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parking

Fairness and Equity in Parking Reform- Part 3

November 12, 2020 By Lindsay Bayley 2 Comments

In previous posts, we talked about why adding parking doesn’t solve the “parking problem,” and why we need to use pricing to get turnover and create parking availability to actually solve the “parking problem.” One challenge commonly brought up when meters are proposed is the issue of fairness and equity.

“Won’t new meters hurt poor folks?” One could argue that it would be fair to the most low-income people to keep costs down, but that is not how most social policy is formed. Providing parking costs money; it is a subsidy whose benefits skew toward more wealthy people. And the more you drive, the more you benefit.

If we leave the current situation as is, that is a decision to continue today’s inequitable conditions. We put enormous public resources into roads and parking, even though many people do not or cannot drive. You must be wealthy enough to own a car in order to benefit from the vast amounts of free parking.

When it comes to our denser cities, the geometry of our roadways is limited. Our roads can move more people and work better by allocating road space to more efficient travel modes. We can’t all get around by car and still expect our cities to thrive. A person on a bus is 10x as efficient as someone in a car. When introducing pricing, there are usually still some free spaces.

Prioritizing driving shifts the costs onto everyone, so that the poorest citizens are essentially subsidizing the wealthiest who are more likely to drive large SUVs and fuel-efficient or electric models that cause major damage to roads but contribute less to their maintenance with the gas tax. The inequities in transportation go back further, as I wrote in a piece on Medium:

The historical inequities of our transportation system go hand-in-hand with the historical inequities in housing. In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein meticulously catalogs the discriminatory housing policies at the local, state, and federal levels that restricted housing opportunities for African-Americans following their emancipation and whose proliferation spread like wildfire in the 1940s. Our discriminatory housing regulations [and White violence], often enforced by police, prevented Black people from living in desirable neighborhoods and restricted them to other neighborhoods — often places with more industry and pollution. There was more demand than supply and Black people ended up paying much more for rental housing than their White counterparts paid in mortgages for nicer homes. They ended up over-crowded and with little savings or investment to pass on to their children, while White folks were building their “nest egg.”

At the same time as the cost of buying a car was dropping significantly, White Americans were fleeing to the suburbs. Yet the jobs remained in the urban centers that White people were abandoning, and getting people to those jobs became a dilemma that needed major transportation dollars. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower delivered the Interstate Highway system, to enhance the ability of our nation’s militia to travel the country. This freeway system also enabled people to live further from urban centers and drive in. Given discriminatory housing practices, this new mobility benefit was essentially limited to White people–and often plowed right through Black neighborhoods, destroying their wealth.

So how do we improve equity for transportation? We shift the costs of driving back onto drivers, not to the population at large. This includes priced parking, or meters. Priced parking should not be a source of revenue, but a process to better manage access to the curb. However, since certain neighborhoods in cities have experienced growth and pushed long-time residents out, we’re now seeing more people of color living in car-dependent suburban locations. So we must consider equity impacts of every policy enacted, and the fines and fees associated with driving. With the wealth extraction that has destroyed Black neighborhoods for the benefit of White neighborhoods, some form of reparations is needed.

Other more equitable policy ideas (many from my piece on Medium) include the following:

  • Buildings would not be required to provide parking, but would be required to “unbundle” parking so that only drivers pay for parking spaces. Parking would not be included as part of rent or sale prices.
  • Employers would offer their employees the option of having subsidized parking, subsidized transit, or the cash equivalent of what it costs them to provide parking. This policy is called Parking Cash Out and has been implemented for certain industries in California, Rhode Island, and the City of Santa Monica. Washington, DC has passed a parking cash out law.
  • Parking validation programs would also offer the equivalent cash benefits to people who arrive by transit, biking or walking so that those people receive the same discounts as driving customers. Transit operators could design a card reader that gives transit credit/ reimbursement and provide those readers to hospitals, malls, and other places where parking is the only transportation discount offered.
  • Residential permit parking areas would price permits by the length of the vehicle and by the demand for parking in the area. So if all the spaces are usually full, permit prices go up. If street parking is never congested, prices remain stable or free. This would prevent the problems like Danielle Steel’s 26 parking permits, or at least raise more city revenue.
  • Residential streets would have space reserved for car share vehicles, delivery vehicles, pick-up and drop-off, or secure bike parking for residents who don’t own cars.
  • High-demand areas with expensive parking would retain parking revenue locally and use it to provide locally-appropriate amenities. These amenities could include free public WiFi, increased transit service, improved walking and biking infrastructure, public art and lighting, and affordable housing subsidies so that people can continue to live in the neighborhood while it increases in popularity.
  • Vehicles would pay to use roads by the mile (a VMT tax), based on their weight (which impacts how much damage they may cause to roads). These fees also would extend to trucks and delivery vehicles.
  • Parking at the curb would be automated and priced so that high demand areas automatically charge a vehicle for curbside access by the minute (to limit Uber / Lyft / Via drop-off congestion).
  • Our transportation investments at the regional and state level would dedicate more money to areas that have more people and higher needs. This would mean fewer suburban highway projects and more urban transit, regular roadway maintenance, and bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.
  • Ticket fines would be proportional to a person’s income and the seriousness of the crime, as is done in Finland. This would ensure that tickets are a deterrent to bad behavior for all, without causing financial ruin for low-income drivers.
  • Fines, fees, and fares would be examined through an equity lens to ensure that there is incentive to prevent people from breaking the law without leading to personal bankruptcy.

