Oh the Humanity!

I recieved this email from TM reader Gerardo Vildostegui:

Dear Transit Miami,

I hope you’ll consider writing a reply to this column by Daniel Shoer Roth.

Shoer Roth is a friend of mass transit and has written often (mostly in El Nuevo Herald) about the problems with sprawl and with auto-oriented development in South Florida.  But this article seems to suggest that what Miami Beach needs is more parking–which can’t be right.  If you can bring him over to the anti-parking viewpoint that would be a huge win.

Thanks Gerardo. Daniel, who is a friend of Transit Miami and usually a great advocate for transit, falls into a trap familiar to neighborhood groups and civic leaders alike: blaming parking supply for problems that come along with urban development. Let’s get this out of the way: the problem with the cost of parking on Miami Beach is not that there is not enough parking, but that there is no other viable way for people to get around without a car.

Now to explain: it seems counter intuitive, but a similar logic applies to parking supply as to road traffic volume: there is a finite capacity, so we need to be proactive in setting the level of parking we want based on established data and goals, not simply as a knee-jerk reaction to the perception of expensive parking. Comparatively speaking, parking in Miami Beach should be more expensive than it is when one accounts for the hidden costs of car ownership (such as pollution, decreased quality of life, pedestrian and cyclist death/injury, blight in communities affected by highways..etc),- not to mention the fact that the initial cost of constructing parking is subsidized in some way by the consumer.

In his seminal work “The High Cost of Free Parking” parking guru Donald Shoup describes the problem best:

Parking is free to the driver for most vehicle trips. Free, but not cheap. According to evaluations by Mark Delucchi of the University of California at Davis, we spend about as much to subsidize off-street parking as we do on Medicare or national defense. The additional driving encouraged by free parking also increases traffic congestion, air pollution and accidents. To fuel this extra driving, we import more oil, and pay for it with borrowed money.

Daniel does what many normal people do, which is to take aim at the problem of parking and its cost by blaming “the lack of development regulations” rather than addressing  the fundamental problem which is the lack of transit infrastructure. We have seen what the future looks like when we oversupply cheap parking: Dadeland Mall circa 1975 – parking lot city.

Daniel the real answer to your ‘parking crisis’ lies not with regulating development, as advocate Frank DelVecchio suggested in your column, but with the future of the stagnant People’s Transportation Plan, and how the lack of a new agenda for PTP expansion has led the feds to pass us over on (potentially) the biggest federal investment in urban mass transit in twenty years.

The real question you should be asking is what happened to Bay Link, and are we ever going to have a functional transit system?

Transportation infrastructure is all connected. Parking, roads, sidewalks, bike lanes, highways, metro-rail – they are all interconnected, and cannot be adjusted piecemeal without affecting the entire system. Most of our mobility problems have to do with lack of transit options.

The real lesson to be learned from Daniel’s parking crisis is that infrastructure is expensive. Someone has to pay for infrastructure – if the end user doesn’t pay, then who foots the bill? Cash strapped cities are going to be less likely to fund transit expansions without a change in the way we pay for/ value transit service.  We should be setting the value of transit, as we do with parking – only in a way that reflects its cost. Daniel doesn’t want to pay for parking what is costs, only what he deems it to be worth – which is not much, yet we charge him for it anyway. Why not do the same for transit?  If we charged for transit what it was worth – and provided a better experience for the end user – we would have a much more successful transit system.

Not to mention people like Daniel would have a solution to their parking crisis – take the train!