Tyler Cowen and David Shoup Against Free Parking

       I found an article Cowen wrote in 2010 siding with Shoup against free parking. Listen to this guy a bit and tell me he could ever run for office:

       "Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it’s in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway. Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block."

      http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1323876508-8m0XnMWl93FKMlpmwHTqbQ

      Nor is he done by a long way:

       "If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove."

      I got to say that Cowen's advocacy for Shoup is helping him much with me. He might want to stop. But he goes on:

     "The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life."

     Right, you are entitled to nothing unless you have the ability to pay. Very libertarian. Of course as RortyBomb argued yesterday that there is a difference between liberalization and privatization. They are not always one and the same.

    Here is more discussion from Shoup himself:

    "Every person plays many different roles in life—tenant, homeowner, worker, consumer, investor, and
motorist. With bundled parking, we pay for parking in all these roles except, usually, as motorists. Because we pay for parking indirectly, its cost does not deter us from driving. Because off-street parking requirements force up the supply of parking spaces, they “externalize” the cost of parking by shifting it to everyone but the parker. only if we pay for parking directly does its cost affect our decisions whether to drive or not."

    http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/ResponseToAntiplanner.pdf

    Yet his complaint that free parking "externalizes" the cost begs the question: aren't these essentially external costs? As he says we each pay many different roles. As most of us outside a place like New York City have the role among others of motorist who is really being stolen from in this "free parking subsidy?"

     Isn't this just another case of market logic being remorselessly over applied to every aspect of life? Seems to me there are already too many things that have been reduced to market logic-certainly am not opposed to markets and believe they have their place. This is just more of the libertarian logic that supposedly no one should ever be "coerced" into "subsidizing" anyone else.

    In truth such subsidies happen every day, some of the ways at least the libertarians don't raise much of a fuss like in the subsidies for oil companies.

    There are some followers of Shoup who go further. They "dream" of not only ending minimum parking requirements but imposing maximum parking requirements, of not only not forcing businesses to make available free parking but of requiring businesses to demand payment for parking.

    Can't you just see the campaign of someone who argues this way? Yet listen to Cowen. Even New York is to generous with the free parking:
 
   "In densely populated cities like New York, people are accustomed to paying high prices for parking, which has helped to encourage a relatively efficient, high-density use of space. Yet even New York is reluctant to enact the full social cost of the automobile into policy. Proposals to impose congestion fees have failed politically, and on-street parking is priced artificially low."

    As someone who has parked in New York there is nothing low about the price, though Cowen, et al. dream of raising it even higher.

    Look it may be that there is some merit in all this. If this is capable of doing what Schoup claims and make it so that parking is readily available I admit this is a laudable goal. But parking fees are just another consumption tax which are by their nature regressive.

    I hardly think calling for another tax increase which is what this call for higher parking fees is what we need right now during the Lesser Depression.

   I live in New York and nobody is going to convince me that the parking situation here is in anyway laudable.