Donald Shoup, famed author of the most fascinating possible book about parking, can also do comedy. From his recent essay on “The Pseudoscience of Parking Requirements“:
Everyone wants to park free, and most people consider parking a personal issue, not a policy problem. Rational people quickly become emotional about parking, and staunch conservatives turn into ardent communists. Thinking about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain responsible for snap judgments about urgent fight-or-flight issues, such as how to avoid being eaten. The reptilian cortex is said to govern instinctive behavior like aggression, territoriality, and ritual display, which all play a role in parking.
Parking clouds people’s minds, shifting analytic faculties to a lower level. Some strongly support market prices — except for parking. Some strongly oppose subsidies — except for parking. Some abhor planning regulations— except for parking. Some insist on rigorous data collection and statistical tests—except for parking. This parking exceptionalism has impoverished thinking about parking policies, and ample free parking is seen as a goal that planning should produce. If drivers paid the full cost of their parking, it would seem too expensive, so we expect someone else to pay for it. But a city where everyone happily pays for everyone else’s free parking is a fool’s paradise.
I already knew the basic economics of parking when I started writing Build, Baby, Build. But it was Shoup who convinced me that parking regulations were a major restriction on housing supply. Residential parking restrictions sharply raise the price of multi-family housing, especially in urban areas. Commercial parking restrictions sharply raise the price of even suburban land, indirectly raising the price of suburban housing. All the parking spaces at the mall that are empty 99% of the year could have been housing instead!
P.S. Build, Baby, Build update: The storyboards are complete. My artist plans to have the pages done by June. The full-color book will be available for sale in early 2023. To whet your appetite, here’s the Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: The Home that Wasn’t There
Chapter 2: The Manufacture of Scarcity
Chapter 3: The Panacea Policy
Chapter 4: The Tower of Terror
Chapter 5: Bastiat’s Buildings
Chapter 6: Dr. Yes
Chapter 7: Mission to YIMBY
READER COMMENTS
Art K
Jan 11 2022 at 10:32am
We need more of this. It’s unfortunate that somehow as stated urban issues become partisan where Conservatives favor bigger government and regulations and the lefties favor free market. We see that the free market within bounds generates the best outcomes and that is what we need in housing. Those bounds should be loose (heavy manufacturing away from homes) – real health/safety issues and that’s it.
Andrew_FL
Jan 11 2022 at 11:36am
LOL no, lefties absolutely do not favor a free market in this context, where did you get that idea? Very blue, very progressive cities are the most intensely regulated housing markets in the country.
MarkW
Jan 11 2022 at 12:20pm
Right. So for example, Seattle didn’t merely remove development restrictions, they did this instead:
Abe
Jan 11 2022 at 5:07pm
It’s not an issue in red areas because they’re low density, but in state-level legislative battles to curb land use regulations typically Republicans are more on the side of regulation. But it’s not a highly partisan issue [0] [1]. Actually it’s one where a little culture war nonsense would be helpful: conservatives who live in rural areas will do little harm by supporting restrictive zoning for dumb partisan reasons, and cancelling some liberal urban nimbys could work wonders.
[0] https://legiscan.com/CA/votes/SB50/2019
[1] https://gov.oregonlive.com/bill/2019/hb2001/
Seppo
Jan 11 2022 at 10:43am
In addition to parking, one should also expand this topic towards roads, especially in dense urban centres.
Roads in cities are almost exclusively publicly owned and maintained + offered to be used for free and need crazy amount of land in the most expensive areas. Opportunity costs are crazy high.
nobody.really
Jan 13 2022 at 12:30pm
Arguably the topic would be expended to encompass the libertarian thesis: Many types of regulation arise from a failure to create and enforce an adequate regime of property rights. If we could get individuals to bear the costs of their decisions directly, we wouldn’t need to manage these costs indirectly.
Under this model, there should be NO “free parking” (for example, on-street parking); everyone should pay market rates. Municipalities would then have no need to require landlords to provide parking. Instead, the tenants would demand it–up to the point where buying on-street parking or perpetual Uber and Lyft rides would be equivalent. Likewise, stores would remain free to bear the cost of parking on behalf of their customers–or not.
