Or: why metered street parking is good, actually
TL;DR: Metered street parking dedicates valuable curb space to cars, excluding other modes of transportation. If we are dedicating physical space to cars, let’s dedicate the generated parking revenue to other modes of transportation and to overall safety by directing it to the City's Safety and Mobility Fund.
Drivers illegally parked in the bike lane and drivers in motion jockey for space on Edgewood Avenue in Atlanta. Photos: Rebecca Serna/Propel ATL
In tribute to the recently-deceased Donald Shoup, author of “The High Cost of Free Parking” (an influential book, at least in urbanist circles), let us consider street parking in the City of Atlanta.
A fair amount of Atlanta’s street parking is metered. According to Professor Shoup, this is good. Parking spaces are valuable real estate, and cities should accrue value from their use.
As Shoup persuasively argued, free parking may be free for the person who is parking, but it comes with hidden costs that burden everyone else from business owners and landlords to consumers and pedestrians. Plus, charging a reasonable rate – corresponding with about 85 percent occupancy, according to Shoup – ensures that street parking is always available for those who need it.
Sure, no one likes to pay for parking, just like no one likes to pay the fare for the bus or train, or likes to pay bridge and road tolls. But these are practical ways to distribute some of the cost of a public good to those who use it. (Those skeptical about this argument might be persuaded by a few minutes on Shoup’s fabulously-named website: shoupdogg.com.)
Even in the presence of off-street surface parking and garages, drivers still encroach upon the sidewalk.
Valuable real estate
Ok, so if parking is metered and not “free,” what should we do with the revenue? Before we answer that, let’s talk a bit about curbside real estate.
If you visualize a two-lane road with street parking on both sides as well as sidewalks, you quickly realize that street parking occupies perhaps as much as 30 to 40 percent of the combined right-of-way. 40 percent! That’s a lot of valuable real estate that could be put to all sorts of different uses, serving all sorts of different people who live, work, and shop in the city.
For instance, street parking on one side of the road could be dedicated to bike/scooter lanes. Or to a broader sidewalk with more room and amenities for pedestrians. Or a dedicated bus lane. Or to short-term loading zones for UPS, FedEx, Amazon, or others. Or for that matter, to another lane of traffic if that’s the right call. (It rarely is)
Rather than repurposing an entire block of street parking, we could repurpose select parking spaces. During the pandemic, there was a need for outdoor seating at restaurant/cafes, so a handful of parking spaces around the city were converted into al fresco parklets – a great use of the space! Such a good use, in fact, that several still remain even after the pandemic has subsided. It demonstrates that the city can make different choices about curbside space when it makes sense for residents and the community.
That is just one example of repurposing select parking spaces. A single parking space could become dedicated bike/scooter parking or a really nice bus stop. Parking spaces near the corners of the street could become bump-outs to both calm traffic and provide pedestrians with more space to congregate while waiting to cross. We could replace a parking space with a tree and a park bench, or a public remembrance and memorial, or public art, or all manner of things.
So we can see that this curb space has a great deal of potential. Ideally, we should use this portion of the right-of-way to improve the public realm for all users, and in particular we should use it to support all modes of transportation to and through our city. Furthermore, we should support all modes of transportation both through our use of the physical curb space itself and our use of any revenue that we generate from the curb space.
So when we dedicate curb space as metered parking to support car traffic, let’s dedicate the revenue from that metered parking to other modes of transportation (bus, taxi, bicycle, scooter, wheelchair, foot) and to overall safety and improvement of the public realm.
Shoup calls this a “parking benefit district,” and his research shows that paid parking is embraced by communities when they can see its proceeds at work where they live.
Work vehicles occupy both a sidewalk and a two-way cycletrack, Memorial Drive and Pearl Street, Atlanta.
The Safety and Mobility Fund
So let’s return to our question: What should we do with the revenue from metered street parking?
The question naturally falls to the Atlanta Department of Transportation, which manages the public right-of-way citywide. So ATLDOT should be responsible for managing the metered street parking and the revenue should help fund ATLDOT. That way, when the city dedicates space to metered parking or to repurpose existing metered parking for alternative uses, it is fully responsible for the tradeoff being made across multiple modes of transportation both with respect to how we use our limited physical space in the right of way and how we spend our limited city revenue.
Furthermore, since ATLDOT is charged with supporting all modes of transportation, then let’s make sure each parking space helps achieve those broad goals: When we dedicate physical space to metered parking to support car traffic, let’s dedicate the revenue generated to all the other modes of transportation and to safety in general. In particular, let’s dedicate that parking revenue to the Safety and Mobility Fund which will finance sustainable transportation projects, including bike/scoot lanes and pedestrian infrastructure.
When metered parking helps fund safety and mobility, while enhancing neighborhoods, we can all smile as we pay to park.