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.

Did you know that American cities usually require off-street parking at bars? To take a random example, the city of Long Beach, CA requires 20 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of gross floor area for “taverns”. I don’t know what the city thinks people are doing at these bars, but I assure you it’s drinking.

This is how insane our mentality is. Even bars, businesses whose sole purpose is to sell alcohol for on-site consumption, “need” off-street parking. Even though we know that people drive to them, drink, and drive home. Drink and drive. Yeah, let’s make sure these people have plenty of free parking.

Obviously it’s possible to go to a tavern, not consume alcohol, and drive home safely. I’ve even served as a designated driver in my day. But in general, public safety demands a very low ratio of “people driving home from the bar” to “customers drinking at the bar” so there’s clearly something absurd about the idea of regulating bar-related land use so as to encourage and facilitate extra driving.

And of course beyond the specific case of mandatory bar-parking, it’s always worth emphasizing that part of the cost of an auto-dependent built environment is to massively increase the number of people on the road who’ve got at least a drink or two under their belt. The human toll of this kind of drunk driving is, in the aggregate, quite severe.

My favorite local development blog features a project coming soon to the Brookland area on land acquired from St Paul’s College. One sticking point has been parking:

Chancellor’s Row is less than a 10 minute walk from the Brookland Metro and, as part of a compromise between the Office of Planning (OP) and the community, each unit will have one parking spot with the option to add a second for a nominal fee. The community expressed concerns that the new neighbors would (collective gasp) seek on-street parking; still, proximity to Metro trumped that concern and OP narrowly won the day with a theoretically smaller carprint.

A world in which a regulatory mandate of over one car per household less than a ten minute walk from a Metro station in a walkable, transit-oriented city counts as a victory against parking mandates is a sad world indeed. I’m not a libertarian and I think there’s nothing wrong with regulating private business to ameliorate, say, a genuine environmental externality. But mandatory parking is bad for the environment, bad for public health, and bad for low-income families on top of being economically inefficient. The only externality pushing in the other direction is the desire of incumbent homeowners to not see existing on-street parking opportunities get crowded.

What’s needed, I think, is some less destructive way of meeting this concern. If I ran the zoo, what I would do is try to scrap all these regulatory minimums—none whatsoever, developers will still build parking, of course, but not because the local community made them—and in exchange arbitrarily set up a new two-level residential parking permit system so that starting in 2011 anyone who wants a new permit to park on the street has to pay way more. That would be “unfair,” of course, in a way that the current system isn’t. But directly buying-off incumbent parkers would both do a better job of meeting the incumbents’ actual concern and also have fewer negative consequences for the community at large.

Sommer Mathis explains a new DC program to let you use your phone to pay for parking spaces:

The pay by phone option is being offered at 700 parking spaces in three areas of the city: around Dupont Circle, Union Station, and downtown on K Street, I Street, and New York Avenue NW. Meters that offer the service will be marked with a green sticker like the one at right, which lists a location number specific to that space.

DDOT has contracted with Verrus Mobile Technologies, Inc. to run the pilot program. In order to take advantage of the option to pay by phone, customers must first sign up for an account at paybyphone.com. You’ll need to provide a mobile phone number, license plate number and credit card info.

Not enough attention is paid in political circles to this kind of thing—finding small ways to make the government work more effectively.

Of course the real next frontier in street parking is to get the prices right. You want to monitor actual use of spaces, and make parking cheaper when demand is low and more expensive when demand is high. That will generate more revenue for cities and towns (allowing more services or lower taxes) and also ensure that it’s easier to find parking spaces, which will be more convenient for people and also reduce circling-induced traffic congestion.

Below-grade parking will add 340 residential spaces and 65 retail spaces, with garage entrances off 8th and 10th Streets. According to ANC 6A Commissioner, Dr. Drew Ronneberg, “the city has a strong interest in having the site host 100 additional city-owned parking spaces that would serve retail establishments outside the building.”

Among other concessions, the developers agreed to a laundry list of community benefits to mitigate traffic congestion and encourage “green” living. The project will have to meet LEED silver requirements, though does not have to seek actual certification. There will be bicycle spaces aplenty in the parking garage, and lockers and showers for retail employees who bike to work. The developers agreed to provide one $20 SmartTrip Card to all initial and future residents up to $15,000, to fund up to $45,000 for a bike share station on undefined public property (quite a bit less than the Union Station bike hub cost), provide car sharing spaces, and pay for a one-time, one-year car sharing membership for initial occupants to max out at $19,000. We can see the marketing materials already.

