| (www.ForYourBrainOnly.hk) Balancing Parking: |
How to balance the demand for and the supply of parking spaces
As reported in a certain business oriented magazine, an Economics Ph.D. candidate was posed, a like of, the following oral question:
There are 2 parking lots, one small nearby, the other large, distance away; how to make people to go to park into the large lot?
The “right” answer is: of course to make use of the pricing mechanism, to charge more for parking at the nearby small lot, less for the farther away lot, until it comes to an equilibrium.
Alas, the situation is far from apocryphal; the situation is every real for an airport of any significance. The small “parking” lot is the limited space along the curb side. Guess what, there is absolutely no major airport employing any pricing mechanism to control the demand for parking at the curbside. Instead, invariably, they all constantly patrol the curbside to limit the quantity (amount of time for space occupation) supplied to a demand to strike a balance. So much for Economic theory's practicality in the real world.
