Free Parking Comes at a Price
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
Fun fact: London has over 600 railway stations.
> 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro
When was the Second Avenue line started in NYC? 1960?
One thing is also true, the newer systems, reliant on new construction techniques, are generally just nicer to get around in, better organized and better planned vs. the really old systems like NYC, Paris and London.
Outside of maybe Spain, western rapid transit systems seem to be in a stasis field, which is really quite sad considering how badly they need new systems (pick a city in Texas) or expanded systems (L.A., San Francisco, Seattle).
Now, US systems are a different story; of a dozen or so cities I've visited recently, Portland is the only one I can think of that was actively building.
And places like L.A. I think absolutely stand-up to the criticism of being locked in stasis. Even the planned system looks embarrassing for the second largest metro region in the U.S.
D.C. is maybe a slight exception with an entire new line (and 11 stations) actually in the process of being built over the next 6 years.
But lets put that in perspective, the Shanghai system opened in 1990, and 20 years later has 269 stations with dozens more still in the works. I'm not expecting the same thing for D.C., but L.A. is a similarly populated metro region.
One other thing to think about, and part of my fixation on metro systems I think, is how the systems tend to define how the cities develop. It's a catch-22 in a way, we build the systems to service the denser parts of a city, but the presence of the system builds density in the immediate (walkable) distance from the station. Outlier areas, away from the metro center, can become perfectly fine mini-city centers in and of themselves (see the edge city phenomenon).
Just the fact that the silver line is being built has stirred a tremendous amount of city planning and building along its length with areas like Tysons Corner being virtually rebuilt to support a walkable city center type environment centered around the stations. This type of co-development is critical I think to sustainable urban planning.
You can't build a car free urban area if people can't get into and out of the urban center.
(Berlin S-Bahn - 166 stations, 206 mtl, 1 mdr)
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.
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.
As you say, allowing cars on the promenade hasn't helped. And big box stores have beaten the smaller local businesses in plenty of other towns.
So why do you attribute the failure of the downtown to the pedestrian only zones rather than to competition?
Though not a certainty, it's a pretty fair conclusion that the bricked pedestrian mall is not what killed Richmond's downtown.
And certainly Richmond's overall economic decline started in the 30's and hasn't really gotten any better since then.
But my overall point is that pedestrian zones don't automatically turn into cafe-laden paradises, as much as we'd all like that to happen, and in America in particular that's less likely to happen than in Europe, largely (imho) due to our much lower density of population - itself due in part to automobile addiction.
It’s very much possible to build high density walkable towns using contemporary architecture [+]. You don’t have to fake it.
[+] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.htm...
I just saw some new construction going up in Budapest along the river that is based heavily on the 19th-century architecture of much of the rest of the city. It still has a couple of airy glass walls, but some of the building was good solid brick with the staggered stone window facing that's so typical of most of Pest. I thought it was fantastic. (My wife, the Hungarian, was unimpressed; indeed, I'm not even sure she understand what point I was trying to make about it. Ah well.)
Providing enough parking space seems important, though. My hometown has two large parking lots just outside the city center (you have to walk maybe 300 meters), two parking garages (500 meters) and a underground parking garage (100 meters). I don’t think the city center would work as well as it does without all those parking spaces. (Those parking spaces are all owned by the city and they will all cost you some money.)
Sometimes, a place can have too much character.
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?
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.
Those might kick-start things by forcing the hand of businesses that influence behaviour, but I think any sustainable and politically credible plan for the long term needs to achieve the results by changing social expectations. As our local authorities have discovered, you can't price people off the road when there is no sufficiently attractive alternative. All you do is gain some extra money, at the expense of popular support.
On the other hand, there is clearly a lot of latent hostility towards current employment practices. I can see a sustained campaign for sensible working practices eventually leading large companies to open up their flexible hours and telecommuting policies, and small companies having to do likewise to remain competitive as employers, simply because that is what a lot of people want anyway.
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.
It's also worth keeping in mind that flight only requires serious land use at the origin and destination, which is a huge win over both rail and road networks, where you have to allocate and maintain land-based infrastructure for the entire network.
