Parking is personal. Find a place for your car to camp out in a dumpy part of the city, while you hoof the rest of the way to your workplace, and you may find yourself feeling your morale weakening every morning and evening as you stroll to your vehicle and back. Find a little piece of real estate that feels perfect -- maybe it's a far distance, but it's cheap; or you're paying a princely sum, but, boy, it's convenient -- and you probably feel a sense of pride every time you pull into your spot.
Sure, it may be irrational that our sense of being can be improved with a flat piece of pavement, and it may even seem like a leap to suggest that parking is personal, but how else to explain how riled up people get when jockeying for the best spot at the mall? Or why companies offer their best workers perks like the best parking spot?
Parking
matters. We get irate when we receive unjustified parking tickets. We fear for our lives when we park in a dangerous area. We chuckle and feel superior when we see other people doing a poor job parking. (
Click here if you'd like to see some video making the rounds in the blogosphere of what is probably the worst parking maneuver ever.)
So if you're finding yourself constantly beleaguered by your parking choices, don't worry -- you aren't crazy -- you just may not be achieving your full parking potential. If you're trying to figure out how to find the best real estate for your car, here are some suggestions. Many of these ideas are rooted in common sense, and some may be painfully obvious, but they still may help.
Ask the people you work with where they park. And don't just ask once. If you asked coworkers six years ago where they park, when you first were hired and never since, you could be missing out on some great parking opportunity that came about in Year Four of your employment.
Ask your community's car experts: If you see a parking enforcement officer, hopefully not at a time when they're ticketing your car, ask them where they would park if they were in your shoes. Stop by an auto dealership; they may have heard of the best parking spaces. And, of course, don't forget your city government. Many cities have a Parking Authority department -- like
Miami, Florida's Parking Authority web site -- and they can give you the most updated parking information out there.
Get a parking broker. As we all know, everything is on the Internet, and while you can't park your car at a web site yet, you can find sites that will help you locate a parking space.
ParkingSearch.com is one such web site. They claim (and I have no reason to doubt them) that there are 105,200,000 parking spots in the United States, and that they can help you find the best one for you.
But brace yourself, if you're at wits' end and thinking you've found Parking Utopia. Be warned that parking brokerage sites often are strongest where the biggest cities are. For instance, I used ParkingSearch.com to see what I could find in downtown Cincinnati, which is close to me and where I used to work -- and came up with one possibility. I then went to see what they had for Manhattan, and tons of possibilities came up.
Aynsley Deluce is a co-founder of
ParkingSpots.com, which is still in the startup stages and working on making itself a national presence, and she freely admits that they aren't omnipresent throughout North America -- though they're working on it. If you're looking for parking in Kansas, you can certainly check them out, but "at this point," says Deluce, "we can be most helpful in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Boston, and we're about to add significant inventory in the San Francisco area. We're continually looking for cities to add."
Basically, ParkingSpots.com and similar brokers work this way. If you want a parking spot, you can look and find one for free. ParkingSpots.com makes its money through fees that commercial parking lots pay, to be listed on the site. And if you have a parking spot that you want to rent out, you can also list that on the site for free. Deluce says that their typical customer is "someone working in a smaller organization who is less cash rich or at the more junior level of a larger cooperation."
She adds that people with less disposable income to spend on parking tend to come to their site as well as employers who "are looking to offer their employees parking but aren't comfortable absorbing the often steep fees associated with traditional parking."
Some other web sites worth checking out:
ParkingCarma.com,
ParkingAnytime.com (currently only servicing Chicago) and
PrimoSpot.com (servicing New York City and Boston).
There's an app for that: Many of the aforementioned parking broker sites have parking apps for your mobile phones.
Help the environment and avoid parking altogether. That's right. Take the bus. You'll save a ton in gas and parking fees, too.
