20 Nov Point of View: City parking should be expensive

Courtesy of the Palm Beach Post

A recent letter to the editor bemoaned the town of Palm Beach’s decision to increase parking rates along Worth Avenue. The writer’s opinion is that this will cause him and his wife, and many others, to stop going there. This was popular intuition in the 1970s and early ’80s when urban dwellers and retail establishments fled to suburban housing developments and shopping malls. Urban areas didn’t know how to stop the decline in residents and revenue. One of the big ideas was to remove parking meters – hoping that free parking would bring people back. It didn’t.

Wiser solutions began to emerge in the late ’90s, and we now know through research and case studies that charging for parking is essential to creating and maintaining quality urban areas, and critical to saving the planet. Here’s why:

1. If someone is willing to pay for parking they are far more likely to be a retail customer rather than a sightseer. If sightseers take up the parking in front of a store it will see fewer customers and fewer sales.
2. Decoupling parking entitlements from mixed-use development, and/or existing urban areas is how one creates and maintains the vibrate walkable culture of places like Worth Avenue that the writer finds charming to visit.
3. Fewer parking creates a supply-demand curve that supports a high premium for the spots that are available. Abundant free parking converts valuable land into soulless non-places that generate no revenue and harm the environment, while perpetuating the convenience of a highly inefficient and polluting transportation choice.
4. Less parking encourages ride sharing, carpooling, micromobility and other more efficient transportation solutions that emit less carbon per capita.
5. Less parking equates to less asphalt, one of the many transportation-related contributors to climate change.

So, in other words, we can’t have it both ways. Charming urban environments have few parking spaces, and market factors will make them expensive. But, parking should be expensive everywhere because of its cost to the environment. If we did the math on free parking’s relative harm to the planet, and instead charged for it accordingly, we’d have less asphalt, more places like Worth Avenue, a planet warming at a slower rate, and a consistent revenue stream for walkable urban areas.

Think of it as a “sin tax” that makes things that are bad for our health, like cigarettes, more expensive.

Worth Avenue is a special place, and Palm Beach is wise to disincentivize the harmful presence of cars there – harmful to both retail and the planet.

TIMOTHY HULLIHAN, NORTH PALM BEACH