Donald Shoup is known as a “Parking Rock Star”, and talks an enormous amount of sense about how we need to change parking policy to get better economic, environmental and social urban outcomes. This video is fairly lengthy, but well worth a watch:
He has two main piece of advice:
- We need to charge for curb-side parking where demand exceeds supply.
- We need to remove minimum parking requirements.
I think the second issue is more important than the former personally, but both issues are important if we’re hoping to end up with more sustainable urban outcomes.
How timely, this is exactly what my infrastructure economics lecturer was saying last night as an example when explaining basic economics… but the funny thing is my lecturer wasn’t suggesting it from an planning/urban design/shift people out of their cars/environmental perspective.
He was just using it to illustrate tow principles of good economics, i.e. non-interference with demand or supply in a competitive market to let the two reach the natural and efficient equilibrium (point 2), but where supply is already limited the use of the resource should be priced to reduce demand to meet supply and likewise achieve the most efficient resource utilisation (point 1).
Great video, thanks. The argument here is essentially economic so I’m not sure it makes sense to which of the two items is more or less important. Currently the city is paying some part of on-street parking, while private developments are paying for off-street parking imposed by MPRs. Both systems subsidise parking and externalise costs that should be borne by the driver. I guess the MPRs provide more subsidised parks than free on-street parking does, but getting rid of MPRs and leave on-street underpriced would see lots more of the curb-crawling behaviour he was describing.
Yeah I guess that’s why both steps are important because they go together and if you only do one you end up with big problems.