Over the years here, as I’ve tried to develop a semi-coherent argument for public transit investment at the expense of automobiles, I’ve occasionally returned to the idea of the parking space. Two years ago, I said the city could fund transit by raising on-street parking rates, and I’ve argued in favor of residential parking permits as a way to raise revenue for anything from street repair and maintenance to public transit investments.
My biggest complaints about parking spaces concern the way we use space and the way we charge for it. In New York, everything costs a lot. Housing prices are high; office rates are high; parkland is at a premium; even sidewalk space has whittled down over the years. Yet, cars get away with parking for free. In essence, you have around two tons of inert metal taking up precious urban space and paying nothing for in exchange for the privilege.
In his City Room column today, Clyde Haberman plays off of the deactivation of the last Manhattan parking meter to wax poetic on parking spaces. Much like the death of the token brought about thought-provoking reflections on mass transit, so too has the death of the parking meter. Muni-meters, after all, free up space. No longer are cars bound by parking meters, and that can be both good and bad for on-street parking.
Haberman’s point, though, is a different one. “Why,” he asks, “is public space, a most precious commodity in this city, allowed to be used as a private storage area?” He continues:
Years ago, I asked in a column if it would be all right for a New Yorker in a crowded apartment to put a chest of drawers on wheels and leave it at curbside — observing all parking rules and taking a chance on theft. The very idea was, of course, absurd; you can’t store personal property on the street.
Why, then, is it O.K. to do that when the wheeled property is called a car?
If public space is to be used for this private purpose, perhaps what the city needs to do is greatly expand the areas where people must pay for the privilege.
Not that this could be done without fierce resistance from some on the City Council and in the State Legislature. Generally speaking, when it comes to the proper place of the automobile in this crowded city, what we have, as Cool Hand Luke found out in his own way, is a failure to communicate.
I don’t believe cars are inherently evil. My family has lived in New York City for my entire life, and we’ve always owned a car. I’m enrolled with the AAA and and card-carrying member of ZipCar. I’m also sympathetic to those who say that fees and taxes in New York are getting out of hand. Parking, though, is a market-based solution. If the market is willing to support significantly higher parking rates, why does New York continue to squander a money-making resource while it gives premium space away for free?
35 comments
You know … the idea that non car owners could buy a parking permit and store stuff in “their” parking space … might actually work! The alternate side of the street thing would be hard but I’m sure we could figure something out.
Your comment made me crack up. Thanks for the good laugh.
On a more serious note, how can we finally dispell the myth that parking spaces & roads in general are NOT FREE.
If you go to the infrastructurist & read the articles you will find some of the same posters who leave comments here as well as some who believe that spending any money on transit is waistful & part of the left wing commi/ socialist agenda. They are easy to spot since they link free parking, cheep gas with the “absolute & extreme” libertarian view of fredom of expression. Put another way, road space & parking MUST be free since I demand it to be so.
You do not understand the extreme libertarian worldview very well. A hard core libertarian would say that the government should not build roads. Private companies should and they should charge for usage as they saw fit. A more moderate libertarian would probably privatize some operations but keep the government in charge of planning, but he’d certainly demand that road users bear all the costs through taxes on gas or cars or something that allowed others not to have to subsidize the roads.
Anyone demanding endless subsides for “free” roads and parking is indistinguishable — in terms of general political philosophy — from you folks who demand greater subsidies for mass transit. You just vary in the specifics of how you think the government should redistribute money it takes in taxes.
That’s a hardcore Libertarian. A hardcore libertarian would cheerfully hit the Libertarian with a shovel for being too friendly with the fascists du jour.
Anyway, joshing aside, any sensible person sees the immediate need for transit and will work with the system to make sure that transit gets the support it needs to operate/expand despite politics; for instance, New Yorkers probably can change MTA labor contracts, if we elected the right people, to get better performance, but we’re stuck with FTA and FRA regulations for the time being. Financial performance should be realistic based on need, and users should contribute something to the operation. None of that precludes debate about best practice or working to change the system too, so performance can be even better.
Regardless of ideology, those of us pushing for better transit, at least those of us who understand what better transit is, generally see it as an investment with a positive tradeoff of paying more now to save in the future, not a personal perk. Those pushing for “free” roads and parking, at least in the face of how expensive and destructive it is, are generally just entitled little twats who often think they’re John Galt. And then, some people on either side just don’t know the evidence and mean well, but want to misdirect scarce resources.
