Boston Area~Find a Parking Spot Instantly~App ....

[Little Star]

A new parking app that lets users seek out unused spaces around the Boston area, so they can rent them hourly, daily, or even monthly, officially launched on Thursday, and the founders of the innovative smartphone technology are already eyeing an expansion to other major cities across the country.

The SPOT app, which Boston first wrote about in March, when it was still in the planning stages, is described by the company’s CEO, Braden Golub, as the “airbnb of the parking industry,” due to its ability to connect residents in Brookline, Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville instantly with drivers scrambling to find a place to park their vehicles.

“In today’s exploding sharing-based economy, companies like Uber and airbnb are proving that there is a tremendous market in peer-to-peer transactions—we’re just aggregating a city’s private parking spot inventory and making it readily accessible,” said Golub, who recently secured advisors to help guide the company’s direction.

Golub, a Back Bay resident, first came up with the idea for SPOT after getting frustrated that he could never find a public parking space for his fiance when she visited.

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2014/12/11/spot-parking-app-launches-in-boston/

[JimDandy]

1. Not available for public parking spots though.

They were sued to stop that use of the app by, I think, municipalities for what cities said amounted to the sale of public space. That would have been the biggest and best use of such an app and is the most needed by drivers. You'd think the such an app would improve the cities coffers by efficiently keeping public spots full instead of losing money as drivers aimlessly search to locate the empty unproductive spots. But no...

In fact, most cities are so greedy for meter money that they turned around all their meters, so that the 'minutes remaining' viewer is no longer visible to drivers on the street, in order to thwart drivers from discovering and using the remaining minutes for 'free'.