At 7:30 this morning, far earlier than I normally leave my house, I was outside in flip-flops and my pajama shorts, moving my car. Nor was I the only one. My neighborhood is filled with students and people who work from home, and a whole lot of them seemed to be making U turns to park across the street.
Why was I doing this? The District of Columbia is trying to make up plummeting tax revenues by getting the money out of motorists, especially parking. It's using cameras to get 100% enforcement of the street cleaning parking rules, nearly doubling the cost of many parking tickets, and upping the bill on meters--it now costs $2 an hour to park in front of the Watergate, up from $1 last month. This is a twofer: raise more revenue from the meter, and from the parking ticket, because who carries around $4 in change on a regular basis?
Anecdotally, they've also upped the quota on parking enforcement, which used to be more of a sinecure; my mother reports that she now has three parking enforcement officers in her small neighborhood, constantly patrolling rather than (as they used to) sleeping in front of the Congressional cemetary. They've started ticketing her for being an "out of state car" persistently parked in the neighborhood. I got a ticket for having no front plate, something I didn't know was required. The district has even started ticketing people for parking in their own driveways. After their budget meeting, the city council announced plans to raise millions in new revenue by issuing an additional 200,000 tickets this year.
It will be interesting-as an observer, not as a resident--to see how this plays out. Most businesses do not raise more money by raising prices when people are least solvent. Is the government different?
I can park in the garage in the Watergate for $20 a day, or obtain a monthly spot in the Kennedy center for $150, which is rapidly starting to look competitive, even though I don't drive that often in the spring and summer months. There's a nearly empty condo across the street from us that could presumably park my car for the cost of a couple of monthly tickets in my neighborhood, and I know I'm not the only one thinking this way--everyone I've talked to who is, for one reason or another, ticket-prone, is shopping monthly spots.
Now it's possible that the costs of spots will rise so that it's still cheaper to park on the street--but with the recession on, the garages presumably have overcapacity, so maybe not. Moreover, I can alter my decision to drive to work, or I can sell my car, depriving the district of car registration fees as well as parking revenue.
The Laffer Curve is usually used to describe American income taxes, for which it isn't all that useful. But it was actually first developed to analyze another sort of "stealth" taxation: seignorage, the income that a government earns from printing money. The interesting result was that the Weimar Republic was printing money too fast--it could have earned more by keeping the inflation rate lower.
I wonder if the District won't also find that it's gone too far. For the first time since I started working at The Atlantic, when I drove to the office on Tuesday there were multiple available metered spots in front of the building. When I left, again for the first time since I've started working there, not a single car had gotten a ticket for letting the meter run over. Meanwhile, the garage in the building next door was full. People will go a lot farther to avoid metered parking at $2 an hour than at $1 an hour, and tickets at $40 instead of $25, at any time, but particularly in a nasty recession.
On the other hand, perhaps the council just wants to help out the District's struggling parking businesses.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I've never lived in such a high-density urban environment, but whenever I visit one I'm always mystified by the local parking traditions. Personally, I think the most bizarre of these is allowing anyone who is not physically disabled to park along the street.
Surely this valuable space could be put to better use? Isn't it more efficient to consolidate parking into medium-sized private lots?
Welcome to San Francisco. Your daily ritual started here about fifteen years ago. My advice, immediately find a monthly parking space. Better yet an apartment with a dedicated parking spot included in the original rental agreement without which a typical space here runs $350 in Pacific Heights.
I got a ticket for having no front plate
That's a pretty common one. About 15 years ago, just north of Kanab, the Utah Highway Patrol pulled me over for not having a front plate.
From one of the linked articles:
Interesting. Do the deeds make that clear? Is then the case that I can park in anyone's driveway if it's after "permit required" hours? That has potential for much fun. You could even call it stalkeriffic.
If minorities - religous, racial, sexual orientation, etc. - were singled out like drivers are for this kind of abuse the ACLU would be apoplectic.
And rightly so, btw.
City governments are charging fares for people to use city services, namely:
1) storing your private vehicle in a public shared-use space
2) the assumption that your vehicle is being monitored by public law enforcement
3) assuming that you are a commmuter and not a resident of that city: using that public property at the expense of the local (resident) taxpayers
now, I think DC is going about this the wrong way with the punitive fine approach. A much more sensible approach would be to simply up the cost of parking, but that would involve, you know, having some balls.