Andrew, you do not understand the actual views of today’s libertarians.
Broadly, there are two factions – let’s call them the Ron Paul faction and the David Koch faction. The Koch faction is notionally more moderate, but really is in the pocket of big industry. It runs Reason and Cato, and does its utmost to convince everyone that government spending on roads and oil is not a big deal.
The Paul faction is more extreme, in the sense that it doesn’t shy away from calling for downright revolutionary actions, such as abolishing the Fed. It’s often far more racist, as well: Reason is run by the secular, pro-immigration business class, whereas Paul flirted with the racists in the early 1990s (hence the infamous letters, which Reason reported about with glee) and remains wedded to fundamentalists. That said, the decidedly Paulist people at Market Urbanism are not racist or fundamentalist, which is why they get along with the left so well.
Uh, no. Sorry.
O’Tool excepted — and granted he’s the most vocal person at Cato on cars and parking, but he’s still only one of dozens — Cato is full of people who believe in congestion charges and other use based taxes to make drivers bear the full costs of their activities. (Well, if you define full as a huge amount of environmental damage, you’ll lose some libertarian support for various reason that run from climate denial to disputation over reasonable calculation of externalities.) To continue along the libertarian spectrum, Cowen and all the folks at George Mason support market clearing parking prices (and congestion fees) as do McArdle and libertarian-leaning, though by no means fully libertarian economists like Mankiw, Glaeser and Becker.
Oh, yes, and it market clearing parking prices were supported by Milton Friedman.
Being a libertarian means not supporting government subsidies. To the extent that people support those subsidies, they are not libertarians. Many people call themselves things inaccurately, which simply means that they are mistaken in their labels, not that the labels mean what they say the do. Very few of those self described fiscally conservative budget cutting republicans would actually cut the budget in the sense of creating a federal budget that was substantially smaller than the one that proceded it. Nearly all the kids who call themselves anarchists would get very mad and call the police if I beat them up and took their stuff, which really isn’t sporting behavior from an anarchist.
From the way that you asserted that the primary belief of one school of libertarianism is racism, I’m guessing you yourself are not really in sympathy with their beliefs. Hell, simply defining Ron Paul as a head of a libertarian school is insane. Ron Paul is a guy who calls himself libertarian and he has some followers, but although some of his views are libertarian many are 180 degrees different. Many are just the ramblings of a crazy guy with no intellectual justification whatever. The only school Ron Paul is at the head of is the Ron Paul school.
You’re generally a pretty fair and factual debater. It’s beneath you to offhandedly tar people who believe in less government than you as mostly racists. (I’m sure some of them actually are but I’d also suspect you’d try to apply that label to anyone who disagrees with your views on unskilled immigration and affirmative action or, possibly, income redistribution.)
Look, I don’t think the primary belief of most Paulistas (with the exception of Rockwell, perhaps) is racism. Paul himself is not personally a racist, and neither was Rothbard. But they don’t mind it. There’s an entire libertarian movement that either considers the Civil Rights Act an infringement of personal liberty or takes those who think so seriously.
I’ll grant you Mankiw and Glaeser, but McArdle has completely drunk the Cox/O’Toole/Poole kool-aid. Practically every time she opens her mouth on public transit or high-speed rail, she says something stupid, all for the same reason: she rides Amtrak and Metro regularly, but feels that as a libertarian she has to oppose socialist/environmentalist transportation. See, for example, her “the US can’t have HSR because its top 10 cities are far away from one another” line. To the extent that she supports market pricing, it’s the same grudging acceptance O’Toole has for it: yes, yes, I support it, but it’s not important and let’s talk about trivial transit subsidies.
There’s also a distinction between independent and organizational pundits. It’s true on both sides: for example, in the 2008 primary, you could easily tell whether a feminist pundit was powered by an organization or by her own clout merely by checking whether she tried to brush racism off and treat it as subservient to sexism. As it happens, within civil rights movements, organizations have the positive effect of avoiding oppression Olympics, whereas within libertarianism and conservatism, organizations have the negative effect of kowtowing to big business (and within liberal policy thinktanks, kowtowing to nice-sounding infrastructure megaprojects). But the principle is the same.