Those concessions to mitigate traffic and encourage green living sound nice, but if Dr Ronneberg is serious about achieving those goals he should rethink his desire to further increase the quantity of parking spaces in the area. After all, the whole point of building parking spaces would be to encourage more people to drive to H Street. Indeed, the best traffic-mitigation strategy the community could possibly pursue would be to get the developer to reduce the number of residential parking spaces associated with the new building. To a small extent that would push new residents into competition with existing users of the area’s on-street parking, but to a much larger extent it would simply discourage people who are committed to car ownership from moving into the building.

Many DC households do not own cars, and if you build an apartment building with many fewer parking spaces than units, you’ll attract those households and similar ones. That will not only minimize the extra traffic burden in the area, but it will create additional customers for businesses that are close enough to access on foot. That, in turn, will spur the creation of neighborhood retail establishments and decrease the amount of time that even car-owning households in the area spend driving from place to place, further reducing traffic.

Now, living with a car in a dense urban area is still considerably greener than living with a car in a far-flung exurb (at a minimum, you’re driving to closer destinations) so I have no problem with developers building below-grade garages beneath new apartment buildings if that’s what they want. But insofar as community activists want to push things in a greener direction, they certainly shouldn’t be encouraging additional parking.

For the past 48 hours or so I’ve decided to think of it as the future location of the Pelosi House Office Building to go alongside Canon, Rayburn, and Longworth.

Subways are wonderful, but they’re expensive to build. Really, really expensive. You can’t just throw up another line or another station on a whim. Consequently, metropolitan areas who’ve invested in building them have a real responsibility to use the land near the stations in an efficient way—buildings with offices, houses, and shops rather than parking lots. Obviously Congress, by its nature, is insulated from the market forces that might otherwise compel someone to do something more useful with this valuable land. But they always have the option of doing the right thing.

It’s a bit frustrating sometimes that the only people who seem interested in reforming parking meter policy are generally car-skeptical urbanist types like me. My interest in this, after all, is a bit second-order* whereas people who actually drive cars around all the time have a strong interest in getting this right. What does getting it right mean? Well, the basic insight is that supply and demand apply to parking. Making parking cheap somewhere where lots of people want to park doesn’t actually make cheap parking widely available—it just creates a parking shortage. What you want is a fee high enough so that there are usually empty spaces available. The target experts agree on is 85 percent occupancy. If occupancy rates are higher than that, you need higher prices, not as a punitive anti-driver measure to make sure that people who really want to park on that bock can.

But you need to get your definitions right. For example, DDOT has decided it should raise rates on three blocks in Columbia Heights where average occupancy exceeds 85 percent. As Michael Perkins writes this is mighty crude since demand varies across the time of day:

If the goal of performance parking is to ensure that a space on every block is always available to people that are arriving to the area, then reporting average occupancy rates doesn’t do much good, because overcrowded parking at one time could be balanced by empty parking at another time. And empty spaces at 10 am don’t help people who are looking for spaces at 6 pm.

All six blocks had some time periods over 85%; according to the report, the maximum utilization on all six blocks ranged from 110% to 190%. (Maximum utilization can exceed 100% when people park extra-tightly, use very small cars, and/or park illegally.) But we also don’t know if those high utilizations were only one hour of one day, or common every day at a certain busy hour.

Getting all this data together, then implementing it, then getting people used to variable pricing is all kind of a hassle. That said, once you get a system up and running that does a decent job of matching pricing to demand there will be long, enduring benefits. Not only will it be easier for people to park, but the government will get much more revenue and can thus have lower taxes. What’s more, everyone who’s not trying to park will have fewer people circling the block to deal with.

* The basic urbanist hope is that if we can learn to manage parking spaces better there won’t be these constant demands to build more parking everywhere or to refuse to build any new buildings because it might adversely impact other people’s parking.

