The solution, as Donald Shoup advocated, is to raise (or in some cases, lower, and in general, have it be dynamic) parking rates to market-clearing prices for parking spots such that there are is always one (but not too much more) free spot available on the block.
That's a necessity, but I'd also add legalizing construction of dedicated parking structures in more places. Land is at a premium in any desirable place and street parking is a lot less efficient usage of that than a multi-level parking structure. As a driver I also prefer them. Circling around blocks is a waste of time and annoying and my car is safer in a dedicated building that typically has some cameras
This is not really because parking lots are not legalized (they are, and in fact are often required) but because structured parking is so expensive to build; $25-35k per space in an above ground garage and $35-50k per space underground. https://dcplm.com/blog/cost-of-building-a-parking-garage/
The only place I'm aware of that bans new parking garages in the US is Manhattan, which has a general parking cap; but providing enough spaces for the actual car travel demand to Manhattan would necessitate leveling the whole island and then some, so the policy is there to get people to stop driving to a narrow, congested island.
At least here in California the big driver is Prop 13. The flat parking lots all over Los Angeles have been owned by the same people for decades, usually since the 70s or earlier, so they’re paying a few thousand bucks in property tax while absolute raking in cash - they can usually meet their obligations with a week of revenue and the constant cash flow is a guaranteed lever for credit and loans. Selling or redeveloping the lots would trigger a reassessment, so the owners just keep them as the cash cow they are.
I have a friend who inherited three such lots in downtown ($$$) and he lives very comfortably off just that revenue because their old assessments totaled under a million so they never got reassessed (though the rules have become far less generous with Prop 19).
I've also heard that it's popular as a literal cash-heavy business. This allows it to be used for manipulating tax filings, in both directions: laundering other income, or under-reporting profits.
I am pretty sure that most areas here in Portland affected by the shortage of parking aren't zoned to allow building a parking structure. I haven't looked this up though. Edit: It's not downtown here that has this problem, but smaller, hip neighborhoods where you have a shopping street surrounded by an ocean of SFHs
If high cost is the issue, it seems like people are complaining about lack of parking but don't want it enough to pay the real, unsubsidized price. So why should everyone else pay for them?
When I last worked in Boston (decades ago... pre Big Dig), I shared a spot with a coworker (we alternated days) that was $600 a month for parking (total).
Im in Sydney AU and parking spots are more like 50-100k. In the city center, or desirable suburbs you might see $150-200k. The city has also restricted parking permits to 1/residential address, and eliminated them for businesses.
This has all been more-or-leas fine, with residential prices factoring in parking, and multi-tenant developments pulling in density via car stackers and the like. Oh, and a pretty functional transit system, of course.
You might think so at first glance, but if you multiply a regular parking space (9' x 18', 162 sq ft) by the median price per sq ft of a normal house ($244) you get $36288. Obviously these figures are specific to the US, but cars take up more space than you think, either because we're usually inside them or because we're just used to it.
For a whole parking garage you need many large I-beams, tons of concrete, frequently elevators are added, etc. Not surprising builders opt out of including them when they can.
I don't think this is actually necessarily true. Most of the AV fantasies involve cars driving about aimlessly when not in use or increasing congestion in the reverse peak towards parking lots in the suburbs during dead times, and to the extent that those scenarios increase vehicle miles traveled that might actually be worse than parking lots everywhere.
Yes, the system developed as it did for a reason, some of the more obscure being:
+ entrenched rent-seekers controlling properties in cities (it's almost axiomatic)
+ centralized transportation systems being subject to political and labor capture-- the main purpose is not great customer service
+ red tape in urban areas for everything
+ market forces created last-resort poor quality housing in cities
+ the car vs transit battle is winner-take-all at a neighborhood level, and transit does not compete properly on a metro or regional level, nor is the park-and-ride system fully competitive
+ car-compatible density negates transit density
+ different ownership model for rolling stock leads to over-investment for cars and under-investment for transit (you buy the car you personally can afford and it sits idle while you ride the subway car your grandparents' generation was willing to pay for collectively )
Is there at least seats available? As shouldn't public transport too be market clearing. So price should be high enough that there is always empty room in busses and the busses fully pay for themselves.