I know you were out of the driving loop for a while, but I guess I'm wondering what you thought the second plate was for when the DMV handed you two. Many states require front and rear plates, although here in Colorado people sometimes get away with putting the front plate in the front windshield and telling the cop at the traffic stop that they just lost the bracket or repainted the car and haven't had time to reinstall it yet.
How can anyone possibly not know how many license plates are required?
If the last time you owned a car was six years ago, in a state that only required rear plates .. . ?
I wonder if they would ticket a car from a state that doesn't issue front plates.
vegemighty -- anything is possible when the agent has broad discretion. It would be overthrown in court and you might have grounds for a suit against the DC cops, but only if you value the principle more than the time required to fight for it.
I live in a town without meters. So here, motorists are tagged with speeding at a couple of speed traps; nearly hidden signs at the bottom of hills where there are other traffic issues to watch, and good places for a cruiser to hide. It generates a lot of money for both the town and, I suspect, auto insurers. And since it's a tourist town -- two ski areas, a recreational river, national forest, and state park/reserve land -- there's always a new stooge to tag.
Business owners ban together and complain about every 1.5 years, it slows down, and than budget crunches rear up and the speed traps start up again.
Motorists are singled out.
But the flip side is at least they're regularly cleaning the streets in you neighborhood. Does that happen in all DC neighborhoods, or just some? When I lived in Boston, there really did seem to be a link between frequency of street cleaning and property values.
A similar revenue-generating campaign in NYC:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/32/7/32_7_gk_kimber.html
When it was brought to court, it was dismissed for purposes of a speedy trial, but had it gone the distance, who knows?
Most businesses do not raise more money by raising prices when people are least solvent. Is the government different?
Is it National Rhetorical Question Day already?!
Next time I get caught holding up a liquor store, I'll tell the cops I'm being fiscally responsible by finding new sources of revenue to pay for all the liquor and whores.
1. How is moving your car in deference to street sweeping news? Was your previous M.O. to just ignore the rules and leave your car there, taking your chances with the ticket? God forbid YOU have to move your car for the street sweepers. Please. Try living in Madison, where you have to move your car every single night for half the year, just in case it might snow.
2. When I moved to DC 4 years ago the first thing I did was get cracking on registering my car in the district to get a parking permit. This entailed getting DC plates -- permit were simply not issued to out of state cars. IIRC, your Mom has lived there for some time. Maybe she should get off the pot and properly register her vehicle?
3. I'm with you on $2/hr meters. If they're gonna charge that much then they should switch to smart cards that are much much less inconvenient.
Compare and contrast the odds of it snowing every night in Madison, WI during the winter versus the odds of a street actually being swept in Washington DC.
If they were actually sweeping streets every other day I'd agree with you, but it's pretty obvious that this is just a smoke-screen for yet another "ah-ha!"
No--we're just making sure that we don't get too close to the 9:30 cutoff, because the meter maids seem to have gotten a little agressive about their definition of 9:30. But yes, our street is never actually, AFAICT, swept.
My mother was a legal resident of New York, not DC, though she also had a residence here; now she's a legal resident of DC, but she's moving in August, and sort of reasonably doesn't want to pay them hundreds to register her car for two months.
Assuming those parking garages and condos pay taxes on their income, the higher parking meter and ticket prices seem to be doing their job (raising revenue for the local government). They may even be helping unemployment, assuming the garages & condos eventually use their share of the money to hire some folks...
Pros and cons to everything, I guess...
Who carries around $4 in change on a regular basis?
Well, I imagine people in DC who want to not get parking tickets are going to start doing so any time now.
city of seattle uses automated parking meters, which allow you to use a credit card (but no amex!) followed by the sticking of a timestamped sticker to the curbside window.
far more sensible and less tempting to smash one with a sledgehammer.
One might become an adovocate of vandalizing parking meters. If they all get spraypainted once week, the city might start to get the message.
That would be a really bad idea. DC tickets you for parking at broken meters. Your only defense is to call the city every time you park at one.
From the city's website:
Parking at a Broken Meter- Call it in First!
