Matt Yglesias

Abu Dhabi Parking Madness

I’ve never been to Abu Dhabi, but I know that they’re in the midst of building out their brand new and successful metro system. But Gregg Carlstrom points to a totally non-worthwhile emirati initiative, a new plan to make landlords provide parking spaces to their tenants: “The owners of new buildings must offer adequate parking or pay the Government Dh160,000 (US$43,000) for each car space they cannot provide.”

Policy rationales for a regulatory parking mandate might include a belief that the poor should subsidize the consumption of the rich, the belief that increasing the volume of traffic congestion would be useful, the view that the planet suffers from insufficient levels of C02 emissions and other air pollution, or the idea that economic growth and the efficient allocation of resources are undesirable. Otherwise, this is a terrible idea, albeit one that’s extremely common in American cities. It’s too bad, too, because according to the same article Abu Dhabi is doing sensible things with its public parking: “parking charges – at Dh2 to Dh3 per hour, already higher than neighbouring emirates – will continue to increase as more public transport becomes available.”

Paying Off Incumbents

As Atrios observed yesterday:

Even within dense cities, such as mine, residents push for increased parking requirements for new developments. In isolation, perhaps their demands make sense (though I think often they are self-defeating), but across numerous projects they make the city less pedestrian friendly, ultimately increasing the amount of traffic.

You see this go round and round all the time. In DC, people are afraid that if new developments are allowed that don’t contain vast parking structures, that everyone will own cars anyway and compete with them for underpriced (and therefore scarce) street parking. You can turn around and try to say that the correct solution to this is to stop underpricing street parking, but ultimately people would rather keep their cheap existing parking. I think the solution is to just accept the fact that the interests of people who don’t live in the city but could if more development were allowed are by nature going to be underrepresented in the political process. Then instead of trying to come up with a solution that’s both fair and broadly acceptable, we could just directly buy off the incumbents.

For example, you could drop mandated parking minimums and just say that anyone who applies for a new residential parking permit will need to pay some fee that’s much higher than the fee that applies to anyone who already has an RPP. And you can mandate that the excess revenue generated by the higher RPP fees be used, in the first interest, to finance reductions in RPP fees for incumbent permit holders. You could even make the incumbent RPPs transferable (but one-time only) so that incumbents could directly profit by selling their right to park to a newcomer.

None of that makes much sense on the policy merits. But it ought to be a policy that incumbent permit holders can embrace, and it’s also in the interests of incumbent residents who don’t drive, and it’s better policy than the mandate-ridden status quo. Best of all, over time the silly payoffs will phase out and we’ll be at a new equilibrium with more residents, fewer cars per resident, and less parking scarcity (presumably more cars and more parking overall since even without mandates many developers will want to build parking). Sometimes in the policy world it makes sense to just squarely face the interest group pressures and buy them off rather than trying to find some kind of halfway compromise between doing the right thing and doing nothing.

The Libertarian Parking Garage Challenge

A couple of days ago, Cato’s Tad DeHaven took aim at a new bicycle storage facility being built at Union Station in Washington, DC. I remarked ” I look forward to the day when the Cato Institute does a blog post denouncing each and every publicly financed parking lot or garage in the United States of America.” To which DeHaven responded yesterday:

I denounce each and every federally financed parking lot or garage in the United States of America on non-federal property. I’m one of those quaint individuals who recognizes that the Constitution grants the federal government specific enumerated powers. Using federal tax dollars to finance local parking garages, lots, bike centers and racks is not one of the powers granted to the federal government. So let me rephrase my statement from yesterday: Look, I harbor no animosity against [car drivers], but under what authority — legal or moral — does the federal government tax me in order to build [parking garages or lots] for parochial, special interests?

To be honest, rather than addressing my concern I think this response highlights the hypocrisy I was pointing out. I have no doubt that on some abstract level DeHaven is opposed to all kinds of federal funding of local transportation projects (though I note that a facility relating to a train station in the national capital seems like a plausible area of federal concern) but in practice he denounces a specific bicycle parking project as an example of unconstitutional waste while not in practice complaining about car facilities.

