By Stonly Baptiste
Parking can be a challenge in most metropolitan cities and while the gripes of Miami parking may seem unique and insurmountable, they are neither. One startup from New York wants to explore two questions, “How bad is it?” and, “Can we help?”
My last parking experience in NYC caused me to avoid having to park when I travel. After finding the “perfect” spot, I returned to find a $200 parking ticket. I’ve since sworn off driving in NYC or any city I visit when I can avoid it.
Parking challenges are not unique to any one city and Miami is no stranger to its own parking issues, as revealed in the Yelp reviews of The City of Miami Beach Parking Department.
“Dear Miami Beach Parking:
I'm officially dropping you to 1 star. Why? Because you thoroughly suck, that's why! This past Friday night I was heading to an event at the Bass Museum. I never made it. Why? Because after arriving at about 9:15 and driving around for more than 30 minutes trying to find parking anywhere within a 5 block radius, I finally gave up and left Miami Beach as I was extremely frustrated, and the event I was there to attend was nearly over at that point…”
The parking problems don’t stop once you cross the bridge from Miami Beach. These struggles have also been long-time challenge across Miami Dade College’s eight campuses. Historically there were too many students and not enough parking. Even extensively planned venue’s like the Marlins Stadium still struggle to build enough parking to meet the demand of its visitors.
At the same time, development projects like the District 36, a 19-story building in Midtown Miami, struggle with minimum parking requirements, which increase costs even for owners or renters who prefer to go car free. The 197-unit project is currently on hold as it works with Miami’s Urban Development Review Board (UDRB) to appease the board's concerns over its parking capacity and design challenges.
Parking is just one of many of the challenges that Miami faces as it continues to grow. At the Smart City Startups event in April, we’re bringing together some of the best startups in the world focused on Urban tech. We’ll be asking founders to pitch us on how they can help us solve our city’s growing pains.
As part of the pitch process, one of the companies, Valet Anywhere*, wants to learn more about what makes parking painful in Miami. Here is your chance to help the company bring a better parking experience to Miami by filling out this really brief survey. We want to hear your biggest complaints, gripes and bad parking experiences to learn how we can work to solve Miami’s parking problems.
Stonly Baptiste is a serial entrepreneur and cofounder of Urban.Us, an investment fund focused on investing in startups that make cities better. He also produces Smart City Startups, an annual event that hosts 100 startups and over 1,000 people and organizations transforming our cities in the next decade taking place April 23, 2015 in Miami.
* disclosure: Urban.Us is a producer of Smart City Startups and an investor in Valet Anywhere.