a smartphone, drives past Smiling Woman’s car as she sits waiting for Bearded Man to pull up. As the two Haystack users pat themselves on the back, Frustrated 63-Year-Old is, in fact, still circling the block, wondering why the hell he never can find a parking spot anymore.

Now, Baltimore-based Haystack doesn’t operate in Philadelphia at the moment, and repeated checks of similar apps like Monkey Parking didn’t turn up any Center City users, either. On Thursday, though, City Council passed Councilman Bill Greenlee’s legislation to ban parking-auction apps and impose a $250 fine for using them to sell a space. If it seems a bit premature, just read up on the battle that Philly, the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) and the taxi industry are currently fighting with Uber, which is proving incredibly difficult to uproot now that it’s established itself in the area.

With Uber, public opinion is split on whether the tech company’s pushiness and lack of respect for city regulations should be classified as heroic disruption or entitled assholery. But most people seem to find parking-auction apps viscerally gross.

The YouTube comments on the Haystack video have been disabled, which usually only happens when they’re overwhelmingly abusive. Other cities, including Boston and L.A., have used strong words in banning parking apps since they became a thing this summer; startup-friendly San Francisco even tried to get Monkey Parking kicked out of Apple’s app store. And a TechCrunch.com editorial recently used Monkey Parking and ReservationHop (which makes phony reservations at popular restaurants and then scalps them) to coin the term “JerkTech,” defined as “a compassionless new wave of self-serving startups that exploit small businesses and public infrastructure to make a buck and aid the wealthy.”

Parking apps have generally responded to cities’ requests that they kindly GTFO by pointing out that they’re not actually selling parking — they just help people sell information about parking spaces, which they argue is protected by the First Amendment. They also note that urban curbside parking is a huge market failure — a snarl of unintended consequences of keeping street parking prices artificially low despite low supply and high demand. Why do we do that, again?

“Curb parking started out being free because the parking meter wasn’t invented until 1935,” nearly 20 years after the Model T made car ownership accessible to the masses, giving people a long time to settle into believing that free public parking is an essential American right, says U.C.L.A. urban planning professor Donald Shoup, author of the 733-page parking-policy bible The High Cost of Free Parking. (Among other things, the book addresses how non-drivers end up shouldering many of the costs of parking, subsidizing car ownership.)

“Haystack responds to a real problem, but it’s the wrong solution,” Shoup says. “Haystack is feasible because the city does a bad job of managing its curb parking.

“Everybody wants to park free — including me — and that will never change,” Shoup continues. But the parking app companies, though they may sound insincere, aren’t wrong about that being a huge market failure. “Probably one of the most valuable things that Philadelphia owns is its on-street parking,” says Shoup, but like in nearly every American city, it’s artificially undervalued in the name of fairness.

Parking-auction apps take advantage of the excess demand that results. “Haystack suggests that something’s wrong — ‘Oh, I see that the prices are wrong, and I can come in and make money out of it.’ Instead of letting a company like Haystack make money out of it, Philadelphia ought to do this and get the money itself,” says Shoup.

By “do this,” Shoup means adjust curbside parking prices to their fair market value, which would leave no space open for parking apps to come in and eat the city’s lunch. He’s spent decades making the case that while fairness is a nice concept, current parking policy in most cities hasn’t changed much since there were many fewer cars on the streets, and no longer makes sense. Meter prices aren’t high enough to motivate people to free up spots by moving their cars (or to leave their cars at home), which results in tons of congestion and added pollution as drivers circle the block searching for a spot. (Shoup’s book cites studies indicating that a third of cars on congested city streets are doing just that.)

The ideal price for a block of parking meters that will keep traffic from getting tied up, Shoup says, is the lowest price the city can charge that would still leave one or two open spaces on every block. “When I was in Philadelphia a couple weeks ago, I walked around a lot, and often I saw not a single open space on a block,” he says.

In 2011, San Francisco used a $20 million federal grant to roll out SFpark, a smart-parking system based on some of the ideas Shoup champions. SFpark uses sensors to track whether parking spots in eight congested areas are occupied or empty throughout the day, analyzes the data, then adjusts prices monthly to nudge occupancy closer to “one or two empty spaces per block at all times.” Drivers can also check an app to see which blocks have more or less parking available, and pay by cell phone.

A study earlier this year found that cruising for parking was down 50 percent in San Francisco since 2011.

“The thing that surprised everybody was that the average price of curb parking went down,” says Shoup. “Seventeen percent of all meters went down to 25 cents an hour, and only something like 7 per-cent of them went up to $6 an hour. And I can assure you that the demand for parking in San Francisco is much higher than it is in Philadelphia!” In most residential neighborhoods without constant block-circling, he says, the fair price would probably remain at zero.

Richard Dickson, deputy executive director of the PPA, says that people often misunderstand parking meters purely as revenue generators. “The fee is really a management tool, though; it’s not like a rental or a lease on the space. The time limits and meter fees are set in such a way that encourages people to turn those spaces over many times during the course of the day so that other people can have access to them as well,” Dickson says.

But, Dickson says, they pointedly don’t raise the fees too high. “We try to find a balance between a fee that encourages turnover and a fee that excludes people because it’s exorbitant,” he says. With the San Francisco maximum hourly price of $6 an hour, three times Philly’s max, he says, “You’re really pricing some people out of access.”

The PPA has mentioned Shoup’s work on their blog. Asked if they’d ever considered a model like SFpark, Dickson said it wasn’t in the cards anytime soon. “It’s very expensive, and there’s a couple problems associated with the sensors. Number one, San Francisco doesn’t have snow like Philadelphia does, which potentially covers the sensors and makes them inoperable.” The SFpark app distracts drivers, and leaves motorists who aren’t using it in the dark about the price of the spot they’re pulling into, he says.

Public parking spaces shouldn’t only go to people who have smart-phones or lots of money, Dickson says. “We believe it is in the best interest of everyone — motorists and people and businesses — that everybody have access to [parking] on an equal basis,” he says.