Tickets

My personal nemesis-who-has-never-heard-of-me Megan McArdle had an extended whine this morning about parking in DC. Her issue:

The District of Columbia is trying to make up plummeting tax revenues by getting the money out of motorists, especially parking. It's using cameras to get 100% enforcement of the street cleaning parking rules, nearly doubling the cost of many parking tickets, and upping the bill on meters-it now costs $2 an hour to park in front of the Watergate, up from $1 last month. This is a twofer: raise more revenue from the meter, and from the parking ticket, because who carries around $4 in change on a regular basis?

As a fellow citizen of the bizarro city of Washington, let me say... boo hoo! I am not really sure her point, other than "I am pissed at the DC government for making me pay more to park." I think she is trying to deploy everyone's favorite Laffer curve to argue that if DC wants to raise more tax revenue from parking they should charge less.

Empirically, I would be quite interested to know how the change in enforcement practices is impacting revenue. If they are getting 100% more per ticket, then cited violations would have to fall by half before their gross revenue went down. Short run it will take people a while to realize they have to be very careful, but long term there is certainly an opportunity for behavior change to lead to that outcome. And same holds for meters.

That said, a simplistic analysis ignores the cost of externalities. For instance, if fewer people drive to work, shift their schedules outside the 9-6 window when meters are on, or people start parking farther away in locations with more favorable restrictions that leads to less congestion. Which is a good thing! The biggest problem in most of downtown DC right now isn't that no one wants to pay $2/hour to park, it is that there are usually too many people willing to pay and so you have to drive around for 15 minutes to find a spot. This not only wastes your time, but slows down traffic and beats on the road (increasing the amount of maintenance the city has to perform). And not to mention the injustice of the city giving away "public space" to drivers, while those who walk or bike are left out in the cold.

And, while I can understand the frustration for Megan and other DC-based drivers, parking taxes are actually one of the most equitable ways to bring revenue into the city. DC already has a big tax burden on residents, but that is because they can't collect property taxes on half the land (because it belongs to the Federal government) and 70% of the people who commute in every day - and use roads and emergency services and other public goods - don't live in the District and so do not produce any income tax revenue either. Diversifying their tax base through tolls and other user fees would be a good thing in the aggregate.

Finally, for the libertarian in me, it seems like one solution would be to get rid of all public parking and sell off street parking. Then the magic of the market and our new greedy parking overlords would optimize cost and use. Except guess what, they already did it in Chicago. And the result has been the elimination of parking holidays, jacking up of rates, stories of excessive enforcement, and an all around boondoggle.