Putting It
I found a nice article on parking in this morning’s Chicago Tribune feed.[Link] AT issue – this time – is inner city congestion and evidently many cities are considering charging for parking.
My first thought on this was one of imagery. I recalled a movie starring Doris Day and Jack Lemmon where there is a town hall meeting. One of the matters that arises is that the parking meter in front of a selectman’s store doesn’t work.
This is the parking fee thing in a nutshell albeit not a complete one. Municipalities have waxed and waned on the matter of parking fees ever since they have been introduced. In many ways its a bit of a push me- pull you.
Basically, there are two types of folks who want to park down town: those who want to make money and those who want to spend money. The problem has different aspects for each. The ones who want to make money usually try to find a way to pass the parking fee off as a cost of business. This is so strong that there is even case law in some states that an employer has to pay for employees’ parking fees.
The ones who want to spend money don’t want to spend it on parking – no material return there – and take their business elsewhere. Hence the advent of places to spend money that don’t charge for parking. Years of these has led us to learn that parking fees only work if they are universal. That is, they can’t be escaped. With the internet, this situation is nearly impossible for businesses.
But if you have a situation where almost everyone who wants to park down town works down town then you do have a form of (local) universality, and this is the heart of the problem that the big cities are feeling. There are too many people fighting over the parking spaces. And I doubt the institution of a charge is going to do much more than hurt things more – but that’s about all governments can often come up with.
When I grew up downtown had parking meters but supermarkets and shopping centers had “free” parking lots. All this did was accelerate urban degeneration and now the only businesses downtown, at least in many towns and cities, are the service businesses who cater to the people who work down there. In Huntsville, the Nawth Alibam Shining City on the Hill, the downtown is a legal ghetto consisting of lawyers’ offices, the county courthouse, and a few businesses who cater to the legal traffic, mostly snack shops and the like. In Greater Metropolitan Arab the city fathers haven’t admitted to having a dieing downtown. There are no parking fees but the only businesses are the legacy ones who have enough clientèle not to have to move, and tax avoidance boutiques whose existence is dependent on being a big enough tax write-off and not a big enough taxpayer. Excluding the first type, the mean time to failure is usually of order a year.
I was surprised when I went to graduate shul to find that not only did the shul charge for parking, but so did the shopping centers. The grad students turned the first into a valid excuse to be late for class and the latter was negated by noting that fees only had to be paid 0800-1600. So I usually bought my groceries at 0200 on Sunday morning. Not that the city expected grad students, or even faculty to spend much money at shopping centers anyway. But ten years later when I went back for a conference the shopping center meters were gone, poles gaping headless.
The point is that this type of blind groping about the margins is about all most organizations can do in the way of social engineering. And usually it ends up with the organization groping its way into a blind corner or some other no-win situation. Several years ago when I worked for the Yankee army, higher headquarters decided that they would charge everyone to park. First the military was excepted from the toll for some legal reason that escapes me at the moment. Then the contractors were excepted when it was determined that they could charge the fees back to the government with overhead and fee added – in effect they would pay the Yankee army $5 a month and the Yankee army would reimburse them $25 for doing so.
This left only the civil servants. This was one of the few times a government union did any good, but they forced the fees to be selective in the following sense: the closer to the door, any door, the more the parking place cost and once paid for it had to be absolutely reserved. This meant that the normally reserved spaces – those reserved for visiting generals and senior bosses – were the most expensive. And they got a mandate that people had to get the parking space (on basis of cost) they asked for. So out of over 2,000 people, over 1,500 asked for the solitary $1 per month space that was 500 m from the door.
In short order the whole plan was scrapped and the commanding general bragged on his performance appraisal that year how he had avoided parking fees as a boon for his workers. Happily the man was promoted and transferred although his successor was almost as much of an asshat as he.
