Disclaimer: I am not a shill for SpotHero just a happy (for now) customer. You paid in advance to have a spot guaranteed (which they failed to provide) in a place that presumably doesn’t have adequate or cheap parking. My point is that parking in these sorts of places (Boston, Chicago loop, etc) is annoying and an app can’t completely remove that annoyance. Like Uber, Turo, and AirBnb, these methods for making otherwise underused things usable, have failure modes so I tend to use them when I am not in a time crunch. I rented a Chevy Bolt on Turo when we were in San Jose since we only needed the car for a subset of our stay. It took 30 minute to do the pick up and another 30 to do the drop off, because the car and the owner where not in the same spot (because of crazy parking rules and access). I had left enough buffer time that a missed communication wouldn’t impact the fun part of the trip. In this case, the prospect of having an electric car to try out was worth the added complication. I don’t expect this to be a time savings as much as provided access where there is none and giving the money to a fellow citizen instead of all of it to a corporation. So far Airbnb hasn’t left me without a place to stay…that will be interesting if that happens…
