Drive

by Tim Falconer

  Although all drivers can figure out what they pay for gas, insurance and other car-related expenses, and some can even put a value on their time, few ever think about what economists call an “externality”—the public cost of congestion. Since Georgina Santos, a lecturer at the University of Oxford’s Transport Studies Unit, has looked into this and co-authored a paper titled, “Road Pricing: Lessons from London,” I took the train to Oxford. Best known for its university, the city is also the home of a BMW plant that has produced over one million Minis, but I was impressed by the sea of bikes locked up at the train station, and at lunchtime I saw far more bikes than cars on the road, and the sidewalks were crammed with people.

  Inside her tidy office, Santos, who is originally from Argentina, explained that external costs vary with the type of vehicle and amount of congestion. Theoretically, if a government charges more than the true cost, it will reduce traffic too much, stunting economic activity; but if it doesn’t charge enough, the roads will remain clogged with traffic. In practice, politics determines the price: Livingstone initially decided to make both cars and trucks pay five pounds—an easy-to-remember round number—even if that meant the plan overcharged cars and undercharged trucks. “I’m not a politician, I’m an academic,” admitted Santos, a slim woman who wore several bracelets that jangled on her wrist as she talked. “Any academic economist would say, ‘You are crazy, you cannot charge the same toll to cars and to trucks. That is against economic theory, completely against.’ And yet, he got traffic congestion down and the benefits in time-savings have been considerable.”

  She recommended that cities thinking of copying London’s example do three things. First, ensure the tolled zone is well served by public transit; otherwise, people have no option but to pay the charge. Second, consult the public, and tweak the plan based on that input, but don’t hold a referendum, because people won’t vote for it. Third, keep it simple. London initially chose a small area with clear limits and a flat toll that was easy to understand— even if it didn’t exactly hold to economic theory.

  Despite the success of the original plan, the westward expansion was controversial. Even supporters questioned the decision to give residents a massive discount (though that did mean the wealthy denizens of Kensington and Chelsea suddenly switched from being the biggest grumblers to placated beneficiaries). That concession worries Stephen Glaister. A professor of transport and infrastructure at London’s Imperial College, he is an economist who needs a congestion charge for his office: the large room was overflowing with papers, files, reports and books on shelves, on the floor and in file boxes. I sat down in a chair behind a pile of papers on the long table attached to his desk. It was late afternoon, and the tail of his rumpled white shirt was no longer tucked in at the back and his red-and-blue tie hung a couple of inches below his undone top button. As we talked, he rose several times to grab a book or a report and I was impressed at how quickly he located them, though at one point several file boxes tumbled to the floor.

  A member of the Transport for London Board, which is the executive agency for the mayor, Glaister supports the congestion charge, but while he understands why the city gave people in the original zone the discount—the charge was new and the residents were few—he fears that maintaining the special status for those in the new area will jeopardize future expansions. “There’s absolutely no point in even thinking about introducing a congestion charging scheme if you give discounts to residents,” he said. “Once you do that, you’ve given it away because most traffic is local.”

  That precedent is particularly unfortunate since he’s really more interested in road pricing for London as a whole and for other parts of England. “Congestion actually is much more serious in outer London than it is in the centre,” said Glaister, who owns a Prius but cycles to work. “That’s where the grief is. This is because it’s much like the rest of the country: public transport isn’t an alternative out there.” The solution is to invest money to improve transit in outer London and then introduce the congestion charge to pay for it. But that will require not just dinging all residents but also replacing the daily fee with one based on how far a driver travels and when, which would require more advanced technology.

  Glaister also had advice for other cities. “Number one, look at the facts. Don’t listen to taxi drivers and the general public,” he said. The second step is to take a lot of care in the design of the plan, not just how, where and when drivers will be charged—and which ones will get exemptions or discounts—but what the money collected will be spent on. Some jurisdictions may want to reduce gas taxes to make the toll revenue neutral; others will dedicate it to public transit. “Then be very careful to present the complete picture to the public before you give them half a chance to go off on the wrong foot.”

  TOLLS MAY BE AN IDEA that some people and some cities are finally willing to debate, but free parking remains the blind spot in urban and transportation planning. During my trip, I’d heard various estimates (four, eight, thirteen) for the number of parking spots per car in North America and I have to admit that, initially, I was shocked. After all, like most people, when I’m driving around hunting for a legal space—all the while burning fossil fuels, spewing emissions and adding to the traffic congestion—it never occurs to me that North American cities devote so much space to parking. But the typical driver has a parking spot at home and one at work (usually bigger than the cubicle he or she spends all day in) as well as shared spots at malls, stores, restaurants and even churches. We’re so accustomed to abundant free parking that we resist paying for it, hate looking for it and, most of all, dread getting tickets. As Donald Shoup, America’s parking guru, told me, “Everybody thinks parking is a personal problem, not a policy problem.” But everybody is wrong.

