I got this hot tip from Bern Grush over at Skymeter Corporation. We won’t hold it against him that he’s a manufacturer of On street equipment, after all, vendors are people, too. He is railing against my buddy Maurice Anderson at the Toronto Parking Authority for on one hand advocating a Shoupista approach to on street rates and on the other hand, not using the free market to do so. Read Bern’s blog here.
Seems Maurice got the city to agree to raise the rates, but then came up with a number (50 cents an hour). The problem as Bern sees it is that if you are going to reduce congestion and the like, you need to set the rates to cause a 15% vacancy rates in on street parking (and drive the folks off street). There’s no Cinderella apporach here. Is the rate too high, is the rate too low or is it just right? Who knows?
I’ll tell you this, Bern doesn’t mince words — just part of his blog entry:
There are two ways to raise parking prices Toronto
The wrong way is a flat, regressive, lazy-minded, revenue-grabbing, across-the-board 50 cents. (Yes, there are the “Lake Shore” exceptions to the proposal, but that’s insufficient.)
The
right way is to [1] lower and advertise prices in places where there’s
under-demand (you would not know that my favorite lot is 50 cents per
hour unless you actually drove in to see), [2] leave prices alone where
there is about 85% peak-average demand and [3] and raise them in places
where peak-average demand is in excess of 85%
Wow — When I see Maurice this weekend at the IPI I’ll see if I can get a comment on tape and put the video up at the PT web Site.
JVH
