Thinking About Parking Policy in Philadelphia, Or How I Became a Shoupista

Living in the suburbs and commuting daily to Center City, I'm no stranger to public transportation. It's safer, cheaper, greener, and usually faster. There are times, though, when it's much more convenient to travel via a personal, self-propelling 2000-pound hunk of steel. Last week I decided to join my cousin for a few rounds of quizzo at a restaurant on 15^th street, and I opted to spend some quality time with my automobile. As I hurtled down Chestnut Street in my steel exoskeleton, I felt in control of my own destiny--guaranteed a comfortable seat, a radio, and a cup holder. Maybe, I thought, driving in the city isn't so bad. 

Then I got to my destination and it was time to find a parking spot.  Suddenly, the dream was over. The serene, personal experience of driving soon turned into a nightmare as I meandered around the general vicinity trying to find a spot on the street; forking over $20 dollars for a spot in the garage just wasn't an option. As I searched, I wondered "What if I needed a quick space to run in for my job interview? What if I wanted to go shopping on Walnut Street for an hour or two?" Twenty stressful minutes later I mercifully found a spot, but I had already learned my lesson: parking policy really matters.

Donald Shoup, professor of Urban Planning at UCLA and probably the country's only parking policy "guru," agrees. In his 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking, he argues that the biggest problem with underpriced parking is that so many cars circle around the neighborhood lured by the promise of a free or comparatively cheap parking space. When there is such a price disparity between on-street and off-street parking, drivers are willing to spend a lot of time searching to avoid the dreaded garage. And, when they find a spot, they're likely to cling to it for hours, or even days. Several studies show that between 30 and 50 percent of inner city congestion is due to cars circling around the neighborhood in search of a spot. Shoup determined that drivers searching for on-street parking in a 15-block area of Los Angeles burned 47,000 gallons of fuel and traveled the distance of two round-trip journeys to the moon. Predictably, this underpriced, fixed commodity has been overwhelmed with demand. The solution, according to Shoup, is to raise the price of on-street parking to just the right amount.

It seems like Mayor Nutter has taken a step in that direction. In January, the City of Philadelphia doubled Center City parking rates to $2 per hour to free up more spots and reduce congestion. Rina Cutler, Mayor Nutter's deputy mayor for transportation, seems to have gotten Shoup's memo: "We had people circling blocks 20 times to find $1-an-hour parking spots, which they would stay in all day. We had virtually no turnover." The City's rate increase worked. So many parking spots opened up that the city lowered rates in some areas and scrapped a plan for a further increase in Center City.  

Though the Nutter administration and other city governments should be commended for recognizing and fighting against the negative externalities of underpriced parking, it seems like there must be a rational way to quantify the optimal on-street parking rate--some outcome that parking rates should be calibrated to achieve--rather than just picking a reasonable-sounding round number every year or two. Shoup's idea is to aim for an 85% occupancy rate; conversely, to set parking rates at whatever leaves 15% of spots open. This would mean that the city would be generating revenue from most parking spots, but drivers wouldn't have to look more than a block or two to find an open space.

Four years after the publication of The High Price of Free Parking, cities across the country are just starting to understand the broader implications of parking policy, beyond the question of how much revenue it produces. Cities across the country have increased rates for underpriced parking, and San Francisco has initiated a multi-million dollar project to study traffic and curbside parking in the downtown area and create an automatically updated website of available parking spots. Other cities are raising rates and installing sensors to detect if a space is occupied and sophisticated meters with rates that adjust to demand. They are eliminating vast swathes of free parking and restricting lots to neighborhood residents. It has only now dawned on policymakers that there is whole menu of parking policy options at their disposal, and it will take many years to identify the best ideas and eliminate the bad ones. All of us have suffered from poor parking policies, but the story of how this parking revolution is emerging is promising. The problem was neglected for decades, but the person leading the reform is an expert, not a politician. He has studied the problem with scientific rigor and rationality. Now, with a clear-minded expert to guide us, we all stand to benefit.

--Adam Biswanger, Research Intern