Parking meters and rabid enforcement killed downtown San Jose retail, but it was planned so as to get shoppers into the malls. That didnt make the merchants downtown very happy.
$75/hour in downtown Sidney.aus. That’s AUD, so about $50/hour USD. And no, it wasn’t for revenue: it was to discourage people from parking there, so that the spots could be used for 3 minute drop off /pick up, which they thought was more important and more valuable and benefited more people.
On-street parking, at least in the US, is considered a shared public resource. A “tragedy of the commons” situation emerges when all on-street spaces are free. In the early days of widespread car ownership, when traditional main streets were more common, business owners and merchants often hogged all the good spots near their offices and stores. They effectively privatized on-street parking, and left few spaces for shoppers. Parking meters were one way to ration a resource for which there was growing demand, but limited supply.
As for handicapped parking, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires a certain percentage of on-street parking spaces to be accessible, and free. It’s both for convenience – space location should be where van access is safe and easy, like next to a hard-surfaced tree lawn with no trees or street furniture in the way – and because many parking meters are not accessible to those in wheelchairs or with limited mobility.
Recommended reading assignment: The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup. It’s a fixture in many planners’ libraries, and it’ll change the way you think about the management of on-street parking.
Apparently your double yellow lines are not like the ones that demark ‘no passing’ stretches of road in the USA. Are these on the curb, outlining no parking spaces, or what?
Yep. For most of my life ( and in three different neighborhoods) , I 've lived within a couple of blocks of the local “Main Street” and I would do a certain amount of shopping there- but rarely anything that would require a car. Not a full week’s worth of groceries, not anything large and no errands on my way to or from somewhere. Because it was unlikely I’d be able to park on the street - even though there were parking meters that only allowed two hour parking, people working in the stores and offices ( the traffic agents rarely marked the tires in order to write tickets for exceeding the two hour limit, so as long as the meter was fed every two hours there was no ticket.) and there are no parking lots, paid or free. If there were no meters, the people who live over the stores and offices would take up the parking spaces.
The inability to park wasn’t the only thing that drove people to malls* but for every family like Musicat’s - who would park two blocks away or go to the free parking mall to avoid paying for parking -there are probably multiple families who just go straight to the mall with free parking because " you can never park on Main Street"
- There was also the stupidity of the business hours. When I moved to my current neighborhood over thirty years ago , lots of stores/offices were open M-Fri 10-6. There were some that were open part of the day on Saturday and only food stores were open on Sunday. At every event, we’d hear about how we should shop locally - but why should I take a day off from work to get insurance at an office open from 10-6 M-F when I can call GEICO 24/7?
Here in CA we have a few cities with a robust, vibrant downtown. They solve that problem by a 2 hour parking limit, and no meters. Two hours limits merchant and employee parking, while allowing shoppers the time they need. It works.
This pic shows typical double yellow lines in the UK. Ordinarily, you can’t park in these, but there’s a couple of exceptions. You can legally park to unload heavy things, for example, as long as you aren’t creating an obstruction. Blue, disabled badge parking is another exception.
London has “Red Routes” in which you are not allowed to park or load. I don’t believe you can park on those with a disabled badge either.
Heartily seconded. If you can face the prospect of wading through 600+ pages on the economics and logistics and planning implications of parking, then this book is a real eye-opener. It’s particularly good for countering arguments like this:
One of the key points that Shoup makes is that “free” parking is not actually free at all, even to the people who use it. For example, the cost of building and maintaining that large parking lot at the mall had to be factored into the cost of building the mall and maintaining the mall, which in turn has an impact on mall rents, which in turn has an impact on the prices that the shops charge. The fact that these costs aren’t immediately obvious doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
By far the most compelling part of the book, though (IMO), is his argument about the consequences of our obsession with free or cheap parking for the urban landscape, not just in downtown business districts, but also in neighborhoods where people live. Paradoxically, some of the people most adversely affected by policies that emphasize free or cheap parking are poor people.
Anyway, if you want to get the gist of Shoup’s argument without committing yourself of hundreds of pages of excruciating detail, you can hear him interviewed in this episode of the Freakonomics podcast. As Shoup says:
I won’t challenge any assertion that free parking isn’t free. Free shipping isn’t free, either, but both are highly attractive to shoppers.
Perhaps the moral is to make something look free even though it isn’t.
Yes, but heres the point- people like free parking. Expensive parking is a great way to kill your shopping district as people will either go to another district or shop online.
When Amazon gives out free shipping, in order to compete, brick and mortar needs to offer free parking.
Have you ever seen a big shopping mall with meters? No. Where does everyone shop now? Big malls or online.
Shoup may be right, but his widely spread arguments have spelled the death of small businesses in a downtown shopping area. In fact the death of downtown shopping areas.
So, he is right only so far… in that businesses need to compete, something he apparently forgets.
Quote from Shoup:
Everybody likes free parking, including me, probably you. But just because the driver doesn’t pay for it doesn’t mean that the cost goes away. If you don’t pay for parking your car, somebody else has to pay for it. And that somebody is everybody. We pay for free parking in the prices of the goods we buy at places where the parking is free.
This is true, but even ignoring the psychology of the hiding of the costs, when I feed a parking meter, I pay 100% of that cost. When that cost is added to prices in general, my parking cost is shared by everyone who shops whether they take the bus, walk, or (to get back to the OP) park in a free handicap spot.
