The invisible urban car subsidy
Europe’s public spaces are littered with idle cars whose owners pay almost nothing for the privilege of storing them there. It's a subsidy worth billions, mostly to the wealthy.
Cities around the world yesterday celebrated World Car-Free Day by restricting downtown driving, giving city-dwellers a few precious hours without blaring horns, pollution, traffic jams and danger. Neighbours chatted in the street, children learned to ride bicycles, and everyone got around more quickly than usual.
Car-free days show how most of the perceived ‘need’ for cars in inner cities is driven by problems that cars themselves cause. Cycling to school is too dangerous because of cars. The tram is always late because of cars. Crime is tolerated on the metro because the people who could fix it are in cars. When all the cars are removed, none are necessary.
Fewer than half of Brussels households own a car, but we all suffer in their chokehold. Yesterday, as I strolled happily around the city with a friend, his newborn son pulling clean air into his tiny lungs, we got a rare glimpse of how much better our urban fabric could be.
A glimpse, but not the full picture. For even when no cars are being driven, they line both sides of nearly every street, occupying huge swathes of public space so that their owners can hop in and drive at a moment’s notice.
And what do the owners pay for this privilege? Almost nothing.
Residential street parking is among the biggest subsidies handed out by governments across Europe, and it’s barely remarked upon. It’s so ubiquitous that a street not lined with cars looks somehow wrong.
In my Brussels neighbourhood, the market value of a covered parking space is between €1,000-€2,000 a year. A street spot right outside your house is presumably worth not much less. And yet the government hands them out for €25 a year.
This meets every definition of a bad subsidy. It primarily benefits older and wealthier people, who are more likely to own a car. It nudges city-dwellers to drive short journeys, which harms everyone around them including other drivers. And it’s discriminatory: you can’t claim this free slice of public space for any other purpose.
Money on the table
There are more than 300,000 cars registered in the greater Brussels region. Let’s assume only one-third of them benefit from public street parking, and let’s put the market price of a parking space at €1,000 a year, the lower end of our range. That’s still €100 million of public goods given to car-owners each year for parking alone (company car tax breaks add millions more).
In other words, if the city charged market rates for long-term car storage on public land, it could in theory bank €100 million a year or more. That would pay for a half-billion-euro overhaul of its public transport system every five years.
Of course, Brussels might not actually rake in €100 million a year. Many people might instead sell their cars, realising they aren’t worth their true cost. This would free up space on every street where the city could create safe cycle lanes and bicycle storage, plant trees, or install car-sharing and micromobility hubs – further reducing the incentives to own a car.
The pattern is repeated across Europe, implying a total subsidy worth several billion euros. While researching this article I looked up two capital cities at random: Lisbon and Budapest. Households in both cities pay nothing at all for a parking permit, and can even get a second one for a token fee. The more cars you own, the more free public space you’re entitled to!
Tunnel vision
Why has no large city managed to break this pattern? Most obviously, politicians tend to be older and wealthier than average which, as noted above, makes them more likely to own cars themselves. Older and wealthier people are also more likely to vote. The half of urban residents who don’t own cars thus have less political power than the half who do.
Another issue is inertia. After decades of setting aside public space for private cars, it feels like the natural order; we are so used to seeing idle cars occupying every free square metre that we fail to see the value of that space, or how else it could be used. Against this background, charging a market rate for street parking would look like just another tax.
Then there is the limit of imagination. Unless you’re closely engaged with transport policy, it’s easy to picture disruption to your own car use, but rather more difficult to imagine how these policies at scale might create a city where you don’t need to drive at all: it’s too far from our reality.
That creates resistance to change. Merchants and restaurateurs in Brussels vociferously opposed a recent traffic reduction plan, fearing that their car-dependent clients would go elsewhere. What they failed to perceive was that their districts would become more pleasant and new customers would arrive. In the event, the areas affected by the plan saw increased footfall and consumer spending.
Ambitious mobility policies can trigger rioting and vandalism. We have all encountered a certain type of man for whom the car is an extension of his masculinity, and who is liable to resort to violence against anyone who dares touch said car, physically or metaphorically.
Meatheads aside, cars have a broader cultural hold on us, tied up with status, that will be difficult to break down. A common trope in car advertising is the open road – the ability to go wherever you want, whenever you want. Often in these adverts there will be no other cars or people at all: millions of euros of public road infrastructure are laid out for you alone.
The reality is different, of course. When enough people have a car, nobody moves freely. Those in cars or buses waste hours in traffic, while those on bicycles or on foot breathe toxic fumes and risk injury or death. In the US, where car dependency is even more entrenched, the number of cyclists and pedestrians killed by people in cars is rising year on year.
But the myth persists: our freedom of movement must include bringing along two tons of metal wherever we go, and governments must give over all available public space for us to do so.
Politics in reverse
The imaginary link between cars and freedom is why conservative parties, which otherwise support free markets and the rights of the individual, agitate against any policy that would level the playing field between different modes of transport.
In the UK, then-prime minister Rishi Sunak acknowledged last year that people were “dependent on cars”. Conservatives aren’t supposed to like dependency, especially on things that the government subsidises. But in this case, Sunak pledged to roll back low-traffic neighbourhoods that had given people a real alternative to cars and boosted active transport.
In Brussels, conservative party MR has waged a campaign to open a three-lane commuter road through the city’s biggest park. Ahead of this year’s elections, it frames its transport policy as giving citizens “free choice over their mode of transport” and “technological neutrality”. That implies that governments shouldn’t subsidise any particular mode of transport – including cars.
Europe’s car subsidies are not only distortive: They’re invisible. And so we have the bizarre situation where free-market politicians support state handouts of public land – so long as you put a car on it.