Seriously, We Have to Stop Giving Away Free Parking to the Disabled

There is no good way to ask this without sounding like a jerk, but here it is: Do disabled people really need free parking? Yes, they need convenient parking spaces. But cities all over the country have oddly conflated drivers in need of close curbside access with people too poor to pay for it. The two groups are not necessarily one and the same. Worse, free parking for the disabled invites all kinds of wildly offensive misuse. As a result, the policy is arguably bad for urban parking systems, definitely bad for city coffers, even bad for the environment.

The best evidence we've seen for this politically touchy case comes from some fascinating ongoing research out of the University of California Transportation Center, by Michael Manville and Jonathan Williams. We've written previously about their findings from several on-the-ground surveys of disabled placard use in Los Angeles, which were published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research. But they've since written a downright entertaining account of the study for a wider audience in ACCESS, the transportation center's magazine.