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Parking rates go up, cities make bucks
An open parking spot in Greenwich Village in New York.
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Parking rates on a meter in New York City
No spots left where parking is free in New York.
TEXT OF STORY
Tess Vigeland: Yesterday the Atlanta city council voluntarily gave up about $400,000 of potential revenue. Not something you hear a lot in these austere days of government budget-cutting. They voted to suspend parking meter enforcement for 30 days because residents complained about the aggressive tactics of a private company that runs the meters.
But coin isn't the only benefit meters bring to cities, and the businesses that line their streets. From WNYC in New York, Andrea Bernstein has more.
Andrea Bernstein: I'm walking on Sixth Avenue, in Greenwich Village, a place famous for limited parking. About a year ago, the city Department of Transportation decided to do an experiment here. They started charging more for parking during peak periods.
Dr. Rachel Weinberger is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a recent study on parking. She says one way to get more parking spots is to get people to leave faster.
RACHEL Weinberger: Which means make it more available for more people to use, and if you make a price that's a little bit closer to what the demand is, then you'll see people share better.
On the street it costs $2 an hour at a meter, $3 an hour during peak periods. But it costs $17 an hour to park in a garage, so it's hard to believe that an extra dollar an hour for a meter can be much of a disincentive. But I notice several open spots as we walk.
Bernstein: I'm shocked.
Weinberger: I was a little shocked myself.
But Weinberger adds...
WEINBERGER: People are actually quite price sensitive to very small increments in price. This can be a very effective tool for effecting different kinds of behavioral changes in how people transport themselves around.
As we're walking, I see a man putting money into a machine to pay for parking.
Bernstein: Hi, how are you?
Mechanic Victor Duran says he drove down from his home in Upper Manhattan to shop. Finding parking, he says, was a breeze.
Bernstein: Was that worth it to you?
VICTOR DURAN: Nah, it's too much.
Bernstein: So would you rather drive around and look for a spot, or would you rather pay the dollar?
Duran: It's better to pay the dollar.
Weinberger says no one likes paying for parking, but paying can influence behavior. When spots are more expensive, they open up more quickly. Drivers circle less. Congestion eases, pollution drops. Paying for parking can push people to carpool or take transit. But making parking more expensive isn't exactly popular.
Greg Ninyasov runs a hair salon. He says the new fees are discouraging his customers.
GREG Ninyasov: Nobody wants to park because everybody's complaining because it's too much money. All my clients, they're like complaining why so much?
But the city liked the results of its Manhattan experiment. Last fall, it launched another pilot in Brooklyn.
Hardware store owner Victor Chabbad is pleased with the results there.
VICTOR Chabbad: Well, make it easy for customer. This way people park, and they move on, and what happen. It's much better.
Business owners in Pasadena, Calif., also came to like the idea of collecting all those quarters.
Steve Mulheim heads up the shopping district. To get the local merchants to embrace the plan, he said, a promise was made. The parking revenue would go right back into the streets.
STEVE Mulheim: The city on a normal basis would sweep streets about once a quarter.
But now...
Mulheim: We sweep every street, every alleyway, every night.
Mulheim says without the parking money, the district faced cutbacks in maintenance.
Mulheim: It really makes a big difference to even our consumer base when they know that money isn't just going into a big bottomless pit somewhere.
Mulheim acknowledges there are still unhappy drivers.
But as more cities face drastic cutbacks, parking revenue looks sweeter and sweeter.
Janette Sadik-Khan is New York City's transportation commissioner. At a recent conference, she had this to say...
JANETTE Sadik-Khan: I think, in a way, in 50 years, people are going to think we were insane to give free space to parking on city streets because it's such a valuable resource.
Arrayed around the table were transportation officials from Houston, Philadelphia, Washington, and elsewhere. Their heads were nodding up and down vigorously in agreement.
In New York, I'm Andrea Bernstein for Marketplace.
You've got my mind working. Some years ago I saw a fabulous musical called Urinetown. The title is play on words, of course.
I bought tix for all the Irish interns staying with that summer. They loved it. So did I, but it got me to thinking (which I do from time to time).
You might remember the premise to it all-pay to pee. Well every time someone says parking free and should be market rate I think of Urinetown!
I'm now looking for surplus lav coin boxes that were used on the subways to install at my bathrooms at home. I figure since public lavs charge there must be a unto now unknown market price to use what was until now free to all, namely at my place.
I'm not greedy, neither are the advocates of higher priced parking; we all just want to cover our 'external costs'. Don't you agree?
I can't imagine the whining we'd see if some of the commenters went to Europe and had to drop .50Euro to visit the toilet.
If you have a valuable commodity then assign a value to it, I'm not getting why peoples' heads are spinning. Seems that supply/demand will sort itself out.
Get your head out of "parking" as an item to be purchased. No one drives to the shops for the purpose of purchasing parking.
Parking as a pay-per-visit line item is an obstacle, an insult, an injury to be endured or ducked on the way to doing business. Keep that going for too long and you get ghost towns. We used to have people in the downtown. I've seen that drop to almost nothing since the 70's. Be grateful if you have people in your downtown. Don't resent them as if they were a burden.
