The High Cost Of Free Parking

"The average cost of supplying one parking space in America is roughly $8,000."

Now I'm not quite sure how to process this figure, but deep down I'd bet this is probably accurate. I refer to Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking as a weath of information regarding how parking ain't free, and how this $8,000 figure was derived.

Google Earth over the SMUD campus, where I work, and you'll instantly notice how there is more land use devoted to parking than for buildings, and indeed, there is more area devoted for parking than in total office square footage. So the next time you pay your SMUD bill, stop to consider how much of your bill is being paid so that our employees have unfettered access to free parking 100% of the time.

Funny, SMUD employees hog tie S Street with wall to wall parking of their vehicles while the back half of their campus is a wasteland of unused parking. It's unused because it's a few minutes farther away by foot, and our employees are just as fucking lazy as the rest of America in that they will park as close as possible regardless. Yet, you the ratepayer are still paying for all that unused parking through asphalt, maintenance, line striping, increased storm water runoff requirements, and the social costs of locating the SMUD campus just a little bit farther away from everything else to accommodate all that unused parking. We are required by the City of Sacramento to develop all that off-street parking even though it has never been used and it will never be used. A colossal, stupendous waste of resources and energy if you ask me -- but you didn't ever ask me, did you, and you didn't ever even stop to think about it. Nope. Just keep on paying your bill, slick.

Because city codes require so damn much parking per unit of office, SMUD had to spend more life-cycle energy developing the steel supports for their solar panels for that now-defunct solar-to-hydrogen filling station than we'll ever get back in solar energy. Steel is manufactured by burning coal, shipped across the country by burning oil, welded by burning natural gas fired electricity, all to raise these solar panels in the air so we'd have sufficient parking spaces underneath for our employees cars to meet the city's parking requirements, all while we have dozens and dozens of unused parking spaces 400 yards away that will never be used. In just this one example, parking is stunningly expensive, yet this is repeated a half a million times across not just the United States but increasingly in mainland China and in India and in Pakistan and in Uruguay. Everyone else wants access to their own free parking too, and they're willing to pay more in taxes and in the cost of their blue jeans to get it.