Municipal taxes and fees #2

Given all that I write that is pro-walking, pro-bicycling, and pro-transit while taking what seems to be a militantly anti-car position, the reality is that I am somewhat troubled by DC's new parking meter policies in the Central Business District and certain other high-demand locations in the city. See "Meters take a bigger bite out of D.C. parkers: Enforcement hours extended as city converts signs to reflect increases" from the Post, which describes how parking enforcement is being extended to 10 pm, and all day (til 10 pm) on Saturdays.

Plus the rates are increasing, to as much as $2/hour.

Now sure, I don't have a problem with making street parking more pricey, rather than being underpriced compared to parking garages. There are two main reasons to increase the price of street parking. One is by underpricing parking on the street, the more in demand parking on the street encourages people to search for street parking spaces to save money, increasing congestion. And the other is that underpricing parking on the street fails to realize its full value.

But there are some issues.

1. DC doesn't have a very good parking wayfinding-signage system that directs people to off-street parking;

2. Many off-street parking structures don't make their parking available to non-building clients, especially after the workday ends and on weekends;

3. Related to 2 is that fact that DC doesn't really manage parking, on-street and off-street, in a coordinated fashion, as a resource (I argue that DDOT needs to add a parking planner--they claim they have a parking planner dealing with parking, but the person wastes all their time dealing with the neighborhood parking programs), within commercial districts parking spaces need to be managed and shared amongst uses;

4. Because DC's commercial districts compete with other places that have more organized parking resources, either free or subsidized, to push the price of street parking ahead of what other areas do does hurt somewhat the competitive position of these areas (maybe not for people attracted to the entertainment value in Adams-Morgan and Georgetown, but Downtown certainly isn't all that as a shopping or entertainment destination compared to many other places);

5. Why all the focus on street parking in commercial areas of the city while residents, for the most part, get a free ride on parking? Even though the price is scheduled to rise, right now, people pay $15/year for a residential parking permit. Especially in high-demand areas of the city, such a space is worth more than $2,000/year.

Considering that automobile users do not pay their freight for the cost of roads, this subsidy is counter-productive, especially given the fixed and constrained inventory of parking spaces in neighborhoods.

In any case, I think we need to focus on transitioning to better policies, and not continuing to give resident parking a virtually free ride, just because it is easier to raise the fees on people who are most likely to be visitors to the city, rather than residents.

The blog entry below is reprinted from 3/22/2005:

The High Cost of Free Parking

It might not be paradise, but it's "free."

Yesterday's USA Today has an article about the new book by Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA, entitled The High Cost of Free Parking, and published by the American Planning Association.

According to the article:

Cities and taxpayers are wasting billions of dollars subsidizing parking on valuable land that could be used for housing or parks...The book challenges traditional thinking that cheap and plentiful parking is smart public policy. It comes at a time when cities and companies are studying how much parking to provide workers and how to encourage wider use of mass transit."

"For anyone who has spent hours circling for a parking space, the conclusions are surprising:

• Curbside parking in many cities is too cheap. Low rates on parking meters encourage people to cruise the streets to avoid costlier parking lots and garages
• Cities and suburbs require too many parking spaces around malls, apartments and office buildings. That wastes land that could be put to better use, and for much of the year, hundreds of spaces sit vacant.
• Shoup says cities mismanage parking supplies and pricing in an attempt to provide free or cheap parking to a car-obsessed nation. When developers are forced to build extra parking, their costs soar — and get passed on to consumers."

'It raises the cost of housing and, really, everything we buy[.] The cost of parking ... is just hidden from us. You pay for it in the cost of dinner (at a restaurant) even if you didn't drive', says Shoup.

Getting the most out of parking is a priority for communities that are struggling with dwindling revenue, worsening traffic gridlock and soaring prices for land and housing:
• Boston froze the number of off-street parking spaces.
• In Washington state, Oregon and Maryland, communities let office and retail developers build fewer parking spaces if they offer cash incentives or transit passes to employees to discourage driving.
• San Francisco realized that its parking requirements didn't match its vision for affordable housing and traffic control, says Amit Ghosh, the city's chief of comprehensive planning. 'We still had minimum parking requirements for residential parking of one parking space for one unit,' he says.

In San Francisco, the city first eliminated minimum requirements for downtown commercial buildings. Now it's proposing scrapping them for residences downtown and surrounding neighborhoods, especially near mass transit stops. If approved, the new parking guidelines would set a maximum of one-half or three-quarters of a parking space per housing unit.

These residential parking spots are subsidized way below what the market would actually bear for them," Ghosh says. "Almost 16% of city land holdings are street parking spaces."
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Parking for new development in Washington is still a big burning issue, particularly in the neighborhoods that ring Capitol Hill and Union Station. In the northwest quadrant, it is not uncommon for apartment buildings to have as many as 80% of residents not owning cars. But the idea of a car-limited lifestyle is still a stretch for people whose predominate planning and development paradigm is car-centric and suburban (this is a key downside about the city's residential resurgence, which is attracting new residents who "don't know how to live in cities").