THE ECONOMICS OF REGULATORY PARKING POLICIES - THE (IM)POSSIBILITIES OF PARKING POLICIES IN TRAFFIC REGULATION

This article contains an economic analysis of regulatory parking polic ies as a substitute to road pricing. The scope for such policies is di scussed, after which a simple diagrammatic analysis is presented, focu sing on the differences between the use of parking fees and physical r estrictions on parking space supply. The former is found to be superio r for three reasons: an information argument, a temporal efficiency ar gument and an intertemporal efficiency argument. Finally, a spatial pa rking model is developed, showing that it may be possible to overcome the difficulty of regulatory parking policies not differentiating acco rding to distance driven by specifying the appropriate spatial pattern of parking fees, making individuals respond to (spatial) parking fee differentials.