Recently, I finished reading a riveting 734 page book, The High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup. OK, maybe it’s a stretch to call a book on parking riveting, but it was certainly thought-provoking. I learned about the surprising effects of parking policy, and took away some important lessons for balanced and sustainable transportation in Humboldt County. Not only does parking have many unintended effects, but it’s darned expensive — did you know the average parking space in the U.S. costs more than the average car? Increasingly, towns and their citizens are deciding they can no longer afford the high cost of free parking. Green Wheels is beginning a discussion about alternatives to current parking policies in the current General Plan and Regional Transportation Plan updates.

Bundling problems

Shoup uses an analogy to describe how "free" parking is not actually free, but a cost that gets bundled with other things we buy and do. What if, asks Shoup, there were free dessert requirements like the zoning requirements that require developers and business to provide free parking? With each meal served, restaurants would be required to bundle in complimentary dessert afterwards. After all, most people appreciate delicious treats, so who could argue against making them "free?"

You, dear reader, can anticipate the problems a mandated "free" dessert could create. Restaurants will still face the costs associated with preparing and serving the desserts, so patrons will end up paying higher menu prices. Diners who choose to forgo dessert will end up subsidizing another’s crème brûlée. Since it’s "free," more people will order dessert, which will lead to expanding waistlines and increased rates of diabetes. With increased costs for dining out, and longer wait times for tables, restaurants may suffer a decrease in patronage and profits. Clearly, keeping dessert "unbundled" from restaurant meals is preferable to an anti-market regulation for "free" desserts.

Granted, the idea of requiring desserts to be bundled with restaurant meals is far-fetched, but the analogy for free parking holds up remarkably well. Virtually every time you shop at a store that offers free parking, the cost of providing that parking is included in your purchase. We pay for "free" parking as renters and homeowners, and even as employees and/or business owners, because of the cost of providing parking subtracts from profits and paychecks.

Free but not cheap

We are so accustomed to the idea of parking as "free" that it is easy to forget the cost of constructing and maintaining it. According to a report by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, "Transpotation Cost and Benefit Analysis - Parking Costs," a typical annualized cost for suburban off-street surface parking is $755/space in 2006 dollars (land, construction, and operations), and, for an urban space, $1,759. Steve Sullivan, parking manager for HSU, estimates surface lot parking costs $2,500 to construct. According to a 1991 study by Mark Delucchi of the University of California at Davis, the annual total cost for providing off-street parking in the United States is between $76 billion and $223 billion per year, or between 1.2% and 3.7% of GNP.

Beyond these dollar costs, unintended consequences of "free" parking lead to a number of other problems, just like in the bundled dessert analogy. For example, in 1961, when the city of Oakland began requiring one parking space per apartment, rental costs increased by 18% and urban density declined by 30% ("We paved paradise," Salon.com). In short, Oakland’s parking requirement made driving less expensive and housing more expensive, a pattern that has been repeated across the country.

More parking = less place

Excessive parking increases walking, biking, and transit distances and makes it less enjoyable to walk or bike. Shoup writes, "Parking lots are like holes in urban fabric." Where would you most enjoy a sidewalk stroll: Old Town Eureka or Eureka’s South Broadway/101? The Arcata Plaza or Arcata’s Valley West/East district?

An addictive cycle

Since more parking makes alternative modes of travel less pleasant and convenient, it breeds more driving. Then citizens ask for, and planners build, more parking, feeding an addiction-like cycle. "Every jab of the parking needle relieves local symptoms, but ultimately worsens the real disease," writes Shoup (94).

Americans park free for 99% of all motorized trips. Since we don’t pay parking costs as motorists, no wonder we drive for 87% of all trips. "Perhaps if all drivers had to pay for their own parking," Shoup ventures, "fewer people would ‘prefer’ to drive everywhere" — people might instead prefer less expensive goods and services.

An oversupply of free parking has made us more automobile dependent, which has created a host of problems — loss of open space, rising incidence rates of obesity and related diseases, over-consumption of foreign oil with associated national security consequences, greenhouse gas emissions, and high costs for transportation which place an unfair burden on low-income people (see What is Transportation Equity?).

