The hassle of circling around looking for parking can be enough to have us calling an Uber or taking Metro instead of driving ourselves—but what if you knew in advance that a convenient spot would be pre-arranged for you upon your arrival at any given destination and all it took was a quick swipe on your phone before you left the house? Two new apps have launched in LA to try to make that high-tech dream a reality.
SpotHero offers a platform for garages and valets to put up unsold spots and allows you to compare local parking options before you set out. Never again will you be lured in by those sneaky signs that proclaim “Parking $5.00” in the big print with a teeny-tiny “For each 15 minutes” below. Instead the pricing is transparent and the online payment system makes ATM runs irrelevant. We definitely found some super-high prices (looking at you, $42.00 for day parking at the PacMutual Building) but, for the most part, spaces are comparable to typical garage prices with the added benefit of knowing your spot is reserved and paid in advance.
While SpotHero is a platform for existing garages to offer up unused spots, the MyLücke app is more like an Airbnb for parking. They allow private citizens who have driveways and parking spots to rent them out to strangers by the hour. Live close to the beach or a popular event venue and don’t mind moving your own car elsewhere? You could put your driveway on the platform and pull in a few bucks an hour. Prices tend to be low, only $1.20 per hour for the majority of the spaces around LA, but the spots available are few. Like many new apps, it may take time for a critical mass of users to join up to make it a truly useful utility across the city.
Anything making parking easier is certainly great, but we see an obvious potential downside to this new technology. From now on, we’ll no longer being able to use “I couldn’t find parking!” as an excuse for flaking on an event we really just didn’t want to attend.