Free parking costs a fortune

UCLA urban planning teacher Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking makes the case that urban parking has a high, hidden cost:

The free parking that Americans love isn't really 'free' at all. A recent parking garage project in New Haven, Conn., for example, cost more than $30 million for almost 1,200 spaces - that's more than $25,000 per space. If you were to finance it using a mortgage, the actual cost would be over $40,000 per space. This breaks down to roughly $135 a month, or $1,600 a year per space - not including externalities like the air pollution and congestion created by increased trips drawn by cheap parking. Even when garages and meters charge for parking, they rarely charge the real value of the parking space. (In Vauban, by contrast, drivers must purchase a parking space in the garages at $40,000 each.) All this amounts to a massive subsidy. Shoup calculates that in 2002 the total subsidy just for off-street parking was between $127 and $374 billion (for comparison, the budget for national defense that year was $349 billion).

Who pays for this? Everyone. The cost of building all that parking is reflected in higher rents, more expensive shopping and dining, and higher costs of home-ownership. Those who don't drive or own cars thus subsidize those who do.

Free parking can become a drain on city coffers. According to a study (PDF) by Bruce Schaller, deputy commissioner of planning and sustainability at the NYC Department of Transportation, the city was losing more than $45 million in parking meter revenue annually as a result of the free parking privileges commonly offered to city employees. But the costs are more than economic: free parking also changes behavior, encouraging us to take more trips and drive alone more often. According to the same study, without that free parking, 19,200 fewer vehicles would enter Manhattan every day, easing congestion.

Free Parking Isn't Free (via Kottke)

• [Anonymous]

  The US. The country that gave the rest of the world “free” parking. Thanks guys. This is just one example of all the hidden subsidies for cars, starting with cheap fuel (no “polluter pays” taxation) and ending with cheap car loans (on an asset that continuously devalues?) and disposable cars.

  Americans are among the fattest people in the world. They also drive everywhere in common mythology. Are the two, perhaps, related? Would it really kill people to walk a mile from a station – is 15 minutes really that bad, or is it too “socialist” to walk?

  The most energy wasteful nation on earth, and you are wondering “gee, are we doing something wrong?”. Sheesh.

• [Anonymous]

  A lot of comments seem to be focusing on driving vs their current public transit situation. This is not a fair comparison, however, as the current public transit is often extremely poor because it is used only by those who can’t afford cars.

  Consider the problem of transporting bulky or heavy items. This is simply solved by having the items delivered. Currently this is impractical since most people are using cars, but in a post-car city such delivery would be an easily available choice.

• [Anonymous]

  Hi folks. Glad to see this discussion.

  I’m almost finished with my undergrad degree in urban planning, with an emphasis on transit planning and driving reduction planning, especially in suburbs. You might think I’ve jumped on the bandwagon in support of eliminating free parking and hiking parking fees where they already exist, as so many of my colleagues have. But no, I haven’t.

  There is nothing original about Donald Shoup’s observation that driving is subsidized. Most people figured that out 40+ years ago, when the problems with American auto dependency had mounted to the point that they became part of the national consciousness, with traffic, sprawl, urban decay, white flight to the suburbs, oil dependency, and air and water pollution. However, that is probably part of why Shoup’s ideas have become so popular: they are based on so little additional thought.

  While I definitely agree we need to reduce our car use, stop facilitating driving, and find ways to facilitate alternatives to driving, there are many problems – of a serious nature – with Shoup’s approach.

  First, it’s discriminatory. Parking fees are a flat tax: everyone pays the same fee per hour or day, regardless of income. This hurts poor people more than the rich, because it takes a bigger chunk out of a poor person’s income. A parking fee high enough that it would make it impossible for a low-income person who can barely afford gas and insurance (such as me! currently) to drive to a destination (say, $1 total for parking) could also be small enough for a rich person to not even take notice. At most, feeding the meter or paying the attendant would be an inconvenience.(1)

  Second, it’s discriminatory in another way. If poor people are forced out of cars and onto transit with this flat tax, and the rich continue to drive, **even if the parking fees are required to be used entirely for transit improvements, and are high enough to subsidize transit as much as driving**, it creates a separate – and therefore, inherently unequal – transportation system: transit for the poor, car driving for the rich. No matter how much money flows from the parking meters into transit agency coffers, as the Supreme Court observed long ago, there is no way to have separate *and equal* accommodations. They will be inherently unequal.

  And that only follows logically. The well paid elected officials, city planners, administrators, traffic engineers and yes, transit planners who will continue to be able to afford to drive will not create a transit system as convenient and comprehensive as they will keep creating for their own primary form of transportation – cars – even if they are well intended public servants. Since they won’t be on the transit themselves, they will remain blissfully unaware of the full extent of the transportation access and convenience needs of full-time transit riders and the significance of those needs for reaching equal opportunity and social equality. Believe me, I see this every day where I live in suburbia. The transit planners, who rarely see the inside of a bus, have no idea how severe the consequences are due to the inconveniences, hassles, and barriers to transit use for the bus-dependent here. Even if they take the bus once a month, to travel across our 8-mile wide city in 4 hours round trip, which is certainly an inconvenience, and which would cost them ~3 hours more per month than driving that same distance once a month, that is nothing compared to the bus-dependent rider making that same trip by bus daily, 5 days per week, costing the bus-dependent person 60 hrs more per month than if they could drive. Sixty hours of bus riding per month means not having the time for other things, such as being able to take night classes after working during the day. It means the difference between being able to get a college education in this suburb or not. That is a massive economic, social and political inequity issue.

