Free Parking Comes at a Price

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.html

by rafaelc • 16 years ago

104 115 16 years ago

akgerber• 16 years ago

As blogger Matthew Yglesias is fond of pointing out, one of the most insane things about minimum parking requirements is that bars have them.

dotcoma• 16 years ago

wonderful article, thanks for sharing!

gamble• 16 years ago

There are two problems with charging people to park: one is enforcement, which isn't free, and the other is that customers strongly prefer to shop where free parking is available. Even if prices are lower at the shop that charges for parking, people will prefer the shop with free parking. If you restrict parking availability in an area, you'd have to be prepared for customers to go elsewhere unless there are no other options.

philwelch8• 16 years ago

Since parking spaces are mandated by the government already, it isn't even an economic choice yet. Once it becomes an economic choice, stores will have to work out the cost-effectiveness of each marginal square foot of parking lot instead of taking a given quantity of free parking space as a given.

maigret• 16 years ago

Living in Europe, I can see free & paying parkings. In bigger cities, most shops haven't free parking an it's not apparently keeping customers away. When you go in the land though, most parking is free.

Interesting enough, I've seen the opposite effect to the one you've described - in a city where all street parking was costly, a supermarket had to make his parking paying for non-customers and customers who took more that one hour.

w00pla• 16 years ago

> which isn't free, and the other is that customers strongly prefer to shop where free parking is available.

It is not just that. The mere act of shopping at most stores requires a car.

In Japan for example all fairly big items (such as chairs, etc...) gets delivered. You do not buy 24 cans of coke and a liter of mayonnaise and take it on the train with you. You buy one ridiculously small can of coke at a small (and expensive) convenience store near you.

So, I wouldn't be as quick as to require all people shopping to not come with a car.

Living in the suburbs has its advantages - cheap storage space, etc... So you can actually buy in bulk.

jrockway• 16 years ago

I buy in bulk (from Amazon) and live in the city center. Food does not take up that much space.

ugh4• 16 years ago

Well, this article doesn’t really argue for charging people to park, it only argues that providing parking space shouldn’t be a requirement for businesses.

yummyfajitas5• 16 years ago

If the gains due to free parking outweigh the costs, stores will provide free parking themselves. If they do not outweigh the costs, stores will not do so.

No one is advocating restricting parking. If a store wishes to provide underground parking, for instance, they should be permitted to do so.

bugsy2• 16 years ago

These sorts of articles are transparently engineered propaganda.

Someone sat around "How can we increase taxes and wealth for ourselves?" "What about a parking tax! $1 each time you park anywhere nationwide, that would be billions each year!" "No one would accept that." "Oh yes they will, I know a guy at the NYT we have worked with before. I will have him write an article. He can spin anything into gold." "Do it."

philwelch8• 16 years ago

Don't attack someone's reputation without basis. Tyler Cowen's an economist with if anything an excessively libertarian bias. If you have evidence he's been paid off by someone hoping a New York Times column arguing for more paid parking and less government-mandated free parking requirements for private business will generate public support for a parking tax scheme that wasn't even mentioned in the column to begin with, present it. (You'll need a lot of evidence, because it's a pretty ridiculous claim.)

bugsy2• 16 years ago

What a tool.

will_critchlow• 16 years ago

I didn't realise that zoning and regulations governed parking spaces attached to houses in the US.

I always assumed that would be something perfectly well decided by the market.

Does anyone know the failure that requires regulation there?

sokoloff• 16 years ago

Living in Cambridge, MA and having read the zoning by-laws here, I believe the intent is two-fold:

1. To control density of housing to preserve the character of the various neighborhoods. We have very high-density housing areas (small triple-deckers with minimal yards) as well as other neighborhoods with large single family detached housing and large (for a city) yards. The former has much lower off-street parking requirements than the latter, and I think for good reason. A city should ideally have housing stock suitable for a range of income and wealth levels, and putting the onus of providing off-street parking onto the inexpensive housing drives up the cost. Let that stock optimize for less convenient but more affordable and "force" the more expensive housing stock to provide some or all of its own parking demand on-site.

Absent this regulation, you might find less expensive housing projects without on-site parking being proposed next to expensive SFH sites and you'd start to lose the appeal [and value] of the old neighborhoods with their single-family homes. (Think of a restaurant with every other table as the smoking section.)

2. Indirectly, this regulation slows the growth rate of demand for on-street parking, which can be tremendous in some of our neighborhoods. Suppose that you were a long-time resident of an established neighborhood with moderately tight parking. Would you prefer that the new condo high-rise a block away be required to provide on-site/off-street parking, or would you happily back the project knowing that an extra 100 cars would be coming to your neighborhood once completed?

