In the book, I briefly mention Donald Schoup’s excellent book, The High Price of Free Parking, but I don’t go into great detail about how changing the way we price parking might improve our quality of life. As it happens, a couple weeks ago, economist Tyler Cowen wrote a great Op-Ed about this very topic, which also led to some interesting follow-up debate. One advantage of being a slightly lazy blogger is that I can list all of these discussions together in a comprehensive post.
Free Parking Comes at a Price by Tyler Cowen.
Arnold Kling responds, and Cowen responds back.
Robin Hanson responds to both, and Kling replies.
On a roll, Cowen also provides a little more ‘color commentary’ here and here.
Of course, here in Chicago we’re living through the great parking meter privatization experiment. Aaron Renn (the Urbanophile) provides some excellent commentary, focusing largely on how Chicago’s parking meter deal locks the city into a pretty inflexible model for parking policy.
For the moment, I’ll spare readers my own entirely correct but quite unpopular opinions about what Chicago should be doing differently parking-wise.
I fear my parking policy ideas might also be unpopular at first glance. And like you, I think they are correct!
Anyway, I try to put Shoup’s parking ideas into wider context at a new parking policy blog, Reinventing Parking.
See for example, http://www.reinventingparking.org/2010/08/shoups-parking-ideas-offer-much-more.html