The Sightline Institute is turning out some great work on transportation and land use these days. (Disclosure: I’m a board member.) Researcher Clark Williams-Derry has had two recent pieces PT has posted, one on declining traffic and tolls here and the other on TransLink’s gasoline problem here .
Today’s post comes from a Sightline Daily piece by Alan Durning on pricing neighbourhood parking. The whole piece – Curb Appeal – is here. Below, a few excerpts.
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Imagine if you could put a meter in front of your house and charge every driver who parks in “your” space. It’d be like having a cash register at the curb. Free money! How much would you collect? Hundreds of dollars a year? Thousands? How might all that lucre shift your perspective on local parking rules?
The idea of a private meter (already available on eBay)—or a variant of it that is legal and practical—is the crux of this whole series. It’s the deal with the devil that forms the pivotal second step in UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup’s three-point plan to fix parking. Why that’s true is because of politics, and those politics take some explaining. …
The root of the problem … is that parking territoriality is more powerful than anything currently arrayed against it. … To overcome it, we need something that can split neighborhood coalitions and thereby neutralize territoriality (and local businesses’ analogous attachment to free curb spaces on shopping streets).
The something we need is greed. If we offer neighborhoods the revenue from meters and parking permits, we can generate a powerful countervailing political force. …
In theory, neighbors might support pricing curb parking in order to enhance city budgets and ultimately help all city residents, including themselves. In practice, though, parking revenue going to the general fund might as well be going to Mars. It has virtually no political salience for most voters. … in local politics, planners and public unions are no match for neighborhoods full of territorial parkers. …
Still, promising as they are, parking benefit districts are not the only option. Although they respond to territoriality by tapping into greed, the greed they tap is still attenuated. To support a parking benefit district on your block, you have to believe that fixing up sidewalks and street lights will boost your property value. You have to trust that the city won’t raid your block’s improvement fund. You have to have a relatively enlightened understanding of your self-interest.
A more radical plan appeals to a cruder form of greed. In the United Kingdom, some housing developments assign curb spaces to the adjacent homes. Curb spaces effectively become private property, and owners can rent them to others.
A more elegant and flexible way to achieve the same result would be for cities to implement markets for local parking passes—parking cap and trade. The city would annually distribute block-specific street-parking permits to property owners. The number of permits would not exceed the number of spots. Those property owners could then keep or sell the permits as they saw fit. The new generation of information tools I described previously would allow easy trade in permits and efficient enforcement by city officers.
Parking passes would thus become private property, and the owners of the passes would push politically to limit the number of passes. They would also have a financial stake in limiting off-street parking, because it floods the parking market. Writer Matt Yglesias even suggests distributing parking permits permanently, so that they become tradable assets, almost like stocks and bonds.
Street Price
Parking cap and trade is a bold idea, and many people—including most urban planners—would likely object to the privatization of public rights of way. A city sale or auction of street-parking permits—auctioned cap and trade—would better align with their values. It would align better with my values too.
But charging people for what they are accustomed to getting for free—for “their” curb space—is a political pipe dream. The best we might hope for would be to distribute most permits for free, or for a low registration fee, for several years and then to gradually ramp up the share of permits that are auctioned. Starting in year 10, for example, perhaps one cheap permit would go to each property owner on a block and any extras would be auctioned by the city.
The reason to distribute parking passes to property owners for little or nothing is not because they deserve them. It’s that they feel they own them already, and so giving them away may be the only politically viable path to profoundly and instantly transforming parking politics. Tradable parking permits would give all property owners the equivalent of parking meters on their curbs. Parking cap and trade would swamp parking territoriality with unadulterated greed. …
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Parklets and Cash?
Another objection to parking benefit districts and parking cap and trade is that they may inadvertently slow down progress on other urban sustainability fronts. If communities are making thousands of dollars a block renting out curb spaces, who will want to replace parking spaces with parklets, bike corrals, and cycletracks? How will we narrow overly wide streets and install more p-patches, bioswales, and rain gardens?
The answer is that, in most places, the financial stakes will not be in the thousands of dollars a year. Moreover, in many cases, pricing street parking and sharing the revenue with neighbors will help to speed other green investments. For one thing, parking benefit districts could help pay for parklets and the like. For another, under performance pricing, removing some parking spaces raises the price of the remainder, so revenue need not suffer. A city block commonly has eight parking spaces on each side. Imagine that those spaces go for about $50 apiece monthly. If we remove two of those spaces, say for a parklet and a bike corral, the price of the others will rise. If it rises above $57 a month, gross receipts go up, not down.
Reading the Meter
Imagine if you could put a meter in front of your house and charge every driver who parks in “your” space. How much free money might you collect? It’s hard to say, of course. Everyone in town would suddenly have an incentive to clean out their garages and park there. Curb spaces might become less scarce. Still, in many neighborhoods, curb spaces would command a healthy price, especially if cities removed time limits. Metered spaces in downtown Seattle yield about $6,000 a year on average. Meters in Seattle’s less-urban Greenlake neighborhood still typically rake in $1,400 per space, and in Portland, average meters collect about $2,700 a year. …
Such options are not the stuff of grand, trendy dreams—no ecodistricts, no passivhaus—but they are potent and promising nonetheless. Their potency comes from how widespread they might become. Their promise derives from how incremental the process of staking in neighbors can be.
Indeed, a major part of the political magic of parking benefit districts and parking cap and trade is their geographic divisibility. A city can create them literally block by block, and it can let the blocks each decide for themselves whether to opt in. They can work not only in metered shopping districts but also on residential streets. And they are likely to prove contagious: each block that opts in will serve as a model for those around it.
Territoriality is the root of the problem in parking politics. Greed—activated through parking benefit districts or tradable parking permits—is the core of the solution. By offering a steady stream of money to neighborhoods, they invert the usual politics of parking. Curb parking becomes less an entitlement and more a business opportunity. Visitors become not interlopers but customers. And off-street parking quotas become no longer saviors but competitors.
That’s why the idea of the private parking meter is the key to the whole parking mess.
The Shoup Dogg nails it with his 3 point plan exactly. The price for parking near me is way too low to represent the real estate and potential community amenity value of the land wasted on stash spots for people’s unused cars.
Keeping the parking revenue generated locally, in the locality, would subvert the Frothers and Wibblers (mostly banner-waving Frothers) of my neighbourhood residents association and their friends in the Coalition of the Concerned.
As I heard Kerry Jang remark during council procedings, the only thing held in higher value than the proximity of a no-pay parking spot outside your house, is your firstborn child.
Nice to see so many urbanism cliches gathered in one article. However, this impractical idea runs headlong into the “reality” that Vancouver’s current council is trying to implement.
1) Allowing multi-unit developers to reduce the number of parking spaces under the guise of affordibility. Rather than the fantasyland premise that the cars will magically disappear, they instead are parked on neighbouring streets.
2) Allowing laneway houses to be built on single family lots with the resultant one parking stall per lot. Add to that the inconvenient truth that prying open many of those laneway houses’ garage doors would reveal a cozy living room rather than a Prius.
Finally, businesses strung along Vancouver’s tram-sculpted arterials rely on people in vehicles from outside the immediate neighbourhood to be successful. The arterials cannot possibly accommodate them, so the default option is parking in adjacent residential streets.