The regulations are largely a codification of the above, as the voters are the incumbent residential property owners and not the land developers.

(As a libertarian, I will also observe that there doesn't need to be a market failure to create regulation, but in this case even I have to admit that some good comes from the regulation, even though I now have to waste time reading the by-laws to determine what type of garage structure I'm permitted to build on my own property.)

cabalamat5• 16 years ago

> Suppose that you were a long-time resident of an established neighborhood with moderately tight parking. Would you prefer that the new condo high-rise a block away be required to provide on-site/off-street parking, or would you happily back the project knowing that an extra 100 cars would be coming to your neighborhood once completed?

I'd prefer a third option: that people who live there not be allowed to park a car within $X meters of their residence. This only works in high-density areas where there is good public transport, of course.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

There is a much steeper cost to parking - the effects on public space. The provision of surface-level parking reduces urban density, making cities less walkable, bringing with it an array of other social problems.

In the parts of Europe where people walk and cycle, there has necessarily been an aggressively anti-car policy. In London there is a daily charge of $12 just to drive into the city. This congestion charge has strong public support due to the obvious and substantial quality-of-life improvements it has brought. A well-located car park can easily charge $70 a day. In denser parts of London, residents are charged fees by the local government for the right to park in front of their own houses, many people lease out driveway space and a single car garage in the most prestigious areas can sell for as much as $300,000. Many towns and cities in Italy have completely banned non-essential motor vehicles from the city centre - often the old city walls form a natural division. Of course, gasoline in most of Europe has cost in excess of $6 a gallon for years.

I'm not arguing that this is a superior way of running things, it is simply a difference in priorities, but the costs of car use are far greater than I think most Americans would recognise. To many of you, our high gas prices, expensive parking and restrictive regulations must be quite shocking. Our small towns must seem almost unreal in their quaintness, in the age of their infrastructure, in their density. Most of us drive vehicles of comically small proportions. By the same token, many of us find cities like LA and Houston to be frightening, Ballardian places. We are shocked at the priority given to cars, at the lack of sidewalks and the sheer sprawl of such cities. By the standards of most European governments, the average American city is practically uninhabitable and would be torn down and started anew. We both pay a steep price for our cars; The price we pay is more obvious to you, but the price you pay is more obvious to us.

altano• 16 years ago

Parking and also other infrastructure, mainly highways and larger roads that cut up the city. The largest benefactors of the Big Dig in Boston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig) were not those driving on the newly improved road or those benefiting from the reduced traffic, but rather those who could now enjoy the green way, those living in or visiting the North End (hey I can walk there now!), those benefiting from the improved air quality of having a filtered highway, etc.

cabalamat5• 16 years ago

While I don't live in London any more, I'm sure that policies to reduce car use and increase public transport are the way to go for London; the alternative would be for everyone to drive (because public transport isn't good enough) and end up sitting in a traffic jam for 4 hours every day!

Fun fact: London has over 600 railway stations.

elblanco3• 16 years ago

> public transport isn't good enough

> London has over 600 railway stations.

But if London can't do public transport properly with over 600 stations, what would it take? The tube system is simply massive.

Just some system comparisons (sorry, I love subway systems, it's a rare obsession of mine):

London Underground - 270 Stations, 250 mile total length (mtl), ~3 million daily riders (mdr)

Métro de Paris - 300 stations, 133 mtl, 4.5 mdr

The Moscow Metro - 182 stations, 187.2 mtl, 6.55 mdr

Seoul Subway - 291 stations, 188.4 miles, 5.6 mdr

Tokyo Subway - 282 stations, 204 mtl, 8.7 mdr

New York Subway - 468 stations, 229 mtl, 5 mdr

D.C. Metro - 86 Stations, 106 mtl, .8 mdr

Chicago L - 144 Stations, 106 mtl, .6 mdr

Barcelona - 164 Stations, 77 mtl, 1 mdr

Of these cities, I've never been to London, or Tokyo. But I've been to the rest and ridden the systems in those cities. I found all the systems provided great coverage near the city center and excellent walkability of the city (except for maybe big chunks of Moscow and Chicago outside of the loop). Things thin out a bit in the burbs for any system, but that's to be expected. The real problem is that cities can grow out fast. Cost of living in the centers of any of these cities can be insane. So people naturally move out, and the systems simply aren't as good there.

