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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

> I'm skeptical of demand-based parking pricing after a local entertainment company started using it. $5-$100 for parking depending on how close the lot is to the venue moderated by big TV screens on each lot.

So what's wrong with this? I think most people would opt for the $5. If that's the case, that's where people would park. As incentivized by the parking structure. I don't see a problem. The lot operator can change their algorithm, and parking consumers will respond according to their value curve.

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There are only so many lots within a few blocks of this venue. Most are owned by the single company. Parking price is not known ahead of time. The full price (including parking) of attending the event isn't know until you arrive, after a long drive into the city. Sure $5 is fine, but it's demand-based. There's nothing that prevents them from making the price floor $50 for a large name artist, and attendees would be caught in a lurch. The whole operation rubs me the wrong way.

And the demand pricing always skews one way: to the parking operator. The old daily price is now the new baseline and it only moves up from there. You know your lot will be full during the big game, so might as well extort them I guess is what they are teaching in business schools these days. Disturbing times ahead.

If your parking lot is full, then that still means that all the people who came later won't be able to park. Raising the price excludes a different set, but it's not immediately obvious to me which one is better.

Probably part of it is increasing wealth inequality playing a role. Now that there are more rich people around prices affordable to this group can be charged and still fill out events. Decades ago there were fewer of this sort of potential customer when more people made closer to median wages. In the end the median worker suffers from fewer affordable entertainment options as these are binned to higher incomes. The most obvious model of this is the ski or resort town where this sort of demographic crisis can play out in mere years after a resort opening in a formal rural township with highly uneven economic demographic growth. New housing supply is almost always exclusively made for higher income people due to the cost of construction and land demanding certain margins, so median wage workers are further hurt as they wait for this new housing to depreciate over decades and only if new housing continues to be built unhindered (not a sure thing unlike the yearly new to used car market).

Because it leads to quieting other forms of entertainment in the form of overall higher parking fees sapping up limited disposable income. Turns out, people go to fewer concerts when their outlay is $300, and then there are fewer concerts scheduled, and fewer local venues, and then fewer concerts that aren't $300 ticket arena fillers because that is all that is left of the market after its been hollowed out through perverse incentives.

If your thesis is true, then there are also fewer people paying for parking. When the parking lot owners notice this, they will probably lower prices.

The issue is parking is not the impetus for this demand. It is an anchor on the demand due to its effect on prices but not an impetus to trigger demand. No one says "hey wait, lets go to the $300 concert now, I just saw this parking lot three blocks away slashed their daily rate from $25 down to $2 because they didn't fill it up!" In fact most parking people pay is obligate. In other words they are paying whatever is asked because they have no choice if they want to seek the event or whatever point of interest out, not the other way around. If that were the case the other way around the most interesting places in town would be surrounded by miles of free surface parking lots, when really that mainly represents places like walmart and not places like concert venues or bar districts or museum districts.

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