David Michael Miller
Americans believe that free parking is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. It’s one of those obscure amendments, seven, eight, nine, one of those. “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to park for free shall not be infringed.” The Founding Fathers understood that a militia not only needed to be armed to the teeth, but also mobile. Makes sense.
But now the city of Madison comes along and wants to charge us more to do what James Madison knew was our God-given right.
The Madison Parking Utility is proposing an increase in the residential parking permit from the current $28 to $42. They say it’s necessary to pay for some of the costs of enforcing the program, which, according to a city fiscal note, is $540,000 a year. Those costs used to be absorbed by the Madison Police Department until they were transferred to the parking utility in the 2018 budget. If approved by the Common Council, the increase would go into effect in September.
These permits are purchased by about 5,200 city residents in the downtown and near east and west side neighborhoods where parking is tight and many of the older homes lack driveways and garages sufficient to park the car or cars that a family might own. The permits allow residents in specific zones to exceed the posted parking time restrictions.
My only problem with the increase is that it’s not enough. City staff estimates that the increase will produce about $74,000, but the fee would have to go up to $105 to pay the whole cost of enforcement. So, I’m for $105.
You might worry about how this is going to affect the poor and people on fixed incomes. But even at $105 that means you get to store your car on public property for less than $9 a month. If you can afford a car at all — gas, insurance, maintenance — nine bucks a month is not unreasonable for parking.
Keep in mind that if we don’t charge that much, at least some of the rest of the cost of enforcement will come from the general fund. That means less money for everything else the city does, including the host of social programs paid for through that fund. Why is it such a progressive idea to rob from social programs to pay for parking enforcement, much of which takes place in some pretty well-off neighborhoods.
Well-off neighborhoods like mine, for example. Last week I did something that I, wisely, never do. I got involved in a neighborhood listserv debate. Well, not my neighborhood exactly, but Vilas, which is close enough. Some of those neighbors on the Vilas listserv were going on about how awful this was and so I gently corrected them. I wrote:
Oh for crying out loud, people. Two points.
First, if you own a half-million-dollar house you sure can afford to spend $100 to park all year on the street.
Second, you don’t own the street. You’re renting it to store your car. It’s PUBLIC property. Suck it up and just deal with it. Stop whining.
Dave
These points were met with gentle rebuke. For example:
I’ve been sucking it up for years and I am not whining. Your comments are insulting, offensive and beneath you.
Gillian
My gentle response:
I was a politician, Gillian. Nothing is beneath me.
Dave
Another friendly correspondent suggested that my views confirmed her early judgments about my public management. “No wonder you’re not mayor,” she wrote. As far as I can tell nobody wonders about that anymore, but I thanked her for recalling that I ever held the job in the first place.
And with that I ended my foray into neighborhood listserv land, vowing to never return.
But I am not daunted. Nobody knows more about this than Donald Shoup, a professor at UCLA, who has recently updated his classic study, The High Cost of Free Parking. Shoup says that these kinds of residential permits make parking artificially easy for residents. His overall argument is that if we stopped subsidizing the cost of driving and parking and let those costs float with the market, drivers would pay a lot more and we would all drive less with the resulting benefits to the environment. Shoup would seem to support not just increasing the cost of the permits, but getting rid of them altogether.
So, the irony is that in my relatively affluent and decidedly progressive neighborhood, a lot of my neighbors are fighting to keep their car subsidies, which result in environmental degradation and take resources from a city budget that might otherwise go to social programs they support.
So suck it up people. Stop whining. Pay nine bucks a month to store your car on the public’s street. It’s the right thing to do.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com.