Actually we do provide a lot of "free" items in order to get people. You don't charge for street lighting, or water fountains, or the streets themselves or the traffic lights as line items per visit. That is included in the cost for the municipality itself - taxes.
If you actually think that parking is some rip-off by customers and potential customers then you may as well also bill them for the lighting in each store they go into as well as a charge for the aisle space to walk along as they look at the racks of merchandise.
Consider "free" parking as a customer acquisition and retention device. When you charge someone to park it is a proxy for charging someone to enter each doorway.
Essentially it is as if some mafia guy were standing outside each business and extracting a toll for letting persons enter and a fine if they stay too long. My, how a business owner would love that, not.
It is NOT about parking. This is about having a population which is willing to come into an area and spend non-specific time wandering around, in and out of shops. Without that people come down for some very specific purpose and leave as soon as they are done with that purpose. I haven't wandered around the downtown of KC since the mid 80's or earlier. Not even when I was employed in those blocks and not even when I lived downtown with underground parking. I always drove out from downtown for shopping.
The difference between Country Club Plaza and Manhattan is that Country Club Plaza benefitted from a single landowner who allocated the cost of parking provision to its benefit. Where land has multiple owners, like Manhattan, some economic mechanism is necessary to allocate the cost of providing the service (basically a public utility) across its users (the merchants and their automobile driving customers). We don't provide electricity or water for free to everyone to use as much or as little as they need. Why do we feel we must do that for parking?
Message back to Sommerville,
I can't imagine what theoretical foundation you are coming from but I am struck by how just plain dumb is the NYC's transportation commissioner's statement and, I am sorry to be insulting, but your assertion about the right pricing for parking. Folks don't go anywhere to buy parking, they go places to wander around and buy merchandise, food, entertainment and more.
What I related is a century's worth of experience in urban community development (not mine, this area's regarding JC Nichols from before 1900). Nichol's developments from that far ago remain financially healthy.
If a city is not a community, where people really want to spend time, leisurely time, then they will also not take time to spend money in unplanned ways. That is what Nichols realized. Parking is a huge revenue earner, but not in the form of parking meters or parking rates. Parking earns money by bringing in shoppers, which is what Nichols did even before cars were a dominant traffic factor by bringing people in from the trolley lines for free.
Obviously you have zero knowledge of JC Nichols who created Kansas City's Country Club Plaza in the 20's - and many other sub-communities in the Kansas City area before and later, all with integrated free parking, way back in the 10's, 20's and 30's. He specifically refused to install metered parking (patented 1933, 1st install 1935), and made a fortune. These are the places which prospered. You get customers by getting people. You get people by putting out the welcome mat.
Parking is a cost of business, like doors and floor space and restrooms (i.e. customer retention devices). Were a merchant to charge people for floor-space usage and fine them if they stayed too long in the store that merchant would be considered crazy and an idiot. That is what charging for parking is. Just because people don't park their cars right in the stores doesn't change that.
Message to Kansas City... if no one wants to go there you shouldn't charge for parking because there's no demand!
If people want to visit an area, charge just the right amount to insure free spaces. If people get annoyed at the price and go away, then there will be more parking spaces and the city can lower their prices. If the city reinvests the parking revenue in to making the downtown worthwhile to visit, then like Pasadena, you will see a cycle of virtue: More and more people pay to park, generating more revenue, making the downtown even nicer, enticing people to pay even more to park there.
"... insane to give free space ..." ??? My take: In 50 years you might think you were insane to charge for parking, when you've lost all your customers. This only works when there is nowhere else to go for what you want. Can you imagine merchants complaining about too many customers? There was a time when KC also thought there were too many people (read "customers").
Compare Kansas City's downtown area and its parking meters with any of the JC Nichols shopping/living communities without parking meters in the Kansas City area and you see downtown an office-park ghost town (mostly) versus live communities with many small shops - mini main streets.
When Kansas City put in parking meters to limit all those customers is seemed to work for some years. But that was because the downtown was the main game in town. Over years, shopping centers with free parking moved customers from downtown to the suburbs. When various shopping centers died out the JC Nichols communities with free parking kept on properously and even in these times are still doing so.
And downtown Kansas City? They haven't learned. Pitifully, they are still depending on parking meters for revenue. For every dollar collected they probably lose thousands for any merchants, except that their are few merchants downtown anymore. The last department store left years ago and for years the closest thing to a store was a general merchandise drug store. Yes there is a new development area downtown but it is insular, robs revenue from the surrounding area of downtown and probably will go the way of other promising development solutions over the last 30 years.
Free parking is not lost revenue. Free parking is what allows people to spend time in an area, enough time to spend money even when they didn't plan too, rather than leaving as soon as their specific business is done because they (read me) don't want to pay more or to pay fines.
Maybe NYC can get away with it because of size, but once you kick those customers out, it is really very hard to bring them back.
