[Vision2020] Re: Parking Downtown Moscow

[Paul Rumelhart]

So you encourage a handful of people to walk, make a few bucks on street 
parking, and watch 90% of the people that can't find an easy or cheap 
parking spot drive to the nearest mall or supercenter? Sometimes the 
free market is not all it's cracked up to be.

Paul

Nils Peterson wrote:

>Philip
>Thanks for an interesting pointer, the book is available at the APA website,
>and the first chapter is there as PDF.
>
>http://www.planning.org/bookservice/pdf/FreeParkingChapter1.pdf
>
>I found this quote (the kicker is in the last sentence).
>
>Although urban planners have not ignored the commons problem cre-
>ated by free curb parking, they have misdiagnosed it. Planners have iden-
>tified the source of the problem not as the city¹s failure to charge market
>prices for curb parking, but as the market¹s failure to supply enough off-
>street parking. Cities therefore require ample on-site parking for all new
>buildings. The logic behind this policy is simple: development may
>increase the demand for parking, but cities can require developers to pro-
>vide enough on-site spaces to satisfy this new demand. If a new building
>increases the demand for parking by 100 spaces, for example, cities can
>require it to provide 100 new spaces so that competition for the scarce
>curb parking doesn¹t increase. Curb parking remains a commons, and
>cities require enough off-street parking to satisfy the increased demand.
>Amajor flaw in this solution, however, is the way planners estimate
>demand: they do not estimate it as a function of price. Instead, they make
>the unstated (perhaps even unconscious) assumption that all parking is
>free. They estimate the demand for freeparking and then require enough
>spaces to meet this demand. In effect, urban planners treat free parking as
>an entitlement, and they consider the resulting demand for free parking a
>³need² that must be met. Off-street parking requirements create an abun-
>dance of parking spaces, driving the market price of parking to zero,
>which explains why drivers can park free for 99 percent of their trips. Off-
>street parking requirements are a fertility drug for cars.
>Most markets depend on prices to allocate resources‹so much so that
>it¹s hard to imagine they could operate in any other way. Nevertheless,
>cities have tried to manage parking almost entirely without prices. To see
>the absurdity of this policy, look at it from a new perspective. Cities
>require off-street parking because the market supposedly fails to provide
>enough of it. But the market fails to provide many things at a price every-
>one can afford. For instance, it fails to provide affordable housing for
>many families. Advocates for affordable housing usually find themselves
>in an uphill battle, but without a second thought cities have imposed
>requirements to ensure affordable parking. Rather than charge fair-market
>prices for on-street parking, cities insist on ample off-street parking for
>every land use. As a result, most of us drive almost everywhere we go. 
>
>
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