How should parking be priced in college towns?
The literature to date has emphasized pricing in big cities. What about college towns?
Prof. Donald Shoup has been teaching at the UCLA planning school for half a century, but his influence on urban parking policy if anything continues to grow. Among other things, his work took something that people consider a boring and picayune question of municipal arcana and revealed it for the seriousness it deserves and the tradeoffs it requires. His focus is on cities, where he is known for advocating more of a market-based approach for parking as opposed to heavily prescriptive policy mandating that new construction be accompanied by off-street parking.1 As YIMBYism and urbanism continue their march into the mainstream—see the speeches of Barack Obama and others at the Democratic National Convention—his work2 is receiving deeper engagement, and rightly so.
But while most of the policy and media conversation on parking policy is part of a larger conversation about urbanism in big cities3, the fundamental challenges of parking policy are not limited to big cities.4 In certain respects, they are more acute in college towns that lack transit access comparable to big cities. In common with resort communities, these places also sometimes experience surges in demand for access to the central area that are seasonal or otherwise cyclical. In the summer, they are surreal—all or most of the amenities intended for a larger, denser population with far fewer people competing for them. Football Saturdays present the opposite problem: the city’s population may double half a dozen days a year but of course the city can’t construct parking infrastructure to accommodate that. As a native of Ann Arbor and someone who teaches at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, I’ve had occasion to both contemplate and experience these swings.
In Iowa City, the price of parking is a hot issue. As overviewed in this article from the Iowa City Press-Citizen, the city recently doubled parking rates downtown (and increased fines), but is now reconsidering these moves, with the City Council planning to vote on possible changes as early as this week. The issues involved implicate many other college towns as well as other types of communities.
Be careful taxing downtown college-town parkers to fund transit
The city is framing the increase as a needed source of revenue for its fare-free transit program. Economics-oriented urbanists have been critical of such programs,5 which prioritize low (zero) cost over quality of service (e.g., frequency), but the case against them is much stronger in big cities, which actually see a lot of transit revenue, than in college towns. In fact, Iowa City’s program has seen transit use increase by over 40%, and presumably most people riding transit are doing so to reach destinations they value. So from a welfarist perspective I don’t think the program is necessarily a problem. That doesn’t imply that parking should pay for it, however. The city is now reconsidering the increase, but not the rationale of taxing motorists to fund transit riders within the same downtown area.
The urban puzzle of college towns extends beyond parking but parking is a useful, manageable domain in which to examine it. I wrote a letter to the editor in response to the above linked article, which was recently published. I include the text below. Obviously the particulars focus on Iowa City, but I think the tradeoffs involved (and the city’s and my approaches to them) are generalizable.
I preface it by noting that one thing I don’t address is campus parking, i.e., university-controlled parking for faculty, staff, students, and other affiliates, which is a separate topic.6
City Should Strive for Optimal Parking Availability Downtown
I am writing in response to your report that the City may scale back the increase in parking rates, which doubled on July 1. I teach and write about business law and transportation, though I write today in my personal capacity only.
One justification the City has offered for the increase is to offset the cost of the fare-free transit program. The program needs $1.5 million annually now that federal pandemic funds are winding down. However, hinging fiscal support for transit on taxing people driving to downtown is potentially counterproductive. It is also misguided: the primary goal of setting parking rates downtown should be to foster optimal availability of parking spaces through regular turnover. A good goal would be one or two open spots per downtown block at any given time as recommended by parking expert Prof. Donald Shoup of UCLA.
While there is a superficial logic to taxing downtown parking to fund transit, in the case of motorists accessing downtown the populations using these services are actually closely aligned. The City's overall goal here should be increasing access to the downtown area through practical and cost-effective means. The ability to drive downtown, park, and access downtown amenities is critical to the City's vibrancy and fiscal stability. This concept is already implied by the parking rate structure. Parking ramps cost one-third less than street spaces, and the first hour of ramp use is free. The hassle factor in using ramps is apparently so great that, in economic terms, the City has to pay motorists $1.50 for the first hour they use a ramp rather than park in the street.
In an economist's paradise, the City would pursue optimal availability of parking spaces through dynamic pricing—allowing parking prices to rise and fall with demand. In Iowa City, this would risk substantial confusion and backlash, especially among the visitors and newcomers drawn to downtown. The best practical choice is to set parking rates—and fines—at the level that can be expected to keep one or two spaces free per block at any given time. To the extent the City's true goal is economic redstribution—taxing motorists to fund relatively less well-off transit riders—it has many other levers at its disposal to do so.
When it takes up the question of downtown parking rates, the City Council should establish optimal parking availability as the goal. Perhaps the wisest move would be to adopt a given rate on a temporary basis with the explicit goal of ensuring an availability target, with a specified plan to consider one or two adjustments to pricing once it can assess how its program is performing. (This would also require the City to study the impact of the new pricing, which it should anyway.) Setting the price too high will harm local business. But setting it too low will, too—motorists can't spend money at a store or restaurant if they can't park nearby.
In the bigger picture, the City Council's choice set here is limited by decisions originally made by generations past and confirmed regularly by the Council. Existing land use patterns and local regulatory constraints predetermine that most people who come downtown will be either students, most of them walking, or motorists. The City has already outlawed increases in population density through the zoning code and other mechanisms, choosing to negotiate exceptions piecemeal in exchange for exactions and other concessions from homebuilders rather than pursue a general overhaul that would allow more new homes in the City’s core as of right. That choice may represent politicians’ best guess at local preferences, but it is a choice and it is not without cost. Given these constraints, buses can only be expected to do so much for downtown. Optimal availability—not maximum possible availability, and not minimum price, but one or two spaces an hour—should be the goal.
Gregory Shill
Professor of Law
University of Iowa College of Law
As I’ve written about myself (e.g., here), the twentieth-century transport regulatory regime (which we still live in) relies on a very heavy, very visible hand in maximizing the level of parking and vehicle use more generally, which creates a lot negative externalities while also sort of foreclosing a serious discussion about them because the tradeoffs are hardwired into law. Shoup put it more memorably: “When it comes to parking, rational people quickly become emotional, and staunch conservatives turn into ardent communists.”
At a high level, he advocates relaxing or abolishing off-street parking mandates, which deter new construction, and instead relying on demand-responsive measures to improve parking availability. His tome is The High Cost of Free Parking but you can find shorter articles by him and summaries of the 800-page book online.
Every local news outlet features gripes about parking. But to the extent the subject is studied or reported on as sounding in public policy as opposed to human interest, it is almost exclusively in big cities.
College towns have other urbanism-policy-relevant similarities to big cities, including housing supply shortages. But these could be solved by building more housing; the problem is political. Politics aside, there’s no technocratic solution for parking that’s equally straightforward.
I distinguish this group from actual economists, who have more mixed opinions. For example, a recent study recommended both implementing congestion pricing and fare-free transit in Chicago. This study makes a lot of simplifying (operational and political) assumptions, and I would be careful to avoid reading too much into it, but it is a serious study by economists that endorses fare-free transit in a big city. Chicago is also distinguishable from some other large transit cities in that fares are a smaller share of system revenue already.
Though it can inspire intense emotions in practice, campus parking is straightforward in principle because only one entity is involved and it enjoys near-total discretion to determine the tradeoffs among its various goals and stakeholders. As an autobiographical aside, I will note that I came to appreciate campus parking questions better when I served on my university’s parking and transportation committee.