This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. The rest of your post fails to grasp the complexity of his argument, but this part is just plain stupid. I would go into some detail about why, but to be honest, if this is where you’re starting from, there’s not even much point in trying to present the case, because it shows a complete unwillingness to fairly assess the scope of his policy arguments.
Absolutely true, but Shoup would argue that this supports his argument. His position here is not that individual businesses or consumers can’t sometimes benefit from free parking; his main point is to argue tthat the emphasis on free parking actually detracts from economic activity, disproportionately impacts the poor, and contributes to different types of urban blight. He doesn’t just want to stop a few malls from offering free parking; he’s trying to change urban policy.
Many parking lots, in both businesses areas and residential housing construction, are mandated by zoning ordinances. He has extensive economic and planning data to demonstrate that these ordinances, by adding to the cost of businesses, and by taking up space that could otherwise be used for other businesses (instead of being used to park cars), actually tend to hollow out downtown areas, reduce foot traffic, and drive up prices for businesses, consumers, and residents. I guess I could go into a whole bunch of detail here, but for better or worse, his book is 600 pages long for a reason.
I’m not saying you have to agree with him. I’m also not saying that you have to read his book to weigh in on the parking debate. But if you see something in his argument that doesn’t quite seem to make sense, it might be best not to simply assume that the nation’s pre-eminent authority on the policy implications of parking has simply forgotten to consider your fantastic point.
Someone like Shoup is worth listening to on issues like this precisely because he looks beyond the simplistic subjectivity that each of us experiences in our own lives, and tries to bring it all together in ways that the layperson doesn’t immediately recognize. My first response when I read a short online summary of Shouip’s work was to think that it sounded silly; reading the book changed my mind.
I am basing this on two things: your precis of what Shoup sez, and my experience as a Parking and Traffic Commissioner.
Parking meters and rigorous enforcement killed Downtown San Jose retail . The huge free parking areas built by the malls made all the shoppers move there. One $36 parking ticket for coming back 15 minutes late, and a shopper will abandon that merchant. People HATE parking tickets.
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/12.25.03/parking-0352.html
"If the city council wants to bring business back to downtown, it needs to rip out every parking meter and putting up free parking garages. I will not visit businesses in a parking meter zone period !..Was less than A MINUTE late coming back to my truck, which was basically 2 storefronts down from Punjab Cafe. $40 ticket. Never again…Yup. Palo Alto, Campbell, Santa Clara, Mt. View, Willow Glen, etc. credit their downtown economic vitality to free parking.
*Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote a column for our downtown community newspaper, City Times, regarding the policy of the City of San Jose and its ridiculous parking laws. Guess what? Nothing has changed. Whenever you want to change the behavior of people or animals, you apply intermittent stimulus to change that behavior. It’s very powerful. An M&M candy or an electric shock given to a subject, administered at unknown intervals, as a reward for certain actions can change the behavior of the subject. Ask B.F. Skinner! Our “SkinnerianCity” is working incredibly well.
The City’s parking rules accomplish this by giving tickets out near the wonderful, new Paesano’s Ristorante in the outskirts of downtown San Jose, situated in the newly designated Little Italy. You’d think the City of San Jose would make a super effort to encourage people to visit the area. Not our city. On Thursday evening, I decided to have dinner at this new restaurant. I fed the meter two hours worth of quarters. …
I then looked up and saw the meter maid parading outside, giving fines for frequenting this fine dining establishment. Tickets are given out all day until 10:00 p.m.! And the ticketing people are relentless.
Luckily, this time, I had 8 minutes left on my meter, so I did not receive a ticket. Pino, the charming owner of Paesano’s, came out with a pocketful of quarters, lamenting that the city and its stupidity was making it tough on his business and customers. His clients at the restaurant feel on edge because the parking situation will add 25% to the restaurant bill if a ticket is given out. So there we were, standing in the rain, with Pino shoving quarters into the meter. Four dollars worth so far! …afe in the city that does whatever it can to hurt businesses and train customers/citizens to stay away.*
Like I said before- Free parking on city streets with defined parking term limits is the best solution.
You can’t park on any double-red lined route. You can’t even pause to let someone out or in the car, and the reason for that is that they’re so high-congestion that there is no safe way to let a passenger out or in. They are absolute no-stop lines.
But you can occasionally park for a certain amount of time on single red routes (how long will be stated on a sign, there’s no general rule), and single red routes almost always allow black cabs and people displaying blue badges to stop to get a passenger out. There are lots of those near tourist attractions in central London not just because we want to placate the tourists but because upgrading the Victorian stations in the vicinity is difficult and costly.
If you have to travel into those areas of London by car sometimes, which I do occasionally because the really central train stations and lines are not made for people with mobility problems, you either get a black cab and they’ll know the rules or you spend ages looking up the rules because they differ to the rest of the UK.
These are special rules in a specific circumstance though. Don’t think they have anything to do with the OP.
How they’re "free"differs though. They might be cost-free at the point of use but in London TFL will have negotiated for various contracts, among which was provision of disabled parking zones. And in London, TFL get a lot of their money eventually by taxation. Most highway authorities anywhere will.
And at some point they will have got to the point where they weighed up the cost-benefits ratio of charging disabled drivers/passengers and assessed that it’s not to their benefit to put in separate parking meters. And then maybe they all said yay, we can be good guys today!