The Shotgun Blog
« The Human Rights Commission's $167,000 Spin Doctors | Main | Walmart: Inflation is Up »
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The Price of Parking
Posted by Richard Anderson on November 13, 2010 | Permalink
Comments
A beautiful cover for his actual agenda: getting cars off of the road, period. Discouraging shops, encouraging mega-malls. Concentration, concentration, concentration.
Why not just be blunt and do it the way the British did it in Africa? Force all the nomads into tightly-packed towns, by threatening them with imprisonment if they don't pay a tax, with money they could only earn by mining in the town, for the British. In the long run, it worked out really well in Africa...for the AK47.
Communism. Let's park that.
Posted by: Paul McKeever | 2010-11-14 7:36:51 AM
I should add: I'm not in favour of on-street parking at all...which is taxpayer-funded parking.
Posted by: Paul McKeever | 2010-11-14 7:39:09 AM
OK. Not seeing the leap from applying something like a market price to curb-side parking to British concentration tactics. I think you are referring to the Second Boer War. Nor do I see much of a causal link between rebellion and concentration. Other colonial powers didn't practice concentration and experienced native uprisings. The uprisings in British Africa were fewer and less intense than in Congo, Angola or Algeria.
If roads and sidewalks were privately owned, it's likely for urban settings a condominium type of organization would predominate. It would be in the interests of the store owners in commercial areas to charge a market rate for parking meters, and then rebate their clients the expense. What the professor is proposing is not an ideal, but since the revenue does provide some benefit to the store owners it is an improvement.
As for concentration, dense urban environments are usually the product of market forces. The suburbs are largely a creation of modern government. See my review of Lawrence Solomon's 2007 book Toronto Sprawls:
http://godscopybook.blogs.com/gpb/2007/05/toronto_the_spr-1.html
Posted by: Publius | 2010-11-14 9:15:17 AM
Publius: the market ends where government ownership begins. I've paid for the roads. I should be free to use them, without finding that the government is removing my right in exchange for a fee paid by some parker. If a four lane road is comprised of two lanes of travel and two lanes of parking, the road should never have been a four lane road in the first place: I should never have been charged for the parking lanes at all. It's not proper for me to subsidize parking by someone else. Leave parking on private land. And whether a private land owner wants parking to be free or paid, that's his business (I acknowledge the professor objected to governments requiring free parking on private land, but that does little but raise him one rung in hell).
If, with on-street parking prices, one ensures that spaces are always available, that is only because fewer cars are coming to park...and, therefore, fewer people are coming to shop. To discourage on-street parking is also, in part, to encourage free parking at mega-malls instead; it is to encourage concentration of shopping facilities.
Now, yes, concentration of shopping facilities will be driven partly by economics. But there are physical limits to concentration that can be broken-through only through uneconomical - hence, taxpayer funded, government-instigated - measures, like "public transit". Take away taxpayer funding for the "red rocket"; keep cars parked off of roads; let Toronto's roads be maintained solely at the cost of those who drive on them; let all municipalities fund all of their expenses with a single, municipal sales tax, the rate being selected by each municipality independently...before long, super-sky scrapers, and towering condos in Toronto will be a thing of the past: the 905 will work in the 905, instead of commuting back and forth to the 416. Congestion is a government-induced phenomenon, not a market phenomenon...and the government ideologues have in mind one thing: keeping the cost of communism to a minimum by cramming people together like sardines. Sprawl - hence the car - is the enemy of communism.
If roads and sidewalks were privately owned, providing a benefit to store owners would not be the prime motivator: the road-owner's profit would be the motivator, and the money would not be spent on anything that did not benefit the road-owner's bottom line. In other words: if the profits were maximized by parking prices that had effects that gave store owners nothing but grief, their grief would be given no regard...nor should it.
Africa. Concentration was only one symptom. The cancer was anti-free-market, anti-democratic, military-style governance: a governor general in each colony, effectively a dictator. Upset with British rule - and with Britain lacking the British muscle to maintain order - independence movements essentially took over the military-like British colonial form of government. Colonial government paved the way for Africa's dictatorships. Those dictators found in communism/central-planning the only economic/social system compatible with dictatorship. The bloody warfare ensued in the usual course.
Posted by: Paul McKeever | 2010-11-14 9:55:22 AM
How's the Marc Emery Movie doing these days Comrade McKeever? Last we heard his majesty the was being transferred to an old overcrowded US federal prison somewhere in Georgia
.......... with lots of parking
Posted by: 419 | 2010-11-14 12:04:50 PM
419 you should show yourself , im wondering if you look as stupid as your comments.
You must of been hittin the internet porn pretty hard when Marc was sent to jail, other peoples misery is the only way a creep like you can get off.
Posted by: don b | 2010-11-14 3:53:18 PM
Donnie Bee:
you leave me no choice
but to report you to Santa Claus
Posted by: 419 | 2010-11-14 8:17:39 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.