Cruising for Parking

Donald Shoup is a professor of urban planning at UCLA who has extensively studied the effect of parking on cities, the economy, and the environment. He views traffic congestion on local streets as the result of under-priced curb parking.

Shoup studied the economic incentive for drivers to cruise around blocks looking for cheap or free curb parking. He examined the price of curb and off-street parking for an hour at noon at the same location (outside City Hall) in twenty U.S. cities. The average price of curb parking was only twenty percent of the price of parking in a garage.[1]

In the Westwood area of L.A., drivers spend an average 3.3 minutes and drive an average half mile to find a curb space. This results in an excess of 4,000 vehicle miles traveled (VMT) every weekday. Over the course of one year, this cruising creates 950,000 excess VMT – the equivalent of four trips to the moon. This translates into 47,000 gallons of gas wasted and the
release of 740 tons of CO2 emissions.[2]

In 2006, researchers in New York City interviewed drivers stopped at a traffic signal in SoHo and found that 28 percent were cruising for curb parking. Another group of researchers found that 45 percent of drivers in Brooklyn were cruising. The large disparity between the price of street parking in New York and the price of parking off-street (curb parking in Manhattan is $1 an hour, compared to an average of $20 for off-street parking) motivates drivers to spend more time cruising.[3]

Shoup argues that cities should adjust meter rates by trial and error until the occupancy of curb spots is about 85 percent all day. When the price is right, there will always be available spots for people willing to pay for convenient curb parking. People who choose to pay less can always park off-street.[4]

If the city returns some of parking revenue to pay for added public services on metered streets, residents and merchants will be more likely to support the change. For example, these funds could be used to clean and maintain sidewalks, plant trees, improve lighting, remove graffiti, or bury overhead utility wires.[5]

Redwood City, California has successfully applied Shoup’s approach to parking rates in its downtown district. According to the city’s downtown development coordinator in March 2007, the initial impacts of the change were positive. The city set hourly rates for spaces further from the main street (Broadway) lower than spaces closer to and on the main street. As a result, congestion on Broadway has decreased and there are usually spots available at all times, even in prime areas. This has been achieved even though the city eliminated time limits on parking spots. Many parkers have shifted to cheaper parking at the edges of Downtown and off-street.[6]

New parking meter technology facilitates Redwood City’s new system. The city’s development coordinator can monitor vacancy rates and change hourly prices for downtown spaces from his desk. The new parking meters have WiFi connections so that customers can get real-time credit card authorization, can pay via a cell phone, and can add time at any pay station from any location.[7]

The extra revenue from Redwood City’s curb parking is applied to added public services in the metered areas. The city expects to generate approximately $1 million a year for these added services.[8]

[1] Donald Shoup, Cruising for Parking, 30 Access 16, 18 (2007), available at http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf.
[2] Id. at 19.
[3] Id. at 21.
[4] Id. at 20.
[5] Id. at 21.
[6] Laurence Aurbach, Redwood City’s Free-Market Parking Meters, Ped Shed, http://pedshed.net/?p=105 (Apr. 3, 2007, 07:24).
[7] Id.
[8] Shoup, supra note 1, at 21.