Free parking comes at a price

"Car owners may not want to hear this, but we have way too much free parking," George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen argues in The New York Times.

In his column in The Times' Sunday business section August 15, Professor Cowen expands on points made in UCLA urban planning professsor Donald Shoup's path-breaking 733-page book, The High Cost of Free Parking. "Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it's in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway," Cowen writes. "Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips."

"We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too," says Cowen. "You don't have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life. As Profesor Shoup wrote, 'Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars.'"

Cowen points out that San Francisco has recently taken a better approach, instituting "a pioneering program to connect parking meter prices to supply and demand." In the Times article, available here, he also says higher fees and permit prices "would help shore up the ailing budgets of local governments."