Parking apps in the US have seen a new wave of customers amid a surge in car ownership spurred by people avoiding mass transit and ride sharing due to COVID-19
Priya Anand / Bloomberg : Tweets: @bw Tweets: @bw : Drivers are back, and so is hunting for a parking spot. These apps are cashing in. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Parking apps have spent a decade searching for a workable business: after legal roadblocks hit public-space reservation apps like MonkeyParking in 2015, startups pivoted to valet parking on demand, while UK-based AppyParking raised £7.6M in 2019 on sensor-equipped bays that help drivers find empty spots.
COVID-19 flipped the demand curve. People avoiding mass transit and ride sharing are buying cars again, and the returned driver's next problem — hunting for a spot — is exactly what these apps sell. Notably, a 2018 study of nine US cities found services like UberPool were luring riders off transit and worsening congestion; the pandemic inverted that flow, sending riders back into private cars and making parking, not hailing, the friction point.
First-order effects
- US parking reservation apps are absorbing a wave of new customers as pandemic-era car owners return to city driving and pay to guarantee a spot instead of circling blocks.
- Sensor-based discovery plays like AppyParking become more valuable: more cars competing for fixed curb supply raises the willingness to pay for real-time bay availability.
Second-order effects
- Uber, whose pooled rides helped pull riders off transit per the nine-city study, now watches those riders drive themselves — and is responding by moving to acquire parking inventory outright, in talks for SpotHero at a $290M valuation.
- Cities face renewed curb congestion from induced car ownership, recreating at the curb the same traffic pressures the rideshare era created on the roadway.
Third-order effects
- If the mode-shift holds, parking discovery and reservation consolidate into platforms owned by mobility companies rather than standalone startups — the same consolidation pressure that pushed 2015's legally blocked reservation apps into adjacent valet models.
- Urban curb space drifts toward being priced and allocated through software intermediaries, giving whoever owns the reservation layer leverage over both drivers and cities.
The trend: The pandemic's shift from shared transit to private cars is converting urban parking from street-level friction into a software-reserved marketplace that mobility platforms want to own.