Suck me in, service-y NYT lede:

In San Francisco, as in most cities, parking is an expensive daily grind that saps the soul. So a year and a half ago, when I discovered the valet-parking app Luxe, the heavens parted, choirs began singing and double rainbows colored the sky. This, I was convinced, could be the next big thing.

Luxe solved parking with an army of smartphone-guided attendants who parked and retrieved your car at the push of a button. That sounds like a bourgeois luxury, but the real magic of Luxe was its underlying economics. By ferrying cars from popular areas to underused parking lots, Luxe’s founders argued that they had discovered a loose thread in the city’s parking knot. It wasn’t simply more convenient — at $5 an hour, with a maximum of $15 for the day — Luxe was also significantly cheaper than just about any other way to park.