Labour’s car-park planA lesson in parkonomics, for Jeremy Corbyn

ONE of my most painful memories, from an otherwise happy day, comes from the autumn of 2005. My wife was labouring with our first child, and I had driven her to the Royal Free Hospital in London. There was, as usual, a slow-moving queue for the car park. Sitting in a reclining position is painful when you are in labour, so my wife got out of the car and went to lean against a railing. Behind us, drivers started hooting impatiently. 

If somebody had at that moment offered me a parking space, I would gladly have taken it, no matter what the cost. Which helps to explain why Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal to abolish parking charges in English hospitals is such a lousy idea. Even by the low standards set by the Labour Party under Mr Corbyn’s leadership, the policy is economically illiterate. If enacted, it would surely harm patients. 

Free parking is not generally thought of as a birthright in Britain—as it is in most of America, for example. If you drive to a British cinema, swimming pool or restaurant, you are likely to have to pay to store your car. Many residential streets are metered or reserved for local residents. Unlike in America and Asia, British cities seldom force developers to build large car parks around their buildings. After all, goes the thinking, a plentiful supply of free parking just encourages people to drive. 

The point of charging for parking is to control demand and avoid a commons tragedy, in which a finite resource is over-exploited to everyone’s detriment. Ideally, parking would be priced so that about one in ten spaces is unoccupied at any given time: that way, everybody who is prepared to pay for a space will quickly be able to find one. This is roughly what commercial multi-storey parking garages try to achieve, and it is also what some hospitals do. The Royal Free hospital currently charges £3 ($3.90) an hour for parking. 

Of course everybody wants to be able to park cheaply or for nothing. But when parking is in short supply, the alternative to paid parking is not really free parking; it is often no parking at all. If English hospitals stopped charging, the car parks would quickly fill up—something that has happened even in relatively uncrowded Scotland, where hospitals do not normally charge. More visitors and staff would drive. And what would stop people from dropping off their cars at the hospital and popping round the corner for a bit of shopping? 

If English hospitals were to abolish parking charges they would instantly give themselves a commons problem. This would have ugly consequences. It is bad enough when cinemas under-price parking, and you miss the first 15 minutes of “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” because you are cruising for a space. If a hospital in a crowded city stopped charging, it would mean more frail, elderly people staggering into the accident and emergency ward on their own as their sons and daughters search for a space, more parents panicking as a child who has hit her head lolls in the back seat, and more labouring women leaning against railings. Anybody who votes Labour because he likes the sound of Mr Corbyn’s proposal had better hope he never needs his head examined.