Downtown Seattle has the dubious distinction of having the sixth costliest garage parking among cities in the United States, according to reporting by the Seattle Times' Susan Gilmore. It's a competitive issue to be taken seriously, especially if it hurts downtown businesses. On the other hand, garages charge what the market will bear and Seattle has a dense downtown with plenty of attractions and assets. (And one doesn't have to own a car here).

But even "free" out in the suburbs isn't really free. The externalities, such as environmental damage and climate-altering emissions, of big surface parking lots, wide streets, extensive car use, etc. aren't priced in to conventional studies or public policies. Much of this is an artifact of a moment in history when energy was very cheap and debt low. Not for nothing are many suburbs suffering worse from the recession and its aftermath than center cities.

Beyond that, "free" parking is heavily subsidized, although these costs are largely hidden from drivers. Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at UCLA, analyzes the costs and consequences of this in his book, The High Cost of Free Parking. Tyler Cohen has written about it for the New York Times.

He writes, "If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove."

This isn't what most Americans want to hear, even if climate change is happening now and we're deeply in debt maintaining armies in the oil-rich Middle East, even if a high-cost energy future is inevitable. But reality will happen whether we like it or not. Too bad we're cutting transit funding and failing to retrofit suburbia with abundant transportation options.

Links from the week:

• The damage already done by the debt-ceiling debate || Seeking Alpha


• Economists find feds underestimate the cost of climate change || Scientific American


• Are bank examiners to blame for slow job growth? || Simon Johnson on NYT Economix


• Getting Fannie's role in the financial collapse so wrong || The American Prospect


• Why Fannie and Freddie are not to blame for the crisis || NY Review of Books


• Six reasons why driving has peaked in U.S. cities || The Infrastructurist


• Guess who's cashing in on the bailout? || Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone


• Why America needs an infrastructure bank || NY Times

Today's Econ Haiku:

A debt-ceiling deal?
A manufactured crisis
While millions lack jobs