The case for the $6 parking meter

Ideas

January 15, 2012|By Leon Neyfakh

Market-rate parking is a novel piece of urban engineering made possible… (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff/File 2011)

The search for a parking space on the streets of downtown Boston can warp a person’s world. Fire hydrants become symbols of thwarted hope. Other drivers become bitter enemies. Signs assume the properties of Talmudic texts, calling out for interpretation and bedeviling us with their complexity. As we drive in circles, sweating and honking hopelessly, our eyes dart around and the clock ticks. Happiness is the sight of red taillights coming on as someone prepares to leave; temptation is a taunting yellow placard offering garage space for $15 an hour. In dense, urban areas like Boston, as many as 30 percent of cars on the street are cruising for parking at any given time.

What if it didn’t have to be this way? What if finding a spot became as routine a procedure as turning a key, or putting on pants in the morning? According to a growing number of urban planners, transportation experts, and economists, that fantastical scenario is within reach. While the rest of us compete with each other for nonexistent spaces like fishermen around a puddle, they envision a city in which every block contains at least one free parking spot at all times. They believe that with a bit of simple social engineering, the act of parking can be transformed.

At the head of the seemingly utopian movement is a man named Donald Shoup, an urban planning professor at UCLA who has spent years studying the problem of parking in cities. The cornerstone of Shoup’s plan: make downtown street parking more expensive. Or, as he would prefer to put it, make the most desirable spots cost what they’re really worth.

The problem, as Shoup and his allies in the planning world see it, is that parking on the street is simply too desirable. Because spaces are so cheap — metered spots in Boston cost 25 cents per 12 minutes, or $1.25 per hour — drivers have a powerful incentive to spend time hunting for them. By imposing a sliding pay scale for curbside parking spots, and simply charging more money for premium spaces, they suggest cities could get people out of their cars and onto their feet much faster.

Making parking more expensive may sound like an outrageous solution to already frustrated drivers, but Shoup’s concept of demand-responsive pricing has been gaining traction in American cities over the past decade. Supporters see it as practical, even necessary. A city like Boston could adjust prices so that spots cost just enough to keep one or two free on every block. If that equilibrium were achieved, it wouldn’t just make parking quicker — it would help the city as a whole by reducing pollution, preventing accidents caused by distracted drivers, and nudging more people to walk, bike, or take public transit.