Something about automobile parking seems to drive otherwise good people bonkers. For example, James Fallows amidst a sensible post about a government shutdown echoes a desire I’ve heard from a lot of people for DC to stop enforcing parking laws:

I have relatives who live in Saudi Arabia. A large group of high schoolers, including their son, from an international school in Riyadh is excited about their upcoming spring trip to Washington, which begins this weekend. For many it will be their first view of the United States. And they will find: Smithsonian museums closed. National Zoo closed. DC trash collectors furloughed. No parking-law enforcement (well, there’s a bright side). The kinds of things one associates with … the third world.

The case for enforcing parking laws is exactly the same as the case for enforcing all laws. Any individual driver might reasonably prefer a world in which he can get away with breaking the rules, but if you stop enforcing the rules then everyone is going to break them. That doesn’t ultimately help anyone. It seems to me that everyone would ultimately gain a lot of relief if we just faced up to the fact that space in crowded urban centers is finite and valuable, and therefore ought to be fairly expensive. Then we’d have less effort to allocate via rationing, and less temptation to break the rationing rules.

Parking “privatization” seems to me to continue to drift in a kind of policy dead zone veering between two perfectly good ideas without actually hitting on either:

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sent a letter Monday urging the City Council to move ahead with his plan to get budget revenue by leasing nine parking garages to a private company, saying he will lay off more employees if the deal is abandoned. [...] Business groups in Hollywood, Westwood and downtown have criticized the plan, fearing that a private company would hike rates and drive away customers. Villaraigosa said in his letter the city can no longer afford to manage parking garages and insisted that “the era of free parking in Los Angeles is over.”

I’m seeing two potentially good ideas here. One is that maybe the city owned parking garages are underpriced and overcrowded, in which case the city should raise prices. Another good idea is that maybe the city should sell the parking garages. A private landowner would probably keep operating them as garages for a while, but when the economy’s growing again might redevelop the parcels into some more efficient use of the land. But this kind of lease scheme—like a similar one under consideration in New Jersey—doesn’t capture the benefits of private ownership, it just introduces a new tier of rent-seekers into land use process. It’s essentially a backdoor way for the city to get a loan.

(cc photo by Arthur Chapman)

Roger K Lewis’ top pet peeve about the DC area built environment concerns parking garages:

A popular holdover from my previous lists, too many parking garages are still inadequately lighted to ensure good visibility for drivers and pedestrians and for late-night safety. Directional and exit signage in parking garages is often hard to see and follow. Ramps, driving aisles and parking spaces in many garages are still too tight for comfortably turning corners and for parking with reasonable ease without hitting a column.

My initial emotional response to this was to want to counter-complain about the evils of parking garages. But then I put my rational policy analyst hat on and realized that Lewis’ problem is the same as my problem. I think jurisdictions in this area mandate the construction of too much parking. Lewis thinks that the quality of parking being provided is too low. These are, however, basically two sides of the same coin. If we said that every developer of a new building needs to provide cupcakes, and the bigger the building the more cupcakes you need to provide, we’d see a collapse in the price of cupcakes matched by a precipitous decline in average quality.

Under the current regulatory regime, we don’t really know what the market price of parking is, and we also don’t know what kind of price/quality tradeoffs people are willing to make. The US parking situation is basically a version of shopping in the Soviet Union. Sometimes you find intense shortages and people circling the block desperate to find an open space. Othertimes there’s an absurd oversupply of low-quality goods.

A “parking lot” is basically just an empty piece of land set aside for cars and I don’t think it really makes sense for government to be in the business of providing parking spaces at sub-market rates. So when I heard that New Jersey Transit might be “privatizing” parking lots near commuter rail stations that sounded like a decent idea to me. But what does it even mean to “privatize” a parking lot? Well it seems to me that the way you would put a parking lot into private hands would be to sell the land which might then be operated as a market-rate parking lot or else redeveloped into something else like transit-oriented housing or shopping.

What’s actually being proposed for New Jersey, however, is something different. New Jersey is going to contract-out the operation of the parking lots. That might lead to more rational pricing of the lots in the short term, but Steven Smith argues it will only make the overall problem worse:

[R]ather than taking on entrenched suburban interests, we’re just adding another layer of government dependents, this time of the monied corporate variety (bidders include KKR, Morgan Stanley, Carlyle, and JP Morgan). The land on which transit parking lots sit is uniquely positioned to be converted into dense development, and the only thing worse than sitting on the land would be for the agencies to sign away their rights to change that within the foreseeable future.

Right. Today’s privately owned parking lot could be tomorrow’s transit-oriented development. And today’s publicly owned parking lot could be sold to a private owner. But a parking lot that’s publicly owned by contracted out to a private operator is the worst of both worlds—a kind of publicly guaranteed, contractually obligated subsidy to parking and parking-lot operation.

