The High Cost of Free Parking - Lecture Fri Sept 8 at UC Berkeley
Sorry for the short notice (and the lack of blogging) but I thought you might like to know that my parking guru Donald Shoup is presenting a 1-hour lecture on The High Cost of Free Parking this Friday, Sept 8 at 4pm on the UC Berkeley campus. This would be a great way to absorb the key points of his excellent book without all that pesky reading time!
September 8th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Interesting that the thread
http://www.thisplaceis.com/archives/26
quickly zeroes in on SPs value prop in this context - at comment #15 someone says:
“what you failed to take into account is the cost and inefficiency in charging the parking space.
the world must have decided that in many locations that the cost exceeds the price it can charge, in areas where price > cost the parking lots are not free.”
September 8th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Indeed - we mostly “fix” the problem of not being able to charge for parking because the cost is higher than the price.
The suggestion you quote, that “in areas where price > cost the parking lots are not free” is unfortunately not true for many locations - instead, the price is paid by someone other than the direct user (the driver) which is one of Don Shoup’s main points - let the cost be borne directly by the driver that benefits from that parking space, and not imposed on all the customers of the store, the residents of the building, the taxpayers of the city, or some other group that clearly benefits unequally, yet ends up all paying the same.