This comes from an offline discussion that in turn grew out of this thread expressing my annoyance at ultra-modern parking meters.
Question. Is parking space for your car in a city:
-a commodity that should be provided by privately operated lot/ramp owners, or
-a common-good utility that does not respond well to free-market forces, and so should be provided (perhaps at no charge) by the city government?
A laisse-faire capitalist or libertarian would advocate letting the market decide for itself how much parking a city needs. Too few parking spots? Parking fees are high, few people want to go into the city and shop there. Businesses suffer, eventually a few go under, land becomes available. An entrepreneur comes along and convinces investors to pool their money to build a high-capacity parking ramp, with return on investment coming from fees charged to drivers who park there.
The opposing position is that the free market does not respond well/smoothly to parking demand, and that parking space is something that benefits all businesses in the city, and therefore the city as a whole benefits if the government uses their power to step in and add parking capacity as needed. More parking (free parking, even) means more business activity (good for local businesses) and more business tax revenue (good for the city and the taxpayers).
If the city owns the parking spots, should they charge a fee for their use? Does this discourage customers from visiting local businesses? Or should they be as inviting as possible to car drivers, luring them and their shopping dollars into town with free parking?
Does the size of the city matter? Do the rules change depending on whether you’re in a big city like New York or a smaller town, like Ann Arbor or Palo Alto?
As long as the streets are public property, I don’t see how there can be a free-market approach to parking on those streets. Off-street parking also feels the long arm of the law through zoning, which limits how many and how large parking structures can be. Also, in San Francisco, several of the largest and best-placed parking structures belong to the city, which probably (no evidence for this really) used eminent domain to capture those very desirable parking locations for its own structures.
Public policy these days often does not encourage auto use, which includes easy parking. I think the theory is that free and/or easy parking is yet another unseen subsidy for car use, along with freeways, roads and streets. The result is global warming and too much dependence on foreign oil, and stuff like that.
I can sort of imagine a completely free-market approach to transportation, in which all property is privately owned and passage thereon has to be paid for. In this imaginary scenario my guess is that private cars would never have developed as they have done as a mass-market transportation solution and would be limited to the wealthy. Suburban sprawl would be unknown. Everyone not wealthy would be relatively happy to use the efficient and effective mass transit solutions that private enterprise would have developed. Perhaps cheaper forms of individual transportation would also have been developed, replacing bicycles with all-weather electric-motorized self-balancing one- or two-person pods.
Hey, I said it was imaginary.
Roddy
I don’t really accept the idea that free parking (on or off street) is something that the city government is obligated to provide. It may make perfect sense for them to provide it and if the community wants to support the idea through their taxes then good on them. In general, I don’t see any particular failure of the free market in this system.
Another issue is that public parking on the streets means lower traffic capacity, which makes congestion more of a problem. The argument between whether cities should own the parking locations or businesses should is secondary to where to locate those. And it seems that many cities are not allocating their space well when they allow parking along the sides of busy streets.
Relevant Slate article calling for people’s ideas about the matter.