The Tragedy of the Commons
Alright doodz, this week I wanted to explore an economic concept that I heard about on Planet Money the other week, called the Tragedy of the Commons. Wikipedia defines it as “an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource through their collective action.”
The phrase was first described by biologist Garrett Hardin in 1968, who explained how shared environmental resources are overused and eventually depleted. He compared shared resources to a common grazing pasture; in this scenario, everyone with rights to the pasture grazes as many animals as possible, acting in self-interest for the greatest short-term personal gain. Eventually, they use up all the grass in the pasture; the shared resource is depleted and no longer useful.
The interesting application of this was to public parking. In fact, this became contentious enough that a UCLA professor, Donald Shoup, wrote a book called “The High Cost of Free Parking.”
According to Shoup, most of the woes of our car culture result not from the automobile itself but from the lack of attention we pay to parking in America. Suburban shopping malls with their wide deserts of surface parking are still the norm in most of the country, and it’s estimated that America contains an astounding three parking spaces for every man, woman, and child.
Shoup says that it’s not only the overabundance of surface parking in America, but the fact that 99 percent of it is free, that is creating a “tragedy of the commons” of national significance. Free parking, Shoup says, is an enormous public subsidy that makes driving less expensive than its true cost, skews transportation choices, increases housing prices, degrades our environment, and encourages sprawl.
Shoup popularized the theory that an 85% occupancy rate of on-street parking spaces would be the most efficient use of public parking.[8] When cars at any given destination in a city (a block or group of blocks) occupy more than 85% of on-street parking spaces, then cars arriving at that destination are forced to circle the block for a few minutes in order to find an unoccupied parking space. This small search time per car creates a surprisingly large amount of traffic congestion, because typically, many cars are searching for parking simultaneously during peak driving times. This wastes time and fuel and increases air pollution. Shoup calls the phenomenon of excess driving as a result of under-priced parking as “cruising for parking”.
Apologists of Shoup’s theories passionately refer to themselves as “Shoupistas” and go around espousing his claims. This became part of the inspiration for an app called Haystack, which was featured on the aforementioned Planet Money episode, and failed fantastically after an initial meteoric rise. You can learn more about Haystack here.
All in all, the Tragedy of the Commons is a bit of a kerfuffle, and it can be found all over the place in everyday life. Check out some other examples from the sources down below.
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