From Peter
Guest:
The Economist
recently published a survey showing parking rates in different cities thus
giving another airing to the old adage “lies, dam lies and statistics”. The article refers to the daily and monthly
charges in various cities across the world and notes that parking charges are
holding firm despite the recession and that charges are higher in Europe and
(wow) lowest in India.
Let’s
look at this in a bit more depth. It costs about a thousand dollars a month to
park in London according to the table. However,
this figure is dominated by municipal parking lots where the price mechanism
has no reverse gear. So boom or bust the charges are only going one way. It costs $26 a month to park in Mumbai but
virtually all of that city’s parking is still free. And do the figures actually mean what they
say? Ok it costs 40 times more to park in London than Mumbai but since the
average London parker is probably earning 50 times what the guy in Mumbai gets
which is really cheaper?
The
numbers are numbers and I think they tell us nothing about either the relative
real cost of parking in the various cities or about parking charges and the
state of the economy. What might tell us something is how parking costs have
altered and how full the parking is and was two years ago.
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