Vehicles are allowed to park at a metered space in DC, even when the meter is not working. There are just a few rules that must be followed in order to avoid paying a fine. Upon parking and discovering that a meter is malfunctioning, the motorist should call the telephone number 311 printed on the meter decal, and report the faulty meter. After a brief recording, the caller will be connected to the Mayor's Citywide Call Center. A customer service representative will take the meter information and issue a six-digit confirmation number. The motorist may then park in that space for the time posted on the meter. After that time has elapsed; however, the vehicle must be moved.
source
I should also add that a viewing of Cool Hand Luke should further persuade you that attacking parking meters is a bad idea, even if you're not stealing the change.
Dr. Patent,
The goal is not to park in front of a broken meter, but penalize the local government for it hamhanded ways. Having to fix the meters every week should get the point across.
And Luke didn't care if he got caught cutting the heads off. His rebellion was against society itself.
But it's not punishment for the City. If anything, it merely adds to their revenue because of the tickets they write. As a result, they are very slow to fix the meters.
It shouldn't be any surprise that the government is simply scraping up more revenue by jacking up fees rather than actually cutting its budget--unlike a business, the government does not have to be responsive to things like supply and demand. What are you going to do, convince enough of the morons who make up the local electorate to actually vote some of these thieving crooks out of office?
Ideally, if there were a responsible city government that wanted to make life easier for its commuters, it would invest in some multi-storey municipal garages to bring the parking off the street (cutting back on congestion that's caused by losing an extra lane or two of traffic as well as the extra cars that at any time are cruising for available spots) and use some of that revenue to beef up alternatives like mass transit systems. Ideally these things could be privately run, but even a publicly subsidized system of garages and metros would be better than the undrivable chaos that is D.C. on a weekday.
Come on down to Texas! We do not put up with crap like that.
On a serious note, I wonder how much it costs the city to enforce and process these tickets? How much money is wasted on paying meter maids salaries, benefits, billing staff, enforcement staff, etc. How much would the sales tax have to be raised to achieve the same revenue, given its already paid for processing?
I'm not in favor of higher taxes, but open taxes are better than hidden ones.
Wasted, you say? Hogwash, this provides salaries for meter maids that stimulate the economy! And don't mention anything about whether it is an efficient use of resources or you might frighten and confuse the intellectual heavyweights on the City Council.
I always figured you could show up at one of their doorsteps on Halloween dressed as an intelligent idea. It'd scare the hell out of them.
It sounds like a lot of people should start thinking about using public transit, instead of worrying about parking.
And frankly, why shouldn't the city try and maximize revenue from it's parking meters? Supply and Demand. And why should the city be undercutting the price of private parking garages so much that only now do they look competitive.
As for your situation where you work at home in the city, but still have a car, but without your own personal spot. Well, it seems to me that the Japanese system would be the way to go for more cities. In Japan If you want to buy a car, you have to prove that you have an owned or monthly rented parking spot. Saying "I will park on the street" doesn't count. Some people can fudge the system, but it generally works well. I lived in a suburb of Nagoya city, where the local public transit wasn't good, but I could rent a parking spot for 3000 yen (~$30) per month. A co-worker of mine, lived in Nagoya city proper, chose to own a car, but had to pay 30,000 yen (~$300) a month for parking. He couldn't just park on the street willy-nilly. Of course, most of my co-workers who lived in the city just chose to use Nagoya's good public transit system. Seems like a good system to me.
It seems that ceding DC to Japan might be beneficial to our country in oh so many ways. Too bad Roosevelt didn't think about it in early 1940... might have saved countless lives not to mention dollars.
What kind of crazy rhetoric is that?
I say that when I lived in Japan, I thought their way of dealing with parking issues worked fairly well, and suddenly I am saying that the US should have lost WW2?
And I was thinking that I adding to the conversation, adding something that I thought was interesting and informative. Guess I just leave the comments section to trolls and mud slinger.
Sorry for an ambiguous snark -- I was expressing the sentiment that we'd benefit from getting rid of DC (especially if all pols come as part of the package), not that you advocated something unpatriotic.
Wasn't this the place where people were complaining a few months ago about the evils of driving in DC? Not so much in the sense that it was difficult to do, but in the sense that everyone should knock it off and use bikes or public transporation instead?
Things have changed.
Here in Salt Lake City I can park several vehicles in my driveway.