The key seems to be rapid and aggressive expansion of the systems. But that just simply doesn't seem to be happening.

ugh4• 16 years ago

Many towns and cities in Italy have completely banned non-essential motor vehicles from the city centre - often the old city walls form a natural division.

And in Germany. Spain. France. And so on. I was actually surprised when I first heard that walkable and car-free city centers are practically unheard of in the US. How could you even go about getting to know a city or exploring a town without some character defining and walkable center?

Those car-free city centers are of course also in Europe a rather recent development. The market square in my town – nowadays used by cafes, restaurants and pedestrians – was a parking lot until the seventies.

Vivtek5• 16 years ago

Richmond, Indiana is a case in point for the American view. In the late 60's there was a huge gas explosion here, destroying three blocks of the downtown. (It was unfortunate that the gas leak was under the sporting goods store that sold ammo, and no I'm not making this up.) During the reconstruction, they decided to make the main drag a pedestrian-only zone; lots of beautiful old storefronts and so on, and so they bricked it in and called it the Promenade.

About ten years ago, they gave it up for a failed experiment. Due to the lack of parking, the stores there failed one by one (the big boxes on the edge of town didn't help). More recent studies showed that the only pedestrian zones that worked in smaller American cities are the ones adjacent to college campuses, where you've got lots of free-range money whose cars are elsewhere.

It was freaking weird getting back to town a couple of years ago and driving down the Promenade. It hasn't much helped the local stores, either; I think it was too late. But the European ideal of the nice leafy pedestrian zones with cafes and stuff didn't happen here, unfortunately.

Silhouette3• 16 years ago

It seems there is at least one good point in the article, if US regulations require that property developers also provide certain minimum levels of parking whether they want to or not. On the other hand, as someone who comes from England, where some of our local authorities very much have that "aggressively anti-car policy" you mentioned and it's more likely that local regulations will prohibit a property developer from providing the expected (by customers) level of parking at a new property, I would like to give some other perspectives.

For one thing, there is an entitlement culture here, because motorists are arguably the most over-taxed group in our population. The bottom line is that motorists pay around £50B/year in direct motoring-related taxation, while only around £10B/year is spent on maintaining and developing our road network. Slapping obviously punitive charges for parking on roads we've already paid for five times over is, understandably enough, politically unpopular.

You mentioned London several times, but London is something of a special case because of its population density and the viability of providing a comprehensive public transport system as an alternative. Most cities in the UK do not have the level of bus service that London does, or any alternatives at all like the London Underground.

In the end, people drive because it is useful. It saves time compared to other modes of transport, other than walking or cycling over relatively short distances. It allows you to take plenty of physical goods with you if you need to. And of course it is much more pleasant to ride in your own vehicle than to sit in an uncomfortable seat, next to someone stinking of whatever they just ate or drank, in a cabin that is so humid the windows have all steamed up, in the middle of winter when several other passengers have kindly brought colds and other bugs with them to share in the fertile breeding environment that public transportation typically provides.

If you think you can reduce the amount of driving we do without taking this usefulness into account, you're crazy. This was summed up neatly in a post on another forum I saw recently, which observed that in one small town centre, a key retail site went through this transition once the local council decided to make money off parking:

Waitrose -> Safeway -> Kwiksave -> empty -> Poundland

For those not in the UK, that starts with one of the nicer general stores with a reputation for selling good quality food and so on, then moves through progressively cheaper stores selling products that aren't as good, finally reaching a store where they basically sell everything at £1 to people without the money to shop anywhere else. Apparently two other big name supermarkets moved out of town to where they could still offer free parking, so those who drive could still go there but anyone living locally in the town centre who didn't have a car lost out.

Public transport can be a sensible alternative where a critical mass of passengers exists, triggering economies of scale in financial cost, environmental impact and land use. However, apart from in really big cities like London, that is rarely the case outside a fairly narrow window of time around the average working day. Running a bus service in the evening is madness in environmental and financial terms, but if you advocate a modal shift from car use to bus use it becomes a political necessity. Did I mention that a lot of the pro-bus propaganda is outright lies in environmental terms, since it typically assumes far higher than average bus passenger numbers vs. single occupany car journeys, and it tends to focus on specific carbon-based pollutants (where buses are better per passenger-mile than cars) while ignoring much nastier things like particulates and sulphur-based pollutants (where buses are typically much worse, as anyone living in the centre of bus-friendly cities here in the UK is now learning to their cost). Public transport advocacy also typically talks about effects "per passenger-mile", while conveniently ignoring the indirect nature of public transport that means a passenger travelling between the same origin and destination might go a lot further along the way.