  Even doubling our local $8 million/year transit budget would not render it close to providing the transportation access that a car driver has. I know, because I chose to not drive for 4 years here, and my life is blissful now that I’ve returned to driving, even though I only use 1 gallon of gas per week, and am very frugal with the car.

  Hiking parking fees won’t determine how much we each drive, but *who* drives. And where.

  Third, charging for parking is a form of “sin” tax. The problem with charging sin taxes for “saintly” causes (such as for funding transit) is that those saintly causes end up depending upon a certain amount of sinning to keep going on, to keep the money flowing in.

  A public mandate to charge for parking will encourage public officials to 1) keep the parking we already have and 2) create more parking, because it will be an opportunity to generate much-needed revenue.

  This will not help, but undermine, our making the much-needed shift from car-dependency to transit use. We need to be using on-street parking for bike lanes and raised bike lanes, or for dedicated bus lanes for bus rapid transit (BRT). We need off-street lots for apartment buildings and office space, to create the level of population density necessary to make good transit cost-effective to provide.

  Consider a similar example:

  Many suburbs are now ringed on their perimeters by big box stores offering low prices and huge free parking lots, gutting downtown shopping districts and leaving shoppers car-dependent to reach these outlying stores, poorly served by transit, because the stores are spread out around the city perimeter, instead of grouped together in the city center, and because their vast parking lots are inconvenient for bus riders to walk across, from the bus stop to the store doors. This pattern of development has occurred because the local tax revenues from big box stores are too lucrative and cities have few other sources of revenue, especially here in California since Prop. 13 in the 1970s gutted local property tax revenues. Electeds just can’t find other ways to raise much needed funds for city services, so they wince and approve construction of sprawling, outlying big boxes.

  The same will happen if there is public agreement to charge more for parking. Parking will become a revenue opportunity that cities won’t want to relinquish, and *will* want to create more of, all under the rubric of “funding transit,” ostensibly to reduce driving!

  However, maintaining or increasing the quantity of parking, to fund transit use, would be a bit like elementary schools selling cigarettes as a fundraiser for anti-smoking programs.

  It is important to explore new ideas to solve our serious problems with car dependency. However, it is even more important to critique new ideas as they come along, to refine them or develop even better ideas, before implementing poorly thought out ideas whose short-comings we didn’t take a close enough look at, before hand, only to have undesired consequences adversely affect people and the environment that could have been prevented. We need to make sure we are implementing the most sound ideas before adopting them.

  (1)(The inconvenience factor of having to pay a minor amount for parking might be a small but smarter deterrant to driving: just charging $.01/hour would nudge driving a teensy bit closer to the inconvenience of transit, which might not be a bad approach, especially if combined with other inconveniences for drivers, such as eliminating parking or placing it further away from store entrances than the bus stop.)

  Also, I think that increasing gas taxes, while still having some of the equity problems of a flat tax, would be better than increasing the cost of parking, especially if the revenues were used for something we don’t like, and that would make sense to eliminate as we reduced our car dependency, such as traffic cops or the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  That’s because a parking fee can deter an entire trip, whereas a higher gas tax deters the number of miles driven, but not necessarily any particular trip. It allows people to continue to drive, but penalizes us for the number of miles we drive, encouraging us to use our cars less, without necessarily knocking out any particular trip. It is more effective at deterring joy riding (sightseeing by car for long distances.) Thus, though it is still discriminatory as a flat tax, it is less discriminatory in effect, because it better permits necessary driving.

• [Anonymous]

  lotsa great debate pro and con. Griffin, Phisrow, #5,7,17,20: I’m feeling you.

  But nobody has touched on this idea yet and I think about it constantly: if the human body seated in a simple chair takes up–what?–say 2′x2′ or unless one is morbidly obese 3′x3′ of ground space max, then even a volkswagen beetle is the scale equivalent of a danged McMansion. A city isn’t successful with all its real estate going towards mansions. you need a lot more apartments/mixed use buildings: high occupancy and optimization of space is analogous to public transit/bikes/scooters/motorcycles/skateboards… ANYTHING but a car.

  Not to mention that heart disease is the #1 killer in the USA, and cars enable arteriosclerosis like an ATM in a strip club. So if we’re talking about subsidies pro/con, how about that most americans own a car but not a viable health plan? As a society, who pays for your fat ass in the hospital?

  Arguing about parking is just tangental to the issue that cars are a bad idea. Insert environmental arguments here. Driving is fun, though.

• [Timothy Hutton]

  As someone who has driven into Manhattan several times in my life (probably less than ten times), I can say with nearly absolute uncertainty there is no such thing as free parking in NYC.

  As a commercial enterprise, Parking is one step lower than self-storage spaces IMHO, and I tend to view both as simple real estate plays, where the hope is to buy land cheap, ride it as it inflates over time, and collect enough money each year to cover taxes & minimal payroll, and sell the land when it’s value peaks…

  Arguably, “free” municipal parking is funded by the members of the community, they see value in it beyond the direct return on investment from ownership of the land. Without parking spaces the shops would have less customers, without customers there would be no shops (or rents would plummet). Does it cost the community – sure, does it provide benefit in excess of it’s cost, I guess. It helps politicians get re-elected, and everyone likes free parking. It’s a win-win!

