Want Less Traffic and More Parking? Start Charging for It
planetizen.com
planetizen.com
Oh? Friends of ours used to live on T St. NW in Washington, DC, just east of 16th St. We eventually learned to take a cab there. But my recollection is that off-street paid parking just isn't there in that neighborhood. The downtown office areas of Washington have lots of off-street paid parking, but from what I see there are large swaths of town with strips of restaurants and bars surrounded by residential blocks, and with very little in the way of parking garages.
We did once pay to park to visit our friends on T. But the lot we parked at was dinky.
Because of that I was struggling to make ends meet so every dollar I earned was desperately needed. For the most part "Single Moms" are far more common than single fathers and they generally make less money than men so charging a single parent to park a car will take away a lot more for them than most others. And it will cost low income families more than others.
So this sounds like yet another "screw the poor more" idea to me. I'd much rather see a tax on the wealthy to deal with the cost mentioned in this article.
is accurate if you ignore that a large portion of the poor don't have access to a reliable vehicle; and that commutes lead to community segmentation and increase inequality.
And that's part of policy point of this. If traffic is decreased, and premium parking is a luxury; then a community is forced into a more local economy that's less dependent on the cars - be it walkable or usable public transit.
More info https://inequality.org/research/public-transit-inequality/
Further, the places where a system like this is cost effective is a place where the revenue can go toward implementing meaningful public transit. Having a car shouldn't be table stakes for being able to provide for your kid in a metropolitan area.
Now I agree we need to do something but it'll just end up being an extra tax that will affect the poor more than others. If we don't tax everyone than it defeats the purpose of using taxes to drive behaviors. So we can't subsidize because that defeats the goal.
If on-street parking is crucial to the well-being of humanity, then we can absolutely subsidize it for lower-income people, just as we do for so many other things we've deemed critical. It's as simple as issuing a prox card that results in free or lower-cost parking. With a centrally managed parking system capable of dynamic pricing, there is no barrier to this strategy.
Finally, the whole purpose of using taxes to drive behaviors is that you're not taxing the people who don't engage in the behavior. That's how it works.