Relative prices and charging for park-and-ride in Wellington

The New Zealand Herald reported this morning:

A Wellington pro-transport lobby group is proposing to charge commuters to park at the city's bus and train stations - while some mayors say this will drive people away from public transport.

The proposal is part of the draft Regional Transport Plan 2021, aimed at increasing public transport usage by 40 percent within 10 years.

But Kāpiti Coast mayor K Gurunathan says while he understands the intention, adding an extra cost to park at train stations will backfire and deter commuters from using public transport anywhere on their journey.

He believes when the Transmission Gully State Highway 1 bypass opens in September more people will already be tempted to drive to Wellington. Without first providing better suburban buses to the railway stations, driving to Wellington will become the most attractive option...

But Living Streets Aotearoa spokesperson Mike Mellor says free carparks at train stations subsidise car-use, and the plan is the right idea.

"Park and ride is actually a very expensive way of increasing public transport usage by not that much. Even a full car park is barely a trainload of passengers, for instance.

"It costs a lot of money, it encourages local car use, and it means that that land is not available for productive purposes like transit-oriented development where you build productive buildings round transport hubs. And it also often makes a really unpleasant environment to access the station by any other means." 

The Kāpiti Coast mayor has this right, and Living Streets Aotearoa needs to check their assumptions. Relative prices matter. When the relative price (or cost) of something increases, we tend to do less of it. So, when you make park-and-ride more expensive (increasing its relative price), people will do less park-and-ride. They will do more driving to Wellington instead. That doesn't mean that every public transport user will switch to driving, only that some will now find it to be relatively less attractive to use the trains (because of the park-and-ride charges), and relatively more attractive to drive into downtown Wellington instead. To claim that free car parking encourages car use, when it probably encourages short car rides to the train station rather than long car rides into downtown Wellington, is misleading at best.

None of this is to say that the proposal to charge park-and-ride customers for parking isn't a good idea. Free car parking for public transport users seems to me to be a bit of an oxymoron. If you coupled charging for park-and-ride with better bus links to the train stations, you might end up in a situation where more people use public transport, rather than fewer. However, you could also have achieved that if you had better bus links and no charging for car parking. Again, it's all about relative prices, and better bus links lower the cost of getting to the rail stations (and the relative price of using public transport). It all rather depends on how much discouragement of public transport use you are willing to tolerate.

Rather than heading off into leftfield and arguing about land availability while seemingly ignoring how public transport users would respond, Living Streets Aotearoa would have been better to focus on the relative prices.