As for trains, they have their advantages, but economics isn't one of them: I'm not sure there is any heavy rail network in the world that would actually be profitable without massive government subsidies that directly or indirectly support it. It's already far cheaper to drive or to fly(!) than to get the train to most places here in the UK, regular rail passengers are always complaining about high fares, yet they aren't even close to paying the true cost of their journey on the ticket price. If you want to make a serious argument about market forces driving transport provisions, start by abolishing trains entirely (and then discover that these things do not operate in a vacuum and there are consequences to that decision beyond the direct operating budget of the railway network).

Do we drive too much today? Yes, we do. Many people lose a huge amount of time they could be spending being productive or enjoying themselves, just sitting in a car instead. Lots of land is devoted to road space, even in densely populated areas like big cities, that could have been put to other uses. There is a significant amount of environmental damage any way you look at it.

But why do we drive too much? That is the real question. It's all very well having critics claiming that building new roads only results in higher traffic demand, but cars don't appear from nowhere and people mostly don't drive for no reason. The extra traffic appears when new roads are built because people want to make a journey, and the latent demand was not adequately served by the existing transport options before the new road.

The solution to all of these problems is "simply" to reduce the number of journeys we need to make. In a modern world, we have communication options that were not available even a few years ago. If you work in a customer-facing role or doing any sort of manual labour, then of course you need to be physically present where the work is. However, how many people are getting into their cars and driving for an hour or more every day just to be in the same office as their colleagues, to whom they will only speak on a few occasions during the day while otherwise keeping to themselves and getting on with their work anyway? There is obviously a need for both communication and socialising even in these jobs, but there are many other arrangements that could provide time to do these things -- and probably in much more efficient or satisfying ways -- than the daily drive to work at a central office with fixed or near-fixed hours.

Maybe, instead of trying to artificially reduce demand for car journeys, we should be looking at the lifestyles we lead today and why people need to make all those journeys in the first place?

sigstoat2• 16 years ago

This is the right train of thought. Look at what (nonrecreational) activities produce the most vehiclemiles, or parking-spacehours, and help people to not have to engage in those activities.

rdtsc2• 16 years ago

> The solution to all of these problems is "simply" to reduce the number of journeys we need to make.

I think you are in a agreement with the author of the book on that. The common goal is "less journeys". The difference seems to be in the way to achieve that. He wants to tax those who commute, you, it seems, might want to give incentives to companies to move to suburbs or to let employees telecommute, or to have some kind of tax incentive for employees to move to the city.

Whatever method is used it will take decades to make a difference and it will be very unpopular. Making parking $70/day like it is in London in some garages, would destroy Los Angeles. It is a city that is so car centric and pedestrian unfriendly that it would completely cripple it.

I personally hate Los Angeles for that reason. Its public transportation sucks, it is filled with a tangled mess of highways, no sidewalks, you end up sitting in traffic for hours, even though the highways are already 8 lanes wide. I would never live there.

decadentcactus• 16 years ago

> It's already far cheaper to drive or to fly(!)

From what I'm aware (and I should do some more searching about this later) there's also plenty of subsidies for flying. I don't know how somebody could think that $60 for a short-range ticket would be anywhere cost effective for an airline.

Good comment btw.

elai2• 16 years ago

You can start by getting rid of or significantly reducing zoning! A lot of municipal zoning designs end up with people having to live in one area and then commute to another. If offices could also be mixed with apartments without having to get permission from a politician or 'pay extra' for the privilege, you would find a lot more city designs that are friendly to living close to where you work and shop.

w1ntermute2• 16 years ago

You can't take European philosophies and apply it to America. Things are completely different over here. You spend so much time worrying about congestion, but we have so much open space here that it's simply not an issue. The population density in Europe is 70 ppl/sq km. In America, it's 32.

masterj2• 16 years ago

>You spend so much time worrying about congestion, but we have so much open space here that it's simply not an issue.

Ever been to LA, Houston, Atlanta?

hugh32• 16 years ago

The provision of surface-level parking reduces urban density, making cities less walkable, bringing with it an array of other social problems.

There are all sorts of social problems associated with high-density housing as well.

1. Crime is rampant in high-density areas all over the world.

2. Children have nowhere to play. You can't just let your children wander freely.

3. Noise. One jerk with a subwoofer can spoil the night of a hundred people instead of just three.

4. And so forth. I'm sure if you looked at statistics you'd find all sorts of horrible social problems (mental illness etc) correlated with population density, even once you correct for income and so forth. Cramming too many people into too little space just has bad consequences.

