What do people think of this indirect proposal: Taxes levied on parking spaces (along with hiking up metered charges) - particularly open lots. It could actually do double duty as an indirect congestion charge
1) We already have
fairly high parking rates ($20/2hrs), but, yes, NYC is $33/2hrs, so there's space to go higher, but all that does is get us the Manhattan problem:
2)
Uber is the perfect technology for congesting the core while avoiding parking charges that you/we would hope would fix things. It is entirely predictable that if we hike parking charges in the CBD, all that'll really happen is that people will leave their personal car at home and switch to Uber. This already happened in NYC
It’s Settled: Uber Is Making NYC Gridlock Worse.
If we look, it has probably already happened in Boston: I already personally know at least 3 daily commuters in Arlington/Medford who find that 2x$25 Uber trips is cheap compared to $40 daily parking (Two guys Uber commute Arlington-to-Kendall Sq each morning and guy* Ubers Medford-to-Seaport). It's gotta be that this is already happening from Belmont, Brookline, and Greater Roslindale, and that higher parking charges would just accelerate it to Melrose, Newton, and Milton.
So every trip you thought you'd discouraged with parking charges, if it switched to Uber imposes twice as many VMT on the core than an SOV commute would (as the Uber itself shuttles in
and out for each commuter instead of just the normal "AM inbound, PM outbound" that an SOV driver makes.**
3) The problem with only taxing "official spots" is that the City's
residential permits are still free, and it therefore
makes cheating more attractive: lying on where a car is domiciled and who is actually a legit "visitor". If we're doing a cost-of-parking reform, we'd need a system that better prices residential permits in places like South End, Beacon Hill and Back Bay--and Cambridge from Harvard to Kendall *** That's proven politically hard.
4) And
Autonomous cars are coming that will out-Uber the Ubers at generating VMTs in the core precisely as a way of avoiding your parking charge, either by "circling the block" or being hired out or being sent back home.
Conclusion: we need a real congestion charge--and, incidentally, Uber is all for it (since their drivers will amortize it across more trips)
*And they are guys: Moms who have drop-kid-at-daycare duty are still in the "family car" with its carseats, while carefree Dads are taking the Uber.
**I'm guilty of this. Given sucky transit options from Medford to the BCEC, and expensive parking in the Seaport, I took a Lyft to a recent convention there, where I've never in the 18 years in Arlington/Medford "been driven" to anyplace but Logan and South Station. Until the trip itself is made expensive, the cost of parking just makes Uber/Lyft more attractive.
***I'm guilty of this too. Every time a friend loaned me his Cambridge parking pass was a $20 win for me, even if I could only use it on limited days. I eventually switched to employer-paid parking (taking the "customer only" spot on days we knew we weren't having visitors), but am happy to have switched entirely to bike commuting by 2015.
