San Fransisco, Is finally looking at more market based parking pricing.

“City officials hope by early next year to start a two-year pilot project that would radically change the way people park in San Francisco - marrying high-tech gadgetry and a free-market philosophy to better manage traffic congestion and to increase collections from meters.

“We’re looking at actually pricing a parking space like housing - let the market dictate the price,” said Sonali Bose, chief financial officer for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

In the idea’s simplest application, people would have to pay more to park where demand for spaces is high.”

The amazing thing is just how radical any attempts to put anything close to market based principles to work seem to most people. It’s not an accident that America’s car culture developed in step with the growth of government. The irony is that so many of the world’s “free market” types live a lifestyle enabled by communist road and parking policies.

Needless, to say–the right first place to look for transit funds should be at on the street parking in the city.

No, children– the $80 crude price we hit the other day was not that much of a fluke. Here’s some quotes from a recent Economist article.

“The difference between now and then is OPEC’s discovery that booming places like China have a seemingly unquenchable demand for oil. Oil producers, including those in OPEC, struggled to keep up. Prices rose, but demand kept on increasing too. By last summer, OPEC was already pumping as much oil as it could, and markets were fearful that hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico or a political storm in the Persian Gulf would lead to shortages. The oil price duly rose to over $77 a barrel.

When those fears dissipated, it became clear that there was enough oil to go around after all. But by then, OPEC had developed a taste for $70 oil. So it cut production to stop prices from falling too far. When the oil price reached a new record of $78 a barrel last month, it was thanks as much to OPEC’s diminished output as to runaway demand. The cartel has now proved that it has enough discipline to prop up prices by restraining supply if need be, and also enough spare capacity to temper prices when they rise too high for its liking. In other words, OPEC is back in control of the oil price.”

The basic reason for that is that the actual world capacity to produce oil is near it’s current limits. All cartels, inspire cheaters who will sell more into the market as the profit of their product rises. In this case, OPEC has power again cause even the inspired cheaters don’t have the goods.One realistic way I could be proved wrong about this, is if we have a sudden drop in demand caused by a severe global recession.

One nice thing to think about at the pump is that each time you fill up you are helping in your small way to destroy the world.

Tube City, had a strange and very sad defence of the Mon-Fayette Expressway, if that’s what it was which was made much more interesting by the very good comments it generated.

OK, here’s the defence??

“Highways Are Rotten, But…: I can think of 1,000 reasons why highways are bad ideas:

They Squander Oil: Not only do we need oil to run the cars and trucks, we need oil to pave the darn highways. It’s really wasteful.

They’re Maintenance Headaches: As Joe Grata pointed out in the Post-Gazette a few weeks ago, whenever we build new roads or bridges, we leave the old ones intact. Thus we keep increasing our maintenance headaches and adding to the infrastructure we have to maintain. For that reason …

They Squander Tax Money: This should be obvious. We keep adding maintenance burdens faster than revenues can match them; liquid fuel taxes don’t cover a fraction of the cost of building, maintaining, and providing emergency services for highways.

They Enable Sprawl: Building highways allows population to disperse thinly throughout an area, which requires more infrastructure, which wastes more oil and tax money.”

Then the defence goes on to describe his fears about “peak oil” and ends up telling us to do it anyway because it’s the only thing we know how to do. It ends with the wish that somehow, the depressed towns of the Mon-valley will act as bedroom communities, even though Pittsburgh itself and the whole region have a surplus of housing.

Several of the commenter’s hit the nail on the head.

Comments


“You’ve got the name wrong: it’s the Mon Valley BYPASS. The entire project is a gift to developers who wish to turn Fayette County into Cranberry Twp. It will ensure that the Mon Valley is dead, forever and ever, as people zip pass it to their McMansions in Fayette. The whole purpose of exurban development is to exploit the resources of a city without paying for them. Need high-tech medical care? Sure thing, drive up to Pittsburgh. Want to put your kids in private school? Sure thing, drive up to Pittsburgh. Want to send them to college? Sure thing, drive up to Pittsburgh. Want to see a concert, attend a play, go to a ball game? Sure thing, drive up to Pittsburgh. Want to help pay for those things? No way, that’s why we live in (fill in the blank).”

