The beauty of the garage door remote control cannot be fully appreciated until you check out this gem:
A cordial reminder people: when you rent out a parking spot in a garage, be sure to follow their parking guidelines/hours.
The new ParkingSpotter.com Forum is up and running. The forum is broken into two sections — a general discussion section and a cities section. Here’s an overview:
General Parking
Politics and parking seem like two industries that just don’t have a lot of overlap. Sure the city government may reduce the amount parking in town or the occasional Senator may get served with an expired meter violation, but for the most part parking doesn’t wind up playing a significant role in the political sphere.
Or at least that was true until 2008.
I’m sure by now you’ve heard the news about Senator McCain’s Arizona parking lot that has been estimated to be worth well upwards of a million dollars. Of course liberals have latched on to it as a sign of McCain’s disconnect with the American middle class, while conservatives have written it off as another cheap political trick. Personally, I don’t really care either way—it is just a parking lot after all.
But as an advocate for universal parking here at ParkingSpotter.com, this story speaks to me on a personal level that transcends political jargon or punditry. What I take from this story is that, regardless of its ownership, there is a parking lot in Phoenix Arizona that is worth over a million dollars. That’s right, a million dollars. And that’s just one parking lot from the millions that exist in cities throughout the country, many of which are probably worth that much and more. If you weren’t convinced that parking was a competitive industry before seeing this, then now you know. I’m pretty sure that this event won’t have any significant effect on the election, but it should help you to realize just how important saving on parking is.
A few short months ago my fellow ParkingSpotter contributor Sean Ash wrote a blog about Dr. Shoup, who is an Urban Planning professor at UCLA who has a radical new theory about parking. Basically he believes that if parking were more expensive then people would be inclined to drive less and therefore not only reduce the country’s oil dependency, but also reduce road congestion and air pollution that have become such a problem in most American Cities. It’s a win-win situation really…unless you’re the one paying the extra few dollars for parking that is.
Well today I’m following up on that story because I just stumbled across this article from Canadian Newspaper “The Globe and Mail,” which has recently published an article outlining the city of Toronto’s new plan to reduce the amount of free parking in the city in an effort to reduce the swarm of cars that follow suburban commuters into town every day. Yes that’s right folks, what we’re seeing is philosophy in action. I don’t know whether they had Dr. Shoup in mind when they came up with this policy, but it sure does have a similar ring to it. Whether it’s for the better or for the worse it has started, and the chances are that this type of parking philosophy will spread through cities across the country (or should I say continent).
In Toronto former parking lots are being swallowed up by high-rise apartment buildings with massive parking garages built underground. But the trick is that if you don’t live there, then the chances are you won’t be allowed to park there. If this is the trend that is on its way then we can expect to see parking costs creep higher and higher over the next few years. Hopefully this new philosophy will help relieve Toronto of its traffic congestion and air pollution problems, but if you are still going to need parking in the city—or any city for that matter—then your best bet is to secure a permanent spot before the rates start to hike.
Want to be a more environmentally conscious driver?
To go “green” is to subscribe to one of the major trends of the early part of the 21st century. Trend or not, isn’t it necessary? No matter how you join the movement to become “green” — whether it’s using solar panels for energy, voting for wind turbines in your area, or making sure to recycle — there are always additional ways to participate. At Parking Spotter, we want to get you involved in our effort to go “green,” namely by revolutionizing the way we park in cities around America. According to environmental groups using US Department of Energy information, carbon emissions have increased about 20% in the last 15 years. One reason for this is the increase in car usage in cities and the major dependence we have on oil. So how can Parking Spotter help curb this trend and, instead, join the trend of going “green”?
One way to be a more environmentally conscious driver is to make sure you drive as little as possible. This either means abandoning your car for walking or biking, or it means re-addressing the whole issue and finding ways to keep driving your car but being more efficient about how you drive it and, here’s the kicker, how you park it. Parking is an issue in major American cities: people circle blocks looking for spots. Carbon emissions from drivers looking for spots may seem small on an individual scale, but when you think about all the people doing it in cities like Boston, NY, San Francisco, Chicago — it adds up quickly. If you were to have a spot selected and secured BEFORE heading out into town, then you would save time in addition to money, all while reducing your carbon emissions. That’s where Parking Spotter’s parking spot database — on that introduces parking spot seekers with parking spot owners — comes in. It is our mission to connect these people and thus make searches for parking spots (in parking garages, parking lots, or for airport parking) as easy and hassle-free as possible. Look — the parking owner gets some extra cash for a spot he/she isn’t using anyway, and the seeker saves time and money. Win-win, no?