  Born in California in 1938, Shoup was living in Honolulu when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Now a professor at UCLA’s urban planning department and the author of The High Cost of Free Parking, he has a growing band of followers who call themselves Shoupistas even though the market-oriented policies he advocates could best be summed up by the battle cry, “Charge whatever the traffic will bear.” He’d offered to arrange “free (or rather fully subsidized) parking” for me, but I wanted to take the bus in order to experience public transit in Los Angeles. I made it to UCLA forty-five minutes early and spent the time checking out the campus and then went up to his office and found a bald man with a grey beard sitting at a desk with a radio in the shape of a parking meter on it.

  Shoup isn’t sure what the ratio of parking spots to cars is—he suspects it’s at least three or four to one, probably more—but he knows it’s too high. He’s also convinced that free parking not only encourages people to drive—it’s actually expensive because subsidizing it costs the economy more than the government devotes to Medicare. Turning to his computer, he showed me aerial photos of several cities to demonstrate how much land we waste just to give drivers a place to leave their wheels. “Parking is the single-biggest land use in almost any city and almost everybody has ignored it,” he told me. “It’s like dark matter in the universe: we know there’s something there, and it seems to weigh a lot, but we don’t know what it is. If only we could get our hands on it.”

  While he was at his computer, he also gave me a virtual tour of Old Town Pasadena, with before and after photos that showed how it had gone from skid row to upscale destination. One of his ideas was instrumental in that transformation. The city faced a common problem: parking was free, but the few merchants who were still in business complained that it was inadequate. The people who worked in the stores took most of the spots, leaving customers to drive around searching for one—or just staying away. Meanwhile, the city had a vision of a revitalized downtown but no money to repair sidewalks, plant trees, increase security or take any of the other steps necessary to attract people. Shoup recommended charging enough for parking to maintain an 85 percent occupancy rate and using the money shoppers dropped in the met
ers to improve the neighbourhood. The revenue couldn’t go into the city’s general coffers; it had to be spent on the streets. Once that happened, the business community started to invest too—even sandblasting and renovating derelict buildings— and soon the shop owners, who had initially opposed meters, wanted to charge for parking until midnight. They wanted the money for the improvements, but they also discovered that their fears about scaring away customers were unfounded—anyone who really wanted to shop or eat in the area was willing to invest a few quarters. As the area became more popular, the meters raised more money for more improvements, which increased the popularity. And so on. The city now collects one million dollars a year to pay for upkeep that includes sweeping the sidewalks nightly and steam-cleaning them twice a month.

  In Calvin Trillin’s Tepper Isn’t Going Out, a slight but charming novel about a man who becomes a New York folk hero because of his parking acumen, once Murray Tepper finds a parking spot he just sits there and enjoys it. But when Shoup and I talked about the book, he pointed out that Tepper wouldn’t have stayed put so long if Manhattan charged the right price for street parking. The right price is the one that means there are always one or two open spots per block. Since the cost encourages turnover, time limits are unnecessary; in fact, any place that needs to impose time limits is not charging enough. A city should adjust the rate every quarter to ensure the 15 percent vacancy rate, always letting the market decide the price. “Nobody can tell you what the right price of gold is, or the right price of wheat or apples,” he argued. “It just happens.”

  Free off-street parking isn’t something that just happens, though, because planning departments always insist that developers include a minimum number of parking spots. Shoup doesn’t have much respect for the ability of urban planners to determine how many spots are necessary. Since planners don’t learn anything about parking in school, they learn it on the job, but because parking is so political—NIMBY neighbours constantly squawk at the thought of anyone parking on their street—what they really learn is the politics of parking. “Planning will be looked back on as worse than phrenology, because phrenology didn’t do any harm,” he said, referring to the nineteenth-century pseudoscience that claimed to be able to determine character and other traits from the size and shape of a cranium. The harm abundant free parking does feeds on itself: all that land dedicated to parking, which often sits empty for much of the day, increases sprawl, and that sprawl makes alternatives such as public transit and walking less feasible, which forces more people into cars, which increases the need for more parking.

  Again, Shoup argued that the market should decide: freed from the arbitrary and capricious demands of the planners, developers will put in the right amount of parking—enough to meet their customers’ needs, but not so much that they waste valuable space or money. When the Westfield San Francisco Centre reopened in September 2006 after a major renovation, it was triple the size, featured high-profile tenants such as Bloomingdale’s and expected twenty-five million visitors a year—all without adding any new parking. A lot of people shook their heads at that, but the mall is close to thirty-two transit lines and sits across the street from a large parking garage that was rarely anywhere close to full.

  In 1992, the state of California adopted another Shoupism: under the parking cash-out law, companies that pay for employees’ parking must offer the equivalent in cash to nonparkers. So someone who works for a firm that pays $150 a month for each spot in an underground lot can opt to forgo the spot and pocket the cash. After the law came in, 13 percent of employees took the money—most switching to car pools or taking public transit, though a few started riding a bike or walking to work.