So while you’ll be able to find plenty of libertarians who are honest about road subsidies, even ones that on most issues are more sympathetic to Reason and Cato’s line than to the von Mises Institute’s, as a rule they won’t be representing major outfits, and for the most part they’ll be more concerned with more general issues than transportation.
I dunno, I think that is a big oversimplification. Those two factions you mention are at most two of the officially sanctioned factions that openly flirt with the GOP, and have a membership more often interested in political power than ideological purity (which is why they stay friendly with the GOP to begin with). Those factions are more akin to the right-wing talk radio crowd, who opportunistically love Atlas Shrugged.* On top of them, I’d throw in more pseudo-academic groups like the Manhattan Institute too; these types may not be driven by base emotionalism as much, but they probably tend to support the GOP out of contempt for the Democrats or the political machines in large cities.
On the fringes of or outside the GOP, there is the actual membership of the ironically named Libertarian Party itself, which has supported Ron Paul, Harry Brown, a few no-names, and hard-right Republican-cum-civil-libertarian Bob Barr. And then you have people totally outside the GOP, like Leonard Peikoff,† who, regardless of what you think of him, probably is way too willing to draw critical distinctions to make anyone on the right-wing spectrum of American politics very happy. You also have the odd legitimate academic.
Every faction of the movement is probably attractive to the occasional racist, but it’s hard to say the movement is broadly racist. If there is anything really wrong with how they deal with racial issues, it’s their unwillingness to discuss and address them at all.
* I have no idea how they reconcile the atheism, but internal contradictions are hardly unusual with high-strung authoritarian groups
† Peikoff rejects the term “libertarian,” perhaps because the Objectivists stole it from Proudhon anyway
While I generally agree with all of the above, I worry about the use of residential parking permits. Car owners already have an inflated sense of ownership when it comes to public space (“my” parking space). Issuing, or even worse, selling these drivers a permit to park near their homes would reinforce that sense of ownership. “How dare you use this public space. I _paid_ for the right to keep my car here.” I’m all for creative ways to raise revenues, but I worry that the knock-on effects could make the fight over this public space worse. And imagine trying to undo the program should it cause more problems than it solves…
NYers aren’t anymore territorial than Washingtonians, Chicagoans, San Franciscans or Berkeleyites or any of the other places I’ve lived with residential parking permits. It’s usually. So you can park anywhere within that zone with a permit.
This is not an impossible idea. I know parochialism likes to tell us we are special. But really, honestly, it’s not that hard to do.
I’ll concede an equal level of parochialism, but so much more of New York is so much denser than any of those cities. This could work in brownstone Brooklyn, but the Upper West Side?
Did you really just use the higher density argument to argue *against* effective use of the limited space we have? The denser an area is, the less territorial people feel – since they know they have to share with more people.
Don’t get me wrong – if I were emperor, no one would be allowed to park on the curb for free. But I disagree with you when you say that in a denser area people feel less territorial. I think that people act crazier and get nastier when they have to compete for resources that are even more limited in a crowded area. And anyone who owns a car in a dense neighborhood and expects to be able to park it for free on the street at all times is more likely to have a deluded sense of entitlement.
Everybody who owns a car in a dense neighborhood knows that, before he pulls his car away from the curb, somebody else is waiting for his spot.
Why do you post five pieces lamenting lackluster transit funding and positing endless ideas for more revenue for every one post about reforms that will slash construction and operational costs?
Until we get world-class bang for our buck, which, as far as I can glean, would mean cutting operational costs almost in half and some construction costs by as much as 90 percent, all this extra money you keep demanding would be wasted. All of it would go right into the pockets of politically connected contractors who would over-bill us even more and MTA workers who would use the extra cash to show that the agency can still afford double digit annual pay raises.
Asking for more money before making the massive, massive, massive — add about ten more “massives” in here — reforms needed to make the MTA a world class organization is putting the cart in front of the horse.
We have the good fortune to be in a major crisis right now. The status quo is very clearly not sustainable. We should start looking for fixes rather than cash to sustain the status quo.
We’re living at a rare time when an idea that started halfway around the world and got some visibility here could spread to the mainstream media (because their transit writers clearly read this) and into actual law. Take advantage of that.
I agree that the argument would be stronger if it didn’t make reference to transit, which is pretty irrelevant to the issue. The arguments for parking fees – as an allocation mechanism, and to allow the city to monetize a valuable asset – are solid on their own.
