Urban Discoveries Baltimore

Recently the Sun ran an article on various parking-pass scams in South Baltimore. Peter Hermann puts it succinctly:  “It goes without saying that trying to find a parking space after work in many Baltimore neighborhoods is an aggravating, blow-your-horn and then your brains out adventure.”

By no means is Baltimore the only city where finding parking is such an exercise in frustration that parking pass fraud almost seems like a viable alternative. Bern Grush tells a story of a friend who drove to downtown Toronto for a meeting. Public transit would’ve cost $5 and taken 40 minutes, so Grush’s friend ended up driving-the sensible choice, he figured. Unwilling to pay $8 for a spot in the building’s privately-owned lot, he began circling the block, looking for an open spot with a $2 meter. You can probably guess how this story ends:  after ten minutes of fruitless searching, he wound up parking in the $8 lot after all-and was late for his meeting. It was a typical city parking story-all in all, aren’t such minor annoyances an unavoidable fact of city life?

Well, not necessarily. Grush’s friend’s three-mile drive ended up five miles-small potatoes, until you multiply it by the thousands of drivers who repeat the same process every day. The private parking company ended up with the money, the city streets got a bit more congested, and Grush’s friend ended up grouchy, late, and out $8.

And this is what makes much of city driving so frustrating-as urban planning professor Donald Shoup says, “[in the city,] a lot of the traffic is not going anywhere, it’s already arrived-and is hunting for a place to park.” Observing motorists near the UCLA campus where he works, Shoup concluded that motorists spent an average of 3.3 minutes in search of a spot. Which doesn’t sound so bad, until you do the math-in one year, Shoup concluded, cars on a parking quest drove a total of 950,000 miles just in this 15-block area. He also cites a recent survey of New York City drivers stopped at red lights-28 percent of those in Soho said they were looking for parking; in Park Slope, 45 percent were.

Shoup hasn’t just identified a problem, however; he’s proposed a solution: performance-based parking prices. With a fixed supply of parking spaces, Shoup and others have argued, then we can regulate demand through adjusting prices. That is, meter prices would vary depending on day of the week and time of day. Turnover could be encouraged by raising prices incrementally over time-say, $1 for the first hour, $2 for the second, and so on. The goal is 85 percent occupancy, or one to two open spots per block-enough so drivers spend zero minutes cruising the streets in search of an available space.

Yes, that means more expensive parking. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. Knowing that they’ll face pricier parking would make more drivers explore other options, such as walking, biking, or taking public transportation. The increased revenue for the city could be funneled into improving the current public transit infrastructure.

It’s not just a pipe dream, either. Pilot programs are currently being tested in New York and Washington, D.C., and Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco plan to do the same soon. Could it work in Baltimore? Lucky for us, we already have those fancy solar-powered meters installed all around town (and 400 more on the way), it might not require much more than a little re-programming… that, and some long term vision.

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