Personally I couldn't stand to live in Houston's outer suburbs, nor in central London, but there's plenty of middle-way that lets people have their own cars plus be able to walk places plus catch public transport when they need it. Give each family of four a quarter-acre block and you've still got ten thousand people per square mile.

But hey, different strokes et cetera. People who think Los Angeles should look more like Paris should go live in Paris instead of trying to turn Los Angeles into Paris. And vice versa.

dillydally• 16 years ago

I'm really excited about SFPark. It's mentioned briefly in the article, but the idea is this: parking meters that can sense when a car is present and dynamically set its rate.

The meters will be set so that parking is (almost) always available anywhere in the city -- at a price. This will include parking garages and other pay-to-park places.

If they do it right it will remove all the guesswork out of determining where to park. Should I go for that garage, or drive around the block five more time?

I could have an iPhone app that can show me the cheapest parking spot within 2 blocks.

This solves the problem someone else here brought up, which is that people prefer to shop where parking is free. In this model parking is only expensive where the demand is high to begin with!

adriand• 16 years ago

The book "The High Cost of Free Parking" has been out for a few years now. Here's a good review from around when it was published: http://www.raisethehammer.org/article/072

teilo• 16 years ago

This entire article is predicated on the premises that 1) Cars are bad, and 2) social engineering (as distinct from punishing crime) is a legitimate function of government.

I deny both and have two other premises: 1) Cars = freedom. 2) The more governments intervene with regulation and taxation, the more they impose upon our freedoms.

Let the market determine how much parking there is. Holding up New York as a virtuous example because parking there is expensive ignores the fact that New York has the highest cost of living of any city in the US, and is also the most heavily taxed and regulated.

philwelch8• 16 years ago

As the article points out, local governments already engage in social engineering, in the form of requiring public businesses to provide parking spaces. In fact, the article didn't advocate any government action at all, other than perhaps deregulating how private businesses are allowed to use their real estate. I don't think you understand Tyler Cowen's background, much less the article itself, if you think he takes social engineering by the government as a premise.

Also, I dare say your premises themselves are contradictory. Cars are only useful, and only provide freedom, where there are copious paved streets and freeways; there are only copious paved streets and freeways where governments in the 20th century redesigned the landscape around the automobile, all but requiring its use for most Americans whether they want it or not. The amount of regulation and taxation required to keep the infrastructure functional for motorists and all but useless for everyone else gets in the way of our freedom and safety, to say nothing of the other negative externalities.

Your right to operate a vehicle ends at your property line. Past that, it's a privilege--and in my opinion, one which has been abused.

kiba• 16 years ago

When you have 300 million people, the privilege tends to get abused.

ergo985• 16 years ago

>local governments already engage in social engineering, in the form of requiring public businesses to provide parking spaces.

That's reflective rather than manipulative. Most municipalities have long knowledge of transportation patterns, and they know that when an establishment has insufficient parking, it causes grief for neighbours.

People end up circling the area indefinitely, or they park illegally on neighbouring grounds, etc.

The real social engineering are articles like this that are, as someone else mentioned, essentially propaganda pieces.

There are places where vehicles aren't appropriate or as usable -- dense urban centres -- and in those places most people don't drive. Most New Yorkers don't own a car. People living in downtown TO condos don't own a car. That is great, but that density and very expensive mass transit system doesn't carry forth to the suburbs, exurbs, or rural areas, so save the rhetoric.

DanielBMarkham4• 16 years ago

I hate to rain on anybody's parade, but this is awful tripe. (I hope I couched that diplomatically enough)

Most of America is rural. Having an open space for your mode of travel has been de rigeur since the days people rode horses around. Most poor people, really poor people, can barely afford a car and the mandatory insurance now. Jacking up gas and parking taxes has terrible consequences to theses folks. No matter how precious the goal you are trying to accomplish.

Look, I'd love a world without gasoline-powered cars, but when it's an hour to town, I'm going to be going in something. And that something is going to need to park somewhere.

I increasingly see a vast difference between urbanites and suburbanites/rural America. It's a shame they seem at cross-purposes so much. The United States is simply nowhere near as dense as Europe is, where things like this might make more sense.

EDIT: Just to be clear that I am directly addressing the author's point: The fact that the cost of land (and to society) for free parking has risen over the last few decades is not germane. Everything has risen in cost. Providing parking for others has always been a cost of having a residence or doing business in the city. I see nothing new in this article except a new look at those costs. The reason for them hasn't changed at all. Nor their justification.