Private land ownership is neither a new concept nor a radical one. If a public agency owns some land somewhere that it wants to privatize, the correct way to privatize it is to sell it thus generating some privately owned land. This shouldn’t be hard. If it’s the case that a parking lot is the most valuable use of the land, then private owners can figure that out.

(cc photo by gracefamily)

A number of readers have sent me Paul McMorrow’s article about parking reform in the Boston area and I’m glad you did:

When Boston development officials recently handed permits to the developers of Waterside Place, they did so despite neighborhood concerns that the developers wanted to build far more apartments than parking spots. On A Street, the Boston Redevelopment Authority is close to green-lighting a 21-story residential tower. The tower’s developer had originally planned to build one parking spot for every two residential units, an abnormally low supply; BRA officials are pushing the developer to push that ratio even lower by replacing a whole floor of parking with innovative workforce housing units.

These permitting decisions are not happening in a vacuum. Government-imposed floors on the number of parking spots required at new developments are falling across the city, and beyond. Somerville, for instance, is increasing zoning density and lowering parking requirements along the route of the planned Green Line extension, with an eye toward spurring new transit-oriented development. But the change is especially pronounced in the Seaport, where developers are working with as close to a blank canvas as you’ll find in any major American city.

Regulators pushing developers to build less parking than they want is much, much, much better than the near-universal practice of regulators mandating minimum levels of parking. But I do think the message is clearer and the potential political coalition bigger if parking reformers just stick to the idea that this should be left up to the market. Cars are useful, and people who have cars need to park them. So there’s nothing wrong with building parking. But urban space is expensive, and parking spaces take up space, so people should weigh the costs and benefits of building/buying more parking against other possibilities. Getting to market-determined levels of parking construction and parking space pricing would be a huge victory, and it’s not particularly necessary to go beyond that.

Rebecca Cooper writes about a parking garage in Arlington County that wants more revenue and believes it can increase revenue by increasing rates. But there’s a catch! The garage is owned by the county:

“The existing rates do not generate sufficient revenues to complete capital repairs and meet debt obligations over the next six to eight years,” she says.

The hourly rate has not been increased since 1994, and the monthly rate has not changed since 1996, according to Patricia Bush, Arlington’s transportation operations manager.

The transportation division will have to receive approval for the increases from the county board, but also from Macy’s Department Store owner Federated Department Stores, which owns the land underneath the garage. The owners of the mall and the attached office buildings will also have to sign off on the rate increases.

This raises the question of why so many municipalities in the United States find themselves owning parking garages. If the idea is to maximize revenue, then you’ll swiftly find that public agencies are not very good at maximizing revenue. Besides which, the public sector has the ability to obtain revenue by taxing parking garages if it wants to fund itself by raising the price of parking to above-market rates. The other possibility is that municipalities are trying to subsidize the cost of parking. In particular, the garage in question appears to be owned by the county’s Department of Environmental Services, suggesting that Arlington County believes subsidized parking is an environmental service.

Parking garages are not, in fact, environmental services. Cheaper parking encourages additional driving, which both directly increased atmospheric pollution and also encourages large homes and low-density residential patterns that indirectly increase pollution because they’re less efficient to heat. Using public funds to subsidize parking transfers resources from poor to rich, while harming the environment. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether it makes sense for public agencies to specifically discourage parking through taxes, but trying to create cheaper or more plentiful parking than what the market will bear is folly.

I often finds points of disagreement with people who work at the Cato Institute or the Reason Foundation, but that almost invariably involves a predictable ideological dispute where they think the government shouldn’t do something that I think it should. The exception is the strange case of Randall O’Toole, who seems to be the only person in the whole Kochtopus who focuses on transportation policy, and who dedicates a remarkable amount of time and energy to trying to deny the obvious point that people drive so much in America in part because of the government’s systematic interventions in land use decisions.

The latest hot front in this can be found in Donald Shoup’s evisceration of O’Toole’s views on minimum parking regulations. I recommend that you read the whole thing. But a quick summary is that O’Toole seems to have somehow persuaded himself that regulatory parking mandates don’t lead to artificially cheap parking and that artificially cheap parking doesn’t lead to artificially high quantities of driving. And he’s supposed to be the libertarian in this argument!

To dodge a strawpoint or two, obviously the main reason there’s a lot more driving in 2010 than in 1910 is that cars were invented and they’re a useful technology. And the main reason many people live in low-density environments is that many people enjoy that lifestyle. The point, however, is that there would be less driving (even among people who go everywhere in their car—distances would be shorter) absent these mandates. Similarly, the main reason that many metropolitan areas contain nearly zero examples of transit-oriented walkable urbanism is that in the postwar period it’s been generally illegal to build such neighborhoods.

