OPINION:
Our city’s politicians have laid out an ambitious agenda for improving the livability in my Northwest Washington neighborhood, and there are detailed, expensive proposals afoot to reduce carbon emissions, improve the performance of mass transit, increase safety for pedestrians and cyclists, eliminate traffic congestion on city streets, mitigate the opposition to new housing in residential neighborhoods near transit, and combat income inequality.
However, the city’s refusal to consider changing its policy of allowing residents to store their cars on neighborhood streets for virtually nothing seriously impedes each one of these goals. Until this practice is abolished, efforts to achieve these other objectives are futile.
The cheap on-street residential parking — a residential parking permit costs just $35 a year, or about one percent of the cost of a private, dedicated parking spot in dense neighborhoods — creates a massive excess demand for on-street parking. As a result, there is significant pressure on the District Department of Transportation to allow parking in every possible open space, and traffic safety officers haphazardly enforce parking rules.
This seemingly munificent attitude imposes a high cost to everyone else. For starters, in the Adams-Morgan-Woodley Park neighborhood where I live the surfeit of parked cars results in numerous places where buses must wait an extended period before exiting a stop, and the city’s refusal to consider banning parked cars in such places means we effectively slow the bus commutes of thousands of people by as much five minutes each way simply to preserve a couple dozen parking spaces for wealthy car owners. The calculus is, in a word, grotesque.
The lax parking regulations slow traffic for everyone else as well: For instance, cars can be legally parked on Kalorama almost up to the street’s intersection with Connecticut Avenue, which means that a car wanting to turn onto the street from Connecticut cannot do so if there is a car on Kalorama waiting for the light. This blockage causes traffic to back up on Connecticut multiple times a day during rush hour.
And if we ever have another 9-11 type emergency requiring an evacuation of downtown, it is worth noting that the portion of Connecticut Avenue immediately south of Taft Bridge allows streetside parking most of the day, which effectively makes it a two lane road. It would create an enormous bottleneck in any evacuation.
Such a bottleneck already occurs with regularity, in fact: Since rush hour parking restrictions in these neighborhoods (and elsewhere) are blithely ignored with little consequence, traffic regularly — and needlessly — backs up regularly in non-emergencies as well.
Cheap on-street parking is also the main driver for the reflexive opposition to new development in these neighborhoods. While my car-owning neighbors may insist that they want to preserve the neighborhood’s character or that public services cannot support more people in the neighborhood, the true reason for their reflexive objection to new development is that it brings more competition for on-street parking, making their search for a parking spot even more problematic and time-consuming.
The preservation of on-street parking dominates virtually all land-use decisions in these neighborhoods: For instance, a proposal to expand Kalorama park and change traffic flow on other streets would have significantly reduced congestion on Columbia Road and improved pedestrian safety, but losing eight parking spaces drew a spate of objections and the proposal was tabled.
As it is, the excess demand for cheap parking significantly contributes to road congestion, with car owners spending a significant amount of time circling city streets in the evening looking for parking. The congestion — and their proclivity to rush to claim any parking spot being vacated — makes the neighborhood more dangerous for pedestrians while increasing emissions.
The usual defense offered by advocates of cheap on-street parking is that charging a market price would hurt the low-income residents who need a car to get to their job. However, these neighborhoods are amply served by mass transit and the low-income residents of Adams Morgan — and many others — forego owning a car, as a perusal of the Audis and BMWs stored on my street demonstrate. Cheap residential on-street parking is a perk for the wealthy in these neighborhoods. If we do have a concern for the transportation needs of the less-well-off, We can use the money from selling on-street parking permits to subsidize mass transit for low-income workers.
And there’s no reason to have the same price for a residential parking permit across the city. The sensible way to do it would be to auction the number of legal parking spaces in each neighborhood, which would presumably give us a much higher price in Adams Morgan than in less dense neighborhoods without ample mass transit.
With an appropriately high price many car owners will sensibly conclude that it is no longer worth it to own a car they use infrequently and go without. This would be a good thing for everyone: The cheap price of on-street parking means that people will leave cars on city streets untouched for years. People in Adams Morgan have taken to buying decrepit vans and putting them in front of their building to use for storage.
The city’s various proposals for reducing carbon emissions and improving transit service, bike lane access, traffic congestion and pedestrian safety will collectively cost residents hundreds of millions of dollars. That our politicians would prefer to spend our money rather than making wealthy car owners pay a fair price to store their cars on public property belies their supposed fealty to progressivism.
In the waning days of the Soviet Union the government reserved two lanes on major thoroughfares for high level government functionaries while everyone else sat in gridlock.
In Washington we also reserve two lanes for our nomenklatura while the rest of us travel in gridlock or on buses that crawl their way through the city. They use these lanes to store their cars.
• Ike Brannon is a senior fellow at the Jack Kemp Foundation.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.