Parking to fill a state

We’ve required so much parking that there are at least three parking spaces for each of the 230 million vehicles in the United States. In a San Francisco Chronicle article, from June 3, 2005, Shoup writes that "the total space devoted to parking in America amounts to an area about the size of Connecticut." That’s just part of the total impermeable surfaces dedicated to automobiles in the United States — including roads, these surfaces add up to an area the size of Ohio. Those surfaces collect and concentrate storm-water runoff that contains leaked mechanical fluids and dangerous heavy metals.

Going nowhere

Most of us are familiar with the experience of "cruising" for parking — driving around city blocks until we find a free on-street space. Cruising for parking adds traffic to city streets, creating an inconvenience for other motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists and needlessly burns fuel and wastes time. Donald Shoup’s study in Westwood, Los Angeles, determined that cruising accounted for enough annual vehicle miles in a 15-block district to make two round trips to the moon (945,000 miles).

One of the factors that leads to cruising is that parking in the most convenient locations fills up first (often with employees), and, if it is free, or very inexpensive, motorists stay parked in these places for longer, reducing turnover, increasing occupancy rates, and compromising convenient access to nearby businesses. While these are most often thought of as metropolitan issues, they do affect us here in Humboldt County. In Arcata, for example, a recent draft downtown parking study showed that parking on the sides of many blocks is filled to 100% occupancy at peak hours of the day, with a low parking turnover rate.

A Byzantine policy

Someone who woke up from a coma, judging exclusively by the parking policies of most cities, might guess we lost the cold war and the Soviet Union took over. Parking regulations demonstrate many of the worst inefficiencies of centralized management.

Parking requirements often require enough parking to accommodate more visitors than on even the busiest days of the year, regardless of whether it is cost-effective for a business to do so, or even if it might be less expensive to share parking with a neighbor that has different peak business hours.

A market for the benefit of all

We could be better served by a well-regulated market designed for the benefit of motorists, pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, businesses, and residents. The first step is to eliminate the circumstance that makes minimum on-site parking requirements necessary in the first place — the availability of "free" on-street parking. Parking meters, especially credit-card accepting multi-space meters, can be effective tools to do this.

The right parking prices will create just enough vacancies that it will be more convenient for customers to access businesses and shops, and will reduce wasteful cruising. Off-street parking requirements can be gradually abandoned or restructured to allow businesses and developers more flexibility in how they can provide parking or alternative mobility options (such as off-site shared parking, providing transit passes for employees, or partially subsidizing shared car services for apartment or subdivision residents).

Shoup points to parking benefit districts (PBDs) as a way of reinvesting some parking revenue in the immediate business neighborhood where it was generated. PBDs can fund downtown landscaping efforts, bike parking installation and maintenance, projects to bury power lines and eliminate utility poles, sidewalk improvements, transit programs and shuttles, and downtown information programs run by MainStreet or similar organizations.

Shoup also proposes the idea of a residential parking benefit district for residential neighborhoods. A residential parking benefit district could sell a limited number of permits for specific curbs, guaranteeing residents will still be able to park, while generating revenue that is paid directly to households or used for neighborhood improvement projects.

An example of such an opportunity in Arcata is the Bayview neighborhood, situated immediately south of the Humboldt State University campus. Such an arrangement could help HSU accommodate parking demand from increasing enrollment without building expensive, resource-intensive parking structures (each space would cost over $30,000 for construction alone). In this way, market forces will allocate resources in a way which provides cheaper parking through eliminating waste, and while creating new benefits for the neighborhood.

Breaking the cycle

At times, the problem of auto-dependency and the legacy of free parking seem to present intractable challenges. But by abandoning off-street parking requirements, charging fair prices for on-street parking, and returning those revenues to the immediately local community, we can take steps to buck auto-dependence and provide new benefits for our community. The last sentence of the High Cost of Free Parking says it best: "We can achieve enormous social, economic, and environmental benefits at almost no cost simply by subsidizing people and places, not parking and cars" (602).