Retric4• 16 years ago

It would be far more efficient to implement the tax and give the money directly back to everyone. At which point you would see people using that money for other things, which would let you reclaim parking spaces for other uses, and or build more based on supply and demand.

PS: I pay to park most places around me, and I take slightly fewer trips because of this. The net effect of which is I spend less money on my car and buy more stuff when I do go out.

DanielBMarkham4• 16 years ago

I know I'm being downvoted for political reasons, but this seems a clear-cut case where you can reason your way around here.

Please explain. Let's use my circumstances for an example.

I live an hour from any city. I do well enough financially, so parking taxes will not effect me one way or the other (neither would a gasoline tax). Within an mile of where I live, there are probably another 100 families. Most of them do not do so well. I live in a very rural and poor area. One family I know is a single mom and teenage daughter. While their housing is provided by family, each of them makes minimum wage and have to drive to the city to work. They barely keep one car running and the lights on at home.

Now I believe you are saying we should tax them for parking in the city. Then give everybody the money back from the tax. Perhaps at the end of the year when they file their taxes.

This would be devastating to these folks. Sure, you'd cut down on car use, but at what cost? For every middle-income person who took a few less trips, how many low-income people did you just kick out of work?

Did I understand that correctly? And please, no "but those folks are living the wrong way!" comments. These people are living as best as they can. One social engineering event per conversation, please. The point is to defend, explain, or analyze the article in question. The essay seemed to me to be the kind of pontificating that looks good from the ivory tower living in the city, but has very limited real application to the rest of the country, aside from hurting people for a noble cause.

yummyfajitas5• 16 years ago

Most Americans do not live in rural areas.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census/cps2k.htm

Land is cheap in rural areas, so parking would not be very pricey there.

Lastly, the edit to your post is nothing more than the implied claim "is == ought". You never actually give a reason why people living in rural areas deserve to be subsidized at the expense of city people. We may have historically forced city folk to subsidize rural folk, but that is not a reason to continue doing so.

DanielBMarkham4• 16 years ago

Land is cheap in rural areas, so parking would not be very pricey there.

Pricey is a relative term.

Subsidized? I would think that cheap or free parking would be the cost of doing business in a city. That was my argument, not that it has been going on for a long time. Yes, it has been going on for a long time, and for a good reason. Folks need a place to park, even in their solar-powered hovercraft.

You are asking if cities can be re-engineered by fiat -- let's pick parking and make it more expensive, thereby driving cars out of the urban area. The internet is full of folks saying a lot more than they know -- hell I am one of them. But even by this standard that position is pretty far out there.

But why argue? I think cities should try all of these things. I will refrain from living or working there. I suspect many others will do the same. Perhaps I am wrong. Don't know. It appears on the surface that this "tax commuters" "tax parking" and "tax tourist" idea is counter-productive to the entire idea of a city. There's only so much of it you can get away with.

But that's just me.

chengas123• 16 years ago

While most American do not live in rural areas, most Americans also do not live in urban areas. You need a car in the suburbs and that breakdown does not mention suburbs at all and simply lumps them together with urban areas.

cabalamat5• 16 years ago

> I increasingly see a vast difference between urbanites and suburbanites/rural America.

Transport policies that make sense where there are high population densities might not make sense where there are low population densities (in fact, probably won't). So it makes sense to have different policies in high density, medium density and low density areas.

rdtsc2• 16 years ago

You forgot one important detail. For the author of the book poor people don't exist and everyone important lives in the cities.

Alright, I was being sarcastic. But on a more serious note. The author probably doesn't address at all the suburbs only. America is built of suburbs. But I think the argument he makes applies to large cities only or large cities. His exact point is to tax everyone driving into the city -- poor and rich. The poor ones will be affected first, and will drop out completely and move to a different city or suburb, or pile together in over-crowded city apartments. He basically wants to disconnect the suburbs from the city. You either stay in the burbs, live and work there. Or go to the city and live and work there. Getting the benefit of both is too costly.

lunchbox4• 16 years ago

Every economic advance will hurt someone. The invention of the car left a lot of buggy manufacturers unable to feed their families. Your startup is probably making someone financially miserable.

The job of a responsible economist is to look at how the implications of a change are distributed across everyone in the population, over the long run. This change would hurt those rural folks visibly, but as outlined in the article, many more people would benefit, often in less directly visible ways.

