I was really hoping for a Planet Rock reference.

Absolutely. We work with the current infrastructure. This means the coin based meters, or kiosks, etc.

Our goal is to keep their costs down, by integrating with whatever they have.

I forgot to add, PPA lost only $100K in ticket revenue.

Actually, a counter example of this is when the City of Pittsburgh rolled out kiosks to accept credit cards. In the 2011 fiscal year, the Parking Authority earned $7.1 million from its metered parking spaces. In 2012, that amount climbed to $9.2 million, and in 2013, without December figures included, it increased to $12.2 million.

Thanks, Norman. We've recently rolled out to a few more areas around Pittsburgh. Looks like there are another five, in Southwester PA, switching to us over the next few months.

Hi, I’m Jim the CEO of Meter Feeder. We are excited to announce our product and that we are participating in Y Combinator W16. My co-founder and I are passionate about the pains of parking. We want to create a solution that is easy and elegant for everyone. Please let us know if you have any questions.

You collect a lot of data about people - their location (and therefore travel patterns), license plate etc. What's your privacy policy with regards to location data collected? Will you disclose if your database is requested by the authorities? How long is the data stored for? Will you be monetizing that data? Your FAQ doesn't address this.

Great question. We only store the data the the municipality needs to enforce tickets. All personal data is stored directly on the phone.

How do you handle different rates for different zones? Does the city hand you the zoning information + coordinates? In general, I'm curious how you work with the various municipalities.

We work with them to set up the initial zones (GIS coordinates are easy to find online). And there is an administrative dashboard that we provide the municipal director of parking where they can adjust the rates. It usually takes about 10 minutes for one of our team members to set up a new city.

10 minutes? That's pretty impressive! Next question: Are you in Chicago?

Unfortunately, no. However, we are excited to move into all of the places that can't afford Park Chicago.

I pay $6/sq ft for my office in Braddock, right outside of Pittsburgh, PA.

...that's $6/sq ft for a year.

So two months paying for my two bedroom apartment, in Mountain View, can get me more than a year of rent for my office.

Pittsburgh is rather cheap, and it has CMU. It might be because I live here that see it in tech news every so often.

There's a lot more places up for rent lately, because the fracking bubble popped.

Hey, I'm Jim. We made the page, to make everyone's life a little easier (SFMTA's PDF process was a little cumbersome). Hopefully, you get some money. If you don't, that's still good news, amirite?

Thanks for this. I scraped all of the PDF data, and threw it in a DB. Now it's searchable.

http://sfmtarefund.com

Is there a way to search by name?

Unfortunately, no. There was no rhyme or reason to the way that they formatted the names. I guess I could implement a fuzzy search, but I'm still at work.

At least they're trying...amirite?