Posted by: Traveler at September 4, 2007 12:49 PM

Brilliant essay. And damnably hard to dispute, also.
I suppose an alternate solution would be DON’T DO ANYTHING. I appreciate your point about our fetish for high speed highways right now … but is there any CLAMOR for more traffic between the regions it services? And if there is, what is the quality of the clamor?
And if you need another tiebreaker … these things cost money. LET’S RESOLVE TO DO NOTHING.

Posted by: Bram R at September 4, 2007 11:15 PM

Quote from a long comment

“The roads in the Mon Valley are crap largely because of the money that’s been diverted away from them for the Mon-Fayette. This one project has been on the books so long, and it’s sucked all the air out of any kind of land-use or transportation planning in the Valley — to the point where now it’s the only thing on the table.

The thing is, it’s not really on the table.

1. We can’t afford it. Floating a bond for $3.6 billion, which is what the MF leg to Pittsburgh/I376 would cost, would ultimately cost the Turnpike (and by extension, PA taxpayers) $235 million a year for 30 years. Getting Harrisburg to approve a toll on users of I-80 in order to raise just $750 million for highway/bridge maintenance and public transit STATEWIDE was like pulling eye-teeth, and even then the amount they approved was less than half what the Governor’s Transportation Funding & Reform Commission recommended as the minimum needed to just cover our asses, er, assets. No way will anyone be willing to sign on the dotted line for an additional $235 million/year for a project that will only “benefit” a small corner of the state. The Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission had to put $19 billion worth of unmet maintenance and operations needs for roads, bridges and public transit on their “illustrative projects” list in the last long-range plan — stuff they wish they could do in the next 30 years, but they don’t have the money. It’s not a joke. The money really isn’t there.”

Posted by: Andrea at September 5, 2007 10:30 AM

The commenter named “Traveler” made I think the most meaningful comment in terms of Pittsburgh itself. The projects like this that have been done over the years have not in been to the benefit to the residents of Pittsburgh.

The city of Los Angeles, seems to to have a experiencing a real revival of it’s downtown and the areas near it. While the center of many jobs, the area used to have only about 20,000 residents living in or near it, many of whom were the poorest in the city. Now it has close to 30,000 residents many of whom are wealthy or middle class. The city is also finally starting to rethink it’s parking policies. The classic issues are developing of how to reduce the dependency on cars in a city with few alternatives.

An article in the LA Weekly seethes with anger and skepticism.

“THE LEAP OF FAITH BEHIND this strategy is tied to affordable housing, and city leaders’ desire to create mixed-income neighborhoods. They argue that if L.A. doesn’t have lower-income, transit-hopping service workers living in proximity to the bankers, lawyers and movie producers they’re presumably serving, the city will consist of gridlocked ghettos for the wealthy like Marina del Rey. Villaraigosa, Rothmann and others believe that builders, if relieved of costly parking requirements, will use the savings to build affordable housing units.

But the entire scheme is based on the dubious premise that developers share City Hall’s interest in mixing affordable housing into pricey neighborhoods. This is to be achieved by using “unbundling,” described in a Planning Department summary of Rothmann’s plan. The presumption is that living space and parking space today are bundled into a single package, and that L.A. residents, in effect, purchase or rent a dwelling with parking attached.”

Basically, what seems to have happened is that the city is almost at the end of it’s rope in terms of it’s ability to build or even maintain it’s wasteful and redundant highway infrastructure which seems incompatible with high density mixed use development. The other thing that seems to have happened is that the one recently built subway line seems to be attracting a lot of demand for development along it’s route.

One factor that is very different from Pittsburgh is that because of LA’s huge sprawling land area, high density land use is not such a financially life and death issue in terms of the city’s tax base.

As a very small city with a limited amount of available land for high density development and a small fragile tax base, Pittsburgh is very affected by it’s car oriented land use policies. Up until recently few cities in America even bothered to study the effects of mandated parking requirements on their tax base,transit usage, environment or housing affordability.This has started to change, and a suprising number of people seem to be interested in buying places with no parking.

“Although condominiums without parking are common in Manhattan and the downtowns of a few other East Coast cities, they are the exception to the rule in most of the country. In fact, almost all local governments require developers to provide a minimum number of parking spaces for each unit — and to fold the cost of the space into the housing price. The exact regulations, which are intended to prevent clogged streets and provide sufficient parking, vary by city. Houston’s code requires a minimum of 1.33 parking spaces for a one-bedroom and 2 spaces for a three-bedroom. Downtown Los Angeles mandates 2.25 parking spaces per unit, regardless of size.”(which is interesting since LA until recently was famous for it’s dead downtown)

“Minimum parking requirements became popular in the 1950s with the growth of suburbia, said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of “The High Cost of Free Parking” (American Planning Association, 2005). “They spread like wildfire,” he said.

