Cutting the Pain Out of Parking

By Megan Finnegan

Any Upper West Side resident who owns a car is familiar with the anguish of circling blocks, scouring the streets for available parking. A new startup called Parking Auction is betting that those drivers would shell out a few bucks to end the cycle of frustration.

“The idea is we’re creating a mobile web service that helps you find street parking,” said Brian Rosetti, part owner of the new venture. “Our approach is to introduce a market solution to this problem. We’re trying to connect people leaving a spot with people looking for a spot.”

The brainchild of local resident Nick Oliva, who came up with the idea but is taking the back seat on running the company, Parking Auction aims to be a virtual marketplace for parking on the Upper West Side. The company launches its mobile app on Aug. 1.

Rosetti is betting that motorists will pay to find out precisely where a free spot on the street will open up to avoid the hassle of looking and the expense of a garage.

Rapid Park, a company that owns dozens of garages around the city, averages almost $16 for just one hour of parking at their Upper West Side locations; Icon Parking averages the same. While the hourly rate goes down slightly at most garages the longer a car is parked, a three-hour stint could set you back $30, and overnight parking rates go as high as $45.By comparison, bidding six or seven dollars for street parking information could seem cheap.

Users can sign up at ParkingAuction.com and set up an account linked to PayPal, Amazon or a credit card. If you’re about to move your car and want to sell your spot, you log on and offer it up. Other users bid on it and you decide to whom you sell.

Parking Auction will take a yet-to-be-finalized percentage from each of these transactions; Rosetti said it will likely be less than 10 percent. They expect most transactions to be in the five-to-ten-dollar range, so turning a profit will depend on building a high volume of users.

One of their most frequently asked questions has been: Is this legal?

Rosetti says yes, completely. “Technically, you’re not actually selling your spot, you’re selling information,” he explained. “A logistics company telling you the fastest route to take—they’re not selling the road.”

And because all the program can sell is information, sometimes a bid will have to be cancelled if a regular parker comes along.

“We can’t avoid that instance when someone just happens to be in the right spot at the right time,” Rosetti said. But he thinks that the market incentive will encourage honesty and that the occasional lost bid or spot won’t deter users overall.

The hope, Rosetti said, is to not only make parking a faster and more convenient task but to cut down on pollution and wasted gas. He pointed to a Transportation Alternatives study from June 2008 that found that motorists drive a total of 366,000 miles a year looking for open street spaces just within a 15-block area on Columbus Avenue,  and that up to 45 percent of traffic in the neighborhood is created by people cruising for parking.

There are other applications designed to help users find parking. A company called Roadify that operates mainly in Park Slope, Brooklyn, shares parking and public transit information for free; it’s based largely on community information sharing. Rosetti said that he thinks his dollar-based program will go further, however.

“No one else is allowing users to buy and sell spots based on real currency,” he said. “We think there has to be a true incentive.”