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Putting a price on parking in Philadelphia

Like most Americans, Philadelphians tend to think of cheap or free parking as a birthright, and view those who would deny it to us - such as the uniformed enforcers at the Philadelphia Parking Authority - as freedom-squelching tyrants.

Like most Americans, Philadelphians tend to think of cheap or free parking as a birthright, and view those who would deny it to us - such as the uniformed enforcers at the Philadelphia Parking Authority - as freedom-squelching tyrants.

But what if - and it pains me to write this - the Parking Authority is right and the rest of us are wrong? I'm not talking about the agency's patronage record and exorbitant executive salaries, which are indefensible. But, rather, its view that parking, particularly in a dense urban setting such as Philadelphia, is a limited resource that should be costly and rigorously policed.

This position starts to make a lot of sense when you look at parking as a commodity like any other, instead of some sort of natural right.

Land has value. Land at, say, 18th and Walnut Streets has a ton of value. So when a driver parks a Cadillac Escalade the size of a small BYOB in an open spot in Center City, he or she really ought to be paying full market rate for the privilege.

The trouble is, the true market rate of parking has been so thoroughly obscured by government regulations and subsidies (which dwarf those for mass transit) that drivers often feel outraged even when asked to pay a relative pittance for street parking, such as the $2 an hour the PPA charges on its busiest blocks.

At least street parking in Center City costs something. The off-street lots drivers are accustomed to in the city and the suburbs typically cost nothing at all, at least not directly. We pull into Cherry Hill Mall or a Rite Aid on Broad Street with every expectation that free parking will be waiting for us.

But free parking isn't really free. We just pay for it - in time, taxes, sprawl, and environmental damage - in a very roundabout way.

For instance, when cities and townships make developers build a parking spot for every household in an apartment complex, it increases the cost of the entire development, which is passed on to the renters, homeowners, and customers who go there whether they drive or not.

At street level, when parking prices are kept artificially low, drivers waste fuel and clog traffic while hunting for an open spot as they seek to avoid paying the higher rates charged by private lots.

Just as important, there are other possible uses for the land we unthinkingly allocate for parking: broader sidewalks, say, or bike lanes, or wider streets.

Nobody thought much about this until 2005, when UCLA urban planning professor Donald C. Shoup published The High Cost of Free Parking. In the years since, city governments across the country, including Philadelphia's, have begun thinking about parking in a more sophisticated way.

San Francisco, for instance, charges fees ranging from a quarter to $6 an hour, and it adjusts prices on the fly in response to demand. In some neighborhoods, sensors embedded in the concrete alert would-be parkers to the closest available spot via their cellphones, putting an end to the half-hour hunt for a spot.

This might be overkill for Philadelphia, which is not as densely populated as San Francisco, or as willing to experiment with policy. Remember how U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah was nearly laughed out of the mayor's race in 2007 when he suggested a Center City congestion tax?

But the PPA and the Nutter administration are making modest changes to parking policy that are encouraging.

The new zoning code, which City Council is now weighing, would reduce the number of off-street parking slots required in new developments.

And while the $2-an-hour maximum meter rate seems too low to me, it is still double what the city charged in 2009. The new parking kiosks have had their share of problems, but they have also given the agency the ability to change hour limits depending on time of day: an hour limit at midday to encourage turnover, and three hours at night to allow for leisurely dinners out.

The streetscape has changed as well, with the new bike lanes and reserved spaces for delivery vehicles.

So far, the policy tweaks are working pretty well.

The PPA says about 10 percent of its metered Center City spots are available at any given moment, compared with 1 or 2 percent before the rate hike. Tickets are down 11 percent, now that drivers need not be as creative when they pick a place to park.

No studies have checked the impact of new parking policies on Center City traffic patterns, but city officials cite anecdotal evidence (like the time it takes buses to go the length of Chestnut Street) that suggests congestion has eased somewhat.

None of the reforms go as far as Shoup might like, but the city has taken a step toward acknowledging the very real costs of free parking.