• [lindsayb]

  I am going to comment as one of the only people who have actually read Shoup’s book, and as another urban planner, and someone who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, got my first car for my 16th birthday, and later chose to be car-free. I’ve been car-free for 10 years, except for one year I spent in southern Cali. I now depend 95% on my bicycle, and 5% on public transit.

  Some arguments from above comments: “I’ll take my business elsewhere.”
  Business owners will be sorry to see you go until a mixed-use condo goes up in place of a giant parking lot and foot traffic goes up astronomically. You can park 30 bikes in one parking spot. Bluemadonna made this point already. Sure, current economic conditions make this more challenging, but if we had not created car-dependent communities in the first place, people would have choices, which brings me to another argument.

  “it disproportionally affects the poor.” if public transit were as nice here in the US as it is in many other countries, and as fast, reliable, and convenient, then this wouldn’t be an issue. People would prefer it, with exceptions.

  “I have to use my car for work.” If pricing were to be implemented according to a community’s needs (shoup goes into a lot of detail on this), revenue were used to make improvements to the streetscape or the provision of transit, it would make driving that much less annoying. There would be less traffic, you wouldn’t have to spend a long time looking for parking, and you can make up for that extra $3 you have to spend by having one less PBR tallboy.

  #48 prefers gas tax instead. But rich people will just buy hybrids; they are already doing this. And with increased fuel economy, the highway trust fund is already experiencing budget problems and looking for alternative funding.

  Overall, putting a price on parking makes economic sense but people hate having previously free things taken away from them. It won’t make our American suburbs magically turn into walkable European towns, but when builders and developers aren’t required to provide insane amounts of parking for free, the look and feel of our communities will improve. And if those revenues go right back into the street (as shoup proposes), we will create much more attractive and healthy places to live. Places where you can walk to the grocery store or bike as I do, or take pleasant and efficient transit, use a car-sharing program on occasion, or drive your own car…if you insist.

  I love where I live because I have more choices than most people do. I chose to live here for that reason, and then found my job. I’ll never go back to a car-dependent suburb, and I wish more people could experience the freedom of not owning a car.

• [dragonfrog]

  Anon @17

  You obviously live someplace with desperately inadequate public transportation. I do too – your description of the process is entirely familiar.

  I’ve also lived in places with good public transportation, and the difference is amazing. I contend that it makes no sense whatever to keep a car in Paris, or Munich, or Montreal – places with real transit systems. Lots of people do, out of vanity if nothing else, but when they’re in a hurry they take transit because it’s faster and less hassle.

• [bluemadonna]

  @45:

  Well, sure. By not building parking, there is definitely the potential that people will not come to the downtown, will shop elsewhere. Having parking, all else being equal, would be good for business. However, all else is not equal. A parking garage (or worse yet, a lot) will take room that could be used for a different purpose, like another business, or an apartment building, or even a public plaza or park. These all have benefits which attract people and/or generate tax revenue which would be lost if the space were used for parking. Plus, when people arrive by car, well, they have to drive there. That means traffic. If downtown traffic results in jams that make a 15 minute trip into a 45 minute trip, people won’t shop there anyway, free parking or no. Well, what can be done about that? You widen the roads, narrow the sidewalks, remove obstacles like pedestrian crossings. You demolish entire city blocks to build freeways. And then? It’s easier to get to the place by car, but harder and far more unpleasant for everyone else. And since everyone drives, the traffic still sucks. And you have a city that’s riddled with hulking parking garages and oppressive freeway underpasses, and everyone says, “screw it, I’m going to shop in the new strip mall out in the suburbs.”

  On the other hand, ditch the plans for the parking garages. Focus on providing good and fast transit connections. Keep the sidewalks wide and pleasant, and fill the space you would have used for cars with shops and apartments and amenities for people. Not only is it a more pleasant environment, but you often find that you don’t have to travel great distances to find what you need, because it’s right next door.

  TL/DR: Building plenty of free parking provides real benefits, but they are short term and ultimately self-defeating. The first priority in city planning should be people, not cars.

• [Anonymous]

  truly basic economics really: anything that you subsidize grows and anything you charge for decreases.

  fine charge for parking, but then guarantee where those funds will go; for example public transportation

  the problem with solving for externalities, ala the coase theorem is assuming that the entity solving the problem will then be ethical with the funds raised.

  so perhaps cities can tax parking spaces at their calculated economic value like a property tax as a way of beginning to redirect people attention.

  personall i live in an area that has allowed me to begin using zip cars and have eliminated my own car. this isn’t practical for many yet, but sure the costs of the car should be fully realized by those who use them.

• [The Life Of Bryan]

  Just check out satellite imagery of your hometown and I bet you’ll be surprised at how much prime, commercial real estate is devoted solely to parking cars. And one thing about it that’s starting to filter through the public consciousness in coastal areas such as this one are the huge effects all those parking lots have on our already considerable drainage issues.

