[Image by Jeremy Price]
If you live and drive in LA, you know you have to budget time not just for fighting traffic, but to fighting to find parking. According to UCLA professor Donald Shoup in an NYT article, a huge chunk of our traffic’s created not by people trying to get places, but by people who’ve already arrived,
Citing studies that show “cruising for curb parking generates about 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts,” Donald points specifically to a business district in LA as an example: “Over the course of a year, the search for curb parking in this 15-block district created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon.”
The problem’s low curb parking prices, which are, on average, just 20% of garage parking prices. “Underpriced curb spaces are like rent-controlled apartments: hard to find and, once you do, crazy to give up. This increases the time costs (and therefore the congestion and pollution costs) of cruising.”
What Donald recommends: “adjust their meter rates (using trial and error) to produce about an 85 percent occupancy rate for curb parking.” The higher prices would mean a disincentive for cruising, pushing more people into parking lots. Plus, the city would get more money from the meters to spend on sidewalk prettying activities (trees!).
Donald doesn’t mention this, but costlier parking would also encourage more people to not drive in the first place. Parking meters = bike racks….
(via kottke)
Except people don’t park at most meters for cost reasons - they park there because the garage (or lot) parking is too far away.
You could of course also make the point that garage parking is overpriced, not the meter parking underpriced. Santa Monica seems to do well with their free parking outside of core hours….
Increasing meter prices is not helping, it’s fighting symptoms. As long as a car is required to get things done (and it is, right now), people will use it. Make public transportation a real option, and a lot of things will sort themselves out. (You could still use parking prices as a policy option - but isolated use is nothing more than a band-aid)
Comment by Robert 'Groby' Blum — April 2, 2007 @ 4:04 pm
This approach might be a bit of a kluge, but any way to reduce the huge subsidies car drivers is fine by me.
I can’t wait for the $4/gal Bay Area gas prices to hit Southland!!!!!!
Comment by Rafi — April 2, 2007 @ 4:32 pm
My point being, that we will have public transit if people demand it.
Comment by Rafi — April 2, 2007 @ 4:33 pm
LA has public transportation, and I take it regularly. I don’t think its a LACK of public transportation that is causing the problem, its the lack of people actually TRYING public transportation rather than driving their gas guzzlers. How many people have you met that have actually tried public transportation and have not been successful? I think the majority is more with people writing it off before even trying it based on some stigma attached.
Comment by Sarah — April 2, 2007 @ 6:19 pm
Okay — I definitely think people park at meters for cost reasons. I s’pose it depends on where you live / hang out, but take, for example, parking around the El Rey, which I used to live next to. There were plenty of close-by parking lots, but people would circle around and around a 6-block radius to find free parking (cuz meters no longer run after like 7) and walk like a mile total to and from the venue.
I’m guessing Rafi means that we’ll have better or more public transit if more people demand it. We don’t LACK public transport, but as a frequent bus rider, I have to say it does create some real headaches at the moment –
Comment by Siel — April 2, 2007 @ 8:14 pm
Thanks Siel. You made my point very well. People don’t try public transit because it’s more expensive and less convenient than driving, thanks to our heavy spending on highways and fuel subsidies (and, apparently, parking meters). Once our governments stop hiding the costs of driving, people will see that we need an alternative.
Comment by Rafi — April 3, 2007 @ 12:59 pm
I was replying to Sarah’s point in here, but it turned so long that I instead posted it on my blog: http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2007/04/04/public-transportation-in-la-is-broken
Comment by Robert 'Groby' Blum — April 4, 2007 @ 6:58 am
I live near the Grove, in one of the few streets that are free of evening parking restrictions. thus, Grove employees will park on out street, walk a mile to the grove, rather than pay out of their pocket to use an otherwise empty space in the Grove parking structure. of course people also park on our street to go to shows at Largo, late night dining at Canters, and much more. so we residents must spend upwards of 20 minutes every night to find parking, EVEN AT A METER that starts at 8am. needless to say I am working toward getting a permit parking district established. after two years of bureacracy and no action, I am finding that I leave my car in my prime parking spots and use my bike as much as possible.
Comment by Andrew — May 5, 2007 @ 4:15 am
When I lived in the miracle mile area, it seriously got to the point where I would not go out sometimes because I didn’t want to lose my parking spot –
Comment by Siel — May 8, 2007 @ 9:01 pm