Barnacles at the Curb

Don't Follow Leaders, Watch the Parking Meters

Careening an old whaler near New Bedford, 1882.

 

Back in the days when ships were made of wood and men were made of iron, the ships had a problem. The problem was barnacles. These pesky little creatures just loved to latch onto the nice wet wood on the bottom of a ship's hull, where they would soon cover the entire area below the waterline with their extended family. With a good crop of barnacles, a sailing ship would become noticeably slower, and its response to the helm more sluggish. The solution was called careening - typically, grounding a ship at high tide and tipping it so the bottom of the hull could be cleaned at low tide. Pirates used to do this on the sands of secluded beaches in the Caribbean, with sunny weather and appropriate palm trees, but you can do it anywhere you can safely tip a boat over on its side. We still use the word careening. When you go a bit too quickly around a corner, and your car goes tippy, you're careening.

The barnacles came to my mind while I was reading the performance audit report that the Philadelphia Controller's Office released at the end of last year on the Philadelphia Parking Authority. I think the report is good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.

Managing Money, Managing People

There's something called LODO - Lights On, Doors Open. LODO seeks to answer a question: Does an organization have the basic infrastructure in place that will allow it do its job - whether that job is selling groceries or managing parking. In my opinion, the auditor's report does a pretty good job looking at these basic issues.

Not surprisingly, the auditors suggested after their review that the PPA has too many workers and pays its senior managers too much money. To arrive at these conclusions, the auditors compared the PPA to a group of peer organizations in other cities, and so the criticisms we have all heard for years now have a basis in data.

The PPA was not happy, claiming essentially that it was a unique organization in an extremely unusual environment. You hear that a lot in Philadelphia, along with the excuse that the city is too poor to do the right thing.

Benchmarking is a standard practice, and frankly the PPA should be doing this itself, rather relying upon outsiders to provide the service.

Next on the list of the usual suspects is the thought that the PPA is a patronage mill. Again, the auditors came up with some interesting, and I think suggestive, data. They selected a random sample of 107 employees working in the on-street parking and support units, and they "compared employee residency data with publicly available records for ward leaders and city committee persons." They found that 25 of the 107 (23%) either held one of those offices or lived with someone who did. This number, of course, only provides a lower bound to the discussion. All that the auditors may have identified is nepotism, which is the hard core of patronage. The more subtle tentacles of patronage can be long and twisty, and cover a much wider area. (Page 14 of the auditors' report. To see the report, click here. For the back-and-forth on salaries and staffing, see pp. 7-12 of the auditors' report and  pp. 4-5 and 8-12 of the PPA's response to the auditors' report, which are also pp. 30-31 and 34-38 of the full report. Then go to pp. 48-50 of the full report for the auditors' response to the PPA response.) 

On the patronage issue, the PPA spluttered a bit, and then blurted out this: "On its face the Audit Report finds that the vast majority (77%) of the PPA's employees have no political connections. This finding undermines the 'patronage' stereotype often errantly restated about the PPA." (Page 5 of the PPA's response to the auditors' report; page 31 of the full report.) 

I think this response is hilarious.

The auditors were careful to note that the employees studied came from both of the major political parties. I suspect that such a bipartisan theme might be found elsewhere in the PPA.  It might be interesting, for instance, to look into where the PPA purchases its vehicles, and what replacement cycles the various types of vehicles are on.

There's a lot more, but I think I'll end this section by looking at something I've taken to calling the school funding corkscrew. Does anyone want to argue that the funding structure by which the PPA gives money to the Philadelphia School District is not screwy? There are much more straightforward ways to fund our schools. And I know we face obstacles in Harrisburg, but shouldn't we at least state that tying the school subsidy to the number of parking tickets is ridiculous? Reform has to start somewhere. The PPA has enough other distractions to keep it from focusing on what should be its job, which is managing parking. It doesn't need the school funding corkscrew.

Managing Parking

So how is the PPA doing with its basic job of managing parking? My answer is, Not very well. 

