Not to mention the fact that government essentially requires you to purchase and maintain a motor vehicle in order to use that portion of the public property.

WE DON"T NEED TIMERS ON THE SPOTS! The only reason to have a timer is because the parking is so underpriced that it is not turning over. What the city needs to do is stop giving away at extremely low rates the valuable commodity that is on street parking. Rates should be set so that every block has a couple open spaces all the time, that is how you know you are charging enough, you don't need to say max 90 minutes.

This would speak to me more if you would promise not to shit your pants if someone proposed a multi-level parking structure in one of these neighborhoods.

The problem with that idea, econoline, is you will have the rich people who have money to burn taking up all the good parking.

@Paul Cone: I don't think there are enough rich people with nothing better to do than park their cars all day to "take up all the good parking." San Francisco uses performance parking, where they use prices to get near 85% occupancy in all street parking spots. If all the spots in an area are full, that means those spots are more valuable than the price, and the price needs to go up in that area.

@extramsg: Let's charge for parking, then we'll see if it's even necessary to add more spots in those neighborhoods. If fewer people drive to Hawthorne (either getting there by bike or bus or on foot or not going) as a result of charging for parking, then we won't need a garage, and we'll have less traffic congestion too.

Parking structures are great. A few levels and you can replace a number of blocks of surface parking lot wasteland. But it wouldn't make sense to add a parking structure simply because meters are added or rates are raised, extramsg. They should be considered when parking spots are removed outright.

What san fran has found is that the people who are willing to pay market price for parking are also the ones who really want to go to the neighborhood and are more likely to be spending money while there, but they are also ones who might have decided not to go because it is too hard to park. Currently many of the parking spots in portlands commercial areas are taken up by people who just live there and are not doing any business and that doesn't help anyone.

It's also possible that people who would be willing to pay for parking but not willing to drive around for-fucking-ever looking for somewhere to park would be more willing to drive.

I don't know of any empirical evidence of how the price of parking affects the number of people who travel to a commercial area, but it depends on the preferences of everybody involved. Drivers might like the lack of congestion (up to 30% of auto traffic is people looking for somewhere to park in urban areas) and the ability to actually find somewhere to park. Cyclists and pedestrians might like less car traffic as well. People on the bus will be happier because the schedule will be more consistent.

BUT, the point is that the ~200 square feet of space in a crowded commercial area is valuable, and it's fucking idiotic to give it away for free to people who want to leave a thousand pounds of metal there for a couple hours.

Sarah,

As a resident of the Hawthorne area the argument really wasn't from merchants all that much. I realize that article painted it as such but it wasn't the case. It was the residents in the neighborhood that reckoned if you made people pay for parking on Hawthorne most people would just park around the block from Hawthorne on a residential street and then the residents of the neighborhood would have to park blocks away from their houses and that would lead to the city eventually charging residents of the neighborhood to pay for parking in front of their houses.

The people parking on Hawthorne/Belmont on the weekend don't live there and can pony up a couple bucks to wait in line for 40 minutes at Pine State.

I eagerly await their Yelp reviews of the parking meters.

My favorite thing is when liberals try to use some weak-ass grasp of "market forces" to try to rationalize a position that they arrived at long ago based on their deeply embedded political ideology.

@Blabby

How do you feel about your bestie's newest curmudgeonly rant about paid parking meters on Broadway over on his blog? I got some serious lolz out of the comments section.

@Blabby,
Last time I commented here (regarding the CRC) you were also eschewing substantive arguments in favor of shallow psychological analyses of "liberals". I have news for you: the vast majority of people, liberal and conservative, engage in frequent rationalization and will seek out new defenses of their beliefs instead of changing their opinion. Yet, I have no idea if your beliefs are built on flimsy rationalizations or dark secrets ("Blabby opposes the social safety net because he was abused as a child!") because, on the topics I read about, you generally pop up only to offer completely non-substantive attacks.

If you can only cheapen the debate, please don't say anything. Rant over.

Now, substantively:
First point is that mandatory parking requirements decrease density per dollar spent on development. A store or apartment building constructing now must provide either a large surface parking lot or an expensive underground garage. This price is passed on to renters and customers, regardless of whether they own a car and benefit from the free parking. Naturally, like most other goods, as density becomes more expensive, less of it is supplied. This makes things relatively better for a frequent driver, and relatively worse for a frequent pedestrian/cyclist/transit user. I doubt many people disagree with the above assessment.

Second point is that there exists a good number of American neighborhoods that were built before mandatory parking requirements and could not legally be built today. I live off of NE Alberta (begin stereotyping now) and, even though it's not a particularly dense neighborhood, I doubt it could be legally built today in most parts of Oregon. The older apartment buildings in NW Portland would never pass muster in the vast majority of the country. All around us are older neighborhoods that would be illegal to build now without substantially more parking (and either higher prices or lower density).

Now, let's look at the prices for renting or owning homes in these neighborhoods versus newer, less dense development. In Portland, and throughout the country, it appears that there is a very high correlation between denser neighborhoods and higher rent. Dense, pre-war neighborhoods are more expensive almost everywhere! (data provided upon request) This shows that there is a huge demand for the kind of neighborhood that is mostly illegal to build today. People want to live in places like this! Yet we don't allow developers to build anything like these neighborhoods! And, we don't allow existing neighborhoods to transition to the level of density that the market clearly demands.

If people want to live somewhere with tons of parking, they should be free to do so. It's America. Someone can build a housing development with lots of parking and people can buy those houses as they see fit. Yet I should also be free to live in a neighborhood that doesn't provide this. And I don't want to implicitly subsidize the construction of places I don't want to live.