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There are still a few coin-operated parking meters in Portland. As a civilized human, I rarely carry any cash, much less four bucks in quarters to park downtown for three hours. Can I pay for a coin-op space using the "smart meter" across the street?
—Renee B.
Not having cash on you is civilized? I'm even more civilized—I don't have money in the bank, either. I'm practically the love child of Margaret Thatcher and Sir David Attenborough when it comes to civilizedness. (Apologies for the disturbing visual—toujours la politesse.)
Parking receipts are indeed portable: Once you've paid, you can park in any metered space (up to that space's posted time limit). The real problem with downtown parking isn't that it's not transferable. It's that it's too cheap.
Saying this is about as popular as reminding the teacher that she forgot to assign homework, but in the pro-density, public-transit-4-ever worldview that is Portland's state religion, low-cost on-street parking amounts to a fat public subsidy for private automobiles.
This becomes obvious every time you cruise a neighborhood for 15 minutes looking for cheap metered parking—it's worth it to avoid paying market prices in a private lot.
San Francisco recently experimented with a different system, one that uses wireless technology (natch) to adjust the price of each space based on occupancy rates. Cruising diminished, and traffic dropped by 30 percent.
Of course, San Francisco has to be density-friendly—it's surrounded by water and couldn't sprawl if it tried. We have to simulate this effect with the urban growth boundary, which is the land-use planning version of pretending the carpet is boiling lava. Still, market-priced parking might be worth trying here, too. (Members of the press, of course, would be exempt.)
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WWeek 2015
