There’s some new parking scheme afoot, says the Washington Post:
The changes underway in Arlington also would allow parking prices to fluctuate depending on demand. Meters would be remotely monitored for parking space usage. The goal is 85 percent occupancy, said Wayne Wentz, the county’s chief of transportation engineering and operations. When it rises, the price will increase from 75 cents to $1.
This actually sounds like a good idea. The whole point of parking meters isn’t — or wasn’t, anyway, when the things were introduced — to raise revenue, but to ensure that parking is available for those who need it. Without parking meters, the space is used more inefficiently.
But:
“It’s sending a signal to drivers that if you’re gonna drive, it’s uniformly going to cost you,” said Harriet Tregoning, the District’s planning director. “We don’t want everyone to think it’s great to drive because parking is free and available.”
So by spending money to manage the supply of and demand for parking spaces, they hope to make parking less available? That’s the intention? How’s that supposed to work? I think pretty much everyone would prefer an actually available parking space for $5 to one that’s available, but only theoretically, for $0.75. Unless you work for minimum wage or near to it, it’s cheaper to drive in and pay quite a bit for parking than it is to take the Metro — particularly if you don’t happen to live within walking distance of a Metro station on the other end of your journey, since that just means that you’ll have to pay for parking at the station.
Tregoning says drivers in the District are long overdue for some tough love: Just 63 percent of city households own a car. The national average is somewhere in the 90s, she said.
The city used to require developers to build four parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of retail space. Now the standard is one space.
“Now we say to developers, look at the car ownership rate in the neighborhood and do something that’s commensurate,” Tregoning said. When a historic building rehabilitation is under review, planners discourage even a single space for each condo or store.
After they get done with this round of planning and meddling, expect more stories about how suburbanites are avoiding DC because they’re all racists.
