Making Performance Parking Politically Appealing

This has nothing to do with Sonia Sotomayor, but parking guru Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking (your must read guide to parking policy), spoke today at a briefing for DC City Council staff. His basic message was, you know, that parking shouldn’t be underpriced and we shouldn’t think of “cheaper” parking as “better” parking.

Listening to him, it occurred to me that it’s weird that this is such a revolutionary concept. When I took economics, we had a little squib in there about price controls. But it was about something nobody would actually think to do these days . . . mandatory cheap bread or something. It was a historical example. At any rate, it’s overwhelming conventional wisdom in the United States that price controls are bad. If I suggested that the city implement price controls on Diet Coke, people would say that it would lead to shortages. And if I proposed dealing with the ensuring shortages by saying that anyone who wants to build a new building needs to also provide millions of dollars worth of Diet Coke to people in the neighborhood, people would look at me as if I were insane. Creating the Diet Coke shortages is not a favor to anyone—neither fans nor haters of Diet Coke benefit—and the regulatory mandate is an absurd subsidy to Diet Coke drinkers with no conceivable policy justification. It’s bizarre. But people have a strong bias toward the status quo, so they tend to assume that status quo policy just must be non-bizarre, no matter how at odds it is with everything else. Which is a long-winded way of saying that economists should probably talk more about these kind of everyday examples of weird market-distortions that nobody ever thinks about.

The other thing is that in some of the ensuing discussion, a twist emerged on how to grease the political wheels for this policy. When you price street parking properly—which is to say a price that’s high enough so that there’s almost always a space or two free on every block, but low enough so that there’s not more than a space or two free on any given block—you’re creating a surplus. That surplus takes the form of more customers for local businesses, less hassle for parkers, less traffic for everyone (almost 30 percent of traffic in crowded urban areas is people circling for parking), etc. But some of it takes the form of higher revenue from parking meters. In principle, that revenue could be used to fund all kinds of things. But politically speaking, the best way to make change appealing is probably to earmark the revenue specifically for use in the area getting the performance parking. That way instead of just having the argument about the correct pricing of space on the street, you can sell it to the neighborhood by saying “performance parking is going to repair the sidewalk, refurbish the bus shelter, spruce up this park, and then provide ongoing revenues necessary to keep everything spic and span going forward.”