An American right?
It’s not mentioned in the Constitution or Bill or Rights, but are there any American motorists—except in densely urban areas– who doubt that free parking for their cars is a fundamental right? Of course not, if there were, they’d be bounced out of town on a greasy frame rail.
Not so for a couple of college professors who, in a Sunday New York Times Business Section opinion, advocate that free parking be banished. Ironically, both are faculty members at commuter colleges that would die without giant parking lots for their briefcase- or backpack-bearing students, most of whom arrive by car.
Donald C. Shoup, professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) pegs the value of a Los Angeles parking place at $31,000. Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University in suburban Washington, DC, posits that “99 percent of all automobile trips in the United States end in a free parking space, rather than a parking space with a market price.”
Eliminating these free spaces, argues Cowen, would “encourage a relatively efficient high-density use of space.” Thanks but no thanks, if I wanted to be a “high-density” cliff dweller in New York City or Chicago’s loop, I would have made that choice long ago. Like most Americans who have a choice, I treasure my suburban sod.
Nearly 30 years ago, I debated in print with a professor of law and psychiatry (yes, an odd combination) at Detroit’s Wayne State University who basically wanted to ban the automobile in favor of what he perceived as the efficiency of mass transit. Some things never change.
What these professors don’t realize is that the fundamental virtue of private automobiles is FREEDOM. And for that freedom, motorists put up with an awful lot—
* Enduring a cost of owning a car second only to that of a house,
* Outrageous parking fees when we have no other choice,
* Rip-off service garages selling unneeded maintenance or replacements such as more frequent oil changes than manufacturers recommend,
* Traffic jams resulting from simultaneous road maintenance or construction on parallel paths,
* Speed traps that now rely on hidden cameras rather than unmarked cars to snag the unwary for the sole benefit of municipal and state budget shortfalls,
* Make-work street repairs which favor shovel-applied hot-patch that quickly crumbles over better, smoother more permanent maintenance fixes that ultimately need fewer workers on the local government payroll,
* Insurance rates based on zip code rather than driving record,
* And bureaucrats and do-gooders who always seem to know (they think) better what we the great unwashed masses should do.
Any of us could rattle off more examples, but I want to go back to the parking issue in this rant.
I studied urban planning in college and served on my community’s planning and traffic-and-safety boards for a number of years. We required adequate parking, free or charged, to insure the success of the businesses involved, who sometimes short-sightedly never took into consideration where their customers would have to park.
Mass transit is a nice idea, I enjoy using it whenever it is available and convenient, but it is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, especially those far away, who never benefit. Further, mass transit is subject to the muscle of unions representing transit workers who know that they can get anything they want from municipal authorities afraid of the catastrophic economic consequences of a strike. When a city becomes dependent on mass transit, it becomes hostage to empire-building unions and politicians. And freedom goes out the window with that situation.
Oddly, mass transit, such as Washington’s relatively new Metro system, creates its own parking problems, as Professor Cowen surely must know. Metro planners never envisioned that passengers not in walking distance from stations would have to drive and park, so parking at suburban Metro stations has become impossible, whether paid or free. Mini-connector busses are one solution, but can they afford to run at all hours for people working or partying late? So mass transit becomes a boon for taxi companies at relatively high cost for users.
Because of the practicalities of staffing, mass transit is not nearly as efficient as its proponents claim, because the morning-and-evening commuting cycle requires two day-shifts even though coaches aren’t carrying many passengers in off-hours. Would workers agree to work two four-hour shifts and sit around on their hands, unpaid, in between rather than their normal one eight-hour shift? Impossible, union or no union, unless there were no other jobs available. This is a problem that has plagued urban transit since the earliest days of horse-drawn streetcars.
[Aside: I’m not anti-union. These simply are the facts of life, the major challenge to truly efficient mass transit.]
And of course when there’s an accident on a mass transit line, the numbers of injured and killed swells way beyond the minor carnage of urban expressways that actually have low crash rates.
The notion by the LA and DC professors of establishing “market rates” for parking also is flawed. The last time I had to drive to New York City and stay overnight, it cost more to park the car overnight in a midtown Manhattan garage than the upscale hotel room for two people. I self-parked my vehicle in a space smaller than our hotel room, so the parking garage had negligible employee costs whereas the hotel had scads. The market rate was basically supply and demand—the garage had the supply and I had the demand. I lost.
The devil as always is in the details: just how do you calculate the market value of a parking space?
If, on top of tuition, UCLA charged its students $31,000 for a parking space, amortized presumably over the time to obtain a degree, there would be few willing to pay and the “customers” would migrate to a school which accommodated them and their parking need at a reasonable rate. The professor would be underemployed unless he followed his students.
Today, UCLA like most campuses, does charge for parking, 25 cents for five minutes at a meter, or $3 an hour, according to its website. If this rate were applied to, say, a 120-hour BA degree, it would come to $360, not counting library research, meetings and cross-campus walking time. This is far short of the, say, four-year degree share of $31,000 the good Professor Shoup wants for student parking to attend his classes. Or would the $31,000 be spread over a decade, a century? I don’t know, I didn’t read his book and don’t plan to. Nevertheless, I don’t think his proposition will fly.
No doubt there are more cogent critiques of the professors’ ideas than I have mustered here in short order. But the bottom line is I believe that personal freedom–including flexibility of movement–is held in high esteem by Americans who have their own instinctive measures of efficiency, college professors not withstanding.
And we’re not ready yet to have the elites tell us how to run our lives—or our automobiles.