Do retailers have a point that stores need parking in order to thrive? Perhaps, in some parts of cities (and suburbs) that aren't so densely populated; however in areas where parking is nearly nonexistent, but public transit is efficient, and there is a lot of foot and bike traffic, I'd argue cars just cause pollution. Of course, I may be biased, since I went over 20 years without owning a car, but still....
Oh, and in the print edition of this article comes this trivial pursuit question: who invented the parking meter? (answer below)
...Since the parking meter was first introduced 70 years ago, in Oklahoma City, the field has been dominated by two simple maxims: Cities can never have too much parking, and it can never be cheap enough.Now a small but vocal band of economists, city planners and entrepreneurs is shaking that up, promoting ideas like free-market pricing at meters and letting developers, rather than the cities, dictate the supply of off-street parking. Seattle is doing away with free street parking in a neighborhood just north of downtown. London has meters that go as high as $10 an hour, while San Francisco has been trying out a system that monitors usage in real time, allowing the city to price spots to match demand. (A recent tally there showed that one meter near AT&T Park brings in around $4,500 a year, while another meter about a mile away takes in less than $10.) Gainesville, Fla., has capped the number of parking spots that can be added to new buildings; Cambridge, Mass., works with companies to reduce off-street parking.
Economists have long made the case that the solution to the parking crunch many cities face lies not in more free or cheap parking but in higher prices. The idea is that higher prices result in a greater churn -- and get more people on buses and subways -- which leads to more open spaces. But this notion has often run up against city planners and retailers arguing that cheap and plentiful parking results in more commerce and, thus, higher sales taxes and a vibrant economy.
...
One of the most influential of the parking gurus is Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who commutes on a bicycle. Since the publication in 2005 of Mr. Shoup's “The High Cost of Free Parking,” he has become something of a celebrity at academic gatherings and parking-industry meetings. Lines form at his book signings. “He's a parking rock star,” says Paul White, of Transportation Alternatives, a New York group that advocates for pedestrians and bicycles....
Mr. Shoup has popularized what might be called the “85% rule”: Cities, he says, should charge whatever rates lead to about 85% of the spots being filled up at any given time, moving rates up or down as demand fluctuates. The 85% target now serves as a policy guideline for cities including Portland, Ore., and Anchorage, Alaska.In Portland, bus ridership to its Lloyd District, a shopping area and home to the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers, has increased to 33% of traffic, from 10% a decade ago. One reason: Parking prices have been raised to about 75 cents an hour from free, nudging store and office employees onto the bus.
.
Tags: parking
Dan Zack, downtown development coordinator for Redwood City, has bought in. A few years ago, his boss presented him with a problem. “He said, 'We're adding a million visitors every year, but only 600 new parking spots -- make it work,' ” Mr. Zack recalls. After visiting neighboring cities and reading books like “The Dimensions of Parking,” Mr. Zack was handed an article by Mr. Shoup....
San Francisco, perhaps more than any other city, shows how radically some cities are rethinking their parking. The city is one of the toughest places to find a meter spot in all of America, and there have been a spate of attacks by angry drivers, against parking enforcement officers. One block near the popular Fisherman's Wharf has average stays of four hours -- even though there's a two-hour time limit -- and some spots are filled for days at a time.Recently, the city hired a company to lay hundreds of 4-inch-by-4-inch sensors along the streets in some areas. The sensors, which resemble reflectors, have recorded some 250,000 “parking events” across 200 parking spots. City planners can now tell you which spots are occupied the longest and how traffic flow affects parking supplies.
If the sensors get a wider rollout, the city has floated a number of ideas. When there's a Giants baseball game at AT&T Park, the city could temporarily charge about the same as private lots near the stadium. The ground sensors are also connected to the Internet wirelessly, which creates the possibility that parking enforcement officers equipped with PDAs could get real-time information on parking violations beamed to them. It also means consumers could get information on which parking spots are open.
About a month ago, the city also installed new kiosks that take credit cards as well as quarters, and boosted prices from a flat rate of $2 per hour to a four-hour rolling rate that starts at $3 and rises to $5, for a total of $15 for four hours. That's more than the day rate at many privately owned parking garages in the area. “We're pricing to match demand,” says Tod Dykstra, chief executive of Streetline Networks, which installed the sensors
The parking meter was invented by Carl Magee in the 1930s, btw, if you didn't already look it up.
