CarHarbor

Lessons Learned

Several people have asked me the same question, "so what's up with CarHarbor?" It's not surprising that this question would come up as there has been a lot of attention paid to parking issues lately.  Addressing parking with expertise in online communities and mobile telecom can generate a real buzz. The simple answer is, CarHarbor was an interesting experiment, but it wasn't worth trying to turn it into a commercial operation. Since early last summer, I have been working full-time on a turnaround involving a household name consumer electronics company, and thankfully it's going well. But since people are curious, let me share a few lessons learned.

Test Market by Blogging. We started CarHarbor with this blog as a way to generate quick feedback from a net savvy community. Within days, TechCrunch and others latched onto us and gave us broad attention, resulting in terrific feedback and business development leads. Not bad for $5 per month. Never write a line of code before completing at least this kind of market research.

Community Dynamics. There is comfort in the relative anonymity offered by most online communities. Considering the shared pain over parking, especially in San Francisco, it was conceivable that reasonable people could cooperate to benefit the community and themselves. However, when it came to the prospect of letting a stranger bring their car near or onto one's property, people expressed some serious reservations. Well, I guess some Match.com dates can seem pretty scary too. Also, the income potential for most space listers was too small considering the level of household wealth in the most desirable neighborhoods.

It's About Execution, not Hype. Another start-up in the space seemed to put a lot of effort into getting media attention. Despite promises to be up and running a year ago, they have little but press to read about the promise. Press clippings even bore your mother after a while.

Need Scale. There are lots of people who will whine about a problem, but it's another thing to get them to participate in a community dedicated to solving that problem. That's not to say that specialized online communities can't succeed. For example, smallworld.com is a terrific place for Euro-jetsetters to interact, but it will never be a commercial wonder like MySpace has been. I'm just not up for doing something like this as a hobby, and that's what CarHarbor would have represented.

Listen to Experts. In addition to having first-rate advisors such as Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame, we met with some people who have devoted their professional lives to understanding the parking industry. Donald Shoup of UCLA and John Van Horn of Parking Today are extremely knowledgeable and interesting leaders in their field.

Permit Abuse

I was beginning to think I was just getting a little cranky as two "Towaway/No Stopping" permit signs on my residential block (and that's just on my side of the street) began to draw my ire.  As if it's not bad enough that they become almost permanent fixtures, any actual construction activity is intermittent at best.  One of the permits sports a March 13 expiration date, but still it looms over a precious parking space or two.  Who needs to build a garage when you can create a virtual one through permit abuse?

Bonnie Eslinger of the San Francisco Examiner addressed this very issue in an article today.  Neighbors in the West Portal area recently said they weren't taking this abuse anymore and got their district Supervisor involved.

Sensor Overload

Mike Langberg of The Mercury News wrote an interesting article about a few start-ups that are testing decidedly high tech approaches to solving parking nightmares between San Jose and Oakland. Streetline Networks, for example, is testing the use of special sensors embedded in street surfaces at 250 spaces controlled by the Port of San Francisco. Considering how precious our parking is, there's gold in the streets of San Francisco.  Up until now, meters have been mute and largely unchanged from their introduction in 1935, providing information only in terms of the number of coins deposited during any given time period.  The sensors, which are activated when covered (presumably by a parked car and not street rubbish), can provide information in real-time that could enable the Port to change pricing depending on usage patterns.

Streetline is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the innumerable sensor-based and other tech-oriented solutions being tested.  We're still in the pioneering stages, far from seeing any one solution becoming universally adopted. Considering the desperate problem that parking currently represents, city parking managers who must evaluate this sea of alternatives may quickly experience their own form of sensor overload.         

With 3 Cars Next Door

A CarHarbor advisor saw a post on Craigslist that says a lot about parking and car ownership in San Francisco.  Under the heading, "Open House / Hayes Valley Home," was the following selling point: "CityCarShare with 3 cars at the lot next door."

CityCarShare is a San Francisco car-sharing cooperative making vehicles available to people on a per-use basis.  Car-sharing is catching on for good reason.  Just do the math on the total cost of vehicular ownership, then factor in the increasing availability of high quality, low cost wheels, and you can understand why many urbanites are looking into this alternative.  Oh yeah; when you're done with your car, you don't have to worry about finding a parking space for it.  Nice.

No Reservations Needed

Jennifer Saranow wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal today entitled "Your Space is Waiting: Reserving a Parking Spot."  Several companies were mentioned, including MobileParking LLC and SpotScout, among others.  The value proposition of reservations models was challenged in the article, and that type of service has been offered by others that didn't survive the dotcom meltdown.

CarHarbor has no interest in the reservations model.  It's simply too likely that such a provider will burn unsuspecting customers who end up passing numerous closer and cheaper parking opportunities as they walk from their reserved space to their ultimate destination.  In addition, most of these start-ups plan to focus on loading inventory at parking garages, where there is almost always excess capacity anyway.  Who wants to pay even more than the typically high garage rates for what is usually a free option?   Most of the garages and lots I use, especially at airports, don't even have an attendant on hand to enforce a reservation system.