  Although his ideas seem like so much common sense, Shoup still feels they’re underappreciated. Many places want to thrive the way Old Town Pasadena has, but few realize how crucial the meter money was to that success. Still, he knows some planners are curious because he receives more invitations to speak than he can accept. Cities pay him large lecture fees, fly him first class and then wine him and dine him, but they don’t all do what he suggests because parking is so political. “All I can do is go and say, ‘You’re doing everything wrong,’” said Shoup, who rides a bike 2 miles to campus, puts just 3,500 miles a year on his Infiniti and admitted that he’s often mistaken as an enemy of the car. He insists he’s not; it’s just that people would live differently—read: drive less—if they had to pay for parking. The good news is that all that parking space is an accidental land reserve for housing that can bring in tax revenue even as it helps ease traffic congestion, air pollution and energy dependence. “The nice thing is that when cities adopt what I’m saying,”—he snapped his fingers—“like that, it works.”

  DRIVERS WON’T BE KEEN on shelling out more for parking, congestion tolls and gas or carbon taxes, but such measures are probably inevitable and they make sense as long as the revenues are strictly dedicated to public transit, local improvement projects and, in the case of gas levies, the development of cleaner fuels. Either that, or these charges should be revenue neutral: a carbon tax, for example, can mean a reduction in income taxes. North American governments should also be investing some of this money in high-speed trains in well-travelled corridors. France’s TGV and similar rail services in other countries offer a fast, efficient and comfortable— and environmentally sensible—way to visit other places. Ultimately, though, individuals need to make the choice to drive less.

  For some people who live in cities, an alternative to owning a second vehicle—or even any at all—may be to join a car-sharing service. Kevin McLaughlin is the president of Toronto-based AutoShare, which allows members to pay an hourly rate to drive its vehicles, which are parked at over one hundred locations around the city. Gas and insurance are included in the cost, so the service is ideal for people who need a car for the occasional chore. The average member drives about ten hours a month. I met with McLaughlin in the spring of 2006, several weeks after Massachusetts-based Zipcar arrived in Toronto. Initially worried about such a well-financed competitor, he soon realized his new rival would not only help to build the market, it would also validate that market, making it easier for him to get the financing he needs to expand. Convinced that there’s the potential for his company to sign up as many as 10 percent of Torontonians and to have a fleet of several thousand, he said his biggest constraint, aside from raising capital, is finding and paying for places to park the company’s cars.

  McLaughlin grew up with posters of race driver Gilles Villeneuve on his bedroom wall, his uncle raced cars and his father still owns a 1938 Cord and a 1929 McLaughlin-Buick (in fact, his family is distantly related to Sam McLaughlin, the Canadian automaker who sold his company to General Motors). And he has been able to combine his youthful love of cars with his adult concern for the environment. McLaughlin, who worked as an environmentalist in Vancouver, admitted that the reaction from people in the movement has been mixed. Many have applauded his attempt to reduce the number of cars on the road, but some don’t like that cars are involved at all. “This isn’t the solution, but there really isn’t a solution,” he said. “It is part of the solution.”

  MY ROAD TRIP ALSO HELPED me to better understand why many people love cars so much. And my own affection for the automobile grew as I started to see the car—even my old car—less as an appliance and more as something fun. It certainly wouldn’t be the first thing I’ve enjoyed that was bad for me. As always, I gather, moderation is necessary. The members of the Classic Car Club, in London, may have found the right balance. James Evans, the club’s co-owner and managing director, was unshaven and dressed in jeans. We sat in old leather chairs and he explained that his members are car lovers who are “money rich and time poor.” In the last few years, he has seen an attitude adjustment, especially after the congestion charge came in. “They just can’t be bothered owning a car in London,” he admitted. “It’s just become such a hassle, such a chore. And it’s become very expensive to own a car.
”

  Evans grew up just outside of Glasgow, the son of a Jaguarloving mother and an auto-hating father. “He would always have a rubbish car, like a Vauxhall Viva, which is dreadful, and he would drive a car until it physically stopped,” he remembered. “And the number of times I was in the car and it would break down—I’d have friends with me, and be like, ‘Oh God, this is so embarrassing’—so one day I decided the one thing I would always have would be a nice car.” In 1997, he was saving up to buy a Ferrari 308 when he heard about the Classic Car Club, which had started two years earlier with eight vehicles. He joined, then started working there, then bought it in 1999.

  Located in an old garage on the edge of The City, London’s financial district, the club doesn’t look at all fancy from the outside. Even the office is far from elegant, though it does feature a foosball table and a jukebox dominated by 1970s and 1980s music—from The Stranglers’ “No More Heroes” to Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come On Eileen”—as well as an Esso gas tank bubble gum machine, a half-height Michelin Man, and steering wheels and a Jaguar grille on the walls. There’s also an old dentist’s chair, and when I asked Evans about it, he joked, “Oh, that’s to make people join.”

  Seems to work: the London site has 450 members and the club now operates in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Copenhagen and New York, with plans for further expansion in other U.S. cities. For an annual fee, members can book a car by redeeming points based on the type of car, time of year and day of the week they want to drive it. A Saturday in the summer, for example, is worth more than a Wednesday in winter. The club has three mechanics and two valets to fix and clean the sixty-vehicle collection, which is worth more than one million pounds and includes forty or so classics and sports cars, from Rolls-Royces to Porsches to E-type Jaguars. The rest range from a Mini and a VW Beetle to several high-end SUVs (since some members have given up their own cars, opting instead to take transit or walk to work, the club now offers cars suitable for family trips).