Abundant free parking as a transportation strategy has not been especially wonderful for low-income people, who among other things:
- Often don't have cars at all, and have to walk that much longer to get across all the parking between places they want to be
- Spend a large portion of their incomes on cars, maintenance, fuel, insurance etc. when they even can
- Are required to live further away from productive places by the high cost of e.g. minimum parking requirements and low density ceilings "because traffic"
- Suffer the brunt of air pollution
Parking in a central business district should probably be as much of a luxury as living in one is today, and vice versa.
Oh I agree parking is a bad strategy overall. It shouldn’t be a luxury though, we should just provide better means of public transportation in dense cities.
It’s a solved problem, look at European cities like Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, and many more... But in America robust public transport never gets done for many reasons including that special interests don’t want it to.
Bill Gates doesn’t care about a $200 double parking ticket, in fact it’s probably worth it for him if if saves him time. He has no incentive to abide by that rule. If you scale it with income then everyone actually has skin in the game.
He also could easily avoid the direct fine by having a driver drop him off and idle outside, or just not directly own the vehicle in question.
The point of raising the price accessing any shared asset is to optimize usage of that asset. Otherwise you end up with private enterprises like non-street parking lots eating the profits with nothing going to the rest of the people.
You're not optimizing the usage though, you're just making it so that people who cannot afford won't be able to park. Sure, if you raise the price enough more spots will be open. What purpose could that possibly serve..?
If you don't want non-street parking lots to funnel in all the profit, then you provide efficient and wide-spread public transport.
