Michael Linder

One moment please, I'm raising my rates.

Parking meter rates jacked up in real time? It’ll soon be reality in Los Angeles, making on-street parking so prohibitive some drivers will be priced out, freeing spaces for others willing to pay several dollars more per hour at a meter that charged far less minutes earlier.

On-demand pricing is on its way to a parking meter near you.

“It’ll be adjusted to what’s going on in that block,” says Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s Peer Ghent of the city’s ExpressPark program now in development. “When the blocks are full, the price will go up. When blocks are empty, the price will go down.”

Meters would also charge more for extended parking. “The first hour might be $2, the next hour might be $3,” says Ghent. “That’s to insure short-term parking.”

Traffic engineers claim up to 90% of traffic congestion is caused by drivers searching for a place to park. They say their scheme will reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions while offering motorists greater convenience — though at a cost calculated to drive away the frugal.

“Most of the time, there’ll always be one or two spaces available on any given block,” says Ghent.

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ExpressPark is quickly becoming a reality. Right now, 5,500 parking spaces are being readied for a one-year pilot program which becomes operational in July, 2011, funded by a federal DOT grant. Street sensors and smart meters are being installed from the Garment District to Chinatown, Civic Center to Little Tokyo, able to send demand data to computers that can boost meter rates in a heartbeat.

Those 10,000 new solar-powered, credit card-reading parking meters now being installed citywide will also be capable of plugging into ExpressPark if the downtown experiment is a success.

City Council, which sets parking fees, has granted LADOT permission to hike existing downtown meter rates up to 50% for the pilot program, increasing the rate at $4/hour meters to $6 when cars pack the streets. The city estimates meter revenues will rise as much as $1.5 million during the test run.

But while the feds prohibit LA from using ExpressPark funding as a revenue booster, Council members will have the freedom to set rates at their whim in 2012 when the grant expires. It’ll be tempting for a cash-strapped city: push a button, parking revenues skyrocket.

Traffic engineers dream of a day when ExpressPark will include a parking guidance system to help drivers locate premium parking spots. Digital message signs along city streets would direct drivers to open spaces.

“You might be driving down Second Street where the block is full and the sign would direct you over to First or Third Street because there’s available parking over there,” says Ghent.

The data would also be made available to Garmin, TomTom and other in-car navigation systems, smartphone apps and Metro’s new 511 traffic hotline.

ExpressPark is also about behavior modification. “If you raise the pricing for parking you can discourage people from bringing cars downtown,” says Ghent, “and fortunately we’ve got Metro’s Blue, Gold and Red Lines.”

But some wonder whether ExpressPark is really about imposing a new class structure on LA’s streets. Will parking become the exclusive turf of those wealthy enough to afford market-driven pricing while poorer drivers (who allegedly have equal access to the city’s parking spaces) are shooed away by exorbitant rates?

ExpressPark may be the latest example of a familiar Orwellian axiom: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

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