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.

In case you didn’t know, auto accidents are the number 1 cause of death among 1-34 year olds. Here in Illinois, about three people die on the roads every day, with approximately eleven traffic-related injuries occurring every hour. I’m all in favor of seat belts and airbags, and all the traffic calming we can muster. But choosing to go places on foot, by bike, or on mass transit is often the safest decision you can make.

(Via Yglesias.)

As you might imagine, this is a pretty complicated question to answer, but recently Charles Komanoff, a transit policy analyst based in New York, unveiled his analysis of what each car added to Manhattan traffic costs in externalities. His finding? About $160 per car per day.

Felix Salmon has a relatively easy-to-understand write up of this analysis based on his discussions with Komaroff, and of course, Yglesias weighs in too. I imagine Komanoff’s spreadsheet (.xls) is a bit too complicated for me to fully digest, but I’m going to take a look to see if I can get a sense of how difficult it would be to adapt his analysis to another city like Chicago.

I think everybody will have an automobile. I think it’s amazing in America when you drive around and look at new homes that are being built, there are three-car garages. I don’t think you’re going to see families with three cars. I think you’re going to see families with one car, possibly two.

As I say more than once in the text, Carless in Chicago is not an anti-car book. And I accept that not everyone lives in as dense an environment as Chicago, and that in some parts of Chicagoland, people will rely on cars for primary transportation. But I think LaHood’s comment reflects one of the real limitations to the ways in which government analyzes problems. For example, here in Chicago, we have a terrible parking shortage, which has resulted in laws and regulations to encourage the creation of new parking. (This itself is a terrible policy, for reasons explored in Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking.)  We fail to examine the problem from the perspective that there may simply be more cars in the city than we can responsibly keep, and rarely examine policies to lessen the parking shortage by reducing their numbers.

To be fair, I should point out that my viewpoint may have some unlikely allies. Way back in 2000 during his first stint as Ford’s CEO, Bill Ford, Jr. said:

The day will come when the notion of car ownership becomes antiquated. If you live in a city, you don’t need to own a car.

That’s the kind of private sector leadership I can get behind.