There’s always opportunity for improvement in what you care about though—I hear the fuming snarl of my significant other now— and among transportation, save for those metal albatrosses, cars have the most opportunity for rounded improvement, especially in dense urban areas. Which brings Radials to San Francisco (apologies to Los Angeles for the northbound detour), beacon of best intentions and often merited self-satisfaction, where parking is becoming a new cynosure of progress. From the New York Times via the The Bay Citizen on May 5th:
In San Francisco’s new parking scheme, Mr. Primus and his colleagues will adjust the prices at 7,000 meters and 20 city-owned parking garages with the aim of keeping two spaces available on every block. Drivers could pay from 25 cents to $6 an hour depending on demand. Currently, rates run from $2 to $3.50 an hour.
The goal of keeping two spaces open on every block almost seems a populist appeal and nonsensical (often the two are the same), $6 an hour isn’t prohibitive, it’s just expensive. But if the mission is to simply keep more cars garaged and increase mode share on public transit (BART and Muni) then it may be one of the more direct paths to that benign end. It may not be the formation of pedestrian only zones in major downtown areas (Elysian Fields covered in asphalt!) but it’s an essential incremental move towards making smart decisions based on one thing that actually matter: money.
“Smart” programs have been popular in politics and application lately, more so in the former than the latter, and that seems to be the most currently solution to an onset of increasingly severe problems. Electric efficiency can be solved by the smart grid congestion by smart tolls, big issues by ostensibly smart people. Now, apparently, parking can be solved by smart metering marked by precision and high tag prices which is actually a great way of going about it. Economic incentives are universal in a world defined by wallet girth, make those wallets lighter and people will adjust accordingly. It’s direct and vulgar but it’s going to keep more cars off the road.
One comment
I’m surprised that NY hasn’t done something like this yet. I’d much rather pay $10 to park every time I go down to Manhattan rather than pay nothing two out of three times and then $30 at a lot the third because of the costs of stress and time associated with driving around & finding a spot (and subsequently walking an extra 10-20 minutes to get to my destination because I parked so far away).
Right now I’m working in the Bronx, and usually three days out of the week I have to spend > 20 minutes driving around looking for parking and then walking to my job. If any level of paid municipal parking existed in the area, I would absolutely pay a fee everyday to get a no-hassle guaranteed spot, but said doesn’t exist and taking public transportation to the job would take over an hour.
Anyways this makes total sense because a parking spot in a metro area is worth more than nothing (or even ~$1 an hour) but it’s absolutely not worth the exorbitant amount that parking garages are charging. The current system’s inefficient because it’s not letting people pay an amount they’re willing to pay to park, but instead giving up valuable real estate to people willing to pay nothing.