Parking meters rarely allow you to buy as much time as you like. Instead, they impose a maximum time quantity of 1 hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours. Why bother? The standard story is that nearby merchants don’t really want people who come to park. They want people who come to shop. Quantity restrictions keep out commuters – and leaves space for folks who want to swing by and spend some money.
As long as you charge parkers with traditional coin-operated meters, there’s no easy way to appease local merchants. With parking apps, however, there’s clearly a better way to make life more convenient. Instead of setting strict quantity limits, why not just set non-linear prices? Such as:
1 hour $0.00
2 hours $1.00
3 hours $3.00
4 hours $6.00
Each extra hour +$3.00
Notice: This still favors people who park briefly, shop, and leave – just as local merchants prefer. But it creates a safety valve for commuters, people who want to see a movie and shop, people who get held up in a meeting, and so on. In the immortal words of The Six Million Dollar Man, “We have the technology.” So why not?
READER COMMENTS
Jason Sorens
Nov 5 2019 at 10:17am
In some places, the time limits effectively work this way. If you go over the time limit, it’s a $10 fine. Low enough to be worth it sometimes.
Christopher Moore
Nov 5 2019 at 2:57pm
Read the work by UCLA economist Donald Shoup, totally changed my perspective on parking and parking requirements.
https://www.shoupdogg.com/
Mark Z
Nov 5 2019 at 3:37pm
Because of who owns the parking spaces/meters? If the merchants owned them, they’d have an incentive to price them that way. If the residents owned them, the merchants could rent the meters/spaces from the residents and price them nonlinearly.
Alternatively: transaction costs (people don’t like doing math in their heads to decide if the price is worth it, they prefer simple if suboptimal pricing schemes).
Andrew
Nov 6 2019 at 1:18am
Reply to Mark Z:
Indeed, sometimes when merchants own the parking spaces, they do in fact price parking non-linearly, just as Bryan suggests. In Sheffield (UK), the car park at John Lewis (a department store) charges £1.20/hr for the first 4 hours but then £3/hr for every additional hour.
Also, even street parking in Sheffield (run by the city council) usually gives you 20 min for free.
Thaomas
Nov 5 2019 at 6:06pm
Better still, charge dynamically according to availability of spaces and numbers of cars seeking spaces. Surge pricing for parking spaces like Uber. Of course the algorithm would have to model future demand using historical data taking account of time of day and year, weather, etc.
Shoup, Donald
Nov 5 2019 at 8:32pm
Here is the link to a book chapter that explains how progressive parking prices have worked in Albany: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4dsoie3g4pbdi3i/Chapter%2028-ProgressiveParkingPrices.pdf?dl=0
And here is the link to a chapter on progressive parking fines: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p25rh5pxm0ykl7m/Chapter%2029-ProgressiveParkingFines.pdf?dl=0
Steve
Nov 6 2019 at 1:51am
The purpose of parking meters in my area isn’t to collect the parking fees. It is to make it very clear who hasn’t paid the parking fees so that they can be hit with parking fines. The local councils around me collect far more money from the sum total of fines related to not paying parking meters than the sum total they collect from the meters themselves.
Phil H
Nov 6 2019 at 10:25am
The sentiment of this post seems right but this isn’t:
“As long as you charge parkers with traditional coin-operated meters, there’s no easy way to appease local merchants.” Why not? Clearly coin meters can be set to follow non-linear pricing rules like the one suggested in the post. When an exciting new proposal is made, it’s a good idea to ask: why hasn’t anyone done this before? Maybe simply because they never thought hard enough about it; or maybe motorists dislike these rules enough that they aren’t worth the effort.
Jonathan
Nov 7 2019 at 2:29pm
New York already does this.
1st hour $4
2nd hour $6.50
Comments are closed.