By Aynsley Deluce
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.
In today’s economy, especially in today’s economy, we’re all trying to figure out ways to cut dollars from our personal cash flow statements. So what do we do? We look at our monthly burn rates and try to determine where we can sacrifice spending to maximize our budgets. Unfortunately however, parking is a necessity we are unable to forgo. It is also an item which the commercial properties that run our city lots quite freely monopolize. From the lot owner’s perspective it is after all a game of supply and demand. The ever increasing migration of traffic from suburbia into our cities only serves to reaffirm the rather glaring power the parking industry has over the consumers in need of its service.
From a consumer standpoint, parking has historically not exactly typified one of life’s ‘fair practices’. No rent controls, shopping around is cumbersome and often frustrating and really no centralized ‘voice of the consumer’ exists to help citizens across the Canada, the US and the globe stand up as a united front to make any changes to the way the business is structured.
That is until now.
The rules of the game are changing. Dare we say it but parking is finally experiencing a renaissance some may even consider a revolution. Whereby the past has seen drivers and car owners alike at the mercy of whatever lots they may stumble upon, the internet is changing the rules on how we park – both literally and figuratively.
Citizens across North America and parts of Europe and the UK are beginning to catch on to the newest niche in the business of parking: online parking marketplaces. Spearheaded by the grandfather of classifieds, Craigslist, first opened the door to parking solutions as an online exercise with its personals listings that highlighted people’s garages, driveways and lots. The challenge with Craigslist however was and is exactly its benefit: it’s a consumer generated list of classifieds that can seem cluttered, cumbersome to search and often listings that one does find are outdated. Naturally it soon began to frustrate many an opportunistic entrepreneur. Next came the google mashups where sites began pulling aggregate feeds directly from the likes of Craigslist and Kijijji and integrating them into google map functions. Again, that too suffered from some of the same issues as Craigslist.
Hence web parking 3.0: up to the minute listings of parking spots across North America. Only this time the listings have extended beyond merely private lots, driveways and condos and into commercial properties and their wealth of inventory (that is, the brave few companies willing to venture into this unchartered territory). Sites such as parkingspots.com which operates across North America, parkatmyhouse.com in the UK, and primospots.com in the US are all examples of companies trying to help make the task of parking that little bit easier and more affordable. All have launched in the last few years and demand and supply continue to justify the need for these types of services.
In this era of technology, increasing debt and need for convenience, consumers are looking for solutions to help make their lives a little easier and less worrisome. Parking until now has functioned as yet another frustration in one’s daily life. But the rules are changing and consumers are finally getting a chance to take control over their parking choices.
It’s nice to know that parking no longer has to be a four letter word.
Summary of the author:
Aynsley Deluce and her partner Matthew Ball are founders of www.parkingspots.com – an online marketplace for monthly parking and can be reached at info@parkingspots.com.
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