Usually yeah. London has buses every 10 mins on most routes. It can get very crowded at rush hour or school run time though. Several groups (OAPs, kids, disabled people...) get discounted or free bus passes which I wouldn't want to change.
Don't get me wrong - London public transport is fantastic. Extensive, frequent, convenient, and multi-modal. But the pricing is quite static so that people who use it for short inner-city journeys lose out a bit.
I think you are right and this is one of my issues with busses in most American cities. Basically, it's just going to be viewed as a worse version of your car. You have to create a categorical change and that's best achieved with rail, biking, and walking which can't be replicated by cars or busses. This doesn't mean we shouldn't have bus routes or anything, that's not great either, but we need to break the habit of hopping on/in motor vehicles if we want to see change.
But also, we need to actually fund public transportation. In most states the amount of funding allocated toward non-car infrastructure amounts to a rounding error.
So what can be done?
Write to your representatives at your city, county, and state level. When your state's department of transportation issues surveys or maps for feedback make sure to give feedback! If there are other opportunities where your local leaders are engaging with the public just mention you'd like to see better transit and walking infrastructure to reduce cost for taxpayers and increase quality of life. Ask for a meeting. Ask for explanations. Ask questions and keep asking questions.
The solution to poor people not having enough money is to give them more money (if you really want to help them).
It's not to make random consumer goods like parking free for all. If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor, so it's very inefficient at helping you achieve your goal of helping poor people.
In addition, many poor people won't want the thing you are making free. In the case of parking that could be because they don't own a car, so this plan doesn't help a portion of the population you are trying to help. Even more inefficient!
When people think we should have free parking to help the poor, it's mostly just status quo bias at work. Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free. Parking isn't any different.
I know this probably doesn't add a lot to the conversation but for me it articulated and cleared some inconsistencies I was failing to square up in my mind. So, nice, thanks. Do you have any books or articles that helped you in your analysis, I wonder?
>If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor,
Why does it seem as though some people believe there is an infinite supply of rich people?
Income disparity is so great that the cost of parking is irrelevant to the mythical army of rich people waiting off to the side for parking prices to come down.
I'm not even in the 99%, I'm in the 97% and I don't give a fuck about parking. I'm driving downtown to buy a $600 Barbour jacket from Orvis. I don't care about $20 for parking and I'm not coming downtown more often if parking is $0.
>Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free.
If you are poor milk and bread should 100% be free.
Support for SNAP (food stamps) routinely and consistently polls at >70%.
People who assert what you just did are in the extreme minority.
SNAP doesn't make food free in the sense of free parking, it gives money to poor people to buy food. The equivalent for parking would be market-rate parking with means-tested parking vouchers, which would be a much, much better solution than what we have now.
You're missing the trade-off between time and money (and how it differs based on wealth).
"Free for all" parking spaces allow you to trade your time (hunting a spot) for parking, the same way coupon-clipping trades time for a discount on food.
You can say "eliminate coupons, all food should be at market price", but coupons really are an effective way of helping people. They segment the market by being too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.
You can trade your time for goods, but others might trade money for time. Something to think about maybe.
Free Shakespeare in the Park is a New York City civic tradition dating back to the 1950s. It is, as the name suggests, free to the public, but because Central Park’s Delacorte Theater has a finite number of seats, tickets are given out on a first come, first served basis. Some folks, who either can’t or don’t want to stand in line to get tickets, have taken to employing line-standers to do the waiting for them. According to Sandel, the price for a line-stander in 2010 was “as much as $125 per ticket for the free performances”
That's not why coupons exist, though, it's just a side effect. If coupons didn't exist and your goal was to help poor people eat, coupons would be a weird way to do it.