Vince Gray and Adrian Fenty did a DC mayoral debate today of which, unfortunately, there seems to be no transcript. There is, however, a Dave Alpert has spent so much time trying to reassure urbanists about Gray. Here’s Austermuhle’s writeup of their back-and-forth on the crucial issue of parking

12:33 p.m.: Audience question on … parking. Really? Ugh. Fenty says you need to find balance between cars and other means of transit, cites Gabe Klein’s work at DDOT. This is actually a winning point for the mayor, at least from the urbanist perspective. Gray calls parking rates “outrageous,” firmly appealing to the car lobby. Boo! Does express concern over loss of business due to expensive parking, but also supports looking at alternative modes of transit.

I wish I had a proper transcript of what was said here since Austermuhle is tragically dismissive of the whole topic. But it seems clear enough that Fenty stood by Klein’s efforts to make the city less car-dependent, whereas Gray wanted to offer rhetorical support for that goal while simultaneously endorsing a policy concept—increased subsidization of parking—that’s diametrically opposed to that goal. I hope this is just Gray being opportunistic on the campaign trail, but I think the basic assumption has to be that Gray’s plan is to undo the controversial Fenty-era education and transportation reforms.

As a sidenote, when you look at the class divide between Fenty and Gray supporters it’s a reminder of how frustratingly upside-down the politics of these transportation issues often gets. Transportation reform plays as a kind of yuppie concern in practical politics, but the biggest losers from parking subsidies aren’t people like me—I could go out and buy a car tomorrow if I wanted to—but poor people for whom owning and maintaining automobiles is genuine financial hardship.

People generally understand that there were shortages and long lines for things in the Soviet Union because goods weren’t priced according to supply and demand. And people generally understand that, in general, price controls will tend to lead to either gluts or shortages. And yet few people understand that this same principle applies to on-street parking. In many places, it’s hard to find and that’s because it’s not priced properly. San Francisco is trying to change things with its SFPark initiative:

SFpark will charge the lowest possible hourly rate to achieve the right level of availability in both garages and at metered spaces. This project is not about raising parking revenue; it’s about making parking easier to find. SFpark is designed so each block and each garage maintains have about, an average, 20% availability. [...]

SFpark will use demand-responsive pricing to even out parking availability and reduce the need for circling. In pilot areas, meter pricing can range from between 25 cents an hour to a maximum of $6.00 an hour, depending on demand. During special events, such as baseball games, hourly prices may temporarily increase beyond the $6.00 ceiling. Parking rate changes will also affect City-owned garages and lots in pilot areas. Since many City-owned garages are currently underutilized, the prices are likely to decrease, which will attract more parking demand to City garages.

A nice next step would be for the city to get out of the garage-owning business. In a city where street parking is priced in a demand-responsive way and developers are not subject to regulatory mandates to construct parking, one assumes that parking garages and parking lots will still be constructed. If you want to drive somewhere then you’ll need to park your car, and since people often do want to drive there’s money to be made charging them for the privilege. But regulatory mandates and city-owned garages tend to ensure that parking is oversupplied.

Michael Perkins explains a small advance in the march toward parking sanity:

At meters in “premium demand zones,” parking time limits won’t apply after 6:30 pm. Drivers still have to pay for parking after that time, but can park for any amount of time. Premium demand zones include Adams Morgan, Georgetown, Chinatown, U Street, Friendship Heights, downtown, the Mall, and the waterfront area.

This is really great news. Parking time limits make little sense when your customers are out for a night of entertainment. It is better to have parking availability driven by appropriately set prices rather than force the turnover that time limits produce at a time when turnover isn’t as desirable.

Time limits are expensive to enforce, requiring near-constant supervision by parking control officers. If the city enforces time limits too aggressively, the perception is that the enforcement is too harsh. But if the enforcement is too lax, then spaces are not available for use. By enforcing meter payment only, enforcement is easier and ticketing is somewhat more objective: you either have paid or you haven’t.

Over the past forty years we’ve seen a huge increase in the scope of activities for which public policy now recognizes that prices, rather than regulatory rationing, are the best way to allocate scarce resources. Parking spaces remain a sad exception to that rule. Consequently, people have become accustomed to the state of affairs where in certain areas of most cities it’s “hard to find a parking space” and the idea that parking shortages should be solved through rationing procedures like time limits. If someone proposed price controls for Diet Coke or TV screens or anything else, almost everyone nowadays would immediately recognize the shortage/rationing problems that would swiftly arise. But it’s rare for people to extend the insight and recognize that systemic parking shortages and efforts to curb them via regulatory rationing represent a failure to price parking appropriately.

The fact is, however, that your city should no more suffer from parking shortages than it suffers from bread shortages. If demand is high and supply limited, the consequence ought to be expensive parking, with the expensive parking providing valuable revenue that allows the city to cut taxes or improve services.