On Friday, Boston City Hall came out and took a stance against a budding new app that has the potential to alleviate all of the aches and pains that come with searching tirelessly for a street parking spot. Called Haystack, the app looks to pick up where other similar parking aids have not fared so well.
First, allow me to give you a quick break down of Haystack. If you’re looking for some street parking in Boston which, let’s face it, is worse than seeing your social media feed flooded with the next place LeBron James is looking to take his talents, simply engage the Haystack app. From there, you’ll be able to connect with people who are leaving a parking space and for the small fee of $3, you can snag it from them.
For its part, City Hall considers Haystack a threat to the accessibility and cost-effectiveness that comes with parking as is. It could also inadvertently perpetuate and widen the gap between Boston’s more and less affluent – those with the app would have a parking advantage as those who don’t.
But it’s unclear at this point what City Hall can do besides voice an opinion on the matter.
There have been similar digital attempts to curtail the frustration associated with trying to park in metropolitan areas, like neighboring Cambridge and out west in San Francisco, but those trains unfortunately we unable to leave the stations.
MonkeyParking was the San Francisco startup that offered an auction-style service specifically for street parking. They announced just on Thursday that they’ve been forced to stop operations “In light of the cease and desist letter that we received from the City of San Francisco,” as noted on the company’s blog.
Tactics of the same municipal variety have extinguished the likes of ParkModo, Sweetch and Cambridge’s own SpotScout.
PartatmyHouse is an app out of London that takes this idea of renting parking spaces and personalizes it. Essentially, it does what Haystack and all of the other aforementioned companies did, only it’s applied to parking spaces owned by people and companies.
One of Haystack’s follies, at least in the eyes of Mayor Walsh’s administration, is that it allows a person to basically sell a parking space to another person when street parking spaces are public property. PartatmyHouse plans on launching a partnership with the City of Boston later this year.
As a spokesperson for the company described to me in an email, “By creating a marketplace where individual homeowners and businesses can list their underutilized parking spots, ParkatmyHouse allows Boston drivers to access thousands of parking options previously unavailable.”
Boston parking spaces on PartatmyHouse are already available for viewing and booking.
ParkatmyHouse, though, confirmed to BostInno that they have yet to engage in any talks with City of Boston officials, so it’s quite possible that despite seeing success across the pond, they could face equal opposition here in The Hub. In the meantime, though, they’ll continue enjoying success in London and plan on planting the seeds to launch in a number of other cities.
