December 26, 2016 ☼ economic reasoning ☼ Economy ☼ free markets ☼ liberalisation ☼ Modi government ☼ natural resources ☼ Public Policy ☼ urban governance
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
The Union government is considering a proposal to make car ownership contingent on the prospective buyer producing an “adequate parking space available certificate.” M Venkaiah Naidu, Union urban development minister stated that he was keen on this and promised to persuade the Union surface transport minister and the state governments on the need to do this. A recent magazine article claims that this is an “absolutely sensible move” as it has been implemented in Sikkim and Mizoram, and has is compulsory in Japan and in one place in South Korea.
Mr Naidu means well, but by itself, the requirement of a parking space certificate will open another source of corruption without doing much to reduce traffic congestion. Anyone who’s visited a local road transport office (RTO) or obtained a pollution under control certificate will know how this works.
But let’s spell it out nevertheless: it is easy to ‘show’ you have adequate parking space because spaces do not have unique identities that are in a common database. It may be necessary to pay someone — a petty official or a person with space — to ‘show’ that you have parking space. Actually, few will take the trouble to do this. It’s more likely that the licencepreneur who owns the photocopying shop next to the RTO will arrange for the parking space available certificate for a small fee. Neither the RTO, nor the traffic police, nor the Union development ministry have the resources to check whether the certified parking space exists in reality or merely in-between folds of red tape.
Needless to say this won’t make a dent in the number of vehicles being purchased. Sikkim and Mizoram are small states with populations and geographies that might even make such a policy workable. In most other places in India, especially in places where traffic congestion is a massive problem, we will just have one more layer of regulation, one more piece of paper to be procured, some more money for petty officials an licencepreneurs.
That said, Mr Naidu is nearly on the mark. The way to reduces incentives for people to purchase and use cars is to charge for parking. Every car parked on public roads not only creates road cholesterol, but also is an implicit, undeserved subsidy to a car owner. The more cars you park on public roads, the greater the subsidy you get from the government. This creates positive incentives for vehicle ownership and use. If we stop rewarding vehicle users for parking on public roads and charge them the market price of the real estate they temporarily occupy, then we will see vehicle use coming down. That, by the way, is what they do not only in Japan, but in almost in every country and city that has sensible urban traffic. It’s not unusual for parking fees to be exhorbitant in central business districts of the world’s cities. In fact, when governments charge market prices for parking in public spaces, more parking space is created as private owners realise there’s good money to be made by creating private parking lots. [Parking availability certificates have reduced car ownership in Japan because parking spaces are available at market prices. See Paul Barter’s blog post.]
The Union and state governments must come to an arrangement on pricing vehicle parking. As Donald Shoup’s research shows, the best way to make the policy work, and get public acceptance, is to ensure that the parking fees collected go to the localities from where it is collected. People are less likely to oppose paid parking if they are convinced that the proceeds from their locality will largely be used to improve that very locality. Funds can be used to finance public transport: from bus services to bus stops, to metro and commuter rail. My colleagues at Takshashila estimate, conservatively, that implementing paid parking on fewer than 10% of Bangalore’s roads can add more than 20% additional revenue to the municipal corporation’s annual budget.
A national policy to make road users pay for parking (or dumping construction material, or hawking) would be a GST-scale reform that Mr Naidu has the opportunity to be the author of. He shouldn’t settle for that red herring called the parking space proof certificate.
Related Post: Eight ways to improve traffic flows in our cities quickly and without spending a lot of money.
Tailpiece: Donald Shoup’s insight:
Drivers want to park free, and that will never change. What can change, however, is that people can want to charge for curb parking. The simplest way to convince people to charge for curb parking in their neighborhood is to dedicate the resulting revenue to paying for added public services in the neighborhood, such as repairing sidewalks, planting street trees, and putting utility wires underground. That is, the city can offer each neighborhood a package that includes both performance-priced curb parking and the added public services financed by the meters. Performance pricing will improve the parking and the revenue will improve the neighborhood. The people who live and work and own property in the neighborhood will see the meter money at work, and the package will be much more popular than meters alone. [Cato Unbound]
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