No Such Thing as a Free Spot: Pricing as a Demand Management Strategy for Parking

This paper looks at parking policy as a demand-management strategy that should be part of sustainable transportation solutions. Overabundant parking affects urban design and the rational decision-making of individuals for transport mode. A typical parking spot requires 300 feet; parking regulations are a key driver of the proliferation of infrastructure such as surface parking lots and garages. Besides being unaesthetic, inactive places, parking infrastructure represents impervious surface contributing to water management and air pollution in urban areas. This paper considers underpriced parking as a public good which is overconsumed – a public subsidy for drivers which encourages more driving. It looks at the experimental practices of cities revising their parking requirements and/or using pricing to manage occupancy of on-street parking. The case of San Francisco is examined in detail, using a market economics methodology which compares the city’s parking supply to demand, using vehicle counts from a transportation demand model. The market for parking was segmented into hourly, daily, and overnight, with distinct user groups and pricing for each. Although San Francisco County has an inventory of parking spots, this analysis discovered 100,000 uncounted parking spots in the city, demonstrating that planning agencies may lack understanding of their parking supply. Further, the paper traces the emergence of pricing zones in the central city, and examines substitute goods to identify the market value of off-street parking.