But I fired up the old Google and found plenty of specific examples of federally-funded parking garage projects. This one in Fairfax County cost $28.8 million. Here’s a story about “an application for $130 million in federal grant funds to help pay for a parking garage complex in downtown Bartow.” Here’s an account of a $9 million parking garage in Vermont “Partially funded with federal transportation money.”

And, look, I’m not kidding about this: I really do look forward to the day when the Cato Institute starts specifically denouncing all of this stuff and really going after it. As a supporter of bicycle initiatives, I think it’s nice to see the federal government kick some bucks into a bicycle facility. But as you can see that money is dwarfed by what’s spent on public (and, yes, federal) subsidies for automobile parking facilities. I would gladly equalize federal funding for car parking and bike parking at $0 per year. But I get annoyed when friends of limited government pick on the crumbs handed to cyclists while completely ignoring the loafs going to cars.

Making Performance Parking Politically Appealing

This has nothing to do with Sonia Sotomayor, but parking guru Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking (your must read guide to parking policy), spoke today at a briefing for DC City Council staff. His basic message was, you know, that parking shouldn’t be underpriced and we shouldn’t think of “cheaper” parking as “better” parking.

Listening to him, it occurred to me that it’s weird that this is such a revolutionary concept. When I took economics, we had a little squib in there about price controls. But it was about something nobody would actually think to do these days . . . mandatory cheap bread or something. It was a historical example. At any rate, it’s overwhelming conventional wisdom in the United States that price controls are bad. If I suggested that the city implement price controls on Diet Coke, people would say that it would lead to shortages. And if I proposed dealing with the ensuring shortages by saying that anyone who wants to build a new building needs to also provide millions of dollars worth of Diet Coke to people in the neighborhood, people would look at me as if I were insane. Creating the Diet Coke shortages is not a favor to anyone—neither fans nor haters of Diet Coke benefit—and the regulatory mandate is an absurd subsidy to Diet Coke drinkers with no conceivable policy justification. It’s bizarre. But people have a strong bias toward the status quo, so they tend to assume that status quo policy just must be non-bizarre, no matter how at odds it is with everything else. Which is a long-winded way of saying that economists should probably talk more about these kind of everyday examples of weird market-distortions that nobody ever thinks about.

The other thing is that in some of the ensuing discussion, a twist emerged on how to grease the political wheels for this policy. When you price street parking properly—which is to say a price that’s high enough so that there’s almost always a space or two free on every block, but low enough so that there’s not more than a space or two free on any given block—you’re creating a surplus. That surplus takes the form of more customers for local businesses, less hassle for parkers, less traffic for everyone (almost 30 percent of traffic in crowded urban areas is people circling for parking), etc. But some of it takes the form of higher revenue from parking meters. In principle, that revenue could be used to fund all kinds of things. But politically speaking, the best way to make change appealing is probably to earmark the revenue specifically for use in the area getting the performance parking. That way instead of just having the argument about the correct pricing of space on the street, you can sell it to the neighborhood by saying “performance parking is going to repair the sidewalk, refurbish the bus shelter, spruce up this park, and then provide ongoing revenues necessary to keep everything spic and span going forward.”

DC Office of Planning Looking at Reduced Parking

The DC Office of Planning’s proposed new rules governing parking structures in high density areas strike me as extremely promising. Parking tends not to get discussed all that much in the national policy conversation. But when you think about real life conversations about transportation modalities, parking often features very heavily as people are disinclined to drive to places where it’s going to be difficult or expensive to park.

There are basically two philosophical approaches government can take to that phenomenon. One, which has predominated in the United States, has been to use a lot of regulatory levers to ensure that everything that’s built includes vast swathes of parking. That ensures that parking is kept cheap, since regulations mandate that it be heavily supplied.

