birdwatcher | Оказывается

Существует проф. Шуп, который установил, что проехать в городе нельзя потому, что все часами ищут бесплатную или несообразно дешевую муниципальную парковку, вместо того, чтобы давно свернуть в первый попавшийся гараж. Уважаю.

   What you may not realize, when you find yourself driving on a crowded city street, is that many of your fellow drivers on that crowded street are simply cruising for parking. The problem is not so much the lack of street parking but the plentiful abundance of free or underpriced parking. This finding has sparked the fiery crusade of Donald Shoup, a bearded, bow-tied, and bicycling economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of a seven-hundred-page, cult-sensation tome titled The High Cost of Free Parking.
   The mantra used by Shoup, and his growing legion of supporters (dubbed "Shoupistas"), is the "85 percent solution." In other words, cities should set prices on parking meters at a level high enough so that an area's spots are only 85 percent occupied at any time. The ideal price, says Shoup, is the "lowest price that will avoid shortages." Spaces with no meters at all, in a city like New York, are total anathema to Shoup. "People who want to store their car shouldn't store it on the most valuable land on the planet, for free," he told me in his office at UCLA, where a vintage parking meter sits atop his desk. "Something that is free is very misallocated." This is why people who want to see free Shakespeare in the Park performances in New York City have to begin waiting in line as early as the day before (or hire people to do it for them), why cafes that offer free Internet access soon find themselves having to limit the time patrons can spend at a table, and why it can be so hard to find a parking spot.
   The reason people cruise is simple: They're hunting for a bargain. In most cities, there is a glaring gap between the cost of a metered parking spot and that of an off-street parking garage. Looking at twenty large U.S. cities, Shoup has found that, on average, garages cost five times more per hour than metered street spots. The reason garages can charge so much, of course, is that the streets charge so little. When free parking spaces are available, the discrepancy is even higher, particularly for a free spot that can be held for many hours. And so people are faced with a strong incentive to drive around looking for parking, rather than heading into the first available garage.
   On the individual level, this makes sense. The problem, as is so often the case in traffic, is that the collective result of everyone's smart behavior begins to seem, on a larger scale, stupid. The amount of extra traffic congestion this collective parking search creates is shocking. When Shoup and his researchers tracked cars looking for parking near UCLA (they rode bikes, so other cars would not think they were looking for parking and throw off the results), they found that on an average day cars in one fifteen-block section drove some 3,600 miles—more than the width of the entire country—searching for a spot.

--Tom Vanderbilt "Traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)".

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ge-m.livejournal.com

Кстати, небезызвестный город Кембридж, Масс., как раз, недавно произвёл революционные преобразования в этом духе. Они, во-первых, подняли в два раза цену митеров, во-вторых стали реально штрафовать за стоянку дольше 2-х часов (даже и при уплоченном митере).
Лично мне это стало страшно неудобно, так как по субботам мне надо там перепарковываться, как минимум, 3 раза, но, во-первых, найти паркинг теперь очень легко, а, во-вторых, иногда я туда теперь на автобусе или метро приезжаю.

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