Parking has been getting attention recently in New York City.  First was the July city council vote to make parking free on Sundays and Mayor Bloomberg’s subsequent veto.  In August, some city parking meters began accepting parking cards for payment.  Meanwhile, the Tri-State Campaign and some Bronx groups have expressed concern over plans to build thousands of additional parking spaces around Yankee Stadium, a change which will encourage more fans to drive.  Thus, our next installment reviewing The High Cost of Free Parking seems timely (parts I and II in MTR #’s 505, 506). 

  In Part 2 of his book, Professor Shoup explores the trials and tribulations of cruising for free curb parking. This is an experience car-owning New Yorkers, facing alternate-side-of-the-street rules, not to mention visitors to the city, are very familiar with. Shoup asserts that cruising for parking is much more than just run-of-the-mill aggravation.  In fact, cruising for parking results in a tremendous amount of excess driving and all of its concomitant ills — air pollution, crashes and traffic congestion.

   Because it is available to drivers on a “first-come, first-served” basis, free parking suffers the problem of communal ownership. Once drivers secure a space, they have no incentive to give it up in a timely fashion. 

   Based on review of 16 mostly American and European studies of cruising conducted between 1927 and 2001, Shoup concludes that cars searching for free parking contribute to over 8% of total traffic. The relevant New York City study was conducted in 1995 by John Falcocchio, Joe Darsin and Elena Prassas.  They concluded the average time drivers took to find a curb space between 8 and 10 a.m. was 7.3 minutes, increasing to 10.6 minutes between 11a.m. and 2 p.m.  According to their research, cruising for curb parking created about 8 percent of the total vehicle miles traveled in west Midtown.

   Shoup has developed a model to explain why a driver would choose to cruise for free curb parking rather than pay for off-street parking (interested readers can turn to page 323 of his book for the equation). He says the decision to seek free parking is based on the price of off-street parking, the amount of time a driver intends to park for, the time spent searching, the cost of gas burned while cruising, the number of people in the car, and the value of the driver and his passengers’ time.  If the cost of off-street parking outweighs all of those other variables, the driver will cruise for parking at the curb.    

   Some will likely disagree that all time-wasting, gridlock-contributing motorists indulge in such an involved calculus, but it at least provides a baseline for how some drivers may approach parking.

   The most compelling chapter in this section examines the impacts of cruising for parking. Shoup uses UCLA’s Westwood Village and its backwards pricing policy as his example. Westwood has plenty of moderately priced off-street parking available, but metered curb spaces are free in the evening when the district sees its highest traffic levels.

  Shoup and his assistants conducted 160 park-and-visit tests by bicycle and found that the average search time for parking is 3.3 minutes for all times, but is nearly 10 minutes during evening hours.  The average search time of 3.3 minutes may seem insignificant, but added up across all of Westwood’s drivers, it amounts to 426 hours per day (a little more than 10 work weeks).

   Shoup found that the average distance driven while cruising for a free parking space in Westwood was half a mile.  Added across all cruising drivers, the behavior contributes 3,600 vehicle miles traveled in the district each day.  Over the year, that totals 945,000 extra miles traveled, or two round trips to the moon, using 47,000 gallons of gasoline and producing 728 tons of CO2.  The cumulative impact of cruising across all commercial districts in the U.S. is obviously far higher.    

   Beyond zoning requirements that cause overbuilding of off-street parking, many areas deal with parking shortages by setting time limits.  These are ineffective because drivers routinely violate the rules. (A Seattle survey found the average parking duration in 1-hour spots was 2.1 hours.)  Some areas have explored providing information measures to broadcast locations of available parking.

    But Shoup asserts that the most appropriate way for cities to address curbside parking shortages is to price the spaces – he says that would result in 14 percent (about 1 in 7) of spaces being open.  Like congestion pricing schemes, rates could vary throughout the day depending on demand (enabled by new technology like NYC’s muni-meters).

    But pricing free curbside parking isn’t rocket science.  Indeed, the parking meter, first introduced in Oklahoma in 1935, is the obvious example. Shoup suggests political hurdles to introducing or hiking prices can be overcome by shifting responsibility for setting rates from politicians to bureaucrats, though this seem a fairly ivory-tower, or at least Californian, point of view.     

   Part 4 of Shoup’s opus, which MTR will review in a future issue, explores in greater detail approaches for overcoming both political and technological obstacles to better parking policies.

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