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Park Circa enables driveway owners to rent out their spaces to parking seekers

A new local startup called Park Circa has taken on the monumental task of trying to alleviate parking woes in San Francisco, one parking spot at a time.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

What if your friends living downtown said you could park in their driveway while they were at work or gone for the weekend, as long as you were out by an agreed time?

Park Circa connects people who have empty parking spaces during a set time to people that need them. We enable coordination between neighbors and friends, so that your community resources are optimized for everyone’s benefit. We help organize and publish parking schedules and we facilitate payment between parties, so that people can find parking when they need it and where they need it. Drivers find a place to park, and space owners make some money on their empty driveways. Everyone wins.

It’s like a crowd-sourced parking lot across the city.

To get started, you set up a free account on the Park Circa website; you can also download their iPhone app and register there (Android and Blackberry coming soon). Using GPS to determine your location, the app looks for available spaces that are listed on the service. If you find a desirable spot and pricing, you simply tap Check-In.

The Check-In process starts the timer and legal contract between you and the Parking Space Owner, and designates the terms of service, costs, and liability limitations. You can then leave your car in the space and go do your thang. When you return to your car, tap “Check-Out” on your phone and then Park Circa will calculate the total time and cost and transfer some credit from your account into the Parking Space Owner’s account. You can add credit to your account on their website or in the app.

If you are the lucky owner of a precious parking space in San Francisco, Park Circa gives you a chance to earn a little something while it’s sitting unused. So if you commute to work every day and your driveway is typically clear from say 9am until 5pm, or you plan to be out of town all weekend, Park Circa gives you an easy way to make your space available to others.

Parking space owners can assign specific schedules and variable rates for their space, for example charging more on a Friday or Saturday night vs. during a weekday. On a sample parking space listing, the service showed rates ranging from $.50 up to $2 per hour.

If your schedule changes, or you get sick and have to come home, you just update your schedule, or set your parking space as inactive, and it will no longer be on the market.

Of course there are some potential pitfalls to the service which the Park Circa team is already thinking about. One issue is “Overstay”, or when parkers are not diligent about sticking to their scheduled time, causing issues for parking space owners. Imagine coming home at 11pm and seeing a car blocking your driveway that was supposed to be gone by 10:30.

To combat this, Park Circa plans to institute strict monetary penalties for drivers who overstay scheduled availability times – which the parking space owner would receive as a direct compensation – in addition to the existing ongoing extra hourly rate of $5.

The other issue is unexpected schedule changes on the part of the parking space owner. Let’s say you get sick at work and need to come home, but your space is occupied until late in the day because someone checked into it. Park Circa says on their blog that they want to give drivers “some stability in the transaction as well”, so for the time being, they aren’t planning any way for parkers and parking space owners to communicate in the hopes this will be a rare situation.

I was on the Park Circa site last night and while they don’t yet have any spaces listed, I think this has the potential to be a really useful service. The service is still in early beta and only focused on a few neighborhoods so far – Inner Sunset (9th/Irving), Cole Valley, Haight, and North Beach.

However its growth is dependent on people getting the word out and adding themselves or their parking spaces to the service. Here’s hoping this is something the Richmond District will get into. We could use the parking help!

What do you think of this? Would you use it either as a parker or parking space owner? Leave a comment to let us know.

Sarah B.

23 Comments

  1. But isn’t it still illegal to park your car in a Richmond district driveway?
    The majority of the spots overlap on sidewalks.

  2. Pretty great idea, I do share the concern regarding over stayers. I think the penalty should be more severe: parking ticket and tow!

  3. It’s illegal to park in your front-yard driveway anywhere in the city.

  4. I thought it was only illegal to park in your driveway if your car was blocking a significant amount of sidewalk, no? If not, jeeez…why the hell do we pay property taxes if we can’t even park on it!
    What a damn scam!

  5. Hi everyone –

    It is not illegal to block your own driveway if you’re parallel parked in the street (e.g. not pulled in and blocking the sidewalk). More details in this SFAppeal.com article:
    http://sfappeal.com/news/2009/11/ask-the-appeal-can-i-block-my-own-driveway.php

    “According to Nell, a spokesperson for DPT Enforcement Services, you can block your own driveway if you comply with any and all applicable street sign restrictions (street cleaning, etc). If you receive a ticket for blocking a driveway and the driveway is your own, you should be able to fight it and win.”