Why is it weird? It's a lot like the 10c can and bottle levy. Ostensibly for recycling, but also gives homeless people a job. Sneaks under the radar of regular-sized market forces, and gives them some agency in their lives.
It’s pretty badly targeted. Lots of poor people don’t have much time, and lots of better off people have lots of time and enjoy things like screwing around with coupons to get a discount. It also doesn’t do much for extreme poverty. If you have no money, it doesn’t matter if you can get a coupon for half off a loaf of bread or whatever, you still can’t afford it. So you end up giving more help to people who need it less.
If you want to help poor people buy food, give them money to buy food.
Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange? I would hope not. It might help the poor, but would be a really crappy way of doing so.
Free parking certainly might help the poor a teensy bit. But it's an incredibly bad way of doing so that comes with all kind of other bad side effects.
If helping the poor is our goal, that is not a good way of doing so. You're better off charging a market rate for parking and then taking that money and giving it to poor people.
> Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange?
That makes a lot of sense, but (mostly conservative) politicians still criticize many innovations because of their supposed effect on the (more or less) poor. Recent example: the 2023 reform of the Gebäudeenergiegesetz (Building Energy Law) in Germany, which sought to promote energy efficient ways of heating and decrease heating using fossil fuels, was met with furious opposition (including a lot of disinformation) from the conservative press and parties because of the poor poor building owners who can't afford a heat pump (which is more expensive to install, but already has much lower operating costs, which are likely to become comparatively even better in the future).
Part of what it allows is more housing (something that places like San Fran fail miserably at) because it's not constrained by having to provide 1.5 spots per bedroom or whatever arbitrary number.
And more housing is what is needed to contain housing costs.
It benefits the poor by allocating resources as efficiently as possible. If there is someone who is poor enough that they need help from society/the government, it would be much more effective to transfer money directly to the, rather than very very poorly (probably regressively in fact) target that help by having the public subsidize parking on their block.
They would rather have the $100 in efficient redistribution rather than the government spend $100 so that they can benefit by $1.
That's true but I'm not really worried about them. I'm worried about the people who are doing everything right and about to not be poor. Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. It's almost like a pseudo welfare cliff. Public policy should strive to avoid doing stuff like that.
I'm of the opinion that when public goods are cheap enough to face shortages all the time the market economy steps up because better off people will spend more to save time/hassle.
The problem is when things are expensive enough to kick out a lot of people, but not enough people actually alleviate shortage, which is basically how it currently goes with parking.
> Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. It's almost like a pseudo welfare cliff.
No, it's the opposite. A city built around everyone having a car makes car ownership a cliff. Normalising not having a car (and a reliable bus service - like the kind you get by turning street parking spaces into bus lanes - helps with that) makes the ladder gentler. If people are late for work because they couldn't find a parking spot just as often as people are late because the bus was late or didn't show, maybe there will be fewer horror stories of people getting fired because their car broke and they couldn't afford to get it fixed.
The market economy has solved none of these problems, and I suggest looking up just how socioeconomically mobile people in the US really are (it's not great).
Price parking at the market rate. Demand for other forms of transportation increase substantially. Provide it. Poor people can now take cheap buses and trains instead of expensive cars.
If you're worried about the transition, subsidize other forms of transport and build that out first, but forcing poor people to own cars just to make it to work is not a good way to help them.
Price parking at the market rate. Political competitor criticizes you for being an "eco-dictator" and promises a return to free parking. You lose the next election.
Sorry for the cynicism, I'm actually for increasing the price of parking, but recent political events have robbed me of any illusions that environmentally friendly policies have a future. When they have a choice between the environment and paying less money (short-term), most people will choose paying less money.
Outside of maybe a couple urban areas like NYC, that's patently untrue in the United States. It would not surprise me if the poor frankly had more and older/rougher cars than their more wealthy counterparts.
One of the ways it benefits them is by reducing traffic congestion so buses can get through. A significant amount of traffic in parking-contested areas is from cars looking for parking.
