Make beach parkers pay

Wow, what an improvement at Siesta Key Beach. 

One of Sarasota County’s most valuable assets became even more valuable.

It looks great. 

Of course, for county taxpayers, it was a pricey investment — $21 million.

But we don’t need to go through all of the math to justify its worth to taxpayers and county residents. Most Sarasotans instinctively know Siesta Key Beach, being the top visitor attraction in this part of the county, is a leading driver of economic activity here. 

Think of the economic spinoffs that occur as a result of attracting beachgoers from elsewhere — food, hotels, retail purchases, condo rentals, as well as people who eventually purchase second homes. Based on the county’s 2014 five-cent tourist development tax collections, the county’s tourism industry generated more than $340 million in direct spending.  

And if you amortized that $21 million investment over 15 years (and that may be short), the cost for renovating Siesta Beach drops to around  $1.4 million a year.

One last point about that investment: If you want to maintain and increase the value of your assets, you know you must reinvest and improve them to remain competitive. Disney World hasn’t remained among the most popular attractions in the world by never re-investing. 

So when the county commissioners and county staffers gather Saturday morning to cut ribbons and give themselves (and Sweet Sparkman Architects and Jon F. Swift Construction) high fives and hosannas, Sarasota County taxpayers can acknowledge renovating Siesta Key Beach’s facilities was a good case of maintaining and improving public infrastructure.

FREE PARKING? NO

Now here is the “but.” Parking.

While Siesta beachgoers no doubt will approve of and enjoy the updated ambience at Siesta Beach, it’s probably accurate to say parking is the most vexing issue on Siesta Key.

It is the never-ending issue in the Village, and at the height of winter, it is just as acute at Siesta Beach. 

It’s a classic supply-and-demand dilemma. Too much demand, not enough supply. 

What’s the solution?

To borrow one of our favorite observations from the esteemed economist Thomas Sowell, “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”

Here is one tradeoff to consider: paid parking in the Siesta Beach parking lot.

It makes economic sense. 

For starters, nothing is free. There is a big cost to free parking. Indeed, UCLA Donald C. Shoup, one of the foremost experts on parking, wrote a 700-page book explaining “The High Cost of Free Parking” — how free parking drives up the cost of housing; how it subsidizes everyone who owns and drives a car; how it adds to pollution; and how it distorts  market prices for real estate and on and on. 

And then there is this bromide: When anything is free, it typically is overused and abused — e.g. free parking at Siesta Beach.

Why should a Siesta Beachgoer have free access to parking for an entire day? Why should the most accessible and convenient parking spaces at the beach be free? In almost every business enterprise, convenience and premium services command the highest prices.

When the Van Wezel Performing Arts Center hosts a popular entertainer, it doesn’t give the best seats in the house away free and charge its highest prices for the nose-bleed seats.

User pays. Everyone has heard that phrase, too. If you play golf at Bobby Jones, a public-owned golf course, you pay. If you borrow a book from the library and keep it beyond its return date, you pay. 

We could go on and on. In short, it makes no sense not to charge for parking at Siesta Beach.

What’s more, in the box at left we illustrate a hypothetical that could be one of the benefits of charging for parking. If users paid for parking, the revenue generated could be used to fund, if not substantially subsidize, beach shuttle services. 

At popular ski resorts in the West, the resort owners often have buses and vans shuttling their customers from the ski village up to their lifts “free” — the cost, of course, is built into the lift ticket. Or consider what happens with car rentals at many U.S. airports. Once you disembark from your plane, you hop on a “free” shuttle that will drive you 10 to 15 minutes to the car-rental counter several miles away. The cost of that “free” shuttle likewise is built into the price of the rental car. But in both instances, the customer experience is acceptable.

County officials often have discussed the idea of shuttling beachgoers to and from drop-off points on the mainland. But private-sector operators have had difficulty making that work largely because the market is distorted: Parking is free close to the beach, but a shuttle service 15 minutes away comes at a price.

It makes no sense.

What about parking on the rights-of-way of neighborhood side streets near the beach?

If you charge for parking at the beach, inevitably beachgoers will seek out the next closest place to park free. But this could be addressed with technology, say, by installing electronic meters at neighborhood street intersections. If a user over-stayed his time, he would be fined just as Florida’s SunPass system fines motorists who shoot through toll gates illegally. Make the fines onerous.

Suffice it to say, it’s great to see a newly renovated Siesta Key Beach that will help keep Sarasota’s reputation for having one of the best beaches in America. But let’s not stop there. Bring some market sense to beach parking. 

When you go to Disney World, you pay dearly to park far away from the venue. Even so, Disney still manages to make its shuttle parking experience seem convenient.

With a little entrepreneurial ingenuity, the same could be achieved at Siesta Beach.