The Tragedy of Free Parking

 In the beginning the earth was without parking. The planner said, Let there be parking, and there was parking. And the planner saw that it was good. And the planner then said, Let there be off-street parking for each land use, according to its kind. And developers provided off-street parking for each land use according to its kind. And again the planner saw that it was good. And the planner said to cars, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over every living thing that moves upon the earth. And the planner saw everything he had made, and, behold, it was not good.

My office occupies prime real estate in the heart of Delhi. The India International Center, Alliance Francaise, the World Bank, UNICEF and INTACH are just a few institutions that surround it. Despite this, the cost to park your vehicle in this tony neighborhood is zero. As someone who commutes by metro, auto rickshaw, or Uber, I have always been rankled by this privilege accorded to car owners.

When the economist Donald Shoup passed away earlier this month, I got to know about his pioneering work in Parking and Urban Planning. His ‘The High Cost of Free Parking’ was illuminating and provided a solid framework to better understand the curse of modern life – the blight of private car ownership driven by free parking.

Free curb parking incentivizes people to drive and increases car ownership. The price of free parking is often borne by people who don’t own vehicles and by society as a whole in the form of congestion, polluted air and urban sprawls. While every city planner aspires for affordable housing, clean transportation, a thriving downtown, and a vibrant economy, free parking ends up undermining each of these goals.

In the words of Shoup:

Every transport system has three elements: vehicles, rights-of-way, and terminal capacity. Rail transport, for example, has trains, tracks, and stations. Sea transport has ships, oceans, and seaports. Air transport has planes, the sky, and airports. Automobile transport has cars, roads, and parking spaces. Two aspects of its terminal capacity set automobile transport apart from all other transport systems. First, automobile transport requires enormous terminal capacity—it is land-hungry—because there are so many cars and several parking spaces for each one. Second, motorists park free for 99 percent of their trips because off-street parking requirements remove the cost of automobile terminal capacity from the transport sector and shift it everywhere else in the economy. Free parking helps explain the enormous demand for automobile terminal capacity

Just as herders compete for scarce grazing land, drivers compete for asphalt. Driving around in a car is akin to carrying around two tons of asphalt making free parking a classic Tragedy of the Commons. Being neither nonrival nor nonexclusive, they also can’t be categorised as public goods. They are clearly private goods being provisioned as public goods by the government (especially when you take into consideration the negative externalities of free parking).

For India, I don’t see a way out of this any time soon. Buying a car is still seen as a sign of having arrived in life. Our public transportation is in a dismal state. And charging for parking is politically sensitive. Ideally, parking fees should be managed at the city level, with the revenue directly reinvested into improving the very streets where it is collected.

 Wishful thinking, no?

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