Well said!
Can you outline those reforms for us? The MTA has cut around $700 million from its annual operating budget over the last few years outside of changes from service cuts. I’d love to hear where else you think they can cut that will save more money. Otherwise, the “cut cut cut” chant just sounds like Lee Zeldin’s uninformed rants.
I don’t pretend to be an expert to the level that a few who read this blog clearly are, but there are several steps that come to mind:
1. The next union contract needs to give the MTA full freedom to use workers in the most productive ways possible. It must be allowed to train individual workers for and assign them to multiple tasks, particularly in cases where time changes prevent workers from doing any one task for eight hours a day straight. The new contract must say there are NO prohibitions from the MTA transferring people or automating tasks or anything else that will increase productivity and reduce costs.
2. In this contract, wages and benefits must be tied to productivity rather than seniority — if two guys who do the same job get different pay, the only justifiable reason is that the one guy does it measurably better, not that he’s simply been around longer. They must also scale overall pay and benefits back to the point where they get no more than three qualified applicants for every opening. If you get 50 applicants who legitimately can do the job for every opening, you are overpaying workers, which is your business if you’re a private company but not when you are taking money from taxpayers and riders who have no way to turn to your competitor.
3. As for reducing construction costs, rather than recommend some a bunch of steps, I’d suggest we just take a look at the countries that produce stuff for less than us and copy what they do. There’s no damned reason to reinvent the wheel here because New York is different or special. By this, I naturally mean copying places like Spain or Germany that pay workers well and have liveable checks on infrastructure projects. I’m well aware that we cannot duplicate the costs of China, where workers make nothing and work can start about five days after the government decides on a project with no review at all.
Actually, I’d be willing to let point 3 override points 1 and 2. Rather than me dictating what the new contract needs to do, we should just look at wealthy countries that run transit systems far more efficiently and copy them.
Your challenge — can you give some specifics, as if you have no idea what changes could possibly be made — makes it sound like you don’t think radical improvement is possible, when clearly that’s nonsense. Other countries do it every day. Spain beats the pants off us. Spain!!! A country that, in general, is worse run than us. A country where labor tends to be less productive. A country where government workers generally enjoy greater protections than they can here. If the Spanish can do it, how can you possibly think that we cannot?
And how can you possibly think it’s not worth a fight? A real political fight against the people who have been ripping transit users off for the past 60 years. The improvements I’m talking about would allow us to afford not only a real 2nd Ave. Subway but a real 10th Ave. Subway as well, along with new lines outside Manhattan that would allow real urban density in Brooklyn and parts of Queens. It would allow real BRT, which would make nearly every part of the city quickly reachable and greatly reduce automobile traffic. That’s worth a big, big fight.
If you think that New York is so corrupt and so dysfunctional that no good ideas, no reforms that will really improve service rather than just limiting deterioration, are politically viable, no matter how much they’d help public transit users, then I can’t imagine how you motivate yourself to run this blog. It must all seem so sad and hopeless.
Construction costs aren’t getting slashed… The procurement process for contractors in the MTA is already extremely transparent.
Its just that there are usually only one or two contractors that are even qualified and willing to bid for their jobs… The lack of competition is what’s driving up the costs. And quite frankly, there’s nothing that can be done to change that, unless things in New York State changes in a fundamental level (like the banning labor unions or something like that)
Then how are they so much lower in other rich countries? Magic? If other places can do it, fully comparable places, we can do it.
The argument as stated does not follow. If the waste is 50%, then it is not true that “every extra dollar is wasted”. It would be half of every extra dollar is wasted.
That would mean that a lot of actions don’t make a cost/benefit cut that with greater efficiency would make a cost/benefit cut ~ but anything that would have benefit/cost ratio of greater than 2 “without any waste” would still have a benefit/cost ratio of greater than 1 “with 50% waste”.
And refusing to pursue those projects where there is still a net benefit “until there is 0% waste” is still cutting off our nose to spite our face.
I’m sorry. Are you actually arguing that 50 percent waste is okay, that anyone should take seriously your request for more money when half goes into the toilet?
I’d agree that it would be silly to say “no more money till no waste” but it’s equally silly to say, “Yes we could do this for half of the price but we promise to work hard on that if you just give us more money.”
