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The Victoria Transport Institute (Victoria, BC, Canada) has this excellent survey. Less theoretical than the discussions by Donald Shoup and by myself – it has lots of excellent case studies but no reference to the role of telematics. I continue my long-term search for a doctoral student interested in pursuing a topic on the economics of [...] One of the interesting and influential figures I met recently in Paris was Professor Donald Shoup from the University of California, Los Angeles - I have a great shot of him iding a (rented) Velib bike near a well-known Parisian tourist attraction. Shoup is one of the world’s experts on the economics of parking. This sounds like a dry topic but it isn’t – parking practices are, in fact, a significant contributor to the unpaid, social costs of motoring. I reviewed Professor Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking here. The average US parking spot costs more to provide than the typical car occupying it and underpriced parking is a significant cause of traffic congestion. The gist of Shoup’s argument is that anyone should be able to park anywhere at any time by paying a high-enough fee and that this would reduce excessive traffic partly by reducing socially-destructive search efforts to find a parking spot. One should set supply=demand in the parking market - allowing for entry and exit from spots you will do this if a 15% vacancy level among spots is targeted. I think a dozen quality PhDs in economics could be constructed in Australia on themes developed in Shoup’s book and all would have greater social payoffs than the current batch of mindless atheoretical, time series macroeconomic studies or the surfeit of ‘sophisticated’, useless game theory projects we are producing. Continue reading Parking economics revisited The Sunday Age today presents a proposed ‘transport revolution’ for Melbourne prepared by Monash University’s Professor Graham Currie – a ‘transport expert’. The plan recognizes that expanding road supply is not a major sensible option in the face of Melbourne’s ballooning congestion problems and instead argues for creating a ‘road hierarchy’ that gives pedestrians, cars, motorists and public transport priority access to roads at different times of the day to improve travel times. To reduce congestion Professor Currie proposes to limit the building of new roads, create the above-mentioned priorities, reduce the speed limits allowed to cars in shopping strip areas during the day and by giving more priority to public transport by, among other things, removing on street parking. Continue reading Daft proposals for Melbourne’s transport woes An apparently obvious way of dealing with traffic congestion in a city such as Melbourne is to drive your car to the nearest train station and catch the train to your destination. It is a great theory but the hitch is that parking places near train stations are becoming exhausted and the cost of constructing extra [...] Courtesy of my French correspondent, Monsieur Ricardo Cabral, I am referred to this delightful article on one of my favourite underappreciated urban disasters, the over-provision of parking spaces because parking is typically unpriced. I have posted on this in the past. The present study is simply tallying up the land allocated to parking spots in the US. A [...] |
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