This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 11th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In big cities parking spots for locals are an underpriced asset.

And like many assets controlled by the government even

homeowners might need to pay more for their on-street parking.

Cato visiting fellow Ike Brandon makes his case for free parking high cost on transit.

I work at the Cato Institute, should come as no surprise to anyone listening to this,

and I'm given essentially a choice between some money toward transit or a parking

space.

Parking is of course limited, but we have it here in our building and so what's

wrong with that problem in a big city like Washington DC is we have made this implicit choice that that free parking

should have some kind of primacy over everything else.

And the reality, it's a point made, is that free parking is not free.

It comes with an enormous opportunity cost and in the regulation article that just came out,

I try to point out an opportunity cost of free parking that people haven't hit on.

And that's the fact that in Washington, D.C., what free parking has done is it's caused our

mass transit system, specifically the bus system that services

mainly the low-income people, it's caused it to operate much slower than it otherwise

would. What's more, it's created a situation where we have lots of people fighting every single

new development in major residential areas in Washington, D.C. solely because they don't want more competition for their

nearly free on-street parking.

What other cities deal with a similar kind of thing, which you're describing on-street parking

...