Free Parking: “A Fertility Drug for Cars”
Decatur Metro | August 17, 2010This past Saturday’s New York Times featured an op-edy sorta piece from a George Mason prof on the economic effects of parking requirements.
If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.
The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life.
…Imposing higher fees for parking may make further changes more palatable by helping to promote higher residential density and support for mass transit.
Of course this is easier said than done, as the expectation of free parking is a national issue, which individual communities must struggle with locally. How do you weigh the parking expectations of out-of-towners looking to spend money in your city with the realities of how parking is affecting your urban landscape?
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