If you check out the daily news feeds from Yahoo or Google by inserting the word parking, and remove those stories dealing with violence in a garage, you find that the vast majority of articles concern themselves with charging for parking, raising parking fees, the concerns the parkers have over these fees.
We can double the price of gas, triple the price of houses, and see upward pressure on practically everything else, but parking, NO! It seems to be a right guaranteed by the Constitution.
Our customers simply don’t want to pay the cost of using our product. Cities, developers, universities, and the rest have subsidized the cost of parking tot he point that I’m certain even they don’t know what it costs to provide parking.
One city, wanted to increase the cost of parking for students at a local beauty college $1 a day, to a total of $40 a month. The hue and cry was heard throughout the city hall. What they were doing was bringing the parking charges up to the amount charged to the rest of the people parking in the particular lot.
This is a case where on street parking in fact did cost more than off street. Metered parking in the city would cost $70 a month. Don Shoup would be proud. However I am certain the true cost of parking in the Butler area of Pittsburgh is far more than either the $40 paid for the permits or the $70 charged for on-street. And I’m certain the money raised doesn’t go into the neighborhood, but into the city’s general fund.
If parkers paid the true cost of parking, maybe they would figure out a way to car pool, or take public transportation, and DUH, if the money stayed in the neighborhood, there would be enough to pay for additional parking in the area, or run the existing parking properly. Read about the debacle with the tier lot in Butler here.
If they charged the proper amount, they could hire a professional parking operator to oversee their parking operations and ensure that when someone bought a permit, they had a place to park.
Let the free market reign.
JVH
