Thowing Free Market Elbows

Free Parking as Always! - by netanIn a column in this week's New York Times, Tyler Cowen, perhaps the internet's most erudite libertarian, endorsed the "free parking isn't free" theory that has gained a lot of traction in liberal circles.  Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking, lays out the case that minimum parking restrictions are actually a subsidy for drivers that makes biking and walking more difficult and thus: "Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist."  Cowen's solution is twofold, remove minimum parking requirements from zoning laws and, whenever appropriate, charge for parking.  Seems like a slam dunk for libertarians: remove market distorting government requirements and charge a free-market price for a service that has costly societal side-effects.  Naturally, Randall O'Toole at Cato Online immediately posted a rebuttal.  Why can't libertarians get behind a good idea that should have come from their neck of the policy woods?

Cowen hews closely to libertarian orthodoxy; to wit his mention of global warming:

PERHAPS most important, if we’re going to wean ourselves away from excess use of fossil fuels, we need to remove current subsidies to energy-unfriendly ways of life. Imposing a cap-and-trade system or a direct carbon tax doesn’t seem politically acceptable right now. But we can start on alternative paths that may take us far.

This is liberal-tarian policy at its finest, yet O'Toole has his hackles up.  Why?  I smell tribalism.  O'Toole has long been an opponent of regulation and subsidization in urban development, but largely in service of the idea that most people want to live in spread out suburbs with no public transportation and de facto mandated car ownership.  In other words, O'Toole has an end as well as a means in mind.  Otherwise he wouldn't seem so invested in defeating an article that reads libertarian in every way, unless you smell picking winners in acknowledging that walkable communities are preferable .

The proof of his bias is in the pudding:

Strangely, one of the examples Cowen uses in his article is Manhattan, where (he claims) “streets are full of cars cruising around, looking for cheaper on-street parking, rather than pulling into a lot.” Give me a break! I defy Cowen to find any free parking anywhere in Manhattan, where ownership of a single parking space can cost more than a median home in other parts of the country.

Cowen doesn't say anything about free parking!  He said people drive around looking for cheaper on-street parking.  This isn't remotely controversial, but O'Toole is looking for reasons to disagree and so he attacks the straw man.

Here's a more important example of O'Toole's agenda is his analysis.

Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not, and that without such requirements there would be less free parking. This last assumption is extremely unlikely, as entrepreneurs everywhere know that (outside of New York City) 90 percent of all urban travel is by car, and businesses that don’t offer parking are going to lose customers to ones that do.

I haven't read Shoup's 700+ plus book, but the notion that he assumes that every municipality in the country has the same parking requirements as L.A. is just obviously spurious.  LA isn't the densest urban area in the country, but it does have a terrible reputation for smog and traffic.  So while L.A. may have bias Shoup against free parking, only because L.A. transportation policy is an obvious failure.  

That allowing people to build as much parking as they want instead of mandating minimum parking won't reduce the amount of available parking seems like a curious abdication of libertarian principles.  Does intrusive government regulations and laws not matter if the outcome is similar to what would occur in nature?  Shoup is even going so far as to argue for L.A.'s parking requirements because they bring necessary relief from dreaded urban density.  Here I thought, government restrictions disort outcomes and over time alienate people from their natural liberty?  Or is that only when the government is building popular public services like mass transportation?

Cato has followed up on O'Toole's response with a more supportive post, but this sort of tribal elbow throwing is the hallmark of puritan liberalism that exists only in the imagination of true believers. Meanwhile, Libertarians who actually want to see their ideas in practice are seeking a more flexible political strategy that allows them to seek temporary alliances when appropriate.  Liberals and libertarians have long viewed each other skeptically, but modern liberalism's focus on quality of life over status quo policies (often built by liberals of generations past) allows plenty of overlap on farm subsidies, occupational liscencing and, yes, transportation policy.

Comments

[Christopher Carr]

I think actually more than anything else what makes a libertarian-liberal alliance possible is liberalism's general abandonment of labor and union special interests, which are by their very nature anathema to pure libertarianism.

On an unrelated note, I think the U.S. could learn a lot from Japan in terms of urban planning. Parking is absurdly expensive, and everybody uses public transportation. Not that it's a contest or anything, but Greater Tokyo makes New York look like a ghost town.

[Jessica]

I don't know much about liberal-libertarian alliances, but I know a bit about urban spaces and parking regulations.

The reality is that most cities do have parking requirements, most often in the form of parking minimums. And it's not places like LA and NYC that should doted on - these are dense cities, these cities offer public transportation (however imperfect) and though they require parking in some shape or form their parking ratios are much lower than that of the suburban communities sprawling out across our country. The parking ratios of these suburb communities are outrageous and because pouring asphalt and buying land in suburban communities is cheap, it's most often that parking minimums are met with parking lots - we know this, we've all been to these communities. When parking minimums are resolved in expensive parking decks the costs are passed on to store owners who then pass it on to customers in the price of merchandise, or if the building is residential its cost is tacked on to the price of an apartment whether you plan to have a car or not. The cost per parking space of a parking deck is absurd often $50,00+ (I'm being conservative because I really believe the number is nearer to $90,000 per space).

As the "green movement" (or common sense ways of inhabiting a planet with finite resources) grows, cities (and believe it or not residents too) are embracing the idea of parking maximums. National rating systems like the US Green Building Council's LEED rating systems also now reward developers who pursue zoning changes to their property to be able to provide less parking than current code requires. And now some multi-unit developers offer plans allowing tenants to opt out of parking and therefore not incur the typically built in inflation due to the cost to provide the parking.

At the end of the day, government parking minimums are a subsidy for drivers. As long as driving is the easiest way and the costs (physical, environmental and social) are out of sight, out of mind, other modes of transit will suffer and our cities and lives will continue to be dominated by a mode of transport which makes us dependent on foreign and not everlasting oil and creates urban places not worth inhabiting. Along with parking maximums, new laws like congestion charging and higher meter prices can help to make biking, walking and transit the quickest and cheapest ways to get around. They are already the healthiest, but people don't care enough about that and that's another issue.