Wednesday afternoon Mayor Marty Walsh announced Boston’s plans to install more protective bike lanes along one of the busiest stretches of Commonwealth Avenue and roll out more mobile-pay ready parking meters as part of the Go Boston 2030 program.
Mayor Walsh said the goal is to make “our streets safer, more accessible and more considerate of the different modes of transportation.”
One phase of plan aims to reconstruct Comm Ave from the B.U. Bridge and Packard’s Corner – which runs along the B Branch of the MBTA’s Green Line – to create more separation between bikers and motorists.
Another phase of the plan will see the Boston Transportation Department install 8,000 parking meters across the city that will be payable by mobile devices or credit cards. While certainly an improvement, mobile-app friendly meters could just be the start of a complete overhaul of the city’s parking system.
Officials hinted that the city might consider implementing a surge pricing-based metered parking system. In layman’s terms, “Uber for on-street hourly parking rates.”
Such a system has already been tried and tested in San Francisco; here’s what you need to know about it:
- In the summer of 2011 San Francisco rolled out new parking meters and demand-responsive pricing, a.k.a. surge pricing, in eight pilot areas of the city. The federally-funded project, dubbed SFpark, was pitched as a way to “open up parking spaces on each block and reduce circling and double-parking.“
- Meter pricing in pilot areas ranged from $0.25 to $6 per hour, depending on demand for a spot at that time.
- After collecting two years of data, the city found the results of the pilot program promising. One UCLA professor observed, in 2013, the average price of metered parking dropped 1 percent.
- This led to the belief that surge pricing – and awareness that surge pricing was in effect at meters – proved an effective way to ensure parking spots were available.
- Surge pricing impacted residential neighborhoods the least, while meters in retail districts experienced the most drastic price adjustments.
- The takeaway, according to the American Enterprise Institute, was chronic congestion is “almost always” the result of “a failure to apply market pricing”; and market pricing will “almost always eliminate or reduce chronic congestion.”
- In 2014, the full results of SFpark pilot program were released.
- The average on-street meter rates dropped $0.11 per hour; target occupancy (60-80 percent) was met 31 percent more often; blocks were full 16 percent less often; meter-related citations declined almost 25 percent; motorists drove less and fewer greenhouse gases emitted.
