For self-declared free-marketeers, we Americans have developed some deeply socialistic tastes. We simply can't abide rationing some things by price. Water. Roads. Parking. Especially roads. But especially parking.
San Francisco's Livable City has put together a nice chart comparing standard American parking doctrine to a more market-oriented, or at least economically rational, doctrine:
Here's a fun exercise. Go through the chart and replace "parking" with "roads." The chart remains just as valid.
Superficially, there is one significant difference between roads and parking: government is the exclusive supplier of roads (except for subdivision streets); private developers supply most parking. The market must be "choosing" the efficient amount of parking. But this difference is an illusion, as everyone understands by now. The government uses its own money to build too many roads or, more commonly, roads with too much capacity. It uses minimum parking requirements to force private developers to build too much parking. In fact, since it costs the government much more to build excess road capacity than to mandate excess parking capacity, we should expect a greater oversupply of parking than of road capacity.
