Co-Op Parking

What is your parking tolerance?

Parking is like a highway without stripes or a major intersection without traffic lights. It is unorganized, unpredictable and inefficient. As a result, its constituents get stuck in traffic, without any idea of how long it will take to reach their destination.

An area's parking difficulty is measured by the time, and/or money and/or hassle required of a driver to get it. Some areas are never difficult to park in, others are sometimes, others are moderate but bearable, still others are chronically difficult.

We all have a tolerance for some parking difficulty, but when it becomes too difficult, the cost (parking) outweighs the benefit (retail). Areas experiencing regular high parking difficulty damage the customers' retail experience and ultimately hurt the retail business.

Parking Saturation

The highest point of parking difficulty for a local area is total saturation of parking -- all spaces within walking distance are occupied or quickly turned over.

The Fee-based Parking Business

The parking business isn't designed to generate parking access, only sell parking spots for a fee. When saturation occurs and they run out of spots to sell, they can no longer add parking value.

Driver-to-Driver Cooperative Parking

Traditionally, when parking in a saturated area, a driver arriving to an area needing parking will "claim" a parking spot with a blinker when they notice a driver leaving it, if they're lucky enough to be in position to take it. The exiting driver honors the claim and makes room for the driver to get the spot as they leave.

What is Co-Op Parking?

This cooperation between drivers helps the unparked driver park, but it occurs at random times & random parking spots, based on the whims of the parked driver to leave their prime spot.

But if a format existed which paid a parked driver for making a good spot available in saturated area at a specific time, and a medium, such as a mobile format, for arrivals & departures to be matched in advance, the random cooperative trades become accessible to everyone when an area's parking is saturated.

This is co-op parking.

Click the button below to learn more about how CYCLE creates effective parking access through a co-op model.