  @38, I live south of the Manson-Nixon line as well. I ride to work every day. I manage to clean up, change, and relax enough to work (ironic statement, eh?) in just under ten minutes. I don’t offend my coworkers with noxious odors, and we don’t have showers either. Some day you might find that most things in life get a lot easier once you stop telling yourself they can’t be done.

• [Anonymous]

  Wait… where is there free parking in New Haven? I certainly haven’t seen any, and my husband spends hundreds of dollars to park in a recently-constructed garage (possibly even the one mentioned in the article).

• [RedShirt77]

  Free Parking is our god given right as Americans. If we eliminate that doesn’t it mean all those Indians, french, and Mexicans died for nothing?

• [Anonymous]

  Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach is just out to collect more money for the state disgiused as environmental problem. Free parking is paid for, Shoup talked about the amount of property a restaurant needs to provide for parking. True the lot might be bigger than the restaurant but the cost of the property is worked into the price of the food. The parking at the mall is free also, well when you buy that pair of sunglasses or clothing ect., yeah guess what you paid for your parking when you bought that stuff. Go to the movies lately, probably paid $8.00 for a small coke and some popcorn am I making my point.
  Shoup and Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach want to make it sound like people are getting away with something.
  There’s another issue some people have no choice but to drive to work due to the distance, or where work is located.
  Also one more thing to say, theres something else thats not free, parking meters, gates and employees to manage the network of booths or meters for collecting parking fees, Upkeep of all the meters ect. California is broke, it would have to borrow money to install all the equipment and just like any other govt program it would soon be mismanaged and cost alot more than planned.
  Business can’t afford to start the progrtam either and probably don’t want to.
  It’s a very bad idea.

• [telaquapacky]

  If you’ve ever tried to buy or build a commercial building, you know that the city requires you to provide a certain number of parking spaces, including one or more handicap spaces. In my town the city-built, free parking structures are in the quaint, old downtown where businesses crammed together before laws were in place that mandated parking. That was also back in the day when Americans were more humble of means and not too proud to travel by public transport, or better yet, put their dogs on the sidewalk and hoof it.

• [zog]

  Interesting arguments both for and against (in the comments).. at least it provides an interesting point to drop on the table when people have one of those “car registration fees subsidise those freeloading bike riders” etc etc type whingefests.

• [EH]

  So let me get this straight: blind people are subsidizing the sighted enjoying free sunsets due to a lack of skyscrapers on the beach? Couldn’t the city make a lot of money from that kind of development?

• [chutz]

  I live about 2 hours out of Montreal, and commute there every second week for business reasons. I typically take a bus there and use public transit (bus/metro or the bixi public bike system, which is awesome BTW). Having a car in Montreal, especially downtown, is way more hassle and expense than it’s worth. It’s usually faster, cheaper and less stressful to just walk, bike or take the bus/metro just about anywhere in the general vicinity of downtown.

• [Brainspore]

  @ anansi133 #33:

  Our current internal combustion automobile infrastructure depends on cheap oil. Car culture depends on cheap energy. It’s still a little early to say whether or not new technologies will fill in the gap as gasoline prices rise.

  Cheap oil isn’t going to last much longer but it isn’t gone yet- the behemoth Ford F-150 is still one of the the top selling cars in America (and I don’t think most of those owners haul stuff on a daily basis).

  Of course oil is subsidized too.

• [consideredopinion]

  http://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2009/08/overparked.html

• [bcsizemo]

  I find these discussions so polar it’s weird.

  There are the people who go, I’ve lived in “blank” city and never needed a car.

  And the others that say well if you live anywhere other than a city you’ll need one.

  Pyros makes and breaks his/her own argument. Sure inside a major (somewhat functional city like NY) your need for a car is limited. But at the same time leave the city and you don’t make it very far on foot, train, bike, ect.. Realistically the US should be about 1/10 it’s size with the same number of people if the idea of a car is to be abandoned. That would leave the rest of the US to be used for agriculture, which requires transport, including cars. (You can’t live/work on a 100+ acre farm and not have a viable way to get off of it.) That is one reason why those “farm” states have such power. Who feeds all the city dwellers? Who puts food in their markets, what makes all that work? It’s modernization. Without the ability to transport all that food, major cities wouldn’t exist.

  I also disprove when authors point out things like NYC. NYC is not the typical city in the US. Pick something substantially smaller and less dense. Work on that model if you are so focused on the US.

  Also to the people in Europe and Canada who keep pointing out that the fat Americans need to get off their ass and walk/ride a bike. Hmm, I live in the South, todays high is 95F with a humidity of 45% and a dewpoint of 66F. That translates into sweating in the shade. So basically we might as rule out showers, because what’s the point? By the time I walk 1/2 a mile to the store my underwear will be dripping wet and I’ll smell like a gym sock. So yeah riding a bike/walking/running is great for exercise, but as a form of transportation 4-6 months out of the year it isn’t going to work for going most places (like a job).

  It also completely blows me away that NO ONE on here even referenced the previous article from a couple months ago about the self driving cars. The problem is car owner ship, not the car. I might be up for “national” car rentalship if it meant I schedule a pickup and arrive at a destination at a given time. The efficiency of car usage would go up considerably. (Over all gas consumption probably would remain similar, as the total miles moved would be about the same.) Car owner ship is something that is more common in the US, but can be found worldwide. It’s the reason you have such a large selection of aftermarket car parts. I could handle owning one car, and simply paying for the right to use a transportation service. (And give that 30 years and most people wouldn’t own a car. The same way teens and young adults see the home phone as obsolete. If anything it would be a status symbol at best.)