Getting Around the City

I walk past this leviathan from time-to-time. I don't want to be judgemental or anything; but, I mean, really!

Almost everyone has a perspective on parking. Someone driving a beast that's more at home on the battlefield than in a tight parking environment like San Francisco can become a lightning rod for critics. On the other hand, there's no law against supersized vehicles like Hummers, SUVs and pick-up trucks on steroids. I suppose this driver's penance comes from the endless laps around the block in search of a suitable space.

If I were a car dealer in this city, I'd sell Cooper-Minis.

Aparkalypse Now

Even within urban planning circles, parking is considered to be something of an academic backwater.  Not much attention has been paid to the subject, so it may seem surprising that there is a real buzz around the recently published book entitled The High Cost of Free Parking, by UCLA Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup.  I met the author in Los Angeles to learn more about his book. Few understand the important implications of the connection between the structure of our communities and municipal parking requirements as clearly as Shoup.

It's a tall order to condense this weighty tome (733 pages) to some blog notes, but the key takeaway is that we all pay a lot more than we should for goods and services because of the abundance of free parking.  Off-street parking requirements that municipalities impose on developers disguise the true cost of parking, which becomes embedded in the price of everything else.  I suppose that if Wal-Mart were to place parking meters in the asphalt wastelands that surround their centers, they might even start giving away the tee shirts we otherwise pay a few bucks for.

I don't want to make light of this, especially since many of the requirements Shoup condemns have been passed along from municipality to municipality, to generation after generation of city planners, often without much scrutiny.  Times change, and some old practices don't necessarily get better with age.  Furthermore, this work goes far beyond the traditional arguments to limit the use of cars offered by urban planners searching for a utopian order dominated by public transit, cycling and even walking (don't we all need to do more of that). 

Shoup argues that cities under-price parking and that jacking-up metered parking rates creates a greater buffer stock of open spaces.  Political opposition to such a move (both by merchants and drivers) could be assuaged if the revenues from such a move were redeployed in the affected areas in the form of better sidewalks, lighting, etc.

While not covered in the book (we're still in development), CarHarbor represents only one piece of the parking puzzle; empowering residential and commercial property owners with a safe and convenient means of listing their parking space from time to time.  Pricing for the resulting set of parking solutions will get set at the most local of levels, and will reflect the circumstances then prevailing.  No urban planner could hope to do better.

Dynamic, Real-Time Classifieds

Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure organized an interesting session at Google on the classifieds business for SDForum last night. Google Base, Oodle and Edgeio demos, and insightful panelist/audience comments, illustrated key themes in the business.

There's a good amount of leap-frogging going on here. Aggregators want to crawl all the other sites and rake out relevant content to post the most comprehensive listings, a strategy that seems to be working well for job search sites like SimplyHired and Indeed. When you consider the prospects for Google to attract large numbers of listings on their own, it was news when their Product Manager, Bindu Reddy, was pressed to admit their willingness to be crawled by other aggregators. Who becomes top dog when all that information is set free from their distinct repositories? I'll leave it to other bloggers to cover the associated revenue models (tagged as searchsig).

Craig Donato (Oodle) asserted that classified ads cover items or services that are perishable, geographic and social in nature. That certainly covers the type of inventory we intend to bring to the market. Whenever a residential or commercial property owner determines that a parking space can be available to drivers, it becomes an asset with a finite life and defined location. CarHarbor is an example of a new type of business model that we call dynamic or real-time classifieds. Online communities, armed with mobile devices, are able to coordinate new classes of resources and solve real problems. Parking (throw in carpooling as another example) is an excellent vertical to illustrate the potential for real-time classifieds.

In The Right Pew

Sascha Meinrath provides a good summary of a recent study produced by the Pew Internet & American Life Project entitled, "The Strength of Internet Ties," which basically reinforces the notion of the Internet as a vital social resource.  At a time when there seems to be a growing concern over the misuse of, and dangers associated with, certain Internet sites like teen-oriented social networks, it's useful to be reminded that the web offers much more good than evil.

We're thinking a lot about what it takes to get people to engage in a new form of online community participation.  Making parking space available to others through an online tool, be they friends or strangers, requires a rule set, site design and safeguards that make participants comfortable.  We seek to deliver on the promise of growing network connectivity. 

Valet Parking: The Mystery

Have you ever wondered how valet parking services are able to accomplish the incredible task of storing everyone's car, especially when the event is held in a crowded residential neighborhood?  I asked the head of a major California parking services company, who told me, "you don't want to know."  Eventually we got around to the general proposition that CarHarbor has in store, and the resulting inventory of untapped spaces we hope to create.  "We'll be one of your biggest customers," he said enthusiastically.

This exchange also made me think about some of the effects of scarce on-street parking on social life in residential neighborhoods in San Francisco.  Who wants to throw a large dinner party when none of your guests can find a spot?  Sure, you see the Pacific Heights crowd signing up small armies to secure attendees' rides, but how many people can spring for that kind of service?  CarHarbor may well be the community solution to such a problem.