Parking Downtown: A $3 Meter, a $30 Garage, and the Death of Spontaneity

Here is a thing I used to do on a Tuesday night in 2008: decide, at 9 PM, with no planning, to drive downtown, park on a side street near 4th, drop a few quarters into a meter, see a band I'd never heard of, drink a $3 Lone Star, and drive home. Total cost of parking: somewhere between free and the loose change in my cupholder. Total cost of the evening: less than what you now pay to park at a garage on Congress for two hours during SXSW.

That kind of spontaneity is now economically impossible, and nobody seems to think that's a problem.

A Brief Timeline of Getting Robbed by a Meter

The downtown parking meter used to be a charmingly analog device. You fed it quarters. It gave you time. If you forgot, you got a $25 ticket that felt like highway robbery. In retrospect, $25 was the last honest price this city ever charged for anything.

Then came the smart meters. Then came the apps. Then came dynamic pricing, which is a phrase that means "we will charge you more when you most need it, because we can." Now parking a car downtown on a Friday night is a multi-step financial commitment:

Option A: Street parking, if you can find it. You will circle for twenty minutes, burning $4 in gas, then pay $1.20 per hour via an app that requires your email, phone number, license plate, blood type, and a credit card that it will charge incorrectly at least once. Total: $8-12, plus the psychic damage of using ParkATX.
Option B: A parking garage. $20-30 for an evening. More during events. During SXSW or ACL, you will pay $40-60 to store your car in a concrete rectangle while you walk to a venue where you will pay $14 for a beer. You are now spending real money just to be near the place where you'll spend more money.
Option C: Don't drive. Take a rideshare, which will surge-price you $25 each way because everyone else also decided not to drive, which is the correct decision, which makes it more expensive, which is the kind of irony that only a city with no real public transit could produce.

What Parking Took With It

When parking was cheap or free, downtown belonged to everyone. You could be broke and still go hear music on 6th Street. You could be a college kid and still drive to a show at Liberty Lunch. The low cost of access meant that the people making the culture could also participate in it. Now downtown is a toll road with live music.

Downtown Austin: where the parking costs more than whatever you parked for.

The city will tell you this is about demand management, about encouraging transit alternatives, about urban planning best practices. And sure, fine, except the transit alternatives are a bus system that stops running at 11 PM and a rail line that goes to one place. You have removed the affordable option and replaced it with nothing, which is a very Austin way to solve a problem.

I parked at The Domain last week. Free parking. Validated. Four hours, no questions asked. The Domain — a shopping center built on an old IBM campus in North Austin — has better parking policy than the entire downtown core of a major American city. That's not a compliment to The Domain. It's a diagnosis.

Meanwhile, somewhere on East 6th, a meter is blinking, and the app is glitching, and a kid who just wants to see a band is doing the math and deciding it's not worth it. That math is the real cost of $30 parking.

Previously in Things That Used to Cost $3: Breakfast Tacos. Next: Barton Springs Admission.