Currently, those people's parking fees are coming out of someone else's wallet. Make the drivers pay the cost and externalities of their own decisions. If the market determines that these people are producing economic value, then they will be ok. (Maybe their employer will recognize that the employee needs a parking spot and subsidize it.) If not, then sooner or later people need to figure out a way of living that is economically sustainable.

bd_at_rivenhill2• 16 years ago

After living in New York for a while, I came to the conclusion that one good way to improve quality of life would be to simply ban on-street parking everywhere in Manhattan and in the denser areas of the boroughs. The only people allowed to stand or park should be certain official vehicles (police, ambulance, etc) and vehicles with a valid delivery permit that would need to be purchased. Anybody else would be ticketed and towed. This would free up extra space for traffic on most roads, reduce the number of vehicles in circulation in the city, and eliminate economically stupid outcomes like UPS trucks constantly getting tickets from fleet-footed traffic officers while they are making deliveries.

araneae2• 16 years ago

What about the handicapped?

jules• 16 years ago

Wheelchair?

bd_at_rivenhill2• 16 years ago

I thought about this for a while, and I can't remember ever seeing a parking place on the street that was reserved for handicapped. At most garages, you hand over your keys right after you drive in so I don't think garage parking would be too bad for handicapped people.

Zak2• 16 years ago

I was expecting pedestrian-utopian drivel here, but the author actually makes a good point.

Why should there be zoning laws mandating parking at houses[0], apartment buildings or stores? In every case, there are market incentives for the developers and owners of these properties to have parking. Stores with too little parking won't get as much business. Houses and apartments with too little parking are harder to sell and/or rent.

It does seem that there's a subsidy being mandated by local governments and paid by property owners, and I can't think of much justification for that.

[0]In the case of houses, overuse of street parking might be a good argument.

dennisgorelik• 16 years ago

If cities force neither "free parking" nor "mandatory paid parking" on businesses then it would probably work just fine. To answer your question, here are possible reasons why city might want to demand free parking from businesses: 1) If there are two neighboring businesses, one with parking and one without, then customers of business without free parking may start parking on free parking of neighboring business. Then business that provides free parking would suffer. 2) With no parking available drivers start parking on the streets, which causes traffic jams.

Zak2• 16 years ago

These both sound like business opportunities for a towing company.

nzmsv2• 16 years ago

Trying to make the world better by banning things often has the opposite of the intended effect. Look at how well prohibition worked out, time after time, in various places around the world.

To see a possible outcome of restricting the availability of parking, look at modern-day Russia. The streets and parking there were designed for a very small number of cars, since most people were expected to use transit. Then public transit failed, and cars became affordable for a lot of people. But there is still no parking, so people must not use cars, right? No, now there are major traffic jams and problems with illegal parking in every city.

There has to be a viable alternative to cars (good public transit, walkable cities).

lunchbox4• 16 years ago

The author is not proposing a ban. Just the opposite, he is proposing that we deregulate parking by having people pay for the parking spots they use, rather than forcing someone else to subsidize them.

nzmsv2• 16 years ago

Not a ban, but an attempt to reduce driving by changing regulations. It's not necessarily bad, it's just that there will be unforeseen consequences, and it's nowhere near as straightforward as "raise the price of parking -> driving decreases".

As far as I know, Russia has no requirements on parking for new construction either. So developers building shopping centres in expensive areas opt to minimize parking space. The result is not clean pedestrian-friendly cities, it's traffic jams and stores going out of business, because as someone else commented here, people will prefer the store with parking, even if it is an extra half an hour away.

I think this problem is better solved by offering functional transit, but it's somewhat chicken and egg. How do you justify spending on transit when everyone drives? How do you not drive when taking the bus multiplies the trip time by a factor of 5?

EricButler• 16 years ago

Two great resources about urban livability for HNers in Seattle:

Seattle Transit Blog (http://seattletransitblog.com/)

HugeAssCity (http://www.publicola.net/category/column/hugeasscity/)

Empact2• 16 years ago

A number of the comments confuse removing artificial subsidies of driving with applying artificial fees to driving. These are existing artificial subsidies, which force non-drivers and marginal drivers to pay heavy costs on behalf of drivers:

  * Drivers don't directly pay for the full cost of roads, e.g. through a gas tax
  * Minimum parking mandates force non-drivers to include parking for their home
  * On-street parking is often far cheaper than the market would demand

You could ask, what's the problem with these subsidies? They change behavior in a systematic way which leads to bad results (sprawl & congestion). For example, for someone who has access to public transit, the mandatory construction of a personal garage via minimum parking requirements becomes a sunk cost, which I don't have to consider between the two options, whereas a market decision would include that substantial cost in the calculation.

