“Stop the parking meter hike! Make the rich pay, not the workers! Don’t squeeze workers and small business. This is a tax on the people!”
If you poked your head into the public sphere during the past two weeks, you probably encountered a complaint about Harrisburg’s parking fee hike, adopted in the fall as part of the receiver’s recovery plan and taking full effect this month.
The new rates at on-street meters—$3 per hour in the central business district, $1.50 per hour outside it—and the extension of hours to include Saturdays and weekday evenings, from 5 to 7 p.m., have prompted angry reactions from just about every corner. Complaints that the changes are “draconian” or “sudden,” or that they’ll spell doom for downtown businesses, could be heard at Tuesday’s parking forum at the Hilton, arranged by Roxbury News. If you missed that, you could find them on TheBurg’s Facebook page, or in the PennLive comments section, or in an online petition drawn up by a local entrepreneur.
The quote at the top of this article, though, isn’t from Harrisburg and isn’t from this year. It actually comes from a flyer handed out in the fall of 2009, at a meeting of the Municipal Transportation Authority in San Francisco’s city hall. At the time, the San Francisco MTA was beginning to undertake a parking meter study that would lead to expanded hours, increased enforcement, and—in many places—increased rates. A group of activists who opposed the study, from the ANSWER Coalition (for “Act Now to Stop War and End Racism”), handed out the flyers as people entered the room. During the meeting, a representative from ANSWER took to the microphone and issued warnings about a “tax that is disproportionately put on the poor, the working class and small-business owners.”
What the activists didn’t seem to realize was that the parking study was actually designed to achieve goals that ANSWER, several of whose members opposed the Iraq war under the mantra “No Blood for Oil,” might have shared. The MTA study was based on the principles outlined in “The High Cost of Free Parking,” a landmark text in urban planning by Donald Shoup.
In his book, Shoup, an economist and urban planning professor at UCLA, argues that the wide availability of underpriced parking in America has had devastating consequences for the environment and for our cities. For decades, urban planners sought to make cities accessible to cars—for example, by requiring new developments to provide adequate off-street parking. The result, according to Shoup, is that people now expect to find parking everywhere they drive, which in turn encourages them to favor cars over every other form of travel. “Free parking,” he writes, “helps to explain…extreme automobile dependence, rapid urban sprawl, and extravagant energy use.”
To correct this, Shoup suggests, cities should embrace three remedies. First, they should match the price of curb parking to demand, which usually means increasing it. Second, they should stop requiring new developments to provide ample off-street parking for potential customers. Finally, they should direct any additional parking revenues to projects in the neighborhoods where they are collected. The ultimate goal is to eliminate the expectation of cheap and abundant parking everywhere we travel, thereby encouraging more people to walk, carpool, and use public transit and reducing the number of cars on the road.
I thought of Shoup’s work this week and last, when the public reaction to the new rates in Harrisburg reached fever pitch. Harrisburg differs from San Francisco and other cities in that the demand for parking has never been so great as to produce congestion. But Harrisburg has also suffered the ill effects of cheap and abundant parking. People who live in the city often drive when they could bike or walk, and people outside the city drive alone when they could carpool or use public transit. This has obvious environmental costs, but it also has social consequences. Much of the city looks the way it does because its planners, for several decades running, have operated on the assumption that everyone will drive everywhere they go. As a result, we have wide urban highways slicing up neighborhoods and surface lots and multi-story garages dotting our downtown.
I now wonder whether the reaction to the parking hike is really a knee-jerk resistance to changes that city residents would have readily embraced if they’d been presented in a different frame. No one likes to pay more for things, of course, and there are plenty of reasons to be wary of increased fees in a city whose management of money has been, shall we say, less than sterling. (Where those fees will be going under the new arrangement, and whether that’s an improvement, will be the subject of a second parking column next week.)
But I think that a long view of the new parking system should acknowledge several potential upsides. For one, daily commuters who previously dodged garage rates will now, as a result of higher on-street rates and increased enforcement, be pushed into the garages. That may not seem obviously good for the city, except that, under the new arrangement, a portion of the higher revenues will flow into the city’s general fund. If City Council and the mayor take Shoup’s advice, and direct some of these revenues towards the improvement of the district producing them, I suspect downtown businesses will come to see the rate hike as less of a threat.
City residents, for their part, will have an incentive to walk, bike or carpool where previously they drove. That’s good for the environment, and though it may require a change in ingrained habits, I suspect such a change is more likely to occur than not. Last week, several business owners expressed a worry that their customers would flee for venues with free parking. That may be true for some suburban customers, but I’d wager that businesses have nothing to fear from city residents, who locate here in part because they want proximity to urban amenities. We’re more likely to walk or share the cost of parking with friends than to ditch Federal Taphouse and Little Amps for the Olive Garden and Starbucks. Federal Taphouse and Little Amps are part of why we moved here.
That brings me to the suburban customers. It may be the case that downtown businesses will lose some of their customers who drive into Harrisburg expressly for weekday happy hours and Saturday events. But here, again, I’d urge business owners to take the long view. In the short term, they may have to work to keep some suburban customers with incentives like rewards for carpooling or parking validations. But in the long term, these patrons will be replaced by new urban ones, as easy access to urban amenities becomes increasingly dependent on actual proximity to them.
A recent comment on our Facebook page is a good demonstration of this point. Last week, we posted the photo above, of a new downtown meter, on our wall. Below it, a reader from Mechanicsburg lamented that, because of the addition of Saturday parking charges, what was once a free afternoon in the city for the film and art festival “will now be an approx $20 expense.” “I’m sure this will be changing my plans,” he added.
When I read that, I thought, Which plans? The ones to live outside the city but have free and easy access to its amenities? It’s a well-worn point that the rise of the automobile contributed to the decline of many an American city, including this one. Our continued deference to car ownership, in the form of cheap parking, has helped to artificially devalue what cities have to offer. As Shoup writes, “Free parking is an invitation to drive wherever we go.” Parking in Harrisburg wasn’t free, but it was cheap and abundant—and as a result, it was an invitation for people to enjoy the amenities a city can offer without paying city property taxes or sending their children to city schools. To the extent that it’s an invitation to live here, rather than simply park here, the fee hike in Harrisburg may not be such a bad thing.
