The Times They Are A Changin' - The New World of Parking
According to statistics published in last year’s Colliers Parking Survey (2007), monthly parking rates in North America’s urban cities grew an average of 4.4% in 2007 alone. 61% of Canadian parking lots/garages have waiting lists and that same figure sits at approximately 20% for US cities with typical wait periods of 6 and 5 months respectively. Some cities such as New York are now witnessing monthly parking rates in excess of $600, Boston with monthly median parking hovering at $460 and even Toronto at a median price of $300 per month. But consumers are not idiots. They know they have options. They are becoming frustrated with the ever increasing costs of owning a vehicle – from insurance, to taxes, to the cost of gas, they are looking for alternative ways to manage their expenditures. So what are they doing?
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Demand fuels growth of online parking site
Ramona Bernardi was at the end of her rope. Finding a parking spot near the downtown Toronto apartment that she had sublet for the summer was quickly becoming an arduous daily chore.
"I was living a nightmare. It was so hard to park my car and obey the rules of the parking authority. I was getting up all the time [to move my car] and after two weeks, I was spent," she says.
In urban markets across North America, where the supply of parking is tight and demand is high, it's a common problem, and one that led Aynsley Deluce and her husband, Matthew Ball, to solve their parking woes while breaking new ground on an emerging online business concept.
"It's usually the simplest issues that are the biggest ones to fix with the biggest opportunity," Ms. Deluce says. "I mean it's parking, for God's sake."
The couple bought the Internet domain parkingspots.com, but didn't do anything with it for the next few years. Until, that is, it became clear the parking problem was only getting worse. This past February, the couple officially launched Parkingspots.com with the aim of connecting people who owned empty parking stalls - commercial operators or private owners - with desperate drivers looking for a place to park, all done via the Web.
Users log on to the site, browse the listings of parking spots available and indicate which ones they're interested in renting. Owners of the stalls contact interested parties and close the deal. Parkingspots.com makes money by charging sellers a fee for each spot.
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Parking No Longer Has To Be A Four Letter Word
Parking: one of the few seven letter words that generates as emotional a response as most four letter words. Often, in fact, they’re even said in tandem. Finding it is a chore, paying for it feels like highway robbery yet owning it seems to print cash. Seem fair? Absolutely not.
Let’s do some math. Cost of vehicle lease $600/month, insurance $120/month, maintenance and repair averages $100/month, gas about $180/month…sadly it doesn’t end there. Extraneous costs such as car washing at $60/month, winter tires amortized at $80/month continue to wrack up the costs. And the capper on all this? Parking. Dependent on what city you call home this little fee to rent a piece of concrete can run you anywhere from $100/month to as much as $650/month in some cities. All to store your precious ‘mobile for sometimes as few as eight hours a day, five days a week.
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The Parking Spot Wars
There’s one site in particular, Toronto, Ontario-based ParkingSpots.com, that seems likely to divert a few of the customers who might otherwise turn to Rollert’s service. By helping commuters to find long-term rental spots in urban cores, it could dampen demand for more expensive hourly spots.
I spoke last week with Aynsley Deluce, one of the partners behind ParkingSpots, which really did launch its service in February and includes Boston and Seattle among its covered cities. The whole premise of the site, she says, is that most cities have more potential parking spots than drivers are aware of—for example, in residential driveways, condominium garages, and out-of-the-way commercial lots. “Parking is an issue in every city,” she says. “The one thing you can’t control in a city is that we’re all running out of space. But there’s all this dormant space like your driveway that can be used in creative ways—it’s just that there’s no venue for doing that.”
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Snag a Parking Spot on the Web
With developers endlessly gobbling up parking lots for new condo and retail developments, parking in the city can be hard to come by. Even when you do find one, life doesn't seem to get any easier.
This can be especially frustrating for those looking to rent a spot monthly, or annually, since many lots can charge ridiculous prices for these coveted patches of pavement. Thankfully, there's a new Web-two-point-oh site on the scene, ParkingSpots.com, that hopes to alleviate many of the headaches prospective renters and owners experience trying to connect with each other.
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Parking Downtown a walk in the Park: New Website Claims
Downtown parking. A couple of four-letter words might come to mind at the mere thought of driving around aimlessly looking for a vacant spot. And they ain't pretty.
But thanks to the wonderful world of the web, those days of throwing temper tantrums in your car when you think no one's looking could all be behind you with the click of a button.
For a website that just launched a month ago, parkingspots.com is getting a whole lot of traffic.
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The Perfect Car Hole
Although we know that every resident of Toronto is a huge fan of the "betterer way," and that not a single one of you has a complaint about the TTC's long wait times, we recognize that it is sometimes necessary to invest in your own personal motorized vehicle. Aside from the costs of car payments, gas, insurance, winter tires, summer tires, oil changes, floor mats and chrome spinners (slammin'!), eventually you also have to think about where you're going to keep the damn thing when you're not using it.
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Parking Spot Pursuit Sends Drivers Online
Danielle Doran has spent months searching for a cheap parking spot close to work.
Like most Ottawans, the 28-year-old is finding parking hard to come by.
Doran, who works at the Ottawa Heart Institute, said there's a waiting list for employee parking.
The Kanata resident didn't even bother applying. Instead, she'll park at the visitor and patient lot for $13 a day. That adds up to $260 a month.
"It's a lot of money," she said.
Finding a parking spot can be one of the most irksome and frustrating aspects of driving in the city.
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Toronto - based Parkingspots.com is a new site that lets you easily find a parking spot when you need one - anywhere in Canada and the U.S.
Imagine you've got an important business meeting somewhere around the Yonge & Eglinton area in midtown Toronto and don't know where to find a good spot. At this site you can type in the address or postal code you're going to and with the help of Google Maps you'll see an overhead map or satellite view (or hybrid) so you can see available parking areas (and you can zoom in and out with a few mouse clicks, too).
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Dan Wells is tired of having to run down and plug the meter every day.
But in a city where waiting lists for downtown parking spots run an average of two years, he didn't have many options -- until he found a new website capitalizing on the lack of available stalls.
"It opens up another avenue for parking opportunities," Wells said of parkingspots.com. "Parking obviously is an issue in Calgary."
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Parking spots.com Goes Live!
As urban areas continue to grow and become increasingly congested, space has become a key concern. Whether it be space to store personal goods because it can no longer fit in ones existing abode or even a seat on the subway on ones way to work, space is running short. Too many people are flowing into North Americas cities and the spatial resources to support them are not growing respectively.
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