In terms of finances and efficient land use, I suspect flying is actually a relatively sensible way to travel. It's the environmental factors, consumption of finite fuel supplies, and need for greater safety/security precautions because of the potential damage caused by something falling out of the sky in an uncontrolled location that really make flying unsustainable in its current form.
(Edit: Out of curiosity, I did some Googling and some very quick and dirty calculations about relative fuel consumption. With huge error bars, it looks like a mid-spec 737 carrying around 130 passengers and their baggage would need about 50x as much fuel per mile as a typical family car with a couple of passengers and a similar amount of luggage, over a distance of a few hundred miles. That suggests that the kind of ticket price you mentioned isn't off the chart in terms of covering costs, if you get your aircraft fuel in bulk and the taxation is low.)
Ever been to LA, Houston, Atlanta?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of all the many possible subsidies the government could or does provide, do you really think free parking is the most beneficial?
>One social engineering event per conversation, please.
Wasn't the central 'event' of the article social engineering?
The central point of the article seemed to be the assertion that people who are that poor and should not be living so far from their place of employ would be better off if we did this. Yes, they would lose their jobs if they stayed where they are.
But the taxes on parking would discourage borderline-poor from owning cars in the city, which in turn would bring down housing costs in the city, making it possible for your neighbors to live more cheaply and healthfully by biking/busing to their now nearby job.
Yes, there would be hardship involved. But the alternative is waiting until fossil fuels rise to such a cost that they can't afford to drive to the city anyway. We've then destroyed their chance of earning a livelihood by chasing their short-term comfort.
Too often the pattern in "what do do about problem X" is to write an essay espousing that we do "A"
Usually these essays gloss over, ignore, or belittle side-effects because a discussion of all the edge cases and results doesn't make a good essay (or a good book). In addition, most things in life are complicated, and authors need to make a succinct point, quickly.
The problem is that what makes for good essays, what makes for good political talk, very rarely is as clear-cut as the essayists make out to be. So along comes some schmuck (I volunteer for this role in my story) and points out the half-dozen or so unstated implications of A.
No problem, the supporters say, we'll just add B and C in there. Now, that fixes all your concerns.
Well yes, but are we talking about A, or A, B, and C. You're just adding in more stuff. Because now we need to talk about the implications of B and C, which you probably haven't thought that much about and are probably worse than the ones for A.
"No problem," folks say, because when we do B and C, obviously D, E, and F come along. They're needed to take care of C.
This can continue ad infinitum, with each addition of terms being less and less thought out, and the implications more and more unpleasant.
The thesis of the article, if I understood it, was that the cost to society for parking in the city (and he seemed to be saying the suburbs as well, although I might have misread) outweighs the benefits. A tax, or elimination of some parking would produce more good than bad.
I take issue with that conclusion, although I grant his premise -- costs of stuff keep going up -- to be true. I take issue with it for many reasons: cost to the rural poor and middle-class, cost to the urban poor, view of the problem from an academic standpoint instead of a practical one, using a long-term problem without clear costs (fossil fuel issues) to directly hurt people living today. There are all kinds of reasons I take issue with his thesis. In addition, the premise was trite. Mundane. The conclusion I found supercilious. It was just really bad. I'm sure the author is a great guy and wonderful and all, and I agree with his cause, but that doesn't mean I have to like this essay. I don't.
The mortgage tax credit is a great example of this. It promoted an increase in the average home price because people without home mortgages where subsidizing those with them. It also reduced the value of existing homes because they where built before the increase in average size etc etc. It destabilized the economy by promoting excessive borrowing... (why pay down your mortgage with an effective rate of 3.5% when you can invest in other things etc.)
The people that benefited from it loved it. However, if you had just given the same people that money without the subsidy they would have spent it on other things and been happier.
There are times when subsidies seem to create short term benefit, however it's always more effective to tax what you don't like than subsidize what we do like or simply have the government build it outright.
