Parking Goes to Highest Bidder

Every now and then, an idea comes along that is so breathtakingly stupid that shining a spotlight on it constitutes performing a public service. Today's lameness du jour: the mercenary public parking space.

The basic idea rests on the premise that trying to find street parking in congested urban neighborhoods is a drag. No argument there. For the city dweller, few things are more infuriating than returning home from a day in the ol' cubicle, only to spend 30 minutes circling the neighborhood hunting for a place to dump the car.

But the alternative, being offered by a Boston-area startup calling itself SpotScout, is just asking for trouble.

Basically, SpotScout proposes a system that would help mobile web surfers locate and bid on available parking spaces; in effect, letting them reserve those spaces in advance. That's fine, assuming that the space being bid for is in a private garage. If a garage owner is eager to gouge you and you're willing to be gouged for the sake of convenience, that's your business.

Part of SpotScout's auction system does involve bidding for private spaces. But part of it doesn't. And that's where the trouble starts.

SpotScout wants to help you stake a claim for public parking spaces, too, spaces that are traditionally taken on a first-come, first-serve basis. Apparently, SpotScout CEO Andrew Rollert has never seen parking rage before. Well, if this harebrained scheme takes off, he will.

The idea is inherently unfair. It is skewed to benefit the tech-savvy -- since all the arrangements are made online -- and it favors those who are solvent enough that they don't mind paying for the privilege of denying someone else a fair shot at a parking space.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Boston Transportation Commissioner Thomas Tinlin said as much. He worries, he said, about creating a "system of the haves and the have-nots."

Rollert's reply to that is the perfect metaphor for the self-involved, self-important, it's-all-about-me demographic he so obviously hopes to serve: "Our society is based on a free flow of information," he told the AP. "There's nothing that prevents me from walking down the street and saying to someone, 'I'm leaving this spot at this time; do you want to know about it?'"

No, nothing prevents it. Nothing, perhaps, except common decency, and some sense of what it means to function socially in densely populated places.

And the fact that you generally give up a parking space without expecting to be compensated financially for the gesture.