Save my spot

By B.R.

THERE has been something of a kerfuffle in Boston recently about Haystack, a smartphone app that allows drivers sneakily to reserve a parking space in the city. The idea is that, on days when an unused parking meter is proving impossible to find, someone about to vacate a space advertises on his smartphone. Others who have signed up for the service can then pay $3 to have the departing driver squat by the meter for them until they arrive.

Not surprisingly the app has proved controversial. Martin Walsh, the mayor of Boston, complains that it artificially inflates parking prices and is unfair on other drivers. Mr Walsh says the city “will take appropriate measures to prohibit any such app”, although, according to the Boston Globe, he has stopped short of “a cease-and-desist letter that City of San Francisco sent to the makers of similar parking apps in June.”

Many people will have an uneasy feeling about such a scheme. Most of us who have lived through the Kafkaesque nightmare of driving around a packed city with every parking space taken will be annoyed at the thought that people can buck the system. But not everyone. The Harvard Business Review has an interview with Rafi Mohammed, a pricing consultant, in which he says it is fair to save someone a parking spot for a price. His argument is an economic one. Haystack, he says, is responding to a market failure: it can only exist because parking meters are too cheap to start with, resulting in excess demand.

There is a problem here. What if the “correct” pricing level were so high that it prohibited all but the rich from driving in the city? Gulliver paid £9 ($15) to park for a couple of hours next to a horribly overcrowded Dorset beach over the weekend. It was a scorching day, there was only one parking option and it was the first weekend of the school holidays. Unsurprisingly by the time I left attendants were turning away a long queue of cars. There was no public transport, and even if there had been it would have been impractical for Gulliver’s family and its array of apparently-essential beach tat. Who knows what the sweet price-spot on such a day would have been? Enough to put a day out on a public beach out of reach for many, I suspect.

In big, privately-owned underground carparks in the City of London, the market rate is around £25 an hour on weekdays. That is at least £20 more than a municipal meter. Many businesses that send cars and vans around the City rely on the latter. It is difficult to make the case that individual drivers should be profiting from this "market failure". Easier to argue the business case for keeping parking affordable.