You are overstating your case. In a completely free market, public goods (goods which are non-rivalrous and non-excludible) will be under provisioned, since people will have an incentive to freeload of the people who do pay. Subsidies for public goods, or even private goods with a positive external benefit can (if the level is chosen correctly) prevent this under provisioning.
Granted, parking (and owning a home) are private goods, so the point is moot for the purposes of this article and your example.
However, that's not what is generally considered a subsidy. A targeted tax break on wind farms is the the class of activity I am talking about. When governments directly provide services there is little incentive to increase production beyond what is useful and significant incentive to cut back production. However, with farm (food) subsidies there is by definition overproduction which prevents non subsidized actors from competing and distorts consumption.
PS: Thanks, I should have been more clear.
Not necessarily. Please see "The private provision of public goods via dominant assurance contracts" ( http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf)
I am a free rider when possible so his logic falls apart. People make irrational choices all the time so charites are capable of gathering relativly small amounts of money (total from all of them is 2.2% GDP and there are a lot of such orginizations). However, there is a reason expencive things like building ITER are not based on cheritable donations.
But the taxes on parking would discourage borderline-poor
from owning cars in the city, which in turn would bring
down housing costs in the city, making it possible for
your neighbors to live more cheaply and healthfully by
biking/busing to their now nearby job.
If this increases prices, that's good, because it lets people more accurately understand the cost of their habitation and transportation.
Alternately, if that's bad, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why inaccurate pricing results in more wealth overall.
* there are about 100 families within a mile or so of you
* they need to spend an hour or so to drive into the city
* they can already barely afford a car and "to keep the lights on"
Also, economies are complex systems. If low income people can't afford to commute into the city, the jobs wouldn't disappear, as the work wouldn't disappear. So someone closer who was previously unemployed might get the job. Or in response to the shortage of workers, the wages of these jobs might be raised.
Didn't someone mention on HN a startup that intends to do for taxis what airbnb is doing for hotels? This could be at least part of a solution.
Also, just from a practical standpoint, telling some people "your jobs won't disappear... other people will have them!" is, uh, problematic. At best.
Perhaps customers and employees should be treated as a form of pollution, just another toxic resource used by business. Wouldn't that justify business having to pay?? If given only enough wealth to survive, aren't we saying that employees have no function except to work and consume?
How far do we have to tax people before it becomes institutionalized slavery?
Cars have been a part of the American dream for a long time. Unless/until our cities are made where everyone can easily function without them, pricing some people out of them equates to a serious impairment and loss of freedom.
Taxing things that impact society isn't always the answer. Try taxing children and see how far that goes.
The wages of city employees keep going up more than that of the poor in the communities they "serve". What do some cities do to fuel that? Bring in more people, more box stores, tax it all.
Perhaps there is a fundamental conflict of interest in the way some city/county/state/national taxes and spending are handled?
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.
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.
Paying for cheap/free parking for other people currently is part of the cost of doing business in the city due to regulations which demand it. The question is, why should it be the cost of doing business in the city?
Also, I'm not proposing any re-engineering. If the current level of parking is optimal, then it would persist persist (but with people paying for their own parking). I don't claim to know the optimal level of parking, I just want to adopt a system with incentives to get the level right.
Incidentally, Manhattan comes pretty close to having market-priced parking. There is some free parking, particularly at low-demand times, but a big chunk of people pay market rates for parking. There seem to be plenty of people who want to live/work there.
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.
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.
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.
* 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one is advocating restricting parking. If a store wishes to provide underground parking, for instance, they should be permitted to do so.
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!
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).
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!
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).
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?
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.
I always assumed that would be something perfectly well decided by the market.
Does anyone know the failure that requires regulation there?
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.)
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.
More here (eg. aerial pictures of Hartford pre and post Interstate): http://theoverheadwire.blogspot.com/2010/02/parking-bombs.ht...
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.
Seattle Transit Blog (http://seattletransitblog.com/)
HugeAssCity (http://www.publicola.net/category/column/hugeasscity/)
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.
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.
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.