A different, better, approach would be to recognize that in crowded urban areas space is a valuable commodity. Residential rents are high in crowded urban spaces. Commercial rents are high in crowded urban spaces. Retail rents are high in crowded urban spaces. They’re crowded. And often centers of high-value activity. Under the circumstances, it doesn’t really make sense to mandate that there be large set-asides for space to be used for the purposes of low-cost parking. It might make sense if parking spaces had environmental benefits. Or public health benefits. Or aesthetic benefits. But despite the similar letters in the words, a parking lot is not a kind of park. It doesn’t have any of those benefits. Under the circumstances, policy should be mildly discouraging parking as a use of valuable space, not actively encouraging it as we currently do. The OP plan would make the correct switch to a world of somewhat fewer, and somewhat more expensive, parking spaces.

You wouldn’t want to see the federal government making decisions about local parking zoning rules. But I feel like there could be a very constructive role for DOT and HUD to play in promulgating some kind of “best practices” and advise to local community. I know that the federal government did a lot of work to informally shape localities’ response to the dawn of the automobile age in the 1920s, much more through persuasion than through mandates.

Cities Charging for all the Wrong Things

It’s not surprising to learn that cities across the country are responding to recession-induced revenue shortfalls by raising all kinds of fees. It is, however, disappointing to see which fees are being raised. Economists have long argued that certain kinds of fees, such as congestion charges for accessing crowded roads at peak hours, or higher parking rates in scarce-parking areas, could do a lot to improve life in many American cities, towns, and suburbs. But status quo bias and political reluctance to embrace revenue-raisers has lager deterred politicians from seeking such fees. A dramatic financial crunch that makes painful measures absolutely necessary would seem to be the ideal time to impose some fees that, though people are initially skeptical, would ultimately prove broadly beneficial. Instead we’re getting stuff like this:

After her sport utility vehicle sideswiped a van in early February, Shirley Kimel was amazed at how quickly a handful of police officers and firefighters in Winter Haven, Fla., showed up. But a real shock came a week later, when a letter arrived from the city billing her $316 for the cost of responding to the accident.

It just doesn’t make sense to be looking to this sort of thing in the first instance when so many more appealing possible sources of revenue are still on the table.

Good National Mall Ideas from NPS

The National Park Service has released its Preliminary Preferred Alternative for the National Mall available and opened it for comments. It’s a pretty solid plan, featuring calls for increased bicycle facilities (in theory, the Mall should be a great venue for recreational biking that also services some cross-town practical transportation needs; in practice it’s sort of neither) some smarter parking policies, and better pedestrian access between the Tidal Basin and the Washington Monument.

You can offer comments on the proposal here and read more about it here.

Parking Minimums and Income Distribution

It seems that Ithaca, New York is working on a plan to increase the permitted level of density in one part of town and to relax minimum parking requirements. Naturally, I favor both steps. Rather than use regulatory minimums to ensure that parking is available, they propose to let builders construct as much parking as they want and use market-rate pricing of street parking to avoid shortages. Opponents of the change seem to think that they’re doing favors to the poor since the burden of more expensive parking falls harder on the poor. But achieving cheap parking through regulatory mandates makes parking cheaper at the cost of making housing more expensive, and the burden of that also falls hardest on the poor.

The distributive impact of parking minimums is to redistribute income from people who don’t own cars to people who do own cars—not to shift income from poor to rich. A rich family will probably have at least one car for every family member who’s at least 16 years old. A family of more modest means will probably own fewer vehicles.

More generally, while I’m obviously not a hard-core free marketers, it does make sense to consider a free market position our default position. Mandating the construction of extra parking doesn’t reduce harmful environmental externalities. Rather, it generates them. It doesn’t help the neediest members of society, it makes it more difficult for them to afford housing. It doesn’t correct important information deficits—people are perfectly capable of asking whether or not a house they’re considering buying or renting comes with a reserved parking space.

Parking Shortages Still Bad for Business

One thing you can normally count rightwingers to be correct about is the subject of price controls. Price controls seem appealing — everyone likes stuff, but nobody likes spending money, so price controls offer the promise of getting stuff for less money. It’s all good! Except it’s not good at all because price controls actually just lead to shortages. The market works, conservatives are awesome, you can look it all up. Unless the subject turns to parking. In that case, the DC GOP is responding to a parking meter price hike by whining that “the new rates will hurt businesses that depend on customers who drive to their stores.”

