When I lived in Boston, one of the major reasons I got rid of my car was the cost of parking. Street parking really wasn’t much of an option, so I had to pay for a spot (first at a nearby garage and then in my building when a space became available). It’s amazing how much we subsidize parking in D.C. (boldface mine):

Take one short block in Adams Morgan: Cliffbourne Place NW. The street is about 100 yards long and has space to park 19 cars.

A few yards away, someone is renting a parking spot in the alley for $15 per day. But if you have a residential parking permit, you can park on the street for only 10 cents per day.

$15 per day is $5,475 per year. Let’s say that you would get a 20% discount for buying a yearly permit, so the market value of one parking spot in Adams Morgan is $4,380. The difference between the market rate for parking and the actual price we charge for a parking permit—our annual subsidy of each residential parking spot in this neighborhood—is $4,345.

For Cliffbourne Place, the annual subsidy for these 19 spots is $82,555. Why are giving the car drivers of Cliffbourne Place such a huge subsidy every year? The District of Columbia has abundant and heavily subsidized public housing, except that housing is for cars…

At $35 a year, some people store unused cars on the street. Why leave them anywhere else? At Cliffbourne Place and Calvert Street, there is a car with flat tires that hasn’t moved for months. The car is a rusting, leaf-collecting eyesore. But it does have a current Zone 1 sticker, and by all appearances, is not breaking any laws.

We encourage this behavior by giving the parking away for next to nothing. Why are we paying $4,345 per year to this car’s owner so they can store their non-functional car on our street? This parking spot—this public real estate—is no longer contributing to the city’s transportation system. It’s just taxpayer-subsidized junk storage.