• [Pyros]

  @31 Parking is tangential to the whole idea of the automobile, and automobile “ownership” which, owing to unintended consequences, has been the most wasteful ideas man has ever concocted.

  Because in America, we’ve built everything to accommodate the ungainly scale of the automobile, it is very difficult, if not impossible to meet basic survival needs by walking. Nevertheless, distances traveled by automobile are directly proportional to its scale. If cars didn’t exist, it is unlikely that you would have to travel over a mile to get bread. When I lived in New York, virtually everything I ever needed could be found within two blocks. By car, the distance would typically be, in an American suburb, ten to fifteen times that. As it so happens, the car is equivalent in mass to about ten to fifteen humans. It doesn’t seem like we’ve really accomplished much.

  The city is a living arrangement made possible by advanced agricultural technologies, and represents, among other things, an economy of movement. As hunter-gatherers we must have used our mental energies to hunt and gather, and that was an ongoing, all consuming, never ending activity. But what occupies the collective mind when a mental void is created by a surplus of food (created by agriculture)?

  In ancient Egypt, the solution to this odd problem was to engage the population in building a series of increasingly larger giant stone pyramids. The Pyramids were the iconic emblem of the idea that, in the presence of surplus, a central physical and mental energy sync must be created around which human activity takes place. That basic idea underlies almost all human activity in a post hunter-gatherer world. We live our lives in service to some symbolic abstraction.

  Therefore, even though the Pyramids had no intrinsic value to feed or cloth people, people were nevertheless given something of value (food and clothes and other items of survival, for example) to create them. To a certain degree, cars in modern American life, serve a function similar to the Pyramids in ancient Egyptian life.

  For such a symbolic system to work on such a scale, an individual worker must be able to directly connect his activities around his cultures given energy sync to practical needs: “if I haul a certain amount of stones by a certain time to a certain place, I will be given bread,” he might think. Nevertheless, the overarching concept of the Pyramid, just like the car, is the human equivalent of the wheel in the hamster cage.

  The Pyramids had a symbolic meaning too, of course, and this meaning was inseparable, in some form, from the Egyptian concept of life and death. Ditto with the car in the American mind. I like to think of driving as an activity that one performs while entombed in a giant sarcophagus. Like the sarcophagi of the ancient Egyptians, they are meant to show our status. I could go on with the analogy, but currently don’t want to, except to say that car is just as much a symbolic representation of death as it is of life.

  One of the underlying ideas behind the car is that it had the power to make the city obsolete because it was no longer as important to economize space. Cars, in a sense, were thought to be the solution to the city (where ignorant, uncultured people never really found a place, and where, country folk will tell you, a whole lot of corruption occurs). Instead of trying to make better cities the way Housman (I think it was) did in Paris, we have diverted our energies elsewhere, and as a result, have really horrible cities in America with few exceptions.

  The rural/urban divide is kind of the pivot point in American politics, and the way we move around is at the center of this. In no other industrialized, Western economy do rural interests have such disproportionate power as they do have in the states. This goes back to the wisdom of some of the hallowed “framers” of our government, particularly Jefferson, who sought to create a model of government based on an unrealistic agrarian ideal. Therefor, Montana, with a population of less than 1 million, has just as much power in the senate as California, a state with 36 million people. Do the residents of Montana have much interest in allocating Federal dollars to build light rail in urban centers, or do they have more of an interest in expropriating federal tax dollars from urban centers to improve the interstate highway system that might allow their goods to be brought to market more efficiently?

  Of course it wouldn’t matter that much what the interests of Montana might be if it weren’t in league with so many of its rural brethren. Forget, for a moment, democrat or republican. Count up all the “red” states. The one striking feature about them is they have smallish populations. IN aggregate, though, they have a lot of power. I think this points up one serious flaw in the way our government was arranged. But who in America ever wants to talk about that? To fix the problem, you really have to take power away from the red states, which is tantamount to changing the very fabric of our government on the most foundational level.

  Parking is just one of the many, many ills caused by mass automobile ownership. If you build a 7-11, for example, how much land is needed for the store, and how much for the parking lot? What about for a mall? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the cost of purchasing and developing the land has to be passed on in the form of higher prices for goods and services. Virtually every brick and mortal business that has a traffic of consumers has to build a parking lot equivalent to the amount of cars that might arrive on one if its busiest days. Most of the other time, the parking land goes unused.

  Though I hate all of the parking problems caused by cars, what about the approximately 42,000 people killed every year by cars? Shouldn’t we start with that first?

  But the concept of cars and car ownership is so firmly ingrained in the American mind, that we are quite willing to accept, or, more accurately, ignore these externalities. When people are killed by cars, or when every year there is a slaughter equivalent to a medium sized stadium full of people, all we can bring ourselves to do is to blame bad driving, alcohol, whatever. We never, never question the car itself.

  Is car ownership worth this annual slaughter? Is it true that an alternative cannot be imagined? If so, does the slaughter become more difficult to justify?

