Cruising for parking
Introduction
My father didn’t pay for parking, my mother, my brother, nobody. It's like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free.
George Costanza
When a resource is communally owned, the right of “first possession” means that anyone who captures the resource has the right to use it. Free curb parking is an example of communal ownership, because drivers occupy it on a first-come, first-served basis. If all the curb spaces are occupied, drivers must cruise to find a space vacated by a departing car. Cruising for parking probably began soon after the wheel was invented.
Section snippets
Cruising in the 20th century
Cruising creates a mobile queue of cars that are waiting for curb vacancies, but no one can see how many cars are in the queue because the cruisers are mixed in with other cars that are actually going somewhere. Perhaps because cruising is invisible, most transport economists and planners have neglected it as a source of congestion. Nevertheless, a few researchers have attempted to estimate the volume of cruising and the time it takes to find a curb space. They have analyzed videotapes of
Choosing to cruise
When we cruise for parking on crowded streets, we rarely seem to think about how we end up in this mobile purgatory. How do you choose whether to cruise or to pay? A simple model of the benefits and costs of cruising can help answer this question. The model predicts several results: you are more likely to cruise if curb parking is cheap, off-street parking is expensive, fuel is cheap, you want to park for a long time, you are alone in the car, and you place a low value on saving time.
To set the
Equilibrium search time: an example
We can use an example to illustrate the equilibrium search time. Suppose you want to park for one hour (), off-street parking costs $1 an hour (), and curb parking is free (). You thus save $1 by parking at the curb rather than off-street. If you drive 10 miles an hour and your car gets 20 miles per gallon of gasoline, the cruising consumes half a gallon of gasoline an hour. If gasoline costs $2 a gallon, the fuel cost is $1 an hour (). You are alone in the car () and your time
The wages of cruising
Cities create the incentive to cruise when they charge less for curb parking than the price of adjacent off-street parking. To examine this incentive, I collected data on the price of curb and off-street parking for an hour at noon at the same location—City Hall—in 20 cities throughout the US.8
Two pricing strategies
Cities can use two pricing strategies to discourage cruising. The first is to charge the market price for curb parking. When the prices of curb and off-street parking are equal (), the equilibrium cruising time (c*) is zero.
If curb parking costs the same as off-street parking, why drive around hunting for a curb space? Since curb parking (after you spend time and money to find it) costs the same as off-street parking, you don’t save any money by cruising. If all curb
Elasticities
Table 3 shows how each of the variables in the model affect the decision whether to cruise or to pay. The second column shows the partial derivatives of c* (the maximum time a driver is willing to cruise) with respect to the variables in the first column. Six factors affect the decision to cruise: (1) the price of curb parking, (2) the price of off-street parking, (3) parking duration, (4) the price of fuel, (5) the number of persons in the car, and (6) the value of time.
The third column shows
Right-priced curb parking: an illustration
The top panel of Fig. 1 illustrates the case where curb parking is underpriced, all spaces are occupied, and cars are circling the block looking for a space. It is based on observations in Westwood Village, a commercial district in Los Angeles next to the UCLA campus.14 The average block has eight curb spaces on each side, the average cruising time before finding a curb space is 3.3 min, and two cruisers are circling each block.
The small distances cruised by each driver
Complications
The decision to cruise is far more complex than a simple model can portray, of course, and I will suggest six complications. First, the value of time savings is not constant. Different people place different values on time savings, and the same person may place different values on saving time on different days, at different hours, and for different trips. Even for a specific trip, the value of saving time may increase as you cruise, because the likelihood that you will arrive late at your
Conclusion: an invitation to cruise
Where curb parking is underpriced and overcrowded, some drivers search for a curb space rather than pay to park off-street. Research throughout the last century showed that cruising is common in congested traffic, and a model of how drivers decide whether to cruise or to pay predicts that charging the fair market price for curb parking can eliminate cruising. City governments therefore play a large part in choosing whether drivers cruise, because they set the prices for curb parking. Cruising
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the University of California Transportation Center, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the United States Department of Transportation for financial support. I am also grateful to Jeffrey Brown, Matthew Dresden, Alexandra Evans, Amy Ford, Mason Gaffney, Daniel Hess, Kevin Holliday, Hiroyuki Iseki, Stephen Ison, David King, Douglas Kolozsvari, Christopher Locke, Michael Manville, Anne McAulay, Eric Morris, Jeremy Nelson, Todd Nelson, Paul Philley, Lisa Schweitzer, Pat
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