Posted on 09/25/2007 7:09:36 PM PDT by curtisgardner
This past Friday was international Park(ing) Day. Thousands of people in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Seattle and other cities spent the day occupying street parking spaces by setting up lawn chairs or pingpong tables to prevent cars from parking. The stated purpose was a protest of car culture and lack of urban greenspace, but the primary impact of Park(ing) Day seems to have been to make drivers even more stressed out.
A running TMQ concern is my theory that parking issues, not bioterrorism or global warming, will be the downfall of Western civilization. It is not just in your mind that it gets harder each year to find spaces. Today, there are about 240 million registered motor vehicles in the United States, but, not counting driveways, only about 110 million parking spaces. For the past two decades, an average of 3 million vehicles per year have been added to the nation's roads -- new vehicles purchased versus old ones retired -- while an average of fewer than 1 million parking spaces have been added annually. And those are just statistics for cars. At the same time, the nation's fleet of tractor-trailer trucks has risen sharply and hardly any new rig-length parking slots have been built; the result is that exhausted truckers often cannot find a place to pull over and rest. Maybe it has become a national necessity that millions of cars and trucks are stuck in traffic jams at any given moment. If they all tried to park simultaneously, they couldn't.
Enviros and some urban activists say offering parking only attracts cars and therefore we should reduce parking: That was the spirit of Park(ing) Day. But it's the other way around -- to reduce urban stress for everyone, the United States, European Union and, soon, China, need major initiatives to construct more parking spaces and parking facilities.
Parking spaces and parking garages are not being made in sufficient numbers for a variety of reasons, including silly government regulations that discourage new parking slots when urban residential complexes are built and the market-forces problem that urban land is almost always more valuable as offices, retail space or housing than as any kind of parking, even paid parking. Now Donald Shoup, an urban planner at UCLA, has thrown a new idea into the topic. His book, "The High Cost of Free Parking," argues that the price of street parking should go way up and should reflect congestion fees depending on time of day.
Shoup estimates that nearly a third of the traffic volume in Manhattan is caused by cars cruising in search of free street parking -- although it seems hard to believe anyone has actually found a street parking space in New York City since the Eisenhower administration. I've done the equivalent of perhaps 100 miles of walking along Manhattan streets, and never once seen a fully legal, free, on-street parking space that was open. (Love those Manhattan cop shows that have the detectives pull into an open parking space directly in front of the building where they are going.) Shoup's studies further show that even in car-oriented Los Angeles, the typical driver circles the block 2.5 times before finding a street spot. All this circling in search of free street parking wastes petroleum while generating greenhouse gases. In a single small business district of Los Angeles that Shoup and his students studied, about 50,000 gallons of gasoline were wasted per year by drivers circling looking for free or inexpensive metered street spaces. Raising the cost of on-street parking, he thinks, would cause more drivers to go directly to pay lots, reducing wasteful trolling.
Shoup has a point, although he overlooks the parking-ticket conspiracy. Many cities today rely on parking tickets for revenue. Washington, D.C., realizes more than $100 million annually in parking-ticket fines; San Francisco reels in $85 million annually. This means on-street parking in many big cities already is high-priced, just in an economically inefficient fashion -- spaces appear to be free or available for a couple of coins, but actually end up costing parkers $50 after the ticket is paid. Presumably, we'd all be better off if parking meters in San Francisco or Washington and other cities charged $2 per hour but an army of meter maids and meter muffins did not slap tickets on windshields. The urban bureaucracies that administer the parking ticket system would resist such reform. What many big cities want is for people to overstay in a legal space, then get hit with a parking ticket.
However on-street parking is priced, the core of the problem is the need to build more parking spaces and parking garages. The idea that parking "only encourages more cars" is fallacious in the same way it's fallacious to argue that building roads only encourages cars. More cars are coming in any case: the questions are whether they will have places to park, and whether traffic will get a lot worse or only somewhat worse. Traffic jams and parking hassles are leading causes of modern stress. Stress is bad for us; thoughtful government planning should seek to make people's lives less stressful; this means more roads and a lot more parking spaces should be built. Roughly 2 percent of the global GDP is dedicated to parking costs. That's not enough!
Funny read, thanks for posting.
I had not heard of Park(ing) Day. It must’ve had even less impact than Not One Dime Day.
Looney leftists.
Liberals always trying to make people miserable.
wonder how much productivity and city funds was wasted by this juvenile BS
This is stupid in so many ways.
Hey! a new parking lot is open on 14th Street! Let's drive over and check it out!
Let's protect the environment - keep that car moving, rather than let it stay PARKED here!
Only problem is is that Boulder is surrounded by a green belt and housing in Boulder is too expensive for the average worker to afford.
So they must drive in.
The height of absurdity was when I asked a traffic planner when they were going to finally build the overpasses for the highway so that there was no longer a need for traffic lights on all the major cross streets.
Silly me, I hadn't realized that the diamond shaped, weed-ridden areas around the major intersections were not intended for future overpasses, but were instead currently acting as open space!
Related article. Even funnier.
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=8807
In Park Slope, Brooklyn, it has been estimated that 60% of the traffic on Seventh Ave (a main strip) is actually circling, looking for parking.
I would have parked on top of one of those lawn chairs and the occupant if he chose to remain!
Reminds me of light rail in Minneapolis. It's also a very efficient use of our tax dollars. /sarc
And how many will notice the contradiction here?
The way to get people out of their cars is to build dense, mixed-use neighborhoods ... and then keep them safe. Urban greenspace translates into low density development, which pushes everyone into cars.
At the same time, the nation’s fleet of tractor-trailer trucks has risen sharply and hardly any new rig-length parking slots have been built; the result is that exhausted truckers often cannot find a place to pull over and rest.
I see them parked on Interstate entry ramps all the time. Several in a row.
Too bad they didn’t choose airport runways....
LOL! There’s plenty of space and heaven knows it couldn’t possibly add to the delays in airline travel now.
I was hoping the incoming planes would see them.
bump
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