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You never can tell

An old friend of my wife's is visiting us for this week. Today we decided to make a day trip to the quaint little town of Niagara-on-the-Lake in a rental car. While the skirts went to see a play that was part of the Shaw Festival (appropriately enough named after the original moonbat), I walked around the town to see if there would be anything interesting there. Nothing much, really, just a lovely little town. Afterwards, we took a trip to the nearby Niagara Falls and also checked out the casino hotel. It was otherwise just like its bigger brothers in Vegas except that by law, there was no smoking allowed and no free alcohol being served.

It's been quite a while since I last used or even consciously saw a parking meter. When I went back to the car to add an extra loonie to the meter so that we would have time to eat somewhere in the little Niagara-on-the-Lake, I started thinking about the famous "parking angels" who are employed by some cities that want to seem friendly. These parking angels simply walk around that city and add more money to the parking meters whose time is running low, and this way make people happier and more relaxed. This pay-it-forward scheme looks good on paper and it feels like sticking it to the man, but I could not help but wonder whether this really is a good thing to do.

For starters, the very fact that parking meters exist already tells me that parking is a scarce resource in that particular town. The parking angels allow people to park for a longer time, and by doing so turn the available parking into an even scarcer resource. As much as the people who avoid a parking ticket may praise these parking angels, other people who are futilely driving around looking for the nonexistent parking spots should curse them. By employing these parking angels, the city creates smiles on some people, at the cost of creating frowns on some other people. Is this a good tradeoff? I don't know, it may be, but you can't just declare that it is without at least acknowledging the existence of the tradeoff.

The parking angels phenomenon seems to me to be another example of the classic "seen and not seen" phenomenon that seems to crop up pretty much in all walks of life. When the people who are better off because of some policy clearly benefit from it directly, whereas the people who are worse off because of that policy do so only indirectly, only the former group gets a say whereas the latter group cannot mount an opposition, and the policy is thus believed to only have beneficial effects. Of course, we can see the exact same phenomenon all over, especially in basically all subsidies and union jobs. If you are the one who gets the subsidy or has the union job, I am sure that it is great for you, but for everybody else it just sucks.

While I was writing this, I also remembered another similarly misguided attempt to create friendly customer service that some stores like to do. In the checkout line, the cashier takes a lot of time to help the customer current at the checkout and leaves the register to go get him something. Again, I am sure that this is great for that particular customer, but it sucks for everybody else who is standing in the line after him. Steve Dutch aptly noted in his essay "How to Go Out of Business" that "personal service" is great if you're the one getting the service, but for everyone else, it often means "lousy and inattentive service."

In fact, I wish that supermarkets and other stores started to offer a special "no problems and no lip" line for people who just want to pay for their groceries and get out. Now that would be truly good customer service. Other customers who want to complain about the fruit they selected or are not sure if the product they picked up really is on sale or who want to rummage through their purses for coupons that are long expired could then use another checkout.

(Speaking of which, I noticed that Professor Dutch has a brand new essay out, "Nutty 9-11 Physics". I will recommend it and link to it before even reading it: that is how much I trust the quality of the essays by this man. I mean it, I am not even going to begin to read it until I press "Publish Post" in this tab.)

2 comments

For starters, the very fact that parking meters exist already tells me that parking is a scarce resource in that particular town.

Not necessarily. The town installs parking meters, and they could do it merely as a measure to collect revenue. It's not necessarily a measure to restrict demand. If individuals owned various parking spaces and could put their own meters on them, then we'd know what the market rate for parking was.

You could have a town with seemingly very little demand for parking, but since the town has essentially cornered the market on street parking, it can put meters on every potential space and then charge whatever it wants to. The driver's choice is to either pay up, not do business in the town and thus not park there, or find a private garage, if that garage could offer parking for less than a meter. (That essentially places an upper bound on what towns can charge).

The existence of parking meters may simply signal that the town thinks this is a good way to collect money from people, many of whom may not be residents of the town (especially if the town gives its residents parking permits).

Your rambling about these "parking angels" makes no sense. If someone needs a parking space, why do you think they would leave when the parking meter runs out instead of just adding more money?

And why would anyone feel more comfortable leaving their car on an unpaid parking space, when they cannot be sure a parking angel drops by to pay for the parking?

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