But in the 21st century, skyrocketing housing prices and the move toward high-density urban development are bringing scrutiny to the ways in which cities and developers manage the relationship between parking and residential real estate. Once a tool of government, parking requirements are increasingly driven by the market.”

A number of cities are in fact trying out the idea of replacing minimum requirements for spaces with the idea of maximums.

“In San Francisco, more downtown housing has been approved over the last few years than in the last 20 years combined, said Joshua Switzky, a city planner. The booming real estate market there inspired local officials to revoke minimum-parking requirements in the central core, Mr. Switzky said. “The city’s modus operandi is ‘transit first,’ ” he said. “Everyone recognized the existing rules didn’t match the policy.”

Under San Francisco’s new parking maximums, downtown developers are also required to “unbundle” the price of parking from the price of the condo. “Buyers aren’t obligated to buy a parking space, and developers don’t have the incentive to build spaces they can’t sell,” Mr. Switzky said. Sustainable development is not the only factor driving changes to parking standards. “We talk about affordable housing as the most critical thing facing cities and the nation,” Mr. Cody said. “But we never talk about the costs of the automobile.” Since individual parking spaces cost about $40,000, reducing or eliminating parking is an effective way to lower housing prices, he said.”

What seems very evident by looking at parking policies is how little serious thought or study seems to have been done. Cars have been given, huge percentages of free or low cost real estate in critical urban areas with almost no study. In fact, trying to guess what real world demand for parking might be in a free market is almost impossible in most places because market forces have been eliminated by law.

Here’s a You tube video on a recent trend in urban activism from San Francisco. the idea is to make people aware of the amount of public space used for parking.

“More than 70% of most cities’ outdoor space is dedicated to the private vehicle while only a fraction of that land is allocated to open space for people. Around the nation, inexpensive curbside parking results in increased traffic, wasted fuel, and more pollution. It’s time to rethink the way streets are used!

A metered parking spot is an inexpensive short-term lease for a 10′x20′ plot of land. Imagine what you can do in a space usually dedicated to private vehicle storage. Parking Day began in a single metered parking spot in San Francisco and then spread around the world. People who want more open space, less traffic, and safer streets have joined together.

PARK(ing) Day in San Francisco!

Learn from Rebar how to temporarily transform a metered parking spot into a park, a playground, or whatever you like. Read our How to Manual and create your own PARK (ing) Project.

Plan to visit Public Architecture’s brand new Sidewalk Plaza, a permanent transformation of parking spots into a new form of urban open space that will be unveiled on PARK(ing) Day!

This year, Rebar plans to take the show on the road and create the first human powered mobile park: the Parkcycle. If all goes well the Rebar crew will be PARK(ing) in your neighborhood on September 21st!”

I don’t know who this guy is but, boy did lay out the cause of our poorly maintained Infrastructure in the Post today. My guess is he might know what he’s talking about.
I really, really want to just paste the whole thing in.

The Title is

Fund bridge repairs not sprawl and speculation

“This latest bridge collapse was no great surprise. As a founding member of the Citizen Advisory Panel of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Planning Commission, I and others uncovered egregious abuses and improprieties in the allocation of federal transportation funds during the CAP’s existence from 1994 to 1998. Our numerous complaints to Federal Highway Administration officials were rebuffed with, “It’s going on everywhere.”(and I guess it was)

We found maintenance being ignored here and elsewhere, with the money instead being used to subsidize suburban real estate speculation — billions of dollars worth of new, unnecessary highways opening more farmland and natural habitat for speculative conversion into spread-out residential and commercial construction. It’s called “suburban sprawl.” The entire process so permeates American society that it’s widely considered a given. In our region, it has drained our traditional communities of people and investment and dispersed our decreasing population ever more thinly.”

“After years of repeated requests, we finally got the SPRPC to identify how much was necessary to meet minimum maintenance needs. It would have required all of the region’s federal transportation funding, yet the SPRPC was allocating 40 percent of that money to build or expand highways, effectively subsidizing more sprawl. Diversion of maintenance money to new construction not only leaves existing infrastructure to deteriorate at an accelerating rate, it also increases and extends the maintenance deficit by adding each new highway’s future maintenance needs to our total liabilities.”

