There has been a constant stream of news items recently about the loss of free parking at Balboa Park and other areas in the City of San Diego.
There were almost universal, knee-jerk reactions to reject any thought of a fee to park at the park.
While an “adult” reaction would be to look at the proposals in light of various financial and behavioral concerns, our “child” ego response was to be outraged at the thought of losing free parking.
I am seriously conflicted in my own ego response. My adult says that paying for parking might have reasonable talking points. My child automatically rejects paying for parking, especially when there are other options. Just last week, I drove along Coast Boulevard in Del Mar for 15 minutes to find a vacant unmetered parking spot.
There are several underlying factors that should be fully researched before deciding whether and how to implement fees for parking. But, in a fashion that is all too popular these days, the city cannot see further than to look at pay stations as revenue-making machines – a mechanism to fund all of their mistakes and mismanaged programs. This is not acceptable.
For starters, we need to examine our basic attitude toward parking fees. As citizens of a caring society, we tend to agree that everyone has a right to food, shelter, safety, healthcare, education and free parking. Is one of these items an outlier?
Owning a car is not free. And once you do acquire a car, you have maintenance costs, fuel costs, insurance costs, garaging costs. We accept these costs as part of the burden of having a car. But we seem to draw the line on paying to park a car. We’ll willingly pay to drive the HOV lanes, to have the car washed, even to get valet parking. But the sight of a parking meter, especially where there hadn’t been one before, will surely trigger an indignant response.
While we often look for benefits and services for which we don’t have a direct payment requirement, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are free. It means that we are paying for it in a different way.
You might be surprised at what it would require to just pay for the land and development of a 10-acre parking lot in San Diego. For a rough figure, my research came up with $4,000 per parking spot per year (over 20 years). That’s about $11 per spot per day. This does not include any operating costs (or profits if commercial).
In most commercial locations, such as shopping centers, we expect (or hope for) parking to be provided by the businesses served. But remember, these entail a substantial cost. For example, I appreciated the parking deal at Horton Plaza. I could park there at a reasonable fee and have some or all of that fee reduced if I actually did any business there.
This was a reasonable compromise, as the affordable parking attracted more business. I have not visited the Gaslamp area since the demise of Horton Plaza. Free or reasonable parking is a powerful benefit, when done right.
If public parking cannot actually be free, our primary choices come down to a general fee (taxes) on the entire city populace, or a user fee (paid parking lots and meters) by those who directly benefit from having a place to park. That is a reasonable discussion to have.
This is an overarching question for most municipal services. For the car-driving public, we are also looking at frameworks for charging users for our roads, via a vehicle-miles travelled system.
Perhaps a reasonable guideline is to have the municipality lay out the original cash to build a public facility, such as a parking lot or a toll road, and have the users pay a fee for the operation and maintenance of the facilities. Nothing is perfect for everyone. But all options should be considered, using our adult egos.
For practical purposes, it is essential that a fee system, if applied, does not become so punitive as to discourage the public from using the facility. The initial reaction in Balboa Park was a noticeable reduction in attendance at most areas — and a loss of revenue at museums and restaurants.
On the other hand, the recent elimination of paid parking (for members) at Safari Park has led to my renewing my membership, and the similar elimination of parking fees at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden has drawn me back to attending the annual tournament.
Another conundrum is how to model a fair system to charge for cars registered outside of the municipality that owns and pays for the parking facility. It is not unusual for out-of-town people to pay a higher fee. Locally, for instance, the parking and entrance fee for Poway Lake (charged only on weekends) applies only to nonresidents.
San Diego, in its haste to implement a new income stream from parking at Balboa Park, bypassed a needed discussion among stakeholders and the harebrained scheme has collapsed.
Unlike the city of Poway, which favors hitching posts over parking meters, San Diego has elected to ignore all rational analyses of parking fee options, in favor of looking at parking as a cash cow. Like its other recent screw-ups, this one has fallen flat.
Part of the dilemma is that the public, for the most part, has considered free parking to be a given. Yet, parking lots are not exactly free and perhaps a reasonable user fee can be fully justified and supported. Whether a business, a museum or a park, parking must be looked at as an integral feature of the facility.
A Rancho Bernardo resident, Levine is a retired project management consultant and the author of three books on the subject. Write to Levine at levine-rbnews@earthlink.net