Land is the most valuable resource, and the ordinary person without an automobile cannot arbitrarily monopolize a piece of public property. But for some reason car owners are allowed to do this.
Nowhere is it written, that motorists have the right to park for free on public land. But from the other side, Russian law does not mention any procedure by which a municipality can force a car owner to pay for parking. This legal vacuum is a vestige of the Soviet system, where there was not an urgent need to deal with the parking problem.
Because of the artificially low cost of maintaining private automobiles in St. Petersburg, our streets are jammed with traffic; sidewalks, lawns and public yards are converted into parking lots. Auto transport is an ecological catastrophe -- it produces most of the air and noise pollution and occupies an enormous expanse of land. Universal free parking on public land only serves to encourage this harm.
The procedure for municipal control of enforcement of traffic rules is absolutely standard in the West. There, cars which repeatedly violate parking rules are towed away. But in Russia the local government does have have the authority to solve such problems. In order to bring order to the problem of automobile parking, and new federal law is required. Such a law should protect the reasonable interests of car owners, who fear that their property may be seized and held hostage. But at the same time, the local authorities should definitely have an effective lever -- towing of illegally parked cars.
Paid parking in the West provides a substantial part of the municipal budget. For example, the city of New York gets more than 400 million dollars per year from parking.
In the West, parking of automobiles is considered a key
municipal policy issue.
The most attractive solution is a zoned system with
fees depending on the distance from the city center and
no free parking on public land.
Such a system already exists in Copenhagen.