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by Wally Thurman

Tyler Cowen has recently promoted the idea that parking in America is costly and inappropriately provided mostly for free.  Summarizing a recent book by Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, he argues that at zero price, Americans park their cars a lot and generate congestion and impose costs on others.  Among the problems he cites: local zoning boards require stores to build a minimum number of parking spaces–more than they would choose absent coercion. Cowen argues that it would improve resource allocation if such requirements were eliminated, the end result being fewer parking spaces and, presumably, stores charging for their use.

Cowen’s observations are intriguing–they suggest that free market proponents should urge planning boards to free big-box retailers from the yoke of parking requirements.  Let the market speak and it will say that parking–unlike information on the internet–does not want to be free.

While still digesting Cowen’s observations, I awoke today to a letter to the editor in my hometown Raleigh News & Observer, written by environmental resource conservation professor George Hess of North Carolina State University.  In his off hours, Hess serves on the Land Use Review Board of Knightdale North Carolina.  He writes that his board does, indeed, stipulate minimum numbers of parking spaces that a retail development should have.  (It also stipulates maximums.)  But, he observes, developers never propose to build parking lots of just the minimum size and often seek to build more parking spaces than the board’s maximum.  At least in the case of Knightdale (near Lizard Lick, by the way), the government restriction that Cowen worries about is never binding.

If Hess’s experience is the norm–and I don’t know that it is or isn’t–then I see no market-based opposition to free parking.  It may be unsound to have a retail society based on free parking.  But it is unlikely due to government regulation.

Suppose that Hess’s experience generalizes: that free parking at retail stores is not the result of government regulation.  We’re left with the question of why stores provide free parking when they do (they don’t in Manhattan.)  I see two possible answers.

by Laura Huggins Following on the heels of Joe Biden’s recent visit to Yellowstone touting green jobs, PERC senior fellow Roger Meiners exposes the folly in much of the “green” stimulus spending in today’s Wall Street Journal. Not far down the road from Bozeman is the village of Ennis, home to the U.S. Fish and WildlifeContinue reading “Talking Green in Yellowstone”

by Shawn Regan This week, EPA director Lisa Jackson announced new plans for her agency to incorporate environmental justice into its decision making processes. Outlined in a guidance document released this week, the EPA will begin considering the disproportionate impact pollution has on low-income and minority communities when drafting new rules. Several factors have led toContinue reading “Environmental Justice or Gentrification?”

The PERColator is a collaborative blog from the Property & Environment Research Center (PERC) – the center for free market environmentalism.  It is dedicated to exploring the notion that environmental quality is best defended by property rights and free markets. PERC espouses the conservation legacy of Aldo Leopold, who wrote that “conservation will ultimately boil down toContinue reading “Welcome to the PERColator”