[sustran] Re: distance based fuel tax technology test

Craig August Johnson caj24 at cornell.edu
Thu Sep 23 15:48:11 JST 2004


Dear Paul,

I appreciated reading your article and found it quite thought-provoking.

One thing I am interested in though, is that your article (nor does much
of the literature I have read) address the cost of a parked vehicle.

Increasing the usage-based costs and decreasing or variablizing
fixed-based cost would make it cheaper to buy a car but more expensive to
drive one. Perhaps, if such a policy would be implemented, one would see
more people buying cars for the first time as well an increase in people
buying second cars.
While this policy would be successful in mitigating traffic congestion,
this policy would do nothing to solve the problem of lack of parking, and
perhaps might even exacerbate the parking problem by increasing the demand
for parking.
In a place like Singapore with little land and high density, an increase
in the parking requirements could have potentially quite high costs, in
terms of higher parking requirements for commercial and residential
developers, more land needing to be devoted for parking by the city, and
higher parking costs for the car-owner.

So I guess my question is, Would an increase in parking demand really be
much of a problem?
And if so, how does one take into account an increase in the cost of
parking if one variabilizes the fixed-based costs?


Thanks,
Craig Johnson




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