Photo by iandavid.

Councilmember Jim Graham is trying hard to make parking easy. He’s proposed reserving one side of every block for resident-only parking. That would be a valuable element of a larger, comprehensive approach to parking. Just on its own, it will make parking easier for some and harder for others. We need to approach this problem holistically, rather than piecemeal. Fundamentally, our parking policy suffers from one consistent problem: we’re giving it away too cheap.

A house with a private parking space costs up to $100,000 more per space. If you want to park in a garage, that’s hundreds a month. But on-street parking is virtually free. Why?

Bus rides aren’t free. Housing isn’t free. Electricity isn’t free. Why is parking free?

At the last parking hearing, Graham asked, shouldn’t people be able to own cars? It can be fun to own a car. Yes, it can be fun. It’s also fun to ride rollercoasters or own yachts or travel to Europe, but the DC government does not pay to make these things free.

Right now, it costs $2.50 a day to ride the bus (with SmarTrip). Yet if you live in the same ward as your workplace, or work near blocks not zoned for RPP, it’s free to drive and park. Why? The proposed Mount Pleasant guest parking program operates on a simple premise: let people buy day passes to park on streets in the neighborhood that aren’t full during the day, and charge just a little more than round-trip bus fare. And the revenue from permits could improve that bus service for the employees who don’t drive

If you go to shop in Adams Morgan by car, it’s either very easy to find parking (during the day), or just about absolutely impossible (in the evening). People drive around and around, creating substantial traffic and making 18th Street more dangerous. The garages aren’t cheap, while parking all evening on Champlain Street, if you can find a space there, is free. Residents should park for free, but isn’t there a better way to allocate the remaining spaces beyond luckiest or most circled, first served?

How about multispace meters that let drivers (neighborhood residents exempted) pay the same rate as the meters on 18th, and set those meter rates at the right level to promote turnover? It would become easy as pie to park in Adams Morgan, just not free. But why should it be free when it’s not free to take the Circulator, and even more not free to take a cab? That revenue could make the Circulator cheaper, or more frequent.

Graham’s bill proposes one free visitor pass for each household. Some residents have wondered whether that would just invite abuse, like people selling passes on eBay to commuters from Maryland. Do we really trust DC to enforce restrictions against that? Why not let visitors simply buy the same permits that employees would get under the proposed day pass program, and mail each household a book of them — say, 25 per year, which is one every other week?

You can buy a resident parking permit for $15 a year, and another, and another, for as many cars as you like. Some households have three or four cars (or more). $15 a year is about four cents a day. Graham’s bill contains a provision to charge higher rates for the second ($50) and third ($100) RPP passes per household. What about group homes and big families? At the previous hearing, Mount Pleasant’s Gregg Edwards suggested giving each household one pass free or cheap, and if they have more than two adults, one more pass for each two adults. The next pass costs $50, then $100, and doubling thereafter. However, this would require a reliable way to verify where people live, as in many households the utility bills don’t list every resident.

Imagine if we let employees or visitors park on underutilized streets in residential neighborhoods, as long as they paid a few dollars a day; let shoppers park on side streets, as long as they paid a dollar or two an hour; let residents park one car for cheap, but charged more for second and third RPP passes; and poured all that money into making transit, like Metrobus and Circulator service, cheap, frequent and reliable. Wouldn’t Ward 1 residents be better off?