Our company Skymeter has responded to the Congestion Pricing RFEI can offer a much better solution to both the parking dilemna and the Congestion Pricing scheme. This would include the ability to accurately price.

Justin Peters

Hilary: If you pay a set fee for a Resident Permit, then you do pay more the more you use your car (because you're most likely driving to a neighborhood where your permit does not work).

Paying money in exchange for a better chance at parking is a carrot, and thus is at least remotely politically feasible. (And generates money that can be invested in mass transit, for instance, while possiblyconvincing the car owners least attached to their vehicles that they're not worth it.) Purposely eliminating parking spaces is a stick, and thus much tougher outside Streetsblogworld.

BTW, Hilary, the disincentive for people to drive, now that they don't have to fear losing a space? Wherever they go, they'll have to pay extremely high metered rates.

But do you think RPPs would cost in the hundreds of dollars for anywhere except 10021 and 10023? There's no guarantee of finding a space near your destination, there's no security, and you would still have to move the car for ASP, so they should be at a steep discount to garage prices. Plus they ought to be limited one each to car registrations, so brokers couldn't hoard them.

The reason I support trying parking permits is because it offers an easy way to get the Gehl-recommended annual decrease in parking spots: simply auction off 2-3% fewer parking spots each year. The problem with removing spaces or converting them to other uses is political: people will complain to their elected representatives when the parking spaces on their block are taken away. Keeping the spaces but making it cost money and limiting the number of eligible parkers is a way to diffuse the effect across an entire neighborhood.

And cvarrick, I agree with you that drivers shouldn't have "free" rights to parking spaces, and I certainly wouldn't mind having more bike lanes or wider sidewalks, but we live in a political world where those kinds of policies, no matter how attractive they seem to you or me, just can't be implemented by fiat. The topic of the original post is the new, more favorable environment for parking reform that the CP proposal has engendered. The exciting part is blazing a trail from 'a' to 'b,' not elaborating on the amazing benefits of 'b' and pounding the table on why we haven't gotten to 'b' yet, when 'b' is so glaringly obviously fantastic.

And as far as storing your record collection or old couch in the parking spot outside your apartment, have you considered buying a beat-up cargo van, packing it with your possessions, and simply parking it there? It would probably cost about as much as a storage locker and certainly it would be more convenient.

Chris H.: To use a muni-meter, you put in payment and it spits out a timed receipt. You have to put the receipt on your dashboard inside your car so the TEA can see it. So yes, it does supply a record that you were parked (although I can't remember right now if it prints the charges on the paper).

You could put a no parking sign on their dashboard and it wouldn't make these people stop parking illegally. It's about enforcement, not cluttering up the streetscape with more useless signs. And enforcement isn't a simple thing either. That's about govt employee pay and perks, union contracts, labor negotiations and a lot of inside baseball. It's not going to be easy.

Comments?

Baloney, Jonathan.

Cars clogging a street are cars clogging a street. It doesn't matter if they are parked or moving. Either way, those cars are taking up public space that could otherwise be used for a bus rapid transit lane, a dedicated bike lane, wider sidewalks, truck deliveries, a public plaza or even a travel lane for moving cars and trucks. Also, parking is a magnet for traffic congestion. If there is space to park, people will drive. Parking is probably the worst kind of congestion because it takes so much and gives so little back to everyone else but the parker.

Jan Gehl says that Copenhagen's single most important tool for de-congesting the city has been to eliminate 2 to 3% of the city's on-street parking each year.

It's unfortunate that we take as a given that every street is just naturally lined on both sides with parked/double parked cars.

I agree that it's unfortunate, but those cars do provide protection from speeders and reckless drivers. If you remove parked cars from a street, you need to put in bollards, or preferably traffic calming measures, to maintain that level of safety.

(Until there're not parked anymore)
Anyway you're confusing congestion with pollution.
It's unfortunate that we take as a given that every street is just naturally lined on both sides with parked/double parked cars.

Parked vehicles are the very definition of congestion - they monopolize very limited *public* space.
Why should drivers have free/exclusive rights to this space? How about a wider sidewalk/full width bike lane? Can i store my bike/couch/record collection in the *public* "parking" space outside my apartment?

When these invisible subsidies are removed and car owners are forced to pay the true cost of the public resources they are consuming, there will be plenty of parking for those whose are wealthy enough to pay. (The people who are parking in private garages right now)

anon has it right:
" No permits, no reservations, no "rights" to a space. For that, you have to use private, not public, property."

If the Munimeters were to use Shoup-ian variable pricing, where prices are adjusted periodically (even by hour) to achieve 85% occupancy you would probably see lower rates for overnight parking than during the day, since there are more car-owner-drivers coming into the city from outside (where you need a car to get around) that car-owners residing in the city who need overnight parking. I doubt that you would get "free" as the 85% occupancy price for overnight, except possibly on holiday weekends.