The High Cost of Free Parking (1997) [pdf]
uctc.net
uctc.net
If you live in the burbs or a rural area, you probably already avoid patronizing downtown businesses because of all the hassles involved and the arm and leg it costs you to park. Those businesses assume that loss in exchange for doing business in a higher density locale. They literally have more foot traffic walking by to more than make up for the dozen free parking spaces they might be able to afford on the ultra high land prices in the city.
Other business people, thinking the same as you, then buy up a dozen acres somewhere and toss down a strip mall with plentiful parking and work out a deal with the county government to expand the road around their new mall to 3 lanes.
Parking is one of the largest sources of revenue for universities, and is a substantial source for municipalities as well. A well researched, well-priced parking plan encourages reasonable use of parking and can actually lower costs for parkers (the parking industry's analog to users).
For example, my apartment is down by Wayne State and there are two WSU parking lots adjacent it to it (one literally beside my building and the other across the street). Buying a pass with WSU would allow me to park overnight in the close-ish parking structure on the other side of Cass but not access it at night/weekends, or park in the structure on the other side of campus and have access at night and on weekends. Nothing was said about the lots adjacent to my building, but last I checked they weren't available at night either. I think that's pretty silly, since the only thing keeping me (or someone else) from my car if I park in a WSU structure/lot is a simple programmable barrier gate. Since I'm not a student at WSU (I room with two students however), I'd have to pay $415 to park during the Winter 2015 semester.
Contrast this to the gas station on the other side of Woodward, which is always open and offers parking for $65/month (recently increased from $50/month). If it was still $50/month I'd never consider switching over to WSU, but if WSU would allow me to access my car whenever, I'd pay the tiny increase in price it would cost to switch.
Those gates aren't as simple as you think :)
Also, you may be more likely to spend money, but that's anecdotal. Lots of people don't own cars (myself included) and excessive parking dissuades me from patronizing a business because it correlates to difficult access.
I used to be a bicycle commuter between Santa Monica and El Segundo (in LA near LAX) and it was a vile, horrible experience of cycling through an asphalt hellscape while motorists tried to kill me. I now live in a place which has no parking minimums and far less free parking (with exceptions for the disabled) and find life to be far superior.
If I had not had this experience, I might feel differently.
Another way to look at it, is it increases demand for land in the burbs, where there's free parking.
There's no obvious inherent benefit to shopping downtown where I work or in the burbs where I live. Theoretically centralization would benefit everyone. However no one shops downtown if they can avoid it, the parking situation is horrendous and high rents mean higher prices. So all my retail shopping is done in the burbs. Which means higher land demand in the burbs (both for the stores, and the free parking).
There are ancillary cultural effects. If you partition an area into "you only go there because you have to go there because there's no free parking and no retail" vs "you go there because you want to, and there's free parking" the coincidence sets up inappropriate beliefs, like free parking is a universal good or paying to park is a universal bad. Reality is its more like a circus ride where if your land prices exceed $X/sq foot then both free parking and retail are inherently economically inappropriate in those areas, if at all avoidable. Stick a super expensive office building on that land instead, etc. Shoppers and their freely parked cars don't belong in areas that cost $2000/sq foot, especially if $20/sq ft is a ten minute drive out of the city.
I'll give my neighborhood as an example. I live in a small city, outside of the most urban part, where most buildings are houses on 1/10 of acre lots. Population density is about 10,000 per square mile. Pretty much everyone has a car, however most local businesses don't have any off street parking. The side streets tend to have free parking (there's always enough), and the main streets tend to have metered parking. Plenty of people come here from the suburbs to shop, because there are unique, local stores you're not going to find at a mall, and there's plenty of good places to eat and drink.
The businesses don't have to provide nearly as much parking, because they have several thousand potential customers within a short walk.
It would be like me picking out the area called 'west Seattle' (one of the near by suburbs of Seattle) when I should really be talking about Seattle as the urban environment.
Source please. My experience, with my friends and coworkers, is that nobody leaves downtown to shop if they can avoid it. It is quite possible that False Consensus effect is coming in to play here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-consensus_effect
I don't mean to be rude, I just think you (and perhaps me too!) may have some inaccurate assumptions about how people behave. You shop in the burbs. I avoid the burbs with every fiber of my being (grew up there, hope never to return).
But there's no such thing as a free lunch. Benefits to you (for easier parking) correspond to subsidizes by others (like those who can't drive).
One conclusion I drew is to view the paper as an argument that centralized planning for parking spaces is inefficient compared to an open market. When economics interferes with human rights and dignities then I am all for changing the laws so as to change the economics. But I find it hard to believe that your disinclination to pay $2 for parking so you can drive to go shopping is a human right any more than my disinclination (as one who walks to the store) to pay for your free parking through higher food costs.
As the paper points out, current infrastructure assumes, and therefore depends on, free parking. It can't be simply changed, which is why the author proposes "parking benefit districts" as a step towards a free market solution.
Edit: Quoting from the article: "These retail corridors have narrow parcels on which building a store and providing the required parking is difficult. As a result, much commercial land remains vacant, and adjacent neighborhoods lack retail services, even food stores".
There are many high streets in Australia completely flanked by parked cars where passing traffic is then blocked from seeing storefronts and thus less likely to stop and shop. Councils are slowly reducing the number of parking spaces in these situations but fighting their own tenants in doing so.