I can drive downtown any day and almost anywhere for $1 an hour, or I
can walk 2 more blocks and pay nothing. On the weekend its all free for
2 hours.
Off course DC has very nice Monuments. Not like Dinosaur or
Cedar Breaks, but still very nice.
If the author lives in a DC neighborhood w/ regular street sweeping, than it must be in central DC, where the Atlantic's offices are also located. Therefore, what are you doing driving to work anyway? Take the bus, Metro, walk, ride a bike. Or, just pay for parking in a private lot. These are all ways us little people do it. I guess that members of the media are - or at least feel they are - entitled to low-cost, on-street parking directly in front of their places of work in downtown DC.
BTW, I'm no fan of DC's ever create revenue scams, but please. Yes, you have to feed the meter for as long as you park and you should move your car for street cleaning. It is only once per week and isn't it a civic and environmental responsibility. Try living in one of those places where you've got to move your car to the other side of the street each day!
Also, the collective opinion of the Atlantic parkers seems to be that if they could get away with parking all day without feeding the meter they surely would and bemoan this new development. Never mind that these meters usually have a 1 or 2 hour limit for a reason - so that people going to sit in their offices all day don't park there and customers for local shops and businesses can and, you know, bring in sales tax revenue, help merchants, all that stuff.
But for the media it is do as I say not as I do. Stuff like cutting down on carbon emissions, supporting small business, being good citizens.
I work at the Watergate, which is shockingly badly served by public transit. I bike in summer, but I needed my car the other day for an excursion.
There are no shops in the Watergate to speak of, except for a few eating places that are used by no one except the captive market because they're terrible. The meters are there to make the district money, period.
It will be interesting-as an observer, not as a resident--to see how this plays out. Most businesses do not raise more money by raising prices when people are least solvent. Is the government different?
Apparently you don't understand the new Obamanomics economic theory, which replaces our failed capitalist model. In the new economy, higher taxes create more government spending, which leads to growth. When business with important Dem constituencies fail, the government buys them and raises taxes to keep them going, creating yet more growth. Surely anyone can see this will all lead to universal prosperity.
Enjoy your parking tickets. I'll be embracing the joys of an excellent transit system in Portland.
That sounds just like London, where parking ranges from £2 to £4 an hour ($3-$6) and tickets are upwards of $120. And with the system set up so that the meter maid receives commission, there is all the incentive for parking officials to sit on parked cars waiting for the meter to expire. The parking tickets becomes part of the parking fee.
Which makes the whole system silly; I commute around the country as part of my job - all my parking costs are billable. So I'm perfectly willing to pay a high price for quality parking. Its just that a system involving carrying around huge rolls of £1 pound coins, and overpaying for time that I will never use in order to ward off the potential traffic warden seems totally unproductive and inefficient (yeah yeah; to note - I'd use a non-existent parking ramp 10 blocks away if I didn't have to carry very heavy equipment for my job).
What makes you think that they'll do the street sweeping? It's a violation whether they do it or not, and they get more money if they just ticket without sending the sweeper around.
Well, its a violation to park in a handicapped parking spot whether someone shows up to use it or not. What are they supposed to do? Go around and post customized signs in advance of every actual appearance by the street sweeper.
Its really very simple. Don't park on that side of the street during the defined period. It is the same every week. Keep track of it. I, as well as thousands of others, continue to do it without problem. Living in a city does entail many unique hassles (to do along with the many unique benefits). Deal with it. Or move.
As it happens I live where there are no meters and no street sweeping violations, and I don't have a car. But thank you for the life instructions.
The suburbs would be happy to take you in, Megan. All is forgiven.
BD: "It shouldn't be any surprise that the government is simply scraping up more revenue by jacking up fees rather than actually cutting its budget--unlike a business, the government does not have to be responsive to things like supply and demand."
There is not a competitive market for what the government supplies-- in this case of parking, there is an insatiable demand that far exceeds supply. The correct response is to do exactly what D.C. has done: raise prices in high-demand areas. In any market economy, a scarce resource rises in price. We can debate the reasoning behind the rule changes, but economically it makes sense. Why should parking be exempt from market pricing? Artificially low parking pricing is an implicit government subsidy.
If there are now empty spaces available in high-demand areas, then the pricing is working properly-- spaces are available for those willing to pony up. Those not willing to pay for a scarce resource can pursue other options.