Free parking, like free lunch, is not truly free. Someone pays for it, whether they know it or not. Outside of downtown areas, the cost of parking is usually embedded in the price of real estate, and passed along in the form of higher leases, rents and prices for products and services. Donald Shoup, a UCLA urban planner and arguably the nation’s foremost academic expert on parking, estimates that the capital value of parking facilities — parking decks, parking lots, on-street parking — equals that of motor vehicles and roads combined.
“Free” parking has at least two pernicious consequences: (1) by reducing the cost of driving, it encourages people to drive more often than they would otherwise, and (2) by separating buildings spatially, it reduces the number of buildings that fall within the 1/4-mile pedestrian shed of bus and transit stops, thus undermining the economics of mass transit.
As I argue in my column this week, at the root of this problem is the universal practice of local governments to set minimum parking-space requirements for every conceivable land use. Although a free market would provide a lot of “free” parking, it would provide significantly less of it than under the current regime. Yes, thanks to government regulations, American landowners have over invested in parking spaces to the tune of tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars, kneecapped mass transit and subsidized traffic congestion!
The very first thing we should do is repeal minimum parking-lot requirements and let property owners make their own calculations of how much parking they should provide. A free market, I suggest, would encourage property owners to devise creative solutions, such as clustering land uses that generate peak traffic demand during different times of the day: apartments at night, offices during the day, shops and restaurants in the evening.
The second thing we should do is embrace emerging GPS satellite technology that will simplify tracking and billing for parking services. Parking managers soon will have the latitude to apply a wide range of creative pricing strategies that will maximize parking-space utilization and charge motorists the full cost of their driving. For this article, I had the opportunity to interview Bern Grush, the visionary founder of Skymeter, a Canadian start-up that has solved the technical problems that had made satellite metering impracticable. Grush is taking Shoup’s academic thinking about parking and figuring out how to apply it in the real world.
Grush has some must-read ideas related to congestion pricing and other transportation-related topics that I will share in due course. For now, make sure you check out “No Such Thing as a Free Park.“
(Photo credit: Richmond parking lot after Hurricane Gaston.)