Tickling the Bear: LA edition—Parking fees as predictable revenue
By: Lucas Dickey
Tags: City Planning, Transportation, Urban Planning, Civic Innovation, Civic Hacking

(Image courtesy of https://www.deviantart.com/walterringtail/ under Creative Commons)

(I decided to do a “lower stakes" version of my “Poking the Bear" series, with this being the first! Lower stakes, quicker read, more frequently published.)

Los Angeles has one of the most onerous street “cleaning" and parking regimes I’ve seen in the United States. Or at the very least, that’s been my personal experience of living in most of the major west coast cities, plus having traveled extensively for work throughout the rest of the US. Thus it really should come as a surprise to no one when I make an ad hoc post like this one on LinkedIn (with a little Chrome DOM manipulation in the dev tools for the sake of art):

Parking tickets are a big source of revenue for the city, but not a meaningful source. Ticketing takes in roughly a quarter of a billion dollars annually, BUT about three quarters of that revenue goes to the cost of serving the revenue.

The city feeds misleading justifications like — ”we need it for emergency access” or “it secures access for local businesses" or “it helps keep things clean". All of these are either absurd or patently false.

As for local businesses, most aren’t operating at standard capacity and yet ticketing is happening at the same pace, so, in fact, no local business is being helped. I got a ticket for being one car in 40 open metered spots, for example, when my meter had run out. That was protecting no businesses.

And street “cleaning" is the equivalent of putting your dirty hands in a Dyson hand dryer —it just blows that shit everywhere, literally (not the Millennial “literally”, actual literally).

Emergency vehicles will do as they please in LA as they always have. They WILL get access to they hydrant, even if a car is in front of it. (Though red zones for hydrants is likely the lowest source of revenue in the parking enforcement bucket.)

Solution

If they’re going to use vehicle parking as revenue, just expand a parking program like neighbor parking passes, but with more egalitarian in distribution/access, or add a vig on the DMV fees associated with plate stickers.

This would make the revenue more predictable — ARR business, baby!

It would also feel less punitive and arbitrary and drive an angry constituent to further anger. We don’t need a further cause for road rage!

It also prevents lower income drivers from getting hit with unpredictable fees that are equivalent to roughly a half-day’s wages for parking in their own neighborhoods where they live and work, instead working the fee into a de minimis, predictable line item on plate stickers.

(Side note: I didn’t even get into the panic and anxiety I’m sure parking enforcement causes citywide for people every night as they ask themselves, “wait, did I park on the right side of the street tonight?!” And note that this disproportionately targets people that a) don’t own homes, b) don’t have garages or driveways since they don’t own homes, and c) people who don’t have the income or inherited wealth to support buying a home.)