In fact, there are two ways meter pricing could, in theory, hurt businesses. On the one hand, meters might be so expensive that there are just tons and tons of vacant parking spaces haunting downtown. In this case, the high price of parking is keeping customers away from stores and the meter rates are two high. On the other hand, meters might be so cheap that convenient street parking is rarely available and drivers leave their cars parked for long stretches of time. In this case, the low price of parking is creating parking shortages and low turnover, keeping customers away from stores. One can’t deduce the answer to this question a priori, but it’s abundantly obvious if you walk (or drive!) around DC that downtown parking is too scarce not too abundant. That means the current price is too low.

On the one hand, this issue isn’t the most dramatic thing in the world. But on the other hand when you consider what a large proportion of economic activity still takes place in big city downtowns and how reliant this country is on automobile transportation it becomes clear that the systematic underpricing of parking in built-up areas is in fact a major source of economic inefficiency. Making it all the more maddening, local governments are leaving funds on the table. Normally when you think of revenue sources you’re dealing with a trade-off between useful expenditures and harmful taxes. But when it comes to parking, correct pricing results in both more efficiency and more revenue that can be spent on useful city services — that would be very good for businesses (and everyone else).

Good Parking News

WMATA is backing off it’s dumb free parking on Inauguration Day plan. A lot of people are going to want to come to the city on Inauguration Day, and making parking free won’t magically increase the volume of space in which they can rest their vehicles. We need parking fees to prevent catastrophic shortages and provide Metro with revenue that can help provide service at other times.

Parking Shortages Don’t Encourage Shopping

As I’ve said before, the part of people’s brains that understands things like supply, demand, and shortages seems to turn off when the subject turns to street parking. Here in DC, for example, we turn our parking meters off and have free parking downtown on Saturdays. People like convenient parking spaces. They’re valuable. And when you set the price of a valuable commodity at zero, you get parking shortages. Which is what we have on Saturdays in key retail corridors. Perversely, the stated reason for this policy of guaranteed shortages is that it’s supposed to encourage people to come downtown to shop:

But [David] Catania and outgoing member Carol Schwartz both spoke passionately about free Saturday parking as an incentive to draw suburban residents into DC to shop and eat, and to encourage DC residents to stay in the District on weekends to spend their dollars. It might be a compelling argument, except for one thing: there’s never any available street parking downtown or in busy neighborhood retail districts on weekend afternoons and evenings.

Schwartz introduced and passed a ban on Saturday parking fees in 1997. “We get money when people come into DC to eat or shop, or DC residents stay to eat,” she said. “I asked people, ‘Why do you go to the suburbs?’ They said, ‘They’ve got free parking.’”

That might have been true in 1997, but not today. People go downtown because of the great restaurants, exciting nightlife, and walkable shopping streets. If you just want to drive to a big box store, the suburbs will win out every time. The nice restaurants downtown all run valet services. If free parking really deters so many people, why are these restaurants packed while the valets are charging $10 for parking during dinner?

Unless we want to blanket our city with surface parking lots (a very bad idea!) downtown businesses can never compete with suburban businesses on the basis of pure parking convenience. But downtown locations have other advantages. But be all that as it may, the best parking-related thing you can do for downtown businesses is to park pricing rationally. You don’t want the fee to be so high that nobody’s using the spaces. But you want it to be high enough that people can generally find a space where they’re trying to go. This isn’t about discouraging people from driving or parking, it’s about ensuring that parking is done efficiently. That kind of performance parking will reduce traffic on the streets (fewer people searching for parking spots) and be better for business. But there’s desperate need to educate the business community, because politicians are often being responsive to what business owners are telling them. One possibility would be to earmark a share of the parking fees in any given area to go to the local BID or something else along those lines.

