OUR VIEW: Caution with meter expansion

The city of Sarasota began installing parking meters in lower downtown last week. Let’s hope it is not a mistake.

Parking meters in premium areas make a certain amount of sense. We recognize that the city needs to control parking because if it were left wide open, free and no time limits, workers would tend to take up the best spots all day. Merchants are healthier, and therefore downtown more vibrant, when parking spaces are used by many different cars in a day.

So let’s look at the issue in straight economic terms. Parking is a scarcity. It is owned by the city for the benefit of the citizenry, and it needs to be priced so that premium parking spaces, particularly on Main Street, turn over regularly to provide customers convenient access to merchants. The right plan to do that is good for merchants, good for jobs, good for tax revenue.

The way it has worked for decades to accomplish this is that drivers are allowed to park for two hours for free downtown. A cadre of three-wheeled meter maids chalks tires and tickets people who stay in one spot beyond two hours. But that program is losing up to $500,000 annually, which is not acceptable given the city’s ongoing budget constraints.

Hence, parking meters are being installed. Make no mistake, the city’s budget problems drove this issue. It wasn’t a parking problem. Nonetheless, that does not mean parking meters are necessarily a mistake.

The city is putting in high-tech parking meters in the core lower downtown area, roughly on Main Street from Gulf Stream Avenue to Orange Avenue and on portions of First and State streets and Lemon, Central, Pineapple, Palm and Cocoanut avenues. The cost to park will be $1 per hour, but a person can put in as many hours worth as he wants.

The city is encouraging downtown employees to buy a $40 monthly parking permit to use in one of the two city parking garages — on Palm and at Whole Foods.

The hope is that this plan will have the two-fold advantage of opening up more premium parking spaces for merchants and eliminating the city’s need to subsidize downtown parking.

That hope is probably promoted best by Chris Gallagher, a designer for Jonathan Parks Architect and a board member of the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce.

Gallagher points out that in addition to the problem with parking enforcement losing up to $500,000 annually, the two-hour parking is not a good arrangement. He suggests that two hours is insufficient for serious shoppers — which downtown merchants want — and that night-shift workers at the many downtown restaurants and other stores often come in at 4 p.m. and the two-hour limit ends at 6 p.m. That generates the problem of employees occupying prime parking spots during the evening dinner hours after 6 p.m.

Unfortunately, the grand hope is mostly hope, because the city did not do a comprehensive parking analysis. And Gallagher acknowledges that he does not have statistics to prove his points — mostly anecdotes and studies from other cities.

That is a red flag for City Commissioner Terry Turner — the only commissioner to vote against the parking meters.

Turner, a Ph.D. economist, worries that rather than helping downtown merchants, the meters could put downtown businesses at a competitive disadvantage to the malls, St. Armands Circle and Lakewood Ranch. “It is, in effect, a tax on downtown businesses and consumers,” says Turner. He’s right.

He also thinks that just when retail is entering a fledgling recovery is a risky moment to be trying experiments.

We endorse Turner’s caution. This was a gamble to take to fix a city budget when downtown parking was not broken.

We are not fans of public subsidies for any private businesses. But if we are going to subsidize, parking would be a better choice than baseball stadiums or cherry-picked businesses, particularly for the major revenue-generator for the entire city.

However, one of the great benefits of the parking meters is that they act as a sort of market mechanism.

UCLA professor Donald Shoup has studied extensively parking meters versus free parking and found that the meters — rightly priced — move cars to the most efficient use of a city’s on-street parking.

The city should consider dynamic pricing that could include different rates on streets not in high demand and different rates for different times of the year — mirror pricing to what the market is doing.

But before deciding to expand the meters, we urge the soon-to-be newly constituted City Commission to proceed slowly, collect data on the price points and be open to adjustments. And only if the data is clearly favorable to merchants — which means it would be good for downtown — should the city look at expanding the meters.

One thing the city should consider as part of a change in parking strategy is eliminating the on-site parking mandate for developments of more than 10,000 square feet. When the economy comes back, getting residents and workers downtown will be integral to making Sarasota’s center more vibrant again.

Developers may choose to build parking for their facility — they know they cannot sell or lease without adequate parking. But the city mandating onsite parking skews development to the small and inefficient side.


Equal caterwauling day
We’re not altogether hip on the latest in feminist thinking, being that there are about 14 trillion more important things on which to focus. But we could not let last week’s Equal Pay Day pass without mentioning a few myth-popping facts.

First, it seems the thinking behind gender pay differentials is that women are paid less than men because they are trapped in an entrenched, pernicious, paternalistic society keeping women one step from barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

And, then, there is non-fiction. The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than women, and the gap has grown wider during the downturn — 9.3% for men and 8.3% for women (Equal Employment for Men Day!). Is this because we are a pernicious, maternalistic society? Of course not. Women tend to congregate in professions more immune to downturns, such as health care and teaching.

The fact that men and women choose different career paths also tends to explain differences in pay, along with the fact that on average, men work nearly an hour longer per day and don’t take off a few years to raise children.

But here is the kicker. The pay disparity goes the other way when controlling several factors. A Reach Advisors study in 2010 found that among single, childless, urban workers between 22 and 30 years old, women earned 8% more than their male counterparts.

The real problem we have is that men are losing ground to women in their level of education, and so this gap is likely to widen.

So when will the National Organization for Women and others behind the Equal Pay Day claptrap stop whipping up false impressions and dividing us along yet another line? Probably about the time “civil rights” leaders stop promoting racism and realize that the United States is the least prejudiced, multi-ethnic country in the history of the world.

In other words: When there is no longer political gain for doing so.