Park It Forward

Park it forward is a design brief for a mobile tool to allow the sharing of curbside parking between drivers leaving and arriving at spaces. Free parking in New York and other cities has an impact on everyone as cars arrive to do business in our neighborhoods or return home at the end of the day. Free parking creates bad models of hoarding and stagnation.

The approach in this thesis is not to solve the parking problem, not even in the narrow range of this subset but to take a look at how the parking problem could be addressed by using principles of social capital and cooperative strategies to motivate people to consider becoming part of a group collective to manage the use of and sharing of this popular resource.

The work will be a finished design brief detailing the strategies and recommendations to develop a collaborative environment. Possible commercial sponsorship and city involvement could finance this initiative and start the real work of building this tool. Design challenges such as transfer of spots from one driver to another, communication and verification all will addressed to provide a template for moving forward.

The effects and impact that such an approach might take are far ranging and could be applied to problems to mediate any resource that is scarce, such as bike sharing to reduce congestion. Technology can’t solve problems until we consider the human factors that motivate us to connect as social groups and work together without limitations imposed by current broken models.

I live in Manhattan and have been parking a small car on the street for nearly a year now. When I first started I observed many other people circling the block looking for spots as well. All of us wasting fuel and time and competing for a very precious commodity, a free parking spot.
I began to see some of the same people as time went on, I spoke to a few as we waited for various events to transpire like alternate side suspensions and staying with our cars to fight off the aggressive parking enforcement officers.

Really, what we all were avoiding was the high cost of garage parking that can be as high as 25 dollars a day or approximately 400. a month. These spot we found had real value and when you pulled into one that was good for a day or several day you felt relieved and lucky.

We were all just exchanging spots in many cases, could there be a smoother way to exchange the positions we were taking and to avoid the dreaded parking ticket!

I began to think of a system to sell your parking spot on the street to someone coming in for work as you were going out. This has actually been tried by other entrepreneurs and has run afoul of laws that prohibit such sales. What then began to coalesce in my mind was a more generous sort of arrangement. A way to give notice to someone that you are leaving soon or even at a later prearranged time and then donating your spot for the arriving guest.

The second aspect that is that of social networks and how I could use this project to define the aspects of how people relate to find the hidden “tipping points”, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s well known term. What dynamics are at work with various competing interests? First you have the people who occupy the parking spots, they can stay as long as the cars remain in a legal parking stasis. The minute alternate side parking is in effect the spot comes into play. The people who are looking are all competing with each other, there are certain unwritten rules and etiquette that interlopers better know before they pull into a spot that is “spoken for”. Finally there are the parking enforcement officers that are responsible for keeping the “law” and collecting revenue for the city.

Online social networks have only scratched the surface of what is to emerge from this new environment for interaction.

My interest have been the development and fostering of "social capital" both for individuals and groups online. My inspiration and raw materials for my research have been the research of Robert Axelrod's work including his book "The evolution of cooperation". Robert D. Putnam's study of the decline of social capital holds many clues to the disappearance of social capital as expressed through physical clubs and service organizations traditional to older generations of Americans. At the same time we have trends of online social networks that exhibit a social anemia due to a scale that is predicated on wrong headed models of success.

Anyone who wants or needs to work together in resource sharing. In this specific case owners of cars in small dense residential neighborhoods, also regular commuters using parking for work in similar areas.

This is a design brief on the large problem of parking in large cities. Specifically I will take on free parking and recommendations on how to best design a mobile tool to allow for notification and transfer of these scarce resources.