Startup helps drivers find, rent parking spaces

Global Business

Too many cars on the road cause a slew of problems from traffic and parking issues to carbon emissions.

So some businesses are coming up with creative, out of the box ideas meant to solve these problems, especially in car- obsessed cities like Los Angeles.

CCTV America’s May Lee reports.

Too many cars, too much traffic, not enough parking. It is daily life in major cities worldwide and Los Angeles is one of the worst.

Some quick U.S. data for perspective zero percent of city traffic is caused by drivers looking for parking. More than 13 billion liters of gas is used in that hunt, which means 54 million tons of greenhouse gases are pumped into the air every year.

But here’s the catch studies show that in most U.S. cities, there are at least three parking spaces for every car.

Now, an app that aggregates parking spaces and rents them out in advance. Look at it as the Airbnb of parking.

Pavemint will officially launch next spring, but it’s up and running now in LA and the results are promising.

Just ask John Molina, a Pavemint host who rents out his front yard to drivers going to events at the LA Coliseum just down the street.

Since joining Pavemint, Molina’s parking business has increased 100 percent.

So what about going from shared parking to no parking whatsoever? Well, this newly renovated apartment building comes with zero parking spaces. So to entice people to move in, they get $100 in Uber or Lyft credits every month.

Property developers Max Sharkansky and Mitch Pascover say the program is working and believe a cultural shift is underway, which may lead to a change in the law that currently requires new developments to build very expensive and space consuming parking options.

Less garage space would mean more room for badly needed housing, and fewer cars would mean less carbon emissions. Sounds like a win all around.

Number of road traffic fatalities in the United States from 2012 to 2015

This statistic shows the number of road traffic fatalities in the United States from 2012 to 2015. Some 35,400 road traffic fatalities occurred in the United States in 2015. That year, motor vehicle deaths increased by eight percent, compared with 2014. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among those under the age of 55 in the United States.