Policy rationales for a regulatory parking mandate might include a belief that the poor should subsidize the consumption of the rich, the belief that increasing the volume of traffic congestion would be useful, the view that the planet suffers from insufficient levels of C02 emissions and other air pollution, or the idea that economic growth and the efficient allocation of resources are undesirable. Otherwise, this is a terrible idea, albeit one that’s extremely common in American cities. It’s too bad, too, because according to the same article Abu Dhabi is doing sensible things with its public parking: “parking charges – at Dh2 to Dh3 per hour, already higher than neighbouring emirates – will continue to increase as more public transport becomes available.”

As Atrios observed yesterday:

Even within dense cities, such as mine, residents push for increased parking requirements for new developments. In isolation, perhaps their demands make sense (though I think often they are self-defeating), but across numerous projects they make the city less pedestrian friendly, ultimately increasing the amount of traffic.

You see this go round and round all the time. In DC, people are afraid that if new developments are allowed that don’t contain vast parking structures, that everyone will own cars anyway and compete with them for underpriced (and therefore scarce) street parking. You can turn around and try to say that the correct solution to this is to stop underpricing street parking, but ultimately people would rather keep their cheap existing parking. I think the solution is to just accept the fact that the interests of people who don’t live in the city but could if more development were allowed are by nature going to be underrepresented in the political process. Then instead of trying to come up with a solution that’s both fair and broadly acceptable, we could just directly buy off the incumbents.

For example, you could drop mandated parking minimums and just say that anyone who applies for a new residential parking permit will need to pay some fee that’s much higher than the fee that applies to anyone who already has an RPP. And you can mandate that the excess revenue generated by the higher RPP fees be used, in the first interest, to finance reductions in RPP fees for incumbent permit holders. You could even make the incumbent RPPs transferable (but one-time only) so that incumbents could directly profit by selling their right to park to a newcomer.

None of that makes much sense on the policy merits. But it ought to be a policy that incumbent permit holders can embrace, and it’s also in the interests of incumbent residents who don’t drive, and it’s better policy than the mandate-ridden status quo. Best of all, over time the silly payoffs will phase out and we’ll be at a new equilibrium with more residents, fewer cars per resident, and less parking scarcity (presumably more cars and more parking overall since even without mandates many developers will want to build parking). Sometimes in the policy world it makes sense to just squarely face the interest group pressures and buy them off rather than trying to find some kind of halfway compromise between doing the right thing and doing nothing.

A couple of days ago, Cato’s Tad DeHaven took aim at a new bicycle storage facility being built at Union Station in Washington, DC. I remarked ” I look forward to the day when the Cato Institute does a blog post denouncing each and every publicly financed parking lot or garage in the United States of America.” To which DeHaven responded yesterday:

I denounce each and every federally financed parking lot or garage in the United States of America on non-federal property. I’m one of those quaint individuals who recognizes that the Constitution grants the federal government specific enumerated powers. Using federal tax dollars to finance local parking garages, lots, bike centers and racks is not one of the powers granted to the federal government. So let me rephrase my statement from yesterday: Look, I harbor no animosity against [car drivers], but under what authority — legal or moral — does the federal government tax me in order to build [parking garages or lots] for parochial, special interests?

To be honest, rather than addressing my concern I think this response highlights the hypocrisy I was pointing out. I have no doubt that on some abstract level DeHaven is opposed to all kinds of federal funding of local transportation projects (though I note that a facility relating to a train station in the national capital seems like a plausible area of federal concern) but in practice he denounces a specific bicycle parking project as an example of unconstitutional waste while not in practice complaining about car facilities.

But I fired up the old Google and found plenty of specific examples of federally-funded parking garage projects. This one in Fairfax County cost $28.8 million. Here’s a story about “an application for $130 million in federal grant funds to help pay for a parking garage complex in downtown Bartow.” Here’s an account of a $9 million parking garage in Vermont “Partially funded with federal transportation money.”

And, look, I’m not kidding about this: I really do look forward to the day when the Cato Institute starts specifically denouncing all of this stuff and really going after it. As a supporter of bicycle initiatives, I think it’s nice to see the federal government kick some bucks into a bicycle facility. But as you can see that money is dwarfed by what’s spent on public (and, yes, federal) subsidies for automobile parking facilities. I would gladly equalize federal funding for car parking and bike parking at $0 per year. But I get annoyed when friends of limited government pick on the crumbs handed to cyclists while completely ignoring the loafs going to cars.