PARKING….Matt Yglesias suggests that conservatives ought to apply free market thinking to issues of urban development:
To my way of thinking an enormous amount of good could be done if conservatives were more interested in applying really basic free market principles to transportation policy. For example, why not allow developers to build as much or as little parking as they want to build when they launch a new development? Why not charge market rates for curbside parking on public streets? How about fewer restrictions on the permitted density of development? Why not reduce congestion on the most-trafficked roads through market pricing of access?
Well, sure. Actually, though, I think conservatives are generally fairly open to the idea of letting developers do whatever they want just on general pandering-to-business-interests grounds. The problem is that the public tends to be rabidly opposed to this kind of thing, and nobody who proposes it has a chance of getting elected (or reelected). So discretion ends up becoming the better part of valor.
Of course, there’s also a chicken and egg problem here. You really can’t build enormous apartment complexes with little or no parking if everyone who lives in the area owns a car. Nobody will rent your apartments if they can’t park their cars, after all. Mass transit is the obvious answer to this, but it’s still the case that no one will rent your apartment unless transit is so good that they can ditch their car entirely and therefore don’t need a parking place. But in most places mass transit is nowhere near that good, so parking spaces continue to be needed. But as long parking spaces are freely available, the pressure to improve mass transit remains minimal.
What to do? Cities have some pretty good options for improving transit, along with a populace that’s less car crazy than the rest of the country, but they usually have huge budgetary constraints. Suburbs and rural areas, conversely, sometimes have the money but seem hopelessly distant from any kind of reasonable solution in anything but the longest term. Here in Orange County, for example, you’d almost literally have to bulldoze the entire place and build anew to get even close to the density you’d need for a decent mass transit system to work.
Maybe motor scooters are the answer. If we all owned one car and one little Vespa out here in suburbia, instead of two cars, we could start cutting back on parking spaces gradually and save gasoline in the process. An electric Vespa with 30 or 40 miles of range on a charge would be even better. Maybe development of a Volt-based scooter ought to be a condition for a GM bailout.
Might not be very popular outside the warm weather south, though. Any other ideas?