• [Anonymous]

  Well, this also fails to connect free parking with two important points. It can create an area, or zone, that people enjoy – thus making a city more enjoyable which in turn drives up the “value” of a city. Second, lacking free parking can kill a neighborhood. Here in LA we have Westwood, a once prime destination which now suffers from one revitalization to the next. The lack of good free parking keeps myself and just about everyone else away in droves. This past winter Beverly HIlls dropped their free parking from 2 hours to 1, and business dropped considerably (we’re talking Gap and Cheesecake Factory not Guicci). Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade has done so well due in part to the 6 giant free parking structures (pay after 6pm, same as BH) which attract the population. I don’t think any city would turn down the taxes generated by the Promenade to charge a few bucks for parking.

• [greensteam]

  #30 and others are right. There are no free lunches and no free parking. Everything costs. As a city councillor here in central Glasgow I know that developers feel in a bind: they believe no one will take space in their development if it doesnt have parking, but the parking space (usually basement and ground floor garages space) costs them about £20,000 per space. That seems broadly similar to the amounts mentioned above.

  But this is in a city where only 57% of households have any access to a car. In some areas (very poor peripheral social housing schemes and very middle class city centre loft appartmentville) the car ownership is much lower than that. There is very very little parking in the city centre that is free at the time of use (which is what the commenters are really mostly talking about I assume), except for disabled drivers with a special Blue Badge.

  Lots of people dont have a car (like our family) and dont need one, since most short journeys are quicker by other modes of transport.

  Having said that, the timetables for the public transport system could really do with offering much better frequencies.

• [anansi133]

  Car culture is over. It’ll go down as a temporary 20 century phenomenon that was fun while it could last. Once you accept that it’s over, all of the parts that go into it become suspect.

  Drive through. Big Freeways. Traffic Jams. Car leasing. Bedroom communities. Oh, and free parking. They all depend on cheap oil in order to make sense. The cheap oil is gone, so do the math.

• [markfrei]

  meanwhile public transit is crumbling due to lack of funding and people grumble about the costs without comparing to the costs of driving.

• [Griffin]

  If free parking makes so little sense economically, why do so many succesfull companies bother to have huge, free, parking lots?

  Answer: Because, most of the time, free parking pays for itself. Many times over.

  Sure, there are places where it doesn’t make any sense – city centers? Yeah, right! Have parking outside of the city centers and public transit in. But its not the free parking thats stupid – its the people who put it in the wrong place.

  Speaking of New York, and hell, Boston too, thats actually what I do – park outside of the cities where the parking is actually free and commute in. But if there wasn’t any free parking at all? I simply wouldn’t go. A lot of people wouldn’t.

• [Takuan]

  sure cars are over. Welcome to motorcycle/three wheeler culture.

• [phisrow]

  But, remember, free parking is(along with cheap gas) a constitutionally guaranteed right for all Real Americans. In fact, only massive government subsidies of parking can protect us from socialist mass transit.

  In other news, welfare makes the free market cry; but bailouts are simply economic good sense.

• [Ted8305]

  Parking (or anything else requiring a few square meters of outside space) still is essentially free anywhere that’s not crowded.

  You’ll never get to a true “post scarcity” economy as long as there’s still a scarcity of space. So sure, blame cars, but don’t forget to blame overpopulation while you’re at it.

• [pecoto]

  This nicely ignores the fact that free (or cheap) parking keeps nearby businesses open and successful. The downtown in my city is dying a slow and painful death, bringing a lot of small businesses down with it because all parking there is metered (there are plenty of spaces, just none without an overpriced meter guarding them).
  When customers find it convenient to shop, they spend, that keeps the local economy strong, and often helps small mom and pop businesses. Wal-Mart can afford to buy a huge lot for every store…and if my money goes to help buy affordable (or free) parking for a small business, so be it.

  • [Anonymous]

    where are you? It must be in my city. My downtown is dying because of meters.

• [Anonymous]

  “Those who don’t drive or own cars thus subsidize those who do.”

  That’s not a terribly impressive complaint. People who “don’t” often “subsidize” people who “do”. Or vice-versa.

  People without children often complain that they are subsidizing people who do.

  People who don’t smoke often complain that they are subsidizing people who do, in the form of higher insurance costs.

  People who don’t approve of war often complain that they are subsidizing people who do.

  Guess what? People who don’t drive or own cars are, presumably taxpayers–and some of those taxes go for road upkeep! OMG!

  In a civil society–such as the one we have in this country–we need to be less concerned about “me” and more concerned about “us”. That’s the way it works.

  Or, to look at it another way…my paying for a parking space subsidizes your meal at a fancy restaurant that I’ll never go to. But I’m not going to complain about that. Are you?

  And yet another way…”encouraging more trips” to do what? Spend money, maybe? Keep the economy flowing? Visit scenic public parks? This is bad?

  I have to say, I am totally not impressed.

• [mdh]

  On the NYC point – aren’t you making the newly metered (formerly Transit Dept.) spaces available to other people who are currently not driving into the city, for want of parking? How do you reduce traffic by increasing public parking? Seems like all you’ll do is increase revenue at the expense of transit employees.