That said, creating appropriate pricing mechanisms for roads is harder, because the mix of cost-causers/benefitted parties is broader and diverse. In this sense, the problem of parking seems more clearly manageable than the problem of roads.
Matthias
Jan 18 2022 at 3:25am
Not sure the problem is harder with roads than with parking from a policy perspective?
Privatize first, and let the new owners figure out whom to charge and how much second.
Both for parking and for streets, the first obvious payers are the users. But you can also try to collect money from local businesses, who might have an interest in subsidizing customers.
MarkW
Jan 11 2022 at 11:28am
I’m perfectly happy with governments getting rid of minimum parking requirements just so long as they don’t turn around and impose maximum parking restrictions. And then I’ll continue to live in a place where land is not so scarce and expensive and businesses will, out of their own self-interest, continue to provide parking. In general, I doubt that suburban retail developers would stop providing sufficient free parking absent regulations requiring them to do so. As for giant mall and multiplex parking lots — it apparently won’t be long before people are asking, “What’s a mall?” and “What’s a multiplex?”
Walt Guyll
Jan 11 2022 at 12:11pm
When our neighborhood business district started charging for on-street parking, and limiting parking to two hours, at night and weekends, we stopped going to movies and shopping there. Lots of other places we can leave the car and wander without risking a ticket.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jan 13 2022 at 6:38am
Parking is just one more instance of the failure to use Pigou taxes to reduce the costs of an externality. The lack of congestion charges (pretty easy now with our commutations technology) is an even bigger one not to mention no tax on net CO2 emissions.
MarkW
Jan 13 2022 at 12:12pm
I think we need to distinguish between parking in public spaces vs private. For the owner of a retail establishment, parking is just another amenity provided to customers like heat, air-conditioning, lighting, decor etc. There’s no externality involved. I’d rather have to wear a heavy coat and a camping headlamp while grocery shopping in a dim, poorly heated store with bare concrete floors than to have to schlep my groceries home by bus.
Of course, localities do impose parking requirements on retail centers based on square footage and business type, and they should stop that and let retailers decide how much parking to provide. But I doubt that the size of parking lots would change significantly in most places after those requirements were removed.
Matthias
Jan 18 2022 at 3:27am
If you remove minimum parking requirements, you also need to remove free street parking.
Part of the justification for minimum parking requirements are to avoid a freer rider problem, where businesses generate a need for parking, but let others pick up the cost of providing free parking.
nobody.really
Jan 13 2022 at 12:05pm
Tangentially related: I’ve often wondered about how to optimally price parking.
Many lots have a fixed price for parking, regardless of duration. This has the advantages of simplicity and ease of administration, but obviously favors long parkers at the expense of short parkers.
Some lots offer discounts for contract parkers.
Some lots cleverly offer discounts for “early birds” who arrive before 8am(?) and leave before 6pm(?). This practice discriminates between regulars (who presumably have an incentive to research the best deals) and one-off parkers during the day, while encouraging these regulars to clear out before evening events begin.
Has someone developed software to optimize these various strategies?
Utterly unrelated: Marvel is developing a film involving a showdown between Spiderman and his evil twin from another dimension racing to complete tasks amid New York City streets–without their spider webs. Tagline: “The Ultimate Nemesis: a Bad Parallel Parker!”
nobody.really
Jan 13 2022 at 12:57pm
Someone reminded me that I’ve been pondering libertarian parking regulation since 2010.
Matthias
Jan 18 2022 at 3:33am
I doubt there’s one universal optimal strategy for pricing parking.
I mean, in theory you can look at usage patterns and willingness to pay, and work out the ideal ways to slice and dice your customers to do the perfect price discrimination and get exactly the maximum amount out of every customer.
But in practice: people value simplicity. But what rules count as simple enough for people to bother understanding depends on existing local customs.
A simple related example: here in Singapore businesses regularly post very transparent seasonal price increases for Chinese New Year. Eg a hair cut might be five dollars more for a while, or pastries might be 50 cents more expensive in the run up to Chinese New Year.
In contrast, when growing up in Germany I saw similar demand spikes in the Christmas season. But I never saw these clearly posted seasonal price hikes. Instead we got queues, crowded supermarkets and the occasional empty shelf.
Mostly, I guess, just because German culture didn’t deem such price hikes acceptable.
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