Elsevier

Transport Policy

Volume 13, Issue 6, November 2006, Pages 479-486
Transport Policy

Cruising for parking

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2006.05.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Suppose curb parking is free but all the spaces are occupied, and off-street parking is expensive but immediately available. In this case, you can cruise to find a curb space being vacated by a departing motorist, or pay for off-street parking right away. This paper presents a model of how drivers choose whether to cruise or to pay, and it 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. The model also predicts that charging the market price for curb parking—at least equal to the price of adjacent off-street parking—will eliminate cruising. Because the government sets curb parking prices, planners and elected officials strongly influence drivers’ decisions to cruise. The failure to charge market rates for curb parking congests traffic, pollutes the air, wastes fuel, and causes accidents. Between 1927 and 2001, studies of cruising in congested downtowns have found that it took between 3.5 and 14 min to find a curb space, and that between 8 and 74 percent of the traffic was 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 (t=1), off-street parking costs $1 an hour (m=1), and curb parking is free (p=0). 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 (f=1). You are alone in the car (n=1) 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 (p=m), the equilibrium cruising time (c*) is zero.c*=t(m-p)f+nv=t(0)f+nv=0

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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