Revenue

One concern people have with the idea of higher street parking fees is the burden this would place on the poor. This kind of worry is, I think, often overstated — middle class people underestimate the extent to which poor people do less driving than the middle class and are in fact the primary victims of driving-oriented public policy.

But another point I would make about this is that a great many of things we would like to do to help poor cost money. And so to do them, you need to find ways to secure revenue. And revenue-enhancing measure is going to be politically difficult to pass and is going to cause some hardships. One consequence of this is that it’s good to look at revenue measures that also accomplish other policy objectives. Auctioning carbon permits will help avert catastrophic climate change and raise funds that can be used to, among other things, further help the cause. Charging market rates at parking meters alleviates parking shortages and reduces idling, thereby reducing emissions and congestion. Congestion pricing for roads reduces traffic jams. Unlike many other kinds of taxes, these car-related are measures that will increase economic efficiency and boost growth.

As an illustration, the DC Council is going to consider a bill to raise parking meter fees and use the money to continue funding the important and effective “housing first” anti-homelessness program that, otherwise, will get the axe due to the economic downturn. The increased fees would probably be useful on their own terms even if the money was just buried in mines because of its beneficial impact on the parking/traffic situation, but the fact that the revenue can actually be put to use on crucial social services further bolsters the case for the step.

Parking Meters

Felix Salmon writes a bit about Chicago’s somewhat backdoor effort to increase its street parking meters from their current $0.25 an hour to $1.00 an hour next month and $2.00 an hour in 2013:

Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, is absolutey on the side of the angels when it comes to green initiatives, and nothing would be greener than managing to reduce the amount of auto traffic downtown. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet — Chicagoans are more attached to their cars than ever. And so maybe this parking-meter initiative is the municipal equivalent of a CEO hiring McKinsey to come in and recommend job cuts: it’s a way of doing what needs to be done while somehow managing to blame someone else.

In any event, Chicago should get much more than $1.157 billion in benefit from this deal. Underpriced on-street parking is the bane of many large cities’ existence: it results in a huge amount of needless congestion as drivers circle around endlessly, looking for a spot to park. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the benefits from lower congestion are larger than the up-front cash that Chicago is receiving.

This is true, but it should be said that the positive environmental benefit of reduced idling isn’t close to being the main benefit of pricing your street parking correctly. The main benefit is just the fact that if parking is priced correctly — i.e., in relationship to the supply and demand — then parking will be widely available. It ought to be the case that if you drive up to any block in the city, there will usually be a parking space available there for you. On some blocks at some times of day, that may mean that parking is very expensive. But that would merely mean that ability to park on that block at that time is very valuable and that making it available is having large social benefits.

In general, the market price of street parking should be very similar to the market price of garage parking. Since a garage is more secure and protected from the elements, that has certain advantages. But a street spot might be more convenient. So you’d be looking at rough similarity. And in parts of the city where there’s no viable market in garage building, that’s a market signal that parking demand is low and therefore street parking should be very cheap. But where garages are charging a lot, street parking should also be expensive. Among other things, that would reduce the need for new construction to be accompanied by expansive parking garages.

Perhaps more important, it would reduce the tendency for conversations about any new development to become immediately dominated by people’s fear of parking shortages. The whole shortage phenomenon is (as shortages tend to be) a symptom of bad pricing policy. Chicago is a big city with a vibrant downtown and tons of economic activity. Space is limited and expensive. Unless you charge more than a quarter for it, you’ll get shortages.

Demand Is High — Let’s Drop the Price

There’s a curious tendency for the portion of peoples’ brains that deals with supply, demand, and price issues to stop functioning when the subject turns to parking. Andrew Samwick has a great example:

Second, my otherwise delightfully governed town has this practice of putting bags over the parking meters around the holiday shopping season. I associate it with the downtown merchants, since the meters north of downtown (say, near my office) remain operational. I can’t figure this one out.

1. If you believe that the meters are there to regulate access to the town’s scarce resource of parking spaces, then you need that regulation even more, not less, during the busy holiday season.

2. If you believe that the meters are there to raise money for the town, then your best opportunity to get that money is when you know demand will be high, like during the busy holiday season.

