How to Win Converts to Paid Parking

I, like many transportation consultants, spend a great deal of time trying to convince people that it is in their best interest, and that of their community, to charge for parking. Paid parking encourages all types of positive behavior including employees staying out of customer spaces, the use of alternative transportation, and the funding of needed infrastructure.

In a recent issue of Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger interviews Jeff Tumlin, a transportation consultant, about what it takes to sell paid parking. “Somebody who’s screaming about ‘parking needs to be free!’ I can sit down with them for 20 minutes and get them to understand,” he says. “But it takes a full 20 minutes. And in a world where everything has to be distilled into 15-second sound bites, it’s really hard to convince people on a large scale.”

Jeff goes on to say that new technology and services are making it easier to charge for parking. "The advent of pay-by-credit card technology allows cities to raise the price of parking to where enough people are turned away onto alternate forms of transportation, without upsetting the people who are now paying more. That’s the trick of credit cards (and a lesson plenty of other businesses have long understood): People don’t mind paying more for something when they don’t actually have to hand over that difference in cash (or coins)." I have often said that if you take something (i.e money to park) you have to give something (i.e. new ways to pay, better level of service).

But, one of the hardest arguments to overcome is the question as to wether or not paid parking charges are a burden on the poor? Well Jeff goes onto explain that,"The poorest people, he’s found, aren’t looking for parking because they don’t own cars. But among the rest of this demographic, he says surveys show that poor people also place an extremely high value on their time. They too often say they’re willing to pay a little more for parking if it means they don’t have to waste time looking for it."

Read the full story here.

The Economics of Paid Parking

Here at Lanier, it is no surprise that we support the concept of paid parking. However, that is not only because our business is built on managing paid parking operations. Placing a monetary value on the availability of parking is also good for the environment, congestion and urban planning.
A recent article by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, makes the economic case for more paid parking.

"Is this a serious economic issue? In fact, it is a classic tale of how subsidies, use restrictions, and price controls can steer an economy in wrong directions. Car owners may not want to hear this, but we have way too much free parking."

Cowen points out that zoning laws often mandate ample parking at businesses, effectively subsidizing car trips that the free market would have discouraged.

"If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove."

Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at UCLA, explains that 99% of all vehicular trips in the United States end up in free parking. Professor Shoup has been arguing for paid parking for the better part of a decade and has written a book that I have previously discussed called "The High Cost of Free Parking."

Park More and Drive Less

As a parking and transportation planner, I often have to explain how paid parking is a tool that encourages good behavior. This is especially true with on-street parking, where a fee encourages people to park more and drive less. By that I mean paid parking causes greater turnover of the spaces, resulting in an increase in the availability of spaces and the reduction of congestion-causing cruising.

Dr. Donald Shoup, professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, has written extensively about this in the "The High Cost of Free Parking," and eloquently illustrated the point during an interview with Mark Gorton of the Open Planning Project on Streetfilms. Although they use NYC as the backdrop, I believe the thesis holds true for large and small communities alike.