(so, class– what do you think our liabilities are now?)

“As a citizen who is currently assisting Allegheny County Council in drafting a transit reform proposal to present to the state Legislature, I can say that it will do no good to make one or two little corrections and think the problem is solved — real solutions will need to be comprehensive.

Before we toss more taxpayer money around, we must rethink transportation at the regional, state and national levels. Transportation is at the nexus of many of our most threatening problems. More efficient transportation can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy usage and our oil dependency.

Eliminating the influence of real estate speculation, currently the controlling factor in transportation planning, can combat suburban sprawl, help preserve and revitalize existing communities, and stop unwarranted consumption of valuable farmland and natural habitat.”

He is running for some office– (all this sh–t’s confusing). Vote for him.

So here goes another video likely to be ignored. I just want to say that, I love Pittsburgh’s Downtown and I love even more what I think it could be. Anyone who knows lower Manhattan well and sees downtown Pittsburgh is likely to notice a strong resemblance. I really see it cause I’m old enough to remember when a lot of it was pretty dead.

On, the odd chance that the major players here were sincerely interested in creating a vibrant Downtown people wanted to live, work, shop and spend time in they would watch these videos and spend a lot of time studying actual vibrant cities.

Here’s the last part of the interview with “Gridlock Sam” and the transcript is here. This part deals a lot with the fact that today’s traffic modeling is based on flawed static assumptions about human behavior. Another interesting thing that comes out is how car centric current planning is. In Manhattan’s central business and shopping districts, walking is by far the most common form of transportation, but they are treated by traffic planners as an obstruction to cars.

“A: The models we use now are very limited. They help with traffic volume and light timing, but they won’t make any judgements in terms of traffic that might shrink. Those are the kinds of things you have to manually input. You have to have the courage to stand up and say 5 percent of traffic won’t be there. I’m in battles like that right now. On the West side of Manhattan, the boulevard being built between the World Trade Center and the World Financial Center has plans for ten lanes of traffic. That’s way too much for New York City. I proposed three lanes in each direction and one for turning, so that’s seven lanes instead of ten, which is 36 feet less for a pedestrian to cross. The signal timing would allow pedestrians to get across in one cycle. The current model has it in two cycles, which means it would take 5 minutes to walk across the street and New Yorkers aren’t going to stand for that. They’re going to try to run across and it’ll create a dangerous situation. But the state model says you have to include every single vehicle there and that what I propose will create massive traffic jams.”

“Q: There are some models for pedestrians, but people aren’t like cars. Cars just drive and park. Pedestrians can do all kinds of things: stop and talk, skateboard, drink coffee by the side of the road. The current model seems to treat people as if they’re mini-cars. What happens when you observe what people really do?

A: There are lots of benefits to having pedestrians. For instance, having activity on street makes street safer. When the traffic engineers do assign levels of service for pedestrians, you’re right: they treat pedestrians almost as little vehicles, and yet they don’t do what they do for cars. For cars they introduce delays. For pedestrians, they never calculate the delay it takes in crossing the street.”

Yinz should listen to this guy. We all should.

This is part two of the interview with “Gridlock Sam“, a good part of it deals with the issue of congestion pricing.

“A: Yes. The far-right and far-left agree that the most capitalistic solution and the most socialist solution is the same solution: congestion pricing. On one hand, it’s pure capitalism. We’ve got a precious resource in the city and we’re going to price that space according to supply and demand. If you want to come in the city at Christmas and show your family the Christmas tree in your SUV, we’ll let you, but you’re polluting the air and consuming space and so it’ll cost you $50. The socialists on the left-wing say it’s wonderful because the money raised will go toward public transportation. There’s a marked skew between people in subway and cars. A study found that people in cars make $14,000 more on average than people in subways. Congestion pricing would move wealth to the less wealthy. Plus there are other benefits: the air will be better and the streets, quieter. But there isn’t a politician ready to step up to the plate.

Q: Why isn’t this being done?

A: Opponents use the word “tax” and “toll” to describe this. It’s a killer in an election. We have to be smarter than a soundbite. We need politicians who can go beyond the soundbite. Ken Livingstone in London implemented congestion pricing–and he was reelected!”