Free parking seems like a great deal, until it isn’t

While house sitting for a friend in Cleveland Park, I was thrilled to find I seemingly didn’t need a residential permit to park due to Mayor Bowser’s Phase Two Reopening Plan. Bowser’s plan suspended rush hour parking restrictions as well as fines for emergency no parking violations, expired District license plates and inspection stickers, expired residential parking permits, and expired meters. (A call with an operator at the Department of Public Works clarified that safety violations and blocking private property still can be ticketed; individuals can still receive tickets for blocking bus stops, fire hydrants, and handicap parking).

My first reaction was elation – no need to deal with the hassle of moving the car every few hours, feeding a ghastly-expensive meter, stressing about having the wrong tags, or being fined.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my reaction was short-sighted. I hate parking tickets as much as the next person, and I love the flexibility of a car. But a little extra cash for me means a lot of missing money for the city. This means significantly less revenue for DC that could go towards supporting transit initiatives or making the city more welcoming to pedestrians and cyclists.

From 2016 to 2018, DC generated an average of $73 million in annual revenue from parking tickets, according to WTOP data. That missing revenue is no small change. It would be enough to financecity-wide protected bike lanes, for instance, or fund transit improvements.

According to the most recent MoveDC plan, DC’s long-range transportation plan, the District’s goals include encouraging sustainable alternative transportation, like biking or taking the Metro. But by suspending ticketing, the city is subsidizing private vehicles and heading in the opposite direction of DC’s stated transportation goals.

Other cities suspended ticketing at the beginning of the pandemic but picked back up in recent months. Los Angeles relaxed parking restrictions but continued meter enforcement. Baltimore suspended ticketing in March but resumed meter enforcement in July.

Building habits that are hard to break

People who have free parking available at home tend to choose driving over public transit. And employees who are offered free parking in DC tend to choose driving too — even when they also are offered public transit benefits.

There will always be people in the region who need cars, and there are people who cannot afford cars. But in DC, many people live without cars by choice — and the pandemic has made many of them choose differently. Some hope that when the pandemic is over, those who bought cars will go back to car-free living — but incentives like free parking could help push people into making their driving lifestyles permanent. I spoke to an acquaintance of mine, Mackenzie Hodgson, a self-described proudly carless city dweller and Ward 2 resident. Her experience illustrates why the habits people are building through these incentives may be tough to break.

Before the pandemic, Hodgson walked, took the train, and ride-shared occasionally. “Even when I left the city, I primarily would just take public transportation – whether Amtrak to visit family in New York, or even just out to Virginia on the Metro,” she said.

But that came to a halt with the pandemic. With public transit feeling unsafe and risky, Hodgson said she stopped taking transit all together. “We were only going places that we could go under our own power, walking or biking. The world got very small.”

In October, Hodgson made the decision to buy a car. “I waffled a bit,” she said. But a car opened up the possibility to connect with family and friends she had been cut off from without a vehicle of her own.

In the few months since buying a car, Hodgson has already recognized her behavior shift. Because parking these days is easy, available, and free, she is more inclined to hop in the car for trips she once took by bicycle or transit, like the grocery store. And she’s not sure she wants to go back to being the carless city dweller she once was.

“I think I’ve gotten used to the car lifestyle at this point,” Hodgson said.

Hodgson isn’t alone. According to The Indicator from Planet Money, used cars are appreciating due to increased demand during the pandemic. In an August podcast, The Atlantic staff writer Robinson Meyer noted a trend of millennials buying “COVID Cars,” saying: “If cities don’t move forward during this time, then I think they’re going to wake up in 2021 or 2022, and they’ll have actually lost ground. People will just default to their cars a lot more.”

By subsidizing parking now, the future of transit suffers. By making parking easy and free, the District is putting a thriving public transit system at risk of future challenges.