  6. Great idea, and yes, it is certainly not parking on sidewalks; this would be for parking on the street in front on one’s driveway.

  7. well definitely I can assure you all that you can get a ticket parking in your own driveway if somebody in a wheelchair etc calls to complain. that’s parking in your own driveway like icon in this startup indicates, not sideways across the front so that you are not on the sidewalk at all.

    for parking sideways across the front, yes that can work. However, you don’t own those little spaces on either side of the driveway. A motorcycle can park there and you can’t do a thing about it, and there goes your sell-the-parking-spot plan for the day.

    I say it ain’t gonna work because of the DPT aspect, but who knows

  8. There are plenty of driveways in the Richmond that are large enough to park a car w/o blocking the sidewalk.

    Regardless, kudos to the people behind Park CIrca for thinking of ways to help with the parking issues of San Francisco (and any crowded city, for that matter). It’s not their fault if your driveway isn’t suitable to rent out to others.

  9. Great idea for those with large enough driveways. How soon until the MTA/City tries to impose some kind of parking tax/business fee on the transaction?

  10. i think the money making part of it is great, BUT not sure i would want to advertise i wasn’t at home. this could be the making of a burglary ring.

  11. I’ve always thought it was weird that any building that adds off-street parking should automatically get exclusive rights to the curbside parking in front as well. It’s like they add a private spot and remove a public spot. There should be some way the city can reclaim the spaces if they’re not used much, for instance if a garage is used for storage. This is especially true when there’s a whole line of garage doors. Maybe the owners could get a discount on property tax if they return the space to public use.

  12. I say this is DOA in San Francisco. SFMTA will tickets cars parked pulled into driveways if they encroach on a sidewalk. They also ticket cars parallel parked in front of driveways if the car does not belong to the ownerl. Would be nice if Park Circa could clarify that! See below from SFMTA website.

    “SF Transportation Code Div II SEC. 1004. – PARKING OF VEHICLES ACROSS PRIVATE DRIVEWAYS: The owner or lessee of property shall be permitted to Park the owner’s or lessee’s vehicle across the private driveway of said property, provided that such vehicle displays a valid license plate registered to the address of that property with the Department of Motor Vehicles, and provided that such driveway serves no more than two family dwelling units. This Section does not permit the Parking of vehicles across sidewalks or in red zones.”

    from http://www.sfmta.com/cms/penf/indxpkenf.htm#donotpark: “Do not park on sidewalks. A vehicle parked on any portion of a sidewalk can be cited for a sidewalk violation. A sidewalk citation can be given even if the pedestrian travel path is partly clear or if the vehicle is parked across a driveway. Sidewalks are the area between the curb and the building property line. Motorcycles are not exempt from sidewalk parking regulations. Bicycles can be parked on the sidewalk but their owners must ensure that the pedestrian path is safe and clear.”

  13. @Maureen: Park Circa posted a FAQ page about legal issues; you can read it here:
    http://www.parkcirca.com/Parking-Guidelines

    In my experience, I’ve never heard of SFMTA ticketing or towing a car that is parked parallel across a driveway, even if it does not belong to an owner. In my own experience, it is the driveway owner calling to report someone blocking their driveway that results in that happening.

    Sarah B.

  14. A driveway is not technically a legal parking space. According to the City’s Planning Code, all parking spaces must be screened from view from the street — i.e. in a building or behind a fence or other enclosure. Driveways were not approved as parking spaces. That’s what the stinking garage is for. The block I live on looks like a junky parking lot because people leave their cars in their driveways and that’s all you see looking down the street is a row of a bunch the butt ends of cars.
    MTA won’t ticket you unless you’re blocking the sidewalk. But it is a Planning Code violation, which the Planning Department could enforce if someone complains about it.

  15. js- you must not be a car owner. why would you want to encourage the mta to issue more tickets? you are a big FAIL and probably not even a SF native! … please note what utopia you come from where there are no parked cars on the streets? gosh are there also communities of mute humans there too?

  16. This is definitely awesome but Im gonna be using parking panda when it comes to the west coast. I use it when i have to park in DC and its way easier than Park Circa

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