Our current inequitable transportation system favors those that are wealthy enough to own and maintain cars, at the expense of those who do not own cars or cannot drive.

Have you heard of cities implementing more equitable parking policies? What other approaches would improve equity?

Filed Under: Equity Tagged With: equity, parking, parking management, parking reform

When pricing is needed – Part 2

October 27, 2020 By Lindsay Bayley 4 Comments

As discussed in Part 1, increasing the supply of parking doesn’t address the fundamental challenge of congested parking areas. When drivers can’t find convenient parking during busy hours, the challenge must be addressed with pricing. No one wants to pay for something that they’re used to getting for free. But many are tired of driving in circles and are willing to pay so that they don’t have to keep wasting their time looking for parking.

When working with a community to understand their supply and demand challenges, a parking consultant will often undertake a parking turnover survey to understand how long cars stay parked in certain areas. Below is a graphic from a turnover study on Division Street in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.

Bar chart depicting length of time cars were parked at free spaces, metered spaces, and loading spaces. (Source: CMAP, 2013)

Metered parking is shown in red, loading zones are orange, and free spaces are shown in green – and the length of the bar is how long cars were parked. I spoke with a business owner on the west end of the metered section. He thought it was *great* because he would park in the free space just west of his business and leave his car all day and his customers could easily find a metered spot.

And this is the problem with free parking. You don’t get turnover.

If you have businesses whose customers want to park, a free space that they can’t use is worthless. We typically find that many cars remain parked for the entire duration of our 7-hour surveys. Maybe they are employees, maybe they are residents who only use their car on the weekend. It doesn’t matter. All those businesses in the green area have no available parking. The alderman saw this chart and quietly put meters in the easternmost block. No one complained, because it makes sense to have meters there. You want turnover.

Part 3 dives into the equity considerations of metering parking.

Filed Under: Performance Pricing Tagged With: meters, parking, parking management, turnover

Parking problems – Part 1

October 8, 2020 By Lindsay Bayley 4 Comments

In the “before times” pre-COVID19, when beginning a parking study in an area that has a “parking problem,” I would start by interviewing people and asking them about the problem. I’d talk to business owners, residents, elected officials, principals at local schools, and anyone else who wants to talk to me. Can you guess the #1 complaint I would hear (prior to lockdowns)?

“There’s not enough parking!”

If you’ve found this site, you probably already understand that parking is more complex than that. But I thought I would share how I generally work with people to help shift their perspective – slowly.  Rather than immediately reject the idea that more parking is needed, I start a conversation around the cost of parking. For at least $30,000 per space for new garages, I can ask who they think should pay for it. Will drivers be willing to pay for that? Should the local taxpayers cover it? Should the businesses have added taxes to pay for it? Will it be worth it? Will each new car bring in the sales tax revenue to cover that? What about people who don’t drive; should their taxes be higher so that others can park free? Should they pay more to dine out so that others can park for free?

When it settles in that their small town or neighborhood isn’t going to get a new free parking garage, I start to talk about ECON 101. Parking and driving are unique in our society because they don’t fit into the standard laws of supply and demand, because we typically don’t price much that has to do with driving. When it comes to other goods (housing, food, cell phone, etc.), the right price makes it so that suppliers can continue to produce and make a profit and demand can be satisfied. The point where the supply curve and the demand curve cross, determined by price, is called the equilibrium. (Credit to Jeffrey Tumlin for graphics and inspiration for this post and others yet to come)

When you don’t price driving and parking, you force people to wait for desirable spaces or sit in congested roadways, and TIME – rather than price – regulates how much demand there is. How much time are you willing to spend looking for parking or on your daily commute? And congestion, or full parking, becomes the equilibrium. While parking problems are very different than they were in February, that is because the demand is lower. The same principles of supply and demand still apply.

As San Francisco MTA’s Executive Director, Jeffrey Tumlin, says: congestion is what happens when the demand for mobility equals supply. It is the constant. Building more parking or more roads won’t fix the problem. So we need to understand what the problem is. Usually, the problem is better stated as “I can’t find convenient parking when I need it.” Solving for that problem requires more than just additional parking.

Part 2 of this series looks at how pricing and parking meters impact driver behavior. Part 3 dives into the equity considerations of metering parking.

Filed Under: Economics Tagged With: economics, parking, parking management

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