As the PPA notes in its response to the auditors' report, its mission statement includes the following language: "A focus on improved access, greater mobility, and increased vehicular and pedestrian safety are the guiding principles of our program." (Pp. 1-2 of the PPA's response; pp. 27-28 of the full report.) Remember that word "access." A big part of access is being able to park your car when you get to your destination.

The auditors don't seem very interested in these issues, as the PPA duly notes, but the audit report does give us a gift. If you have trouble reading this table, click on it. It should get larger.

Back in 2015, I came up with the idea that we should have a set of vital signs to measure the health of our parking system. This would be similar to the vital signs that get taken every time you go to your doctor's office - you know, heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, that sort of thing. 

I think the most important vital sign for a parking system is its occupancy rate, which should ideally be about 85 percent. I stumbled onto my second-most important vital sign while I was doing some research on the (then) new parking system in San Francisco, and it turned out that its ratio of meter revenue to ticket revenue was four to one - four dollars of meter revenue for every dollar of ticket revenue.

I wondered what the ratio was in Philadelphia. Finding out involved filing a Right-to-Know request, and when the data for the answer came back it turned out that we had a reverse ratio - we had twice as much ticket revenue as meter revenue. (For the article I wrote, click here.) 

The table above, from page 8 of the auditor's report, displays the necessary numbers for six cities. Only two have reverse ratios - Philadelphia and Detroit. Portland, Oregon, has five dollars of meter revenue for every dollar of ticket revenue. (Meter revenue figures are not available for Boston.) 

Why does Philadelphia have so much more ticket revenue than meter revenue? The answer is simple. Parking on the street is very inexpensive in Philadelphia, and so the legal spots at the curb are almost always taken. 

So when a plumber shows up to fix a clogged sewer line, and he looks for a spot to park, he is almost always looking at a block that has an occupancy rate of 100 percent. If the occupancy rate was 85 percent, he would find an open space and park in it. At 100 percent he parks in the crosswalk at the corner.

And that's when a young parent and a child in a stroller step out into the street and get hit by a car careening around the corner. So the plumber doesn't get access, and the pedestrians don't get safety. Feel free to refer to the extract from PPA's mission statement, above.

Oh - I almost forgot. Why is there so much more money in parking fines than in meter revenue? Because the meter rates are artificially low, and the clogging at the curb forces people to park illegally, which drives up the revenue from fines. The PPA profits greatly by dangerously overloading our curbs.

The PPA could provide 85 percent occupancy in metered areas by adopting dynamic pricing, the system that was pioneered in San Francisco back in 2008. Dynamic, or variable, pricing is at its heart very simple: At places and times where demand is high, prices go up. At places and times where demand is low, prices go down. (For more on dynamic pricing and the San Francisco demonstration project, click here.) 

This system works. And it's not even new any more. 

There's an interesting twist in residential areas where the PPA offers residential parking permits to the people who live in the area. At $35 a year, the parking permit is essentially free. Once again, the curbs are jammed. (For more on parking permits, click here and here.)

There is a solution. Its name is uniform price auction. Explaining it is a bit complicated, although I think it would actually be fairly straightforward in operation. For a discussion of uniform price auctions, click here. 

When it comes to adopting new technology, I think it's fair to say that the PPA is a slow, fumbling adopter. 

The auditors were quite interested in license-plate recognition technology. There's an interesting tit-for-tat between the auditors and the PPA on pages 12-14, 38-39 (pp. 12-13 of the PPA reply), and 51-52 (in the auditors' response to the PPA response). 

The basic question has to do with the fact that the PPA has issued hand-held license-plate readers to its staff of ambulatory enforcement officers. The auditors suggest that it would be more efficient (and more in keeping with best practice) to mount license-plate readers on vehicles, which could cover large amounts of territory in not a lot of time, thereby allowing the PPA to lay off a substantial number of enforcement officers, an indeterminate number of whom are members of a political machine. 

