Slate’s Matt Yglesias responds! | Rockville Councilmember Tom Moore

I’ll give Matt Yglesias this: He responds to his e-mail extremely quickly. He got back to me in just over half an hour this afternoon with a gracious note:

This “externalities” analysis is a common but fundamentally wrongheaded misconception.

Suppose some brilliant Chinese chef wants to open up a restaurant in Rockville and the owner of Sichuan Jin River gets worried that the new establishment will poach his customers and cost him business. The city council wouldn’t step in and say “hey wait a minute, your proposal for a new restaurant has too many externalities we won’t let you open.” It’s true that it would be more convenient for incumbent businesses to not face competition, but that’s not a public policy problem.

By the same token, some incumbent business owners may be deriving benefit from existing availability of street parking (or other municipally owned parking) and may not want to share that parking with new people. But this isn’t externalities in the sense of pollution.

At any rate, I apologize if you feel that I was picking on Rockville. This is actually something I’ve written about with reference to quite a few cities all across America in a whole variety of contexts and isn’t any particular knock on [you] or on Rockville. If you’re at all interested in a real expert analysis of parking regulations, I’d strongly recommend UCLA professor Donald Shoup and his book The High Cost of Free Parking.

Best,
Matthew Yglesias

I responded tonight:

Mr. Yglesias,

Thank you for your thoughtful and extremely quick response! The high cost of free parking has been on my mind since I’ve been in office, and I’ve been trying to move Rockville in the right direction on it. I’ll nab the book and let it illuminate my further movements on this.

I’m going to have to disagree with your Sichuan Jin River analogy. I would totally step in to crush that other guy. The free market goes out the window when a local treasure like Jin River’s garlic eggplant is endangered.

Pollution’s not the only kind of externality — with parking in urban areas, we have a “tragedy of the commons” variety when cars spill over into other types of neighborhoods that can’t absorb them. It’s not quite as tragic as cities used to think it was, and modern public policy has changed to reflect this. But urban parking is certainly not an area where regulating it is tantamount to Stalinism.

Thank you as well for your gracious apology; it did indeed feel like you were picking on us, even if it did delight my parents.

Your good taste in Chinese restaurants has partially restored my faith in your analytical powers. (You live nearby, do you?)

All the best,

Tom Moore