Stephen Rees's blog

It is on cbc.ca and it is headed “Vancouver parking rates not so bad: survey“. It is in the same league as those surveys that compare cities around the world and then say Vancouver is the most livable. It may or may not be true – I am not at all sure it matters – but the effect it has is to create a sense of complacency and a ready excuse to not do anything.

Once upon a time I was required by my then employer to get my head around the notion of a market for parking. The political dogma of my masters at that time was that the market was the key to everything. All policy was to deregulate and decontrol so that market forces would create the best of all possible worlds. That process was already under way with public transport and would now be applied to parking too. I was held to be argumentative – if not uncooperative – if I pointed out that many of the regulations we had were created by earlier generations to deal with obvious market failures, such as operating buses in an unsafe manner. In the case of parking, if not for regulation, there would be no market at all, as people would then just leave their cars where they damn well pleased (i.e. on the street) and the result would be chaos.

The City of Vancouver has recently decided there is probably too much parking provision, and new construction will in future be required to provide less of it. And of course, the gear heads promptly got all bent out of shape saying how hard that would make things for everybody: no one it seems wondered if maybe the market would step in and start providing more parking – for a price.

The market for parking in Vancouver is not like that of Central London or Hong Kong – so the fact that it is priced differently should come as no surprise. But what really irritated me was that the rates they looked at meant they completely missed the point. They compared monthly parking rates. In other words, what commuters pay – or more often what the commuters’ employers or companies pay. Because that is the first lesson I had to get across to the politicians. The people who drive into Central London and park do not pay for the space out of their own pockets. Somebody else does – and often its the taxpayer. Senior civil servants, in those days, parked for free on Horse Guards’ Parade. Indeed that privilege marked them out from the ordinary hoi-polloi.  The office parking space is a status symbol. Except for some Japanese companies who say the best spaces should go to those who arrive first in the morning: its a sort of self determined employee of the month thing. Companies of all sizes simply offset the cost of providing parking as a cost of doing business: in other words, it is tax deductible. I even had the temerity to suggest that perhaps we should recover the imputed benefit of the parking privilege as a personal taxable benefit. My boss (who drove his VW camper to work every day) was not at all impressed.

The low cost of commuter parking is not a good news story at all.  It demonstrates that we have not used one of the most powerful levers in the traffic engineer’s toolbox to deal with traffic congestion. Moreover, the market in Vancouver is back asswards. The lots get filled with commuters – who get cheap rates – and then there is not enough space for the hourly parkers, who get dinged. If people like the DVBIA had their heads on straight, they would have realised that it is the hourly parkers that businesses need. These are the people who are not going to get the “early bird specials” or the monthly discounts – because they come into town to do business – attend a meeting, do some shopping, go to a concert or whatever. In other words we are currently deterring the very people the DVBIA says it wants to encourage. The best spots in any Vancouver garage are marked “reserved 24 hours”and are often empty during the evenings and weekends. Goodness only knows which business school the creator of this system went to. Parking inventory is time sensitive – just like aeroplane seats and sushi. Keeping your inventory off the market at the times of highest demand (the words “event parking” should strike terror in anyone’s heart) is economic suicide.  Possibly the worst offender would be the Government of Canada – but they are not alone – who permanently barricade off swathes of parking spaces for their employees in public lots like the Vancouver public library. They say, I am sure, that this is necessary in the name of security.   Well that was the same as the Horse Guards Parade argument and it did not hold true there either (though now no-one is allowed to park there at any time).

But the real kicker in this story is at the end

“By the 2010 Games, public transit will have improved tremendously in order to accommodate this increased ridership that they’re going to be seeing,” Rogowski said.

“Once the Olympics are done and people see how easy it is to take these new transportation initiatives that are being introduced, I think more people will be using public transportation as opposed to paying these expensive parking costs.”

Huh? Did I miss something? As far as  know the only change we can expect to see by 2010 is that the Canada Line will have opened and some buses will therefore have been freed up for service elsewhere. Translink is still cash strapped and will be cutting service if it cannot get the provincial government to change its current policies, which prevent the regional agency from raising enough revenue to keep operating and also expand service. That is what the current “be part of the plan” process is all about. This is not a region that is going to see “tremendous improvement” in transit service if the Kevin Falcon legacy holds – and could well see quite the opposite.

The reason that the survey says there is “less demand” for commuter parking in downtown Vancouver than other major Canadian cities is that they have done better at holding on to major office employment. Most of the those shiny towers in our downtown are residential  – something which is less pronounced in other cities. Indeed it is one of the reasons we think we have cracked the livability problem because some people can live and work within walking distance. We tend to ignore the rather larger number who drive out of downtown to suburban office parks (where the parking is “free”). And Translink does not try to run buses for such people – although that was the first thing Microsoft did when it moved into Richmond.

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Footnote

In this piece I mentioned “my boss” but did not name him. But it occurred to me that I had not heard much about him lately so i looked him upon Google and found this

“Neville Rees was also a mould-breaker; in his case changing the way in which Government analysed and then addressed problems of traffic management, traveller information, dynamic navigation and the links between traffic and spatial planning.”

(source : ITS UK)

That’s a reference to Traffic Master “Neville Rees, a senior civil servant, who eased the way for a pilot scheme to cover the M25 and other motorways within 100 miles of London.”

Neville (no relation) was the Under Secretary for Traffic Policy during my time with the UK Department of Transport. I was saddened to learn of his death but since an award is now named after him, I am glad he is remembered. He was one of the better bosses I have had to work for.