The problem with resident parking permits is that not everyone who parks on a street is going to live in the neighborhood. What about someone visiting friends or family? What about a contractor doing work on a nearby building? They need parking spaces too and they shouldn’t be less privileged to them just because they aren’t local residents.
You would need to also have a means of a nonresident paying to park, or else it’s obnoxious in an unproductive way.
Best way to do this? Have a universal city wide parking pass, good on all streets in all 5 boroughs. Sell them by the hour, by the day, by the week, and by the month, with discounts applying to longer term purchases.
This is a serious problem. The whole point of driving is to go places. Resident parking permits make it easy to store your car on the street in your own neighborhood but difficult to use it to go anywhere else.
Take three people who want to park their cars in Park Slope. John lives in Park Slope and owns a car, which he parks on the street and uses on occasional weekends. Jane lives in New Jersey and also owns a car, but she often drives to Park Slope to visit her friends. Joan lives in Park Slope but doesn’t own a car, although she occasionally rents when she needs to transport heavy objects.
With residential parking permits, John has it easiest, even though he doesn’t use his car much. Jane, who uses her car to visit Park Slope, has trouble finding parking there, and Joan, who needs curb access to load and unload her heavy objects, doesn’t own a car so doesn’t have a parking permit.
The more equitable way is to allocate space by price, which can vary based on demand (depending on location, time of day, and day of week). Think of parking meters, but without the time limits, and ideally without the need to decide in advance how long you’ll be parked.
That might persuade John to sell his car, which he doesn’t use much, rather than having to pay to keep it parked. On the flip side, it would give Jane and Joan curb access when they need it.
(And if enforcement could be somehow taken out of the hands of the NYPD, all the better.)
I think DC has this problem solved pretty easily. First, not every block is zoned. Second, to park in a zoned area for 3 hours requires no permit all. Third, vistors and business owners can apply for special permits. For visitors who are staying with someone who resides in the zone, the cost is free, and that’s the same for contractors. The system requires a bit more effort on the part of residents, but it seems to work well.
But that IS the problem with parking permits. Seattle has them too and it mostly works, but it always seems that permitted locals are more entitled to use “their” street for parking (most people already think that way) and if you don’t have a permit, please leave. It needs to be city-wide to be fair. It shouldn’t matter if you live in a really dense neighborhood unless you are going to charge permits by the foot length of the car.
Free street parking anywhere in NYC is ridiculous. Look at all the problems parked cars cost us in blizzards. Nothing is free in this world.
Now, if only those new permits clearly went directly for street & bridge repair, we’d then have NY Nirvana.
What about residents who don’t own cars but occasionally rent?
And how is any of this preferable to market pricing?
The kinds of problems you mention only exist because both transit service and the private parking market have atrophied due to the deliberate distortion of the public parking “market.” In a world of market-price street parking, there would be more transportation and parking options for the travelers you describe.
I don’t disagree at all with zoned parking permits (although they should probably give the right to park in the “home” zone or adjacent zones, if one needs to go several blocks to find a space).
The one question I have when it comes to parking is for food-vending trucks. Are there/should there be a different set of rules for them? Since the driver remains with the vehicle, are they even truly “parking”, even though they occupy the same (larger than normal) space for hours?
Yep, those trucks are parked, at least according to the local legal definition: “The standing of a vehicle, whether occupied or not, otherwise than temporarily for the purpose of and while actually engaged in loading or unloading property or passenger.” Doesn’t matter if there’s someone in the vehicle or if the motor is running. In a No Parking zone, you can let a passenger out of the vehicle and unload items to the curb (no, not to the lobby of your building). It’s a lot broader than most people realize. And for those who are curious, No Standing is the same, except you can’t unload property, only passengers.
Agreed. Let’s start charging admission to Central Park, too.
Why, are people routinely unable to enter Central Park because it’s full already?
There are a few areas in the city where parking is only a problem when only half the streets are available because of alternate side parking. Should those people pay too? And areas without ASP are cleaner than some areas with it.
A digression on the topic: In Chicago the private entity contracted by the City to run its parking meter program went a little overboard with parking meter placement in what’s currently a large urban prairie: http://achicagosojourn.blogspo.....eland.html
Related Google Maps link: http://maps.google.com/?ll=41......=12,272.73,,0,12.32
(The area IIRC was home to a medical center which closed years ago and is currently maybe a dozen square empty blocks which various entities are fighting over for redevelopment).