Virtually every large pre-automobile city had a very similar population density distribution to modern cities, albeit with a gentler distribution curve. Usually the poor clustered densely together in the center, the wealthy layered out in decreased density patterns (essentially suburbs), and then the rural areas surrounded.
The desire for a bit of space and not to be around quite as many people -- aside from being simply more hygienic and less fragile -- goes back through time, just as it exists today.
I don't want to live in a 500 sq. ft condo and like it. I don't want to cluster in crowds everything I do.
And if you do find yourself living in some shady little inner-city apartment, don't fall to the classic justification pattern of suddenly pretending that you're doing the world a favour. You aren't.
But only one of us has had their desires subsidized by various levels of government for decades. That's you, so I guess you already win. You even get the right add insult to injury by calling it "social engineering" when someone asks them to stop.
>But only one of us has had their desires subsidized by various levels of government for decades.
This is almost comically wrong, but given the ridiculous hyperbole you engage in, you won't be convinced otherwise.
Also, why are my personal desires "urbanist hyperbole" while yours are, evidently, something I should be forced to not only pay for, but live in myself?
And I don't want to live in a dirty, squalid, crime-filled ghetto of overcrowding and limited accommodation that is the city. Of course that's hyperbole, but given that I'm responding to a guy who referred to suburbs as "the desolate, isolating distance between various places", it sounds like it's the colour of the argument.
Of course, I like driving in my comfortable, air-conditioned, very safe vehicle (without the risks of dangers and olfactory offenses of public transit -- again, just borrowing some of your style) while listening to music of my own choice.
>something I should be forced to not only pay for
Yes, you've covered this again and again. It turns out that in a modern society all of us pay for a lot of things that we don't personally benefit from. I pay towards mass transit that I don't use. I pay towards welfare that I don't use. I pay towards police that aren't policing me, and doctors that aren't tending to me. I pay for arts facilities that I don't use, and sports facilities that I don't play at. That's aggregate living for you. Of course cities simply can't exist without the transportation networks around them (the products and foods that you exist on most certainly weren't made locally), so your argument smells a little more ripe.
Let me make it totally clear that I engaged in this discussion with a full expectation of being downvoted (even for absolute statements of fact such as the reason for parking space regulations). People who live in the suburbs generally just enjoy life. People who live in the city sit online justifying why living in the city is the ideal form of existence.
I just came into this to say teilo misread the article and that there's more regulations and taxations required to prop up car usage than some people are willing to acknowledge. You're the one started justifying why living in the suburbs is the ideal form of existence.
Incidentally, I'd be happier living in a suburb or small town that allowed for a car-free lifestyle than I would be living in a city like Houston or LA where you still need a car.
People end up circling the area indefinitely, or they park
illegally on neighbouring grounds, etc.
essentially propaganda pieces
Extraordinary. Slavery no less. You should have gone with Hitler.
>In other words: immediate negative consequences are not a good argument, because most change causes some immediate unhappiness for greater good later.
Positive actions yield positive outcomes. A positive action is, for instance, creating robust, usable mass transit systems. Building bike paths and car sharing lanes and other actions that encourage and assist people in moving to the behavior that is desired.
Negative actions, on the other hand, are the domain of the dim witted, and countless stunning failures go ignored: If teens are causing trouble at night, don't think of positive ways of engaging their interest and attention, instead announce restrictive laws and punishments.
>The fact that you have to stoop to arguments founded on paranoid delusions of propaganda
Slavery, paranoid delusion...your spittle will probably get upvoted, as such nonsense generally does in generalist discussions on HN (courtesy of the Reddit refugees). I think you overstate what propaganda is.
Some of the other things you suggest (mass transit, bike paths) by necessity have to take either space or money away from roads for cars. I think those ideas are essential, but you can't accomplish them very well without impeding cars. (The naive solution of putting a bike lane right between on-street parking and moving traffic only works as a cruel joke on cyclists. Cities that take bike paths seriously physically separate them from motorways, but that often involves reducing the space of the motorway.)
You should have gone with Hitler.
Positive actions yield positive outcomes.
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."