Down with Free Parking!

[Nye Bevan]

In the multi-level parking garage that sits directly across the street from where I’m typing these words, in the heart of Manhattan’s business-filled Flatiron District, an hour of parking will set you back $27.03. I’m told by the friendly attendant there that he almost always has spaces available. Still, if you’re willing to drive around for a while and hunt for a hard-to-find metered spot on the street, you might be able to zoom your way into one just as its previous occupant is zooming out of it.

To celebrate your accomplishment, you really should treat yourself to lunch. I’d recommend the house-ground wagyu beef cheeseburger with triple crème Brie and caramelized onion aioli at Alison Eighteen, a nearby restaurant – though at $17, it doesn’t come cheap. Still, with the amount of money you just saved by parking at a $3.50-per-hour spot on the street, you’ll have no trouble covering the lunch bill. And while you’re savoring your $23.53 in savings, as well as the last of your “frites” (they don’t call them “fries” when you’re paying this much for them), ponder this question: What, do you suppose, is the “fair market value” of a one-hour parking spot in this part of town?

......

In one 15-block commercial district that he studied in Los Angeles, Shoup estimated that drivers trolling for a cheap or free curbside spot were responsible for an extra 950,000 vehicle miles driven per year — “equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon.” Although the average search may have taken only a few minutes and covered only half a mile, the aggregate impact that all these rationally self-interested economic actors were having on energy consumption and climate was staggering: together they burned an extra 47,000 gallons of gasoline, and released an extra 730 tons of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere, over the course of a single year.All in one relatively small commercial area. Feel free to extrapolate, if you think you can stomach the implications.

.......

Shoup has studied the issue long enough to know which way things are likely to turn out; you can probably guess what his prediction is regarding the effect of free Sunday parking on merchants’ and restaurateurs’ bottom lines. (Here’s a hint: “Free curb parking in a congested city gives a small, temporary benefit to a few drivers who happen to be lucky on a particular day, but it imposes large social costs on everyone else every day.”) It’s just another way of pointing out, as Shoup often does, that there’s really no such thing as free parking. When we as individuals pay nothing (or next to nothing) for it, parking becomes what economists call a “negative externality,” where the public cost of a particular item or service actually exceeds its private cost. “If you don’t pay for parking your car, somebody else has to pay for it,” Shoup has said. “And that somebody is everybody.”


http://www.salon.com/2013/06/09/down_with_free_parking_partner/

[taterguy]

1. Are you some shopping mall shill?

In my town those are the major beneficiaries of making it difficult to park downtown.

YMMV

[Nye Bevan]

2. Charging the fair market value for parking would actually make it *easier* to park downtown (nt)

[Fumesucker]

4. The invisible hand would make sure of that

[taterguy]

7. Which downtown?

And it also depends on how you calculate fair market value.

In my town, if you have to pay to park, you just go somewhere else.

[hobbit709]

3. I just don't go downtown.

One of the few places I go to has metered parking on the street outside but the city stops charging after 6 PM-which is about the time I go there.

[Recursion]

5. Matt Yglesias writes a lot about this

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/07/urban_parking_wars.html

One of the main issues that leads people to oppose new real estate development in their neighborhood is parking. Access to street parking, in particular. Many cities massively over-allocate scarce public space to automobiles with the vast stretches of land set aside as on-street car storage being a key culprit. Incumbent residents enjoy access to that resource and fear that newcomers will compete with them for access to it. The traditional remedy to this concern has been growth-and-environment-killing minimum parking mandates, but in DC at least the hip new idea is to prevent residents of new developments from obtaining street parking permits.

That's better than regulatory mandates, but I do think there's an even better way. That would be to simply stop handing out new street permits altogether and turn the existing permits into tradeable private property owned by the people who hold them. Creating that kind of windfall for incumbent parkers would be moderately unfair, but precisely because it's unfair it would actually accomplish the desired political objective of halting parking-related objections to new development. For incumbent permit-holders, development would no longer degrade the value of their parking permits. Since the total number of permits would be capped, there'd be no scarcity of street parking. And since the permits would be tradable property, new residents would actually increase the market price. Now everybody's happy.

[wercal]

6. I don't trust their study

That gallon usage would yield 470 tons co2...they are off by nearly a factor of two on that calculation...what else did they get wrong?