In large cities like San Francisco, Hong Kong and Amsterdam, finding a parking spot near your destination is a mission impossible. Often there is simply no parking spot available and when there is, it is mostly an expensive parking garage where you pay 10$ per hour. MonkeyParking is an app that responds to the need of finding a parking spot nearby. It enables people who are about to leave their parking spot to sell their spot to drivers via an auction system; the highest bidder gets the spot.
The idea of the app arose from the annoyance of the founders of finding a vacant parking spot in San Francisco. “Sometimes it happens that you end up circling around one block for hours but one block away someone is just about to leave” (Paolo Dobrowolny, 2014). MonkeyParking brings inside information about whether someone will leave a parking space into the open. By making this tacit knowledge explicit, MonkeyParking makes the process of finding a parking spot more efficient and consequently allows drivers to save time.
In the second place, the app of MonkeyParking can solve one of the major problems large cities are facing these days; air pollution (Rainwater, B., 2015). Because drivers can now drive directly to a vacant parking spot, drivers do not have to circle around for hours. Nowadays, over one third of all traffic in cities, is looking for a parking spot (IBM, 2011) and 50 to 90 per cent of air pollution in cities is caused by it(Smith, M., 2016). Imagine what for effect MonkeyParking can have on the air quality in large cities when they gain ground.
Unfortunately the app is shot down on July 11th 2014. According the city Attorney of San Fransisco, Dennis Herrera the app creates a predatory private market for parking spaces and causes traffic accidents because people are too busy with the auction in the app. Moreover, Dennis Herrera called on the American Law that it is not legal to sell something you do not own. But is MonkeyParking selling parking spots, or are they selling only information about parking spots? There is no law in America that says that you can’t sell information.
What do you think? Is MonkeyParking the solution of the future or is it a Monkey business?
Sources:
http://www.monkeyparking.co/
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235575
http://www.techinsider.io/cities-are-facing-these-10-big-issues-2015-8
http://pollutionfreecities.blogspot.nl/2011/10/searching-for-parking-spot-and-needless.html
https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/10/apesht/
Hi Anne Merel. Thanks for your blog! I have never heard of MonkeyParking before (it could be of course because it is currently not available in the app store, like you mentioned in the blog). Like we all know, finding a parking spot can be a time-consuming job, causing a lot of frustration and irritation. Even though this app seems to be a great solution for this, I am not completely convinced it will work out. Some downsides:
– As shown in de video, people will have to bid, starting at 5 dollars. Since the highest bidder will get the parking spot, people can misuse this app by waiting for a high bid and then give it to the other driver, increasing parking cost.
– Additionally, the MonkeyParking app does not know whether someone actually used a parking spot and if this parking spot is even free or not. Both will increase the parking cost
– Also, I believe that some people will wait for a high bid, not leaving their place until such a bid is obtained, rather than giving the spot away to other drivers.
Altogether, I am not really convinced that this app will be the solution for this problem, and thus is indeed a monkey business. However, it is nice to see people are trying to solve this and I hope another app will come up with a great idea!
Thank you first off for your interesting post. I had not heard of this app before.
I agree with the city attorney of San Fransisco. Even though you might have a nice angle saying you are actually selling the information that the parking spot is available, I still think that the fact that money is made off of a parking space the person does not know is somewhat wrong and can easily be taken advantage of.
In my opinion, the very well known example of smart parking in Barcelona, part of Cisco’s Internet of Things project (http://internetofeverything.cisco.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/Barcelona_Jurisdiction_Profile_final.pdf) is a better way to approach solving the problem of finding a parking spot as well as reducing pollution because cars do not have to drive around as much.