Allow me to return briefly to the topic of metered street parking that I took up in September in “Parking smartly.” A lot of people say to me,
“We should have free parking, like Decatur.” A significant fraction of local
opinion (usually from small towns) don’t think anyone should have to pay for
parking, and resent being asked to, no matter how convenient. But free parking
never worked. Forty-one years ago, when I wrote my first screed on that topic,
downtown in those days was the shopping center of the city. Street parking
didn’t matter when most shoppers came and went by streetcar. But downtown also
was the city’s job center. when free parking the street places were taken up by
office workers before shops opened, shoppers bitched because all the street
parking spaces were in use.
The point of charging for street parking spaces is to ration
a valuable public resource to maximize that public good. Which matters not a
bit to people who do not believe in the public good. Complaining about charging
for street parking is a manifestation of a
familiar American dispute: do public spaces belong to everyone, share and share
alike, or do they belong to no one, useable on a first-come first serve
basis?
For decades I argued that
street parking should be more expensive, not less. I last did so in The mysteries of space and time (Jan. 5, 2012). “Make street spaces free,
undercharge for street space or underfine for overusing it, and the result is
not more parking, only more parkers – more parkers, usually, than there are
spaces,” I railed. “Free parking does not give everyone a chance to park,” I
ranted. “It gives a few early arrivers a chance to park longer at the expense
of their neighbors.”
All true, every word—about places other than
Springfield. In Springfield free parking downtown might
work today because people no longer do.
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2017.
