Op-Ed: A rethinking of what parking is in the first place

"If your parking policy debates are going in circles, there is a good chance the protagonists are 'framing' parking in totally different ways."  (Let's see what Paul Barter of Reinventing Parking had to say  on this earlier today in Singapore.)

A rethinking of what parking is in the first place

Paul Barter, Reinventing Parking.  Monday, January 16, 2012

They have different ideas about 'what parking is in the first place', as the Boston Globe's Leon Neyfakh puts in in his short feature, which focuses on the rise ofperformance pricing for parking in US cities.

I have written before that parking debates often involve different ways to frame the whole idea of parking. So I liked this bit in the article:

At one level, the idea is a novel piece of urban engineering made possible because of new parking technology. But at another, it amounts to a rethinking of what parking is in the first place — not a public resource to be shared by all, but a scarce commodity whose price should fluctuate depending on how badly people want it.

Possible translation into policy-speak:  parking is not a public good, it is a private good which can have a market price.  

Does that claim shock you?

How could parking in public space (such as in a street) be a private good? Well, you need to understand that when policy wonks use the term 'private good' they do NOT necessarily mean it must be privatized. It just means that it is both rivalrous and excludable.

Now, you CAN try to pretend that parking is a public good if you really want to. This means you would refuse to ration it (or 'exclude' some people some of the time). But, unfortunately, you can't magically stop parking from being rivalrous. If I am parking in a specific spot you can't park there at the same time. So you end up not with a public good but with a common-property resource (or 'commons good'). This means it is non-excludable (or inconvenient to exclude) but it is rivalrous (or 'subtractable'). It also means that you are likely to face a tragedy of the commons situation, such as saturated parking with lots of cruising for parking and much moaning about the parking 'shortage'.

Image from Living Economics

By the way, we have lots of choices on how to manage common-pool resources. Shifting them into the private goods box (eg by pricing it or allocating property rights) is one approach. Others include central planning or local community solutions, such as the common property regimes highlighted by Elinor Ostrum's Nobel winning work on common pool resources).

Further into the article we can see some of these ideas applied to parking and expressed in everyday English:

At the heart of the early resistance to meters was a sense of entitlement to free street parking that has endured in America to this day. We carry a deep-seated belief that people should be free to go where they please on the streets we’ve built, and that a city’s curb space is public — that, like air and water, it belongs to everyone.
To Shoup and his adherents, this is the wrong way to see it: Curbside parking isn’t a shared resource, like Boston Common, but rather a valuable piece of real estate, managed by the city, that should be priced according to what it’s worth. As Shoup put it, “We have a problem with parking exceptionalism in this country. Somehow people think that the normal laws of supply and demand don’t apply.”

So Shoup's thinking on parking, even on-street parking, sees it as a 'private good' (in the policy-wonk sense of the term). This causes dismay to people who are thinking of it as somehow 'public' or 'common'.

This post was about on-street parking. What about off-street parking? That's a whole different story. Conventional parking policy treats off-street parking as like the restrooms we require with each building and we should probably treat parking more like the cooked-food outlets that the market provides and planners usually allow in any walkable district. More on that some other time.

Are parking debates where you live going in circles? Is it because of different ideas about what parking is in the first place?

* * * Read more Barter on parking at http://www.reinventingparking.org/

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About the author:

Paul Barter is Assistant Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore where he teaches infrastructure policy, urban policy, transport policy and an introduction to public policy. He has published studies of transport policy in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. His current research interests are in innovation in transport demand management, public transport regulation, and contested priorities in urban transport policy.

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