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�/T ' �/G/ The Bargain Hunters � As the name implies, bargain hunters are looking for a great deal. They are typically people who will be Downtown for a while and don't want to rack up a large tab for parking. Often times they are employees, merchants, or people on all-day Downtown visits. Typically they are willing to do what it takes to get that bazgain, whether it be circling around the block or walking a few blocks. They just want that bargain. It is useful to note that while the Bargain Hunters are willing to walk, they are not martyrs. They are only willing to walk if it saves them some money. Setting Prices to Meet People's Needs When prices are "correct," the needs of the Bargain Hunters and the Convenience Hunters are met by different parking spaces. This causes them to spread out and ration the parking supply. When the prices are wrong, the Bargain Hunters and Convenience Hunters compete for the same parking spaces, congesting them, even though other spaces may sit empty. Oddly, it seems that most cities get it wrong. If a city's downtown is lively and vibrant and there is a lot of competition for parking, it makes no sense to make all parking free. Yet that is just what many cities insist on doing. Naturally, the on-street parking in front of the shops and restaurants gets completely congested, because it is both a bargain and convenient! Both groups are competing for these same spots. To compensate, rigid time limits are aggressively enforced in an attempt to de-congest the prime spaces and to remove employees from them, but this often results in customers getting inconvenienced by having to move their car every so often or, worse yet, burdened with an expensive ticket for being just a few minutes late. Ironically, employees (the main focus of the time limits and ticket-writing) often develop very sophisticated systems to rotate cars and avoid tickets while still congesting the prime customer parking spaces. Some cities accept that they must charge for parking in their lively downtowns, but they get the prices backwazds. With all commodities, rarer and more coveted products cost more, while less desirable and more plentiful products cost less. This holds true for everything from diamonds to petroleum to limited edition Darth Vader action figures. This is the basic law of supply and demand. Why would parking not be subject to these same forces? Well, it is. In downtowns, the most desirable parking spaces are the on-street spaces right in front of the businesses that are major attractors. On-street spaces on side streets aze usually a little less desirable but still pretty good. Surface lots are a little less desirable, and garages seems to be even less desirable to most parkers (although weather conditions can make garages more desirable that surface lots at times). Spaces located beyond a 3 to 5 minute walk from the parker's destination (whether on the street, or in a garage or lot) are the very least desirable spaces. Yet how many cities price their on-street parking spaces cheaply, while chazging more for garage spaces? This is even worse than making all spaces free! Why would someone want to pay $3 per hour to park in a garage 2 blocks away when you can pay 50 cents an hour to park right on the main street? Cities with this sort of pricing system often build expensive new garages expecting to relieve their parking problems, only to �nd the new garages underused while the main street remains congested. Downtown Redwood City's current pricing system is not perfect, but it is not the worst, either. It is illustrated in Figure 4 on Page 36. Most parking is 25 cents an hour, while some peripheral page 16