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American Vision – November 19, 2009
The Inefficiency of Cheap Grace
By Eric Rauch
The city of Atlanta recently announced that it was going to privatize its parking enforcement. As of November 1, ParkAtlanta, a privately-owned company, took over responsibility for enforcing the city’s parking meters and ticketing, as well as the booting and towing of illegally-parked cars. The seven-year contract guarantees the city a $5.5 million paycheck each year, meaning a $38.5 million boost for the city, in addition to getting rid of the hassles of maintaining its own publicly-funded force. Atlanta is only one of many cities that have recently adopted the private option. Cities that have been privatized in whole or part (including Anaheim and Baltimore), have seen remarkable reductions in cost as well as an increase in annual revenue. While not everyone is convinced that the private option is the way to go, no one can argue that it is less efficient.
In fact, some even argue that the private companies’ high efficiency is a good enough reason for NOT adopting it. The host of an Atlanta morning radio program and many of his listeners were in agreement recently that November 1 would spell the end of expired-meter “grace” and the dawn of a getsapo-like parking police “reign of terror.” Listeners called in from all over the city, relating horror stories of privatized parking attendants writing tickets and having vehicles towed to the shadier side of town with apparent malevolent glee. When the co-host of the program dared to suggest that when a parking meter expires, the car IS technically illegally-parked, she was berated as being a clueless suburbanite who reveled in seeing cars ticketed and towed. It was all rather interesting to listen to on my way to work that morning.
Since I am not a usual participant to these morning debates, I wasn’t prepared with the phone number to the station. I wanted to call in to the host and ask him a few questions of my own, but he was too busy decrying the Nazi regime of private meter-maids to give the phone number for the studio. So I decided to write this article instead, because I think the host’s nearsightedness in the area of parking efficiency is shared by many, many others.
The first question I would have asked the host if I had been able to call that morning would have went something like this: “Have you been to the DMV lately?” Most of us have been the victims of the DMV at one point or another in our lives. If you live anywhere near a major city, you know just how frustrating a simple trip to renew your driver’s license can be. A visit to a major metropolitan DMV is a case study in government inefficiency. I have yet to talk to anyone who looked forward to going to one. I have known people who have driven twenty-five miles away from Atlanta in order to experience small-town incompetence, rather than enduring a half-day (at best) of big-city incompetence. But why would I ask the morning radio host, who is on a kick over private parking enforcement, if he has been to the DMV lately? Because it provides a counter-example and an agreed-upon standard of governmental ineptitude.
Public date: November 19th, 2009