Presumably, the reason the town does this is to accommodate a request from the downtown merchants. But why do they perceive this to be in their self-interest? Why does “free (but scarce) parking” attract people to drive to town? Wouldn’t the better marketing approach be “still cheap but available parking,” given that the cost of the parking (about $1 an hour) is still small relative to the cost of whatever the visitors are going to buy?

If it were me, I’d raise the fees during the holiday season (and lower some other local tax). Yet anoSether reason why I will never be town manager.

But the world could really use more town managers like Samwick! Virtually ever town or city in the United States of America could adopt smarter parking pricing policies and suddenly find itself with parking spaces more available, taxes lower, higher retail sales, etc. See also the problems with too cheap parking at Harvard Square.

Metro Plans to Create Parking Shortages

For some reason people’s basic knowledge of price mechanisms seems to go out the window when the subject turns to parking. A ridiculously large number of people are expected to come to town for Barack Obama’s inauguration. Since one way of getting to town is on Metro, they’re anticipating record ridership figures. And many of Metro’s station are park-and-ride facilities in the suburbs — you drive there, drop your car, and drive into town. Since they’re anticipating record ridership, they’re also anticipating record demand for parking. Naturally, they’ve decided this would be a good moment for a temporary spate of free parking.

This is insane. The marginal costs associated with mass transit are close to zero. Consequently, fares and fees should really be kept as low as possible, with as much of operating costs as possible covered by direct subsidy. The exception to this guideline, however, is when you’re genuinely up against a supply constraint. When you can’t fit any more people on to your trains and there’s no good way to expand service, you need to use pricing to keep demand in check, even in an Yglesian world where transit funding was sky-high. Similarly, since we aren’t (and shouldn’t) going to build whole new parking facilities between now and Inauguration Day, the only way to avoid ridiculous parking shortages is to charge more, not less, than usual. What’s more we of course don’t live in that ideal world where public subsidy is generous enough to use fees purely for rationing purposes. Metro needs to cover some of its operating costs through fares and parking fees. And Inauguration Day is a potential bonanza in that regard.

It’s not too late to correct this error, and hopefully WMATA will think harder about this.

Urban Costco in Vancouver

Pertaining to yesterday’s post about encouraging big box stores to open urban outlets if and only if they fit themselves into physical structures that are suitably urban in nature, a reader sent me this article about an urbanist Costco in Vancouver:

The new store is a feat of engineering and an unusual mix of uses. It is built in a hole bordered by GM Place, the Georgia viaduct and the escarpment on the eastern end of Vancouver’s downtown. The 127,000-square-foot store, built by Concord Pacific, has two floors of parking below it, two floors of parking above it, and then, above that, another four towers of residential condos with 900 units. [...] To appeal to what is expected to be a slightly higher proportion of downtown shoppers, the store stocks a bigger variety of home-ready meals — chicken parmigiana, prawns and pasta, souvlaki, lasagna, and the like — electronics and leather goods, said Ross. [...]

The 700 parking spots will cost $2 for two hours, but in an effort to keep out downtown office workers, the system requires parkers to return to the lot every two hours. Concord Pacific has also incorporated an elevator and stairway that connect the store to the Stadium-Chinatown SkyTrain station above it.

This sounds good to me. It’s uncontroversial, of course, that cities need supermarkets. But in DC, unfortunately, a lot of our supermarkets are basically suburban strip mall structures just plopped down into the city — perhaps with less parking than you’d otherwise see. Much better is to do what’s suggested in this article, or something like my new building where many floors of apartments are located directly above a Safeway.

Being within walking distance of a supermarket is a major facilitator of walkable urbanism, just like being within walking distance of a rail station. But like rail stations, major retail destinations like supermarkets (or a Costco) are bound to be somewhat rare. Consequently, it’s important to maximize the residential density in their immediate vicinity. Since it’s often also nice to put a supermarket right by a rail station, it’s an especially tragic lost opportunity when you see something like the strip mall-style Safeway (one-story windowless structure adjacent to an open air parking lot) located right by the Waterfront-SEU Metro station on the Green Line.

