American approach to parking policy is broken

[Bridges]

Harvard Political Review article on the economic waste of our current city parking policy

http://harvardpolitics.com/covers/parking-policy-smartphone-city/

Some hits

Largely overlooked in the popular media discussion, however, are the reasons why Haystack and MonkeyParking were able to make a profit in the first place. Unlike in the private sector, where prices typically settle at the market-clearing price, parking has been deliberately kept under the market-clearing price, even free, on political grounds. The results—the perceived impossibility of finding a free space in a convenient location, added congestion as drivers circle blocks finding places to park (some surveys in New York City, in which researchers approached cars at stoplights, suggest that 30 percent of city traffic comes from parking searches), and the growth of a black market to accomplish what the controlled market can't—are all what anyone with a basic grounding in economics would expect from a price ceiling that encourages demand far in excess of supply.

The negative effects of parking minimums and free parking are well-established. They drive up housing costs, as every buyer or renter of an apartment, with or without a car, must pay for a parking spot as well. They require developers either to use expensive urban land on surface parking lots or to build structured garages.

This adoption of the rhetoric of populism by advocates of policies whose effects are quite unpopulist, however, persists because the lower classes—who have less money and fewer connections to political leaders and the media—are politically neutralized.....

...newspapers often quote motorists worried about the loss of car lanes but very rarely quote bus riders. This, he says, gives the impression of "a debate between, on the one hand, neighborhood residents who drive, and on the other, government transportation planners and their transit-nerd friends." He claims that the root of the problem is that journalists for major news outlets rarely know people who rely on the bus.

Bearing all this in mind, what can be done to fix parking shortages? We can begin by recognizing that often, the "shortage" is entirely spurious, or could be fixed with better management of existing parking. "Parking studies in towns in the Boston area tend to find a pretty consistent pattern that in a lot of places there's a perception of a parking problem," Robertson noted, "but really there's available parking, it's just a little bit further away."

The standard American approach to parking policy is broken, creating false perceptions of shortages, unnecessary traffic problems, and vast amounts of economic waste. A serious political effort to address this must recognize that supply and demand applies to parking just as surely as it applies to everything else, and fix the broken rhetoric around urban policy that ignores the needs and even existence of the car-less urban class. Such a political program will be challenging, as the benefits of the status quo are obvious every time someone parks without needing to pay, whereas the manifold costs—in inflated housing prices, pollution, and congestion—are hidden. But it can, and must, be done.