The PPA responded that LPRs can only be programmed to recognize one type of regulation, which meant that LPRs could not be used on complicated blocks where, in addition to parking spaces, there were such things as loading zones, handicapped zones, fire hydrants, and crosswalks.

The auditors demurred: "Additionally, our parking management consultant has indicated that LPR systems can be programmed to recognize different regulations within a city block. Crosswalks, loading zones, fire hydrants, and drivers who decide to double park are not unique to Philadelphia. The PPA should consider researching how other cities manage these constraints while using mobile LPR systems." 

This is a very polite suggestion that the PPA should do some benchmarking of its own.

If the reader is thinking that the decision to use hand-held license-plate readers rather than vehicle-mounted readers may have been influenced by the prospect of laying off a large number of employees who have connections, you would not be alone. Remember: Distractions can damage the mission.

There are two glancing mentions of the PPA's mobile parking app, meterUP, on pages 13 and 39 (p. 13 of the PPA response). I won't go into the history here, but the PPA did not exactly cover itself with glory when it set this program up. (Click here for more.) 

For several years I have been serving on the municipal parking committee for Asbury Park, a small city at the Jersey shore. In July 2017, 8 percent of parking revenue was coming through Asbury's mobile app. In 2019 a second app was added to the first, and, in December 2020, 67 percent of all metered parking revenue was coming through the two apps. 

That's a pretty steep adoption curve, but, in the world of electronics, adoption curves can be nearly vertical. I wonder what the PPA's experience with meterUP has been.

Managing Streets 

So let's back up now and ask a bigger question: What are our streets for? Or, perhaps better, what should our streets be for? For the last century there has been an unexamined assumption that our streets are for motor vehicles - moving, and also parked. In recent years, people have started to push back against this dominant belief. 

And in the last year, with the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a shift. People no longer automatically accept the hegemony of the car. In Philadelphia the best example of this shift is the proliferation of restaurants located in the open air - on the street and not just on the sidewalk. (For more, click here and here.) 

In Paris, there has been great progress in the last year to establish a complete, safe, network of bicycle lanes. No such rapid progress on bike lanes has occurred in Philadelphia, although we do continue to inch along at our usual snail's pace. 

My own thinking about the use of streets has evolved slowly. When I started writing about these issues on my blog in 2012, I was initially concerned about making recreational bicycling safer on Martin Luther King Drive, in Fairmount Park. And then I turned to the problem of the incredibly tight parking conditions in Center City and South Philly. 

Only in time did I come to see the rapidly developing use of bicycles for many purposes other than recreation, such as commuting to work or dropping the kids off at school or going to the grocery store. And only in time did I come to see parked cars as barnacles - in the way, and slowing down the progress we needed to make, first in reimagining our streets and then in redesigning them. 

I really enjoyed playing around with Professor Shoup's ideas about parking, and trying to see how they could be applied in Philadelphia. I still do. But now I see clearly that the basic problem is not that our parking system is badly designed and poorly executed, but that we simply have way too much parking on our streets.

I think it's clear that long-term on-street storage of cars on the street has to go away. These cars belong off the street. In my opinion, PPA should be leading this shift by building or encouraging the development of large regional garages in residential neighborhoods. 

One good location for such a garage would be the site of the old Moyamensing Prison in the heart of South Philly. (For more, click here and here.) 

Managing our streets is a complicated task that is, at present, poorly organized and lacks any unified, coherent vision. A great many public agencies and private organizations have a say in our streets, and just figuring out who owns or controls a particular patch of street can be a patience. Jim Saksa had a good story on this in PlanPhilly in 2015. (To see the story, click here.) 

So there are challenges. How surprising. I will leave you with one thought, a little piece of light that came to me only slowly, and in pieces, but is now whole.

We need to scrape off the barnacles. I think the barnacles are the key to liberating our streets.

Picture credit: F.S. Cozzens, in Harper's Weekly, December 1882. Per Wikimedia Commons.

See also Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy, Professor Shoup's Parking Book, It's the Road Design, Stupid, The Supreme Court and Parking.