Just another way to go “green” in the 21st century.
For any of you long time ParkingSpotter.com users out there, you may remember the promotion that was offered a while back, which gave away a month of free parking in the Boston Metro area. Well it’s happening again, only this time it’s good for any city in the country. That’s right, one person will get free parking for a month courtesy of ParkingSpotter.com in any city in the country.
The way it works is simple, you head on over the free parking page and fill out all of the required fields. It’s one of the most straightforward contests that I’ve ever seen, so there is really no risk in signing up. You just choose the parking spot, the city, and the month within the next year that you need parking. On August 31st one winner will be chosen to get the free parking. Whether you need long term airport parking or just parking near home, it doesn’t get much better than this.
The ParkingSpotter.com parking giveaway was pretty neat the first time around, but now that they’ve expanded out of New England it’s really going to be something special. Submit your request and start browsing the site to find the parking space that you need, no matter where you are.
Since it has gotten to be something of a theme for me here on the ParkingSpotter blog, I’ve decided just to run with it. So today I will be writing about—you guessed it—parking tickets. This time, though, I wanted to talk about a service called www.parkingticket.com, which is a site that actually works to get your parking ticket dismissed. The site has been around for a while and seems to have had some success, but in doing a little bit of online research I uncovered that the site does have it’s flaws. As a matter of fact one retired Parking Violations Judge commented that the service had a reputation for submitting tickets late (which in most cities comes along with a pretty steep penalty!)
The thing is, fines are becoming more expensive in almost every city and it has become tougher to pay for all of your tickets, so a service like Parkingticket is, in the end, a pretty useful service to people like you and me who are just sick of dealing with them. Even though this site exists, though, the fact remains that tickets still get handed out and the majority come from curb-side parking violations. The only way to protect your car from tickets is to have permanent parking: I mean what would you rather do, pay someone to reverse all of your parking tickets or just rent a permanent and safe parking space that you can use worry-free?
I know what I would choose…
If you had to take a guess at which US state has the highest cars per capita (that’s cars per person), where would you begin? Many people would consider traffic congestion.
Well, Los Angeles has twice as many cars as people. Haven’t I heard that before?
You have, and you might have heard it here. But the Golden State doesn’t hold the highest cars per capita.
Chicago has the third worst traffic in America, according to The Sun-Times, but ranks surprisingly low on the list of states with the highest number of cars per person.
New York City is brutal when it comes to not only driving, but even finding parking: “Bruce Schaller, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Transportation found that 28 percent of drivers in SoHo were looking for curb parking. A similar study conducted by Transportation Alternatives in Park Slope concluded that 45 percent of drivers were cruising,” according to Streetsblog
Still, New York isn’t close to being the state with the most cars per person. In fact, it has the fourth lowest cars per capita in the US.
The state with the highest cars per capita is actually Wyoming. Cars and residents aren’t so evenly matched in “The Equality State”: Wyoming boasts 1.27 cars per person, meaning the state actually has more cars than people. Other states with more cars than people include: Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Alaska, according to the US Census. All of these states have low population densities, and this certainly factors in to their rankings.
When you think about it, it makes sense that large states with few people have small public transportation systems; this means residents are responsible for their own transportation, hence, more cars per person. Likewise, states known for their public transportation like the District of Columbia (not a state, I know), New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have relatively few cars per capita.
That title may sound may sound counterintuitive, but the premise is simple. I’ll explain:
You’re downtown and you need to find a parking spot where you can leave your car for just a few minutes in order to pick up some new clothes or grab a cup of coffee, or whatever it is that you do. After scouring the block as intently as your roadrage will allow you to for over half an hour and still finding nothing, you finally just bite the bullet and park in a spot that is nowhere close to where you need to be. And on the walk back to where you were in the first place you see at least 4 perfect spots! It happens to everyone, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.
Moral of the story: Don’t stress out over parking. If you don’t find what you need immediately then stop looking and just relax. The right parking spot will find you when you least expect it. Either that or plan ahead before you get stuck in town without anywhere to leave your car just to make sure that there will be a parking spot waiting for you.
That’s probably your best bet actually.
6 ways to avoid parking tickets
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