You could address the bulk of Cowen & Shoup's points by simply:

  * Raising the gas tax to cover the cost of road construction and maintenance
  * Removing the mandatory minimums on parking spaces for new developments
  * Charging closer to market value for existing meter parking

These measures aren't social engineering - they're in support of the idea that the real costs of driving ought to be borne by the driver themselves, and that non-drivers should be unburdened by the imposition of driving costs.

hugh32• 16 years ago

Drivers don't directly pay for the full cost of roads, e.g. through a gas tax

We already pay gas taxes, and car registration fees, and license fees. I'd be interested to hear how the road construction budget compares to the amount of money brought in by these.

they're in support of the idea that the real costs of driving ought to be borne by the driver themselves, and that non-drivers should be unburdened by the imposition of driving costs

I'm okay with that, as long as we also support the idea that the cost of public schools should be supported entirely by those who send their children to public schools, and the cost of Medicaid is supported entirely by those who benefit from Medicaid.

But it seems that social engineers only ever want to implement user-pays solutions for things that rich people use. They think that the costs of services used by rich people should be borne by rich people, and the costs of services used by poor people should also be borne by rich people.

Empact2• 16 years ago

> I'd be interested to hear how the road construction budget compares to the amount of money brought in by these.

The best I can do to answer that is to point you to a study by the Texas DOT (the original page is down, but it's cited widely, e.g.: http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/Home/17093):

> Applying this methodology, revealed that no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.

> This is just one example, but there is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their true cost, but most roads we have analyzed pay for considerably less.

---

> I'm okay with that, as long as we also support the idea that the cost of public schools should be supported entirely by those who send their children to public schools, and the cost of Medicaid is supported entirely by those who benefit from Medicaid.

Is the dividing line between drivers and non-drivers really the rich vs. the poor? I bought my first car at 17 for $4k. Plenty of folks of all income levels drive.

The problem doesn't have to do with who uses the roads but the fact that the subsidies distort their decision-making such that they use the roads even which it doesn't make economic sense to use them.

In a regular, market-based transportation system, you'd use whichever mode fit the circumstances. For example, rather than driving your single-occupant vehicle 3 hours down a crowded (but free!) highway to a neighboring city, you might instead take an inter-city bus or train and then rent a car or use transit at your destination. But only if the actual cost of your share of the roads' cost (collected via electronic tolls and gas taxes) led you to do so.

By using markets to inform decisions, like in the case above, we can make more efficient use of our available space & infrastructure and reduce time and fuel wasted in traffic, for example.

I want drivers to bear the cost of their infrastructure, just as I want riders of buses, trains and airplanes to do the same. Because when we subsidize any of these, we distort decisions and lead people to over-invest, over-allocate in that direction.

flatulent13• 16 years ago

Silence is valuable. People take for granted not paying for that audio-frequency near-field modulated air pressure bandwidth.

Why shouldn't that spectrum be sold? Shouldn't we be paid to have people talk to us or make noise? It's time to buy audio pollution credits. And if you're poor, don't even think about farting.

tptacek2• 16 years ago

Worth reading Tyler Cowan's take on this:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/08...

* It's going to be hard to properly price all that parking, and if you do it wrong, you wind up shifting the problem around (from K-Mart's parking lot to neighborhood streets).

* The same externality might be addressed better with a lump-sum tax (Tyler Cowan is not exactly a tax fanatic, by the way).

* If urban congestion and land use are the problems, you can address them with satellite lots on the outskirts and mass transit.

* The effect on "poor people" is probably salubrious: many of them don't own cars to begin with, and without parking lots vying for land, land prices will go down).

lunchbox4• 16 years ago

Tyler Cowen is the author of the article :)

tptacek2• 16 years ago

Go me!

flatulent13• 16 years ago

"* The effect on "poor people" is probably salubrious: many of them don't own cars to begin with, and without parking lots vying for land, land prices will go down)."

Who was the politician that said "poor people don't need to drive"? You sound a bit like him.

You're half right in a twisted way though. Not having cars helps poor people into a new place to live - ON THE STREET!

Ras_• 16 years ago

http://www.islandia.is/lhm/images/parking-houston.jpg (from 1980s)

More here (eg. aerial pictures of Hartford pre and post Interstate): http://theoverheadwire.blogspot.com/2010/02/parking-bombs.ht...

Free Parking Comes at a Price

Related Stories