• [Anonymous]

  Please. I live in Brooklyn, pay a whole lot of taxes, and I park my car for “free” on the street. Except for the alternate-side parking tickets, the broken windows, stolen radios, etc……

  I happen to play drums for a living and need a car to transport my gear. I already pay a fortune in gas taxes, insurance, inspections, registrations, maintenance, etc….

  There is nothing free about owning a car. And if I had the money I might pay the $250 and up for a private garage space, but most lower and middle class drivers like me can’t afford any more auto-related expenses.

• [Thac0]

  I have the good sense not to live in an overcrowded urban wasteland where you cant park walk, think or breathe. No one subsidize’s my parking so go bugger off with your assumptions that we all live in your city.

• [EggyToast]

  We talked about this book briefly in one of my business classes. I think the major factor that the author overlooks is the idea that all space in a city should generate revenue. Free parking costs the city money if you assume that the space would go towards some other revenue-generating purpose. What if you put a wide sidewalk in its place? Or a park? My goodness, the parkland doesn’t generate any revenue at all! Even ignoring other uses, though, roads to that parking costs money, too. Do we erect tolls on every road to generate revenue, and do those tolls cover maintenance, return a profit, or simply try to reduce the number of cars?

  The real fallacy that the author commits is the purpose of metered parking. Metered parking is not intended to generate revenue — it’s to encourage the turnover of parking spots so that individuals can conduct business. That’s why there are cheap 15-minute meters in front of banks, and why the 4-hour meters seem further away from stuff than the 1-hour meter. It’s also why companies typically put employee parking in the rear and customer parking in the front — to encourage business.

  The author seems to simply run some numbers and point out how much it costs to stick a car somewhere. The problem is a lack of non-car transportation infrastructure so people have no choice but to drive. But there are already plenty of books written on that subject.

• [Enoch_Root]

  An interesting question is 19,200 less vehicles equals what in lost revenue to the city? I live not far from NYC (Rhode Island) and I have a lot of friends there. One of the main reasons I don’t go there more often is the huge PITA that is driving to NYC. I usually drive to a train station outside NYC that has reasonable or free parking rates and then take the train in. Driving in to NYC costs a huge amount in tolls and time and parking is at a minimum $30 a day. Yes free parking is available if you are willing to hunt for it and move your car depending on time restrictions. Adding $60-100 in parking fees, or 1-4 hours in commuting time for a weekend really makes a huge difference for me between visiting New York and Boston. I would probably spend about the same for a trip to either city so I wonder if it is worth the subsidy cost for parking?

  I am from Indiana and about a 3 hour drive from Chicago (similar to the time it takes me to get to NYC from RI)and I would visit Chicago much more often specifically because it was an easier transit and parking was much less of a hassle.

• [Ninth Stage]

  The high cost of free [insert here the free item you don't use at this time]. I nominate health care.

• [mn_camera]

  People will always need to go someplace at some very individualized time, some bringing (or receiving) objects large and ungainly enough to warrant some form of personal transport equal to the task. So parking (in some form) needs to be there.

  What is not needed is parking for someone who regularly travels into a center city area from home in the suburbs where public transit is available.

  One partial solution might be a surcharge on monthly parking ramp contracts (only regular commuters do these) with the proceeds dedicated to the subsidy of public transportation.

• [Enoch_Root]

  wow the first sentence of my own post kind of offends me… is there no edit button?

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    is there no edit button?

    No, but congratulations on completing your week-long ESL course.

• [mdh]

  Eggytoast –

  I see your point, what puzzles me is this –

  Free parking costs the city money if you assume that the space would go towards some other revenue-generating purpose.

  Traffic mitigation is another civic goal for which potential revenue is weighed against, clearly, since they are bragging about it at part of this idea to convert the spaces. If Public Transit reduces traffic, isn’t the needs of those workers part of the larger equation? I guess I’m thinking that parking is a perk of the job, for people who mostly don;t make a ton of money and who make the city operate smoothly.

  Making their lives harder to generate some spare change doesn’t equate to me with the potential disruption unless you build them a big parking garage, which was pilloried in the other half of the poat.

• [Pyros]

  #38 et al…

  I agree with basically everything you’ve written. New York is not a typical American city, and solutions need to be applicable to smaller cities.

  I have a car, and I don’t have any problem owning one. I was mainly lamenting the fact that we have made them compulsory. I wish I didn’t have to own a car, but I do.

  Car sharing is a great idea, but, in its most common form, it is severely limited. Zip car would be an example. I wrote VERY extensively about these limitations on this site and others several years ago.

  There is a company called Car2go (car2go.com) which is a fairly large initiative sponsored by Daimler/Benz. It started in Ulm, Germany a year or so ago, and will be coming to Austin, Texas soon. Not to brag, but everything about this idea is something that I had explicitly described to Bodo Schweiger, Rudy Six, and Dave Brook. Bodo and Rudy went to Daimler, and got them to do the idea, which is kind of exciting! This is the future of instant car rental because it does away with the need to schedule a car and return it to the pick-up spot at a specified time. Car2go uses GPS so that members can find cars. Enough cars are saturated in a certain locale so that finding one isn’t difficult.

  Part of the parking problem has to do with the fact that cars are idle most of the time because they’re only used by one or two people. If a system could be developed so that each car was used sort of like a horse on a merry-go-round then you could reduce the demand for parking spaces since fewer cars would be needed, obviously.

