"who pays for free parking? everyone but the motorist!"

In last Sunday's New York Times, Professor Tyler Cowen argued that ubiquitous free parking amounts to an immense subsidy for automobiles.  Most new commercial construction in the U.S. is required by law to include a generous number of free parking spaces, leading to the horrific seas of pavement likely coming soon to Olympian Drive in Urbana.  As with gasoline, drivers are insulated from paying the true costs of operating cars.  Open space gets paved and new commercial buildings usually look like the ugliest of Robert Venturi's fantasies.  Progressives like James Howard Kunstler have spent years advocating that we recognize the true costs of automobility.  Cowen's essay argues that we do so in prices:

Higher charges for parking spaces would limit our trips by car. That would cut emissions, alleviate congestion and, as a side effect, improve land use. Donald C. Shoup, professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, has made this idea a cause, as presented in his 733-page book, “The High Cost of Free Parking.”

Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it’s in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway. Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block.

Pricing parking to reflect the true costs of driving would also encourage the growth of green modes of transit, like buses and bicycles. "Perhaps most important," Cowen adds, "if we’re going to wean ourselves away from excess use of fossil fuels, we need to remove current subsidies to energy-unfriendly ways of life."

The Bike Project's blog will soon be in new hands: I'm passing it off to the co-op's new Volunteer Coordinator.  We'll introduce her or him next week!