Parking Reform

There’s been some talk in the blogosphere lately about DC’s building height limit and the potential benefits for lifting it. That’s important, but at the moment there’s no more important issue for the future of urbanism in DC than the Office of Planning’s proposal to change the parking requirements for new development in the city. At the moment, the main reason large swathes of DC are very nice places to live is that most of the city’s buildings were built before the current rules were put in place. Another important contributing factor is that it’s possible to get the requirements waived. But the existing requirements, as applied to small buildings, destroy the urban character of the city while, as applied to large buildings, unduly hamper redevelopment of large underutilized parcels.

Today comes the news that reform got a big boost as the Zoning Commission offered largely favorable remarks on the proposal to mostly scrap the parking minimum requirements.

This issue, it should be said, really hits hard in rowhousey areas that became afflicted by blight in decades past and now are making a comeback. Some of that comeback simply manifests itself in existing structures being renovated. And so far so good. But part of the legacy of blight is a lot of “missing” buildings, vacant lots, or underutilized open-air parking areas. As neighborhoods like that become more desirable, what one wants to see is new infill development filling those gaps. That adds vitality to the neighborhoods, makes neighborhood retail more viable, and helps keep the price of housing from spiraling out of control. But current parking requirements typically make it illegal to build a new building that’s just like the old buildings in the neighborhood — instead you need to build much more parking, in a way that’s often just impractical on a small lot. This becomes a major burden on the neighborhood as a whole, with vacant spaces simultaneously degrading quality of life and artificially pushing up housing costs.

But beyond that specific case, mandatory minimums for parking are just generally undesirable. They promote economically inefficient use of space which brings down everyone’s material standard of living. They involving richer-than-average car owners getting, in effective, subsidies from poorer-than-average non-owners, which is stupid. They promote excessive levels of traffic which is annoying for people who drive. And they fail to internalize the full costs of car ownership, which encourages higher-than-optimal levels of driving, which is bad for public health and the environment. Most of all, though incumbent residents naturally worry about the potentially deleterious impact on their existing parking arrangements, this can be resolved through “performance parking” programs. What can’t be resolved is that fact that with existing minimums in place, new development risks destroying the city rather than providing it with new vitality as it ought to.

Minimum Parking

Here’s a pretty good AP article about the parking minimums debate in DC and around the country. It leads with the story of Jeff and Alice Speck who live in my neighborhood and built this cool house on an otherwise unusable corner triangle lot:

Alice and Jeff Speck didn’t have a car and didn’t want one. But District of Columbia zoning regulations required them to carve out a place to park one at the house they were building. It would have eaten up precious space on their odd-shaped lot and marred the aesthetics of their neighborhood, dominated by historic row houses. The Specks succeeded in getting a waiver, even though it took nine months.

I think there are absolutely no valid reasons whatsoever for maintaining parking minimum mandates. The minimums are economically inefficient and hamper growth. They’re inequitable, with the burdens falling hardest on the poor. And they’re bad for the environment. And for public health. They’re really, really bad — vestiges of a 1950s mindset that lacked any empirical track record about the relationship between automobiles and urban planning (not their fault, it was new technology) and was also just unduly in love with central planning schemes. There is, however, one extremely powerful political argument in favor of minimum regulations:

In old D.C. neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and Georgetown, where parking is scarce, opponents of the change fear that if new homes don’t provide off-street spots, competition for on-street parking will worsen.

Since hypothetical future residents don’t get to vote, this can carry the day. On the merits, the right policy response would be to deal with the on-street parking crunch with performance parking rules. But parking minimums are so pernicious, and the opponents of reform so self-centered, that I think the best way to go is to crudely buy them off. In a city like DC that gives out zone-based residential parking permits, you could just offer incumbent permit holders a guarantee of a lifetime free permits, while saying that all new on-street parking permits will be auctioned or sold at some high price. That’s not quite optimal policy on the merits, but if it could grease the wheels and get minimums eliminated it’d be a deal well-worth making.