Tom Keane

The Brave New World Of Boston Parking

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh wants to emulate San Francisco, jacking up parking meter rates and even have them float up and down depending on demand and the time of day. Fees could be as high as $7 an hour. If you’re thinking this sounds like a back-door tax hike, a clever way for a revenue-hungry city to add to its coffers, you’re probably right. That notwithstanding, however, Walsh’s ideas make sense.

The coin-fed meters we all know and love produce some perverse behaviors. In downtown areas, parking garages often have plenty of spaces available, but motorists avoid them. The reason is that parking meters are dramatically cheaper. It costs $12 for an hour inside the Boston Common Garage. But if you’re lucky enough to find one of the metered spaces that line the roadway entering the garage, you’ll only pay $1.25. That difference (almost 1000 percent more!) is big enough that all but the rich or those on expense accounts will keep looking for a meter, circling city blocks, hoping to spot a car about to pull out of a space. Indeed, the phenomenon is so common that several traffic studies have found that an average of 30 percent — and sometimes as high as half — of all cars on downtown streets are cruising for parking. The results are congested streets, wasted fuel, increased air pollution and surly motorists.

Moreover, the system itself is unfair. Those lucky enough to see a car leaving can snag a cheap spot. Others — late for appointments or perhaps just frustrated — give up and pay the far higher garage rates.

But, just as the wonders of technology have changed everything from taking taxis to making travel plans, so too our digital age is transforming the lowly parking meter. Meters can now take credit cards. They can be connected to the internet. They can be made smart, knowing, for example, if cars are parked next to them or not.

It’s this brave new world of parking that enthralls City Hall. With the new meters, rates can be adjusted on the fly, going up as demand increases and dropping when there are few cars searching for spaces. (This kind of “surge” pricing is the same strategy employed by Uber and Lyft as well as by many public transit systems around the country.) Smartphone apps feeding off information from meters could tell drivers where to find empty spots (much like the ill-fated Haystack, a parking app that caused controversy a year ago). Any economist would tell you that such a scheme makes sense. Right now, inexpensive meter rates, fixed prices and a lack of information create excessive demand and traffic congestion. By closely matching price to supply and demand, spaces would be more fairly and efficiently allocated.

All of this runs headlong into a few objections, however. One is the attitude of many car owners: they want the world to cater to them. Roads should be free, gas should be cheap and parking should be plentiful. I’m not immune to that way of thinking myself, but the rational part of me knows that parking is a good like any other — and one I should be willing to pay for.

Others protest that increasing meter fees is unfair, a burden on the poor. That objection is true, of course, but it’s true of any price change, be it food, housing or the cost of movies. The problems of poverty and low-wage jobs are urgent (and much the focus of the current presidential campaign), but they require different solutions than simply abandoning the price system.

And finally, city retailers fear that making parking more expensive will hurt their business, pushing customers out to suburban malls. Their concern is legitimate but also can be solved by the new, internet-connected meters. Very short-term parking — say 30 minutes — can be made cheap, encouraging people to shop but not spend the day wandering around. Or perhaps retailers could offer vouchers to customers that could be scanned at meters to reduce parking fees.

Granted, dropping quarters for parking is an old and comfortable habit. But Walsh is right to think it a habit worth changing. And despite the higher prices, my guess is drivers too would eventually find easier parking and less crowded streets a trade off worth their while.

This column was first published in Cognoscenti on September 30, 2015.

Politicians And Privacy: Why Text Messages Should Be Off Limits

First Boston Mayor Marty Walsh refuses to make public his text messages and then, a few weeks later, Governor Charlie Baker follows suit. Good government types are in a tizzy. Texts should be public documents, they cry, the same as any other written records. Openness and transparency are the enemies of corruption and back-room dealing.

The two men are right to resist. As much as we like to deride them, even politicians have some right to privacy. Moreover, and most importantly, good government depends not only on openness, but also on privacy: governance itself is better if elected officials can say and speak their minds, unfettered by the fear that every offhand, casual remark is grist for the public mill.

The mini-scandal developed over the last two months, spurred by journalists who had made requests to City Hall for Walsh’s text messages — first for those relating to Boston’s doomed Olympic bid and then, more broadly, for pretty much everything. In August, Walsh said no. The mayor offered up some fatuous excuses for why (a lack of “technical capacity”) but in likelihood Walsh — like Tom Brady in DeflateGate — just didn’t want to release messages he thought private and potentially embarrassing. And just last week, Governor Charlie Baker also declined to release his texts, asserting the governor’s office is exempt from the state’s public records law.

That law is what’s at issue. Written before the advent of the digital age, it — like other similar laws around the country — rests on one big distinction. Written documents are considered public records. Oral communications are not. Thus, a letter from a pol to a constituent is a public record. But a phone call to that same constituent about exactly the same subject is not.

Why the difference?

One reason may be technological: back when the law was enacted, it was easier to keep paper records than to somehow monitor and record oral communications. But while that may have been once true, these days, it’s not. With a little help from, say, the NSA, it should be easy to set up a system monitoring, recording and even transcribing every phone call a politician makes. Indeed, it might even be feasible to demand (as many do of cops) that politicians wear body cameras recording and transcribing whatever they might say.

If you’re not exactly comfortable with that idea, horrified perhaps at the invasion of privacy, consider another reason we distinguish between paper and oral communications. There’s a general sense that a document is more formal and well-thought-out, something that has received a measure of consideration and stands as a record of how a decision is being made. Moreover, documents are things we generally maintain for a long time. In a sense, we intend for them to be read by others and — when it comes to government — those others should include ordinary citizens.

Oral communications are different: extemporaneous, casual, often ill-considered or carelessly expressed. In a conversation, people will banter, bounce ideas off of each other, and test out theories, sometimes saying things they never would put in a written document.

If you buy into the merits of that distinction — paper documents are public, while oral communications are private — then the question arises: are emails, texts and other forms of electronic communication really the same as traditional paper documents? Or are they more like oral communication?

Granted, texts and emails are “written” (although, with text-to-speech and speech-to-text processing, that’s increasingly less true). And right now, the public records law makes no distinction between paper and electronic (and for good reason: a report in PDF truly is no different from the same report on paper). But on a day-to-day basis, emails and especially texts really function as a kind of oral communication. They are just a different way of having a conversation.

Indeed, they are a better way to have a conversation. Phone calls are hard to set up and tend to drag on. There are the opening pleasantries, the settling down to business, and then the awkward efforts to ring off. Texting has none of those problems. In the hands of technologically-savvy politicians, it becomes a rapid and efficient way of chatting back and forth with a wide variety of people. Good politicians rely on information from myriad sources to figure out what is going on and how they should react. Texting helps them get all of that information.

And what happens if we insist that texts are public documents? Politicians will simply stop text messaging. That, in effect, is what the late Boston Mayor Tom Menino did. Notorious for refusing to even use email, Menino wasn’t a technophobe; he just wanted his communications to be private. But to put that burden on all other politicians — to say that they can’t take advantage of modern technology to better do their jobs — would be foolish.

Text messages as public records? As a texter might say: TMI.

This column was first published in Cognoscenti on September 24, 2015.