  My overarching idea for the Car2go concept that the Germans co-opted, was for local businesses to sponsor car-sharing. In Portland, where I was living at the time, local merchants were in league with the city parking administration, and if you went to Nordstrom’s or the movies, it was possible to get your parking validated so you wouldn’t have to pay. Since most trips in a car share vehicle shouldn’t need to be that expensive (if you’re only paying for drive time, and not parking time), a similar off-set could be imagined. Additionally, I advocated for making parking free for car share vehicles which I think is also what Portland has done.

  My feeling is that you will hear a lot about car2go in the future. It’s going to shake things up. The trials in Germany were very successful, and this is fairly unusual for car sharing which has had a hard time making a solid business case.

• [KWillets]

  This makes parking the largest Soviet-style economy in the world. Viva Socialism.

  There’s also a crime cost with free parking, I’ve learned, as drug dealers love to set up in parked cars.

• [Enoch_Root]

  @Senor Antinous / Moderator,
  It was a two week course you clod! Looking back I can see it made at least basic sense depending on how you read it. The main point being there is certainly a bonus gained from free parking. Consider a government subsidy… many examples follow.

• [Anonymous]

  And paid parking has a hidden detractor as well. As a consumer I refuse to pay for parking. If your not forward thinking enough to realize that customers drive cars to your business you deserve to loose out on business. If cities are not forward thinking enough to think that visitors will need parking the stores and tax revenue suffer. I live in a suburb outside of the city I live near and drive downtown for work. Because of the parking situation in the city I don’t do any shopping or dining here. I’m not going to help support a bad idea.

  Its not just the money that’s the problem. Its the hassle to go into the controlled deck. Its the worry of getting towed by some overzealous lot attendant and having to “feed the meter” and actually having to do the payment transaction.

  The simple truth comes down to you can’t force people to do what you want no matter how good a reason you think you have. Americans love their cars. Trying to force us onto public transit with paid parking and poorly planned cities only affects the poor. The wealthy will just move and use money to get around whatever road blocks you put up. All of the suburban bedroom communities are a perfect example of this which only makes matters worse.

• [Anonymous]

  THE REAL QUESTION: Is the tax revenue for the city (through increased sales) going to exceed $135 per month? Which leads us to the question: What is the total economic value of the shoppers who will occupy that space to the merchants that they are interacting with?

  In other words, how much money will the people who park in that spot spend in the surrounding stores every month?

  I think it’s not unreasonable to presume that each parking spot could be responsible for $900-$1200 or more each month. This is assuming that the parking structure is near capacity every day of course, which is a promotional issue.

  In my area there are two main shopping sectors, one is 10 miles away in Santa Barbara, the other is 20 miles away in Ventura. If there were no free parking in Santa Barbara, I would just take my dollars to Ventura every weekend.

  But I hate to say it looks like the analysis does not make its point that free parking costs the community an unreasonable amount.

  Oh yeah… and I SURE AS HELL wouldn’t take public transportation to go shopping for fun. Walking a mile to the train station? Spending an extra two hours each way of my desperately short precious free time to travel to shops and eateries?

  Yeah… you go ahead with that. I’m going to keep my car.

• [jacobian]

  Cars require 17 times the width of transport for the same carrying capacity as a train. If we just look at flux of persons versus land use, for city-centres cars are obviously idiotic. Car culture can not scale.

  The imagined time savings from driving directly to ones destination is quickly swamped by congestion caused by cars and the need to find appropriate parking. In the end, the time necessary to travel by car is greater in all but the least dense regions.

  In addition, the large number of cars on the roads makes buses slower and less efficient than they would be otherwise.

  Someone mentioned that we have to take into account the amount of money that a person would spend who is using that parking space. Do they think that people don’t shop in Europe? Obviously you need to replace car transport with public transport.

• [Anonymous]

  I am an urban planner.
  Ok, that’s out of the way. I mention it because some might take the opinion below with more weight. Others may choose to give it less.

  Free parking isn’t free.

  I hope (and feel) that its something we all knew.

  It is a subsidy. Is it wrong? That’s the debate. We subsidize all sorts of things and are quite happy to do so.

  I feel what is important to know (and yes, we can debate the accuracy of the methods) is what is the size of the subsidy.

  Personally I feel too much land is consumed by surface parking. Worse still, because it separates uses some much, it makes other forms of transportation (eg walking) less of an option.

• [Anonymous]

  Realistically speaking, urbanites who walk or use public transit do subsidise several of the facilities needed by drivers: roads, parking, even certain kinds of risk and environmental concerns.

  But why do people do it? Yes for some it’s ideological, but in Toronto, for instance, half the house costs twice as much, never mind the property taxes. With low vacancy rates, that’s if you can find a house at all.

  So people live what should be an hour or less drive away, but instead takes 3. In *Canada*, where a shorter drive in a slightly different direction puts you in a forest.

  Urbanisation is good to a point, but it seems to have gotten away from us. City planners are part of the problem. In my town (Hamilton) they’ve been increasing traffic congestion deliberately through downtown in a misguided effort to boost business. Instead, people who used to drive through go around, and so no one goes downtown now except transit users and those who work there.

• [rrh]

  How does the amount spent on parking compare to the amount spent on roads and highways?