Emerging Ideas Roundup: Culture & politics

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Not surprisingly, CEI is supported financially by ExxonMobil, Amoco, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute, and other corporations whose emission-generating products do more than blow dandelion seeds.

This isn't the first time CEI has addressed global warming in its defense of unfettered enterprise. First it claimed global warming didn't exist. Then it claimed that humans have nothing to do with it. This, however, is an entirely new approach: Maybe it exists. And maybe we're causing it. But carbon dioxide is just so darn cute. Embrace it. Feel its gentle breeze on your face. Never mind the hurricanes and melting glaciers.

View the ads for yourself at www.cei.org.

By Jennifer Errick, reprinted from In Balance (Summer 2006), the newsletter of the Center for a New American Dream; www.newdream.org.

Getting Out of Park

Cities experiment with ways to reduce the tolls of hunting for a spot

By Dan Orzech

The next time you score a parking spot downtown, consider this: The most expensive part of parking may not be the quarters you feed into the meter.

First, there's the time drain. On average, you'll spend eight minutes looking for a parking place on downtown streets, according to 16 studies in 11 American cities, says Donald Shoup, a UCLA professor of urban planning and author of the book The High Cost of Free Parking (American Planning Association, 2005).

Then there are the hidden costs. If you're driving around for eight minutes looking for a space, so are lots of other people. Add up all those slow-moving cars gulping down gas and spewing out exhaust fumes, and you've got an enormous, and largely unnoticed, environmental toll. In just one 15-block area in Los Angeles that Shoup has studied, cars hunting for parking on the street drive a total of 945,000 miles each year. That's enough to make it around the earth 38 times, or to the moon and back.

With nearly a third of cars, on average, searching for parking in downtown areas, congestion has gotten so bad that some municipalities are now charging people just to drive downtown. In London, that's enforced by video cameras recording the license plate numbers of cars entering the city center.

Ironically, it's the cities that are causing much of the problem, with artificially low meter rates. At noon on a weekday in 20 American cities, says Shoup, parking on the street costs about five dollars an hour less than off-street parking.

Some cities, including California's Redwood City and Old Pasadena, are experimenting with a new approach: constantly adjusting the price of street parking so that no more than 85 percent of the parking places on a city block are occupied at any given time. The theory is that higher prices compel more drivers to seek off-street spots.

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