Institutional/Technological Impact On On-street Parking Management

With the booming of China economy, automobiles especially cars step down from the symbol of luxury to common life requirements in big prosperous cities. The rapid growth in number of cars running on the road put much pressure in such two ways as causing traffic jams in dynamic and parking dilemma in static on the transportation system of these populated cities. Therefore, it becomes imperative for cities like Beijing to develop the present parking management especially the on-street parking management from low efficiency to the advanced high efficiency system in order to overcome the institutional constraints and solve the transportation problems.Since the parking management is operated by companies, taking Beijng as an example, this paper is focused on analyzing institutions that impact the on-street parking management companies in their performances such as the fluctuating revenue for policy-made unsteadiness of parking places and the serious principle-agent problem for its manual fees collection system. By analysis on What the situation is and How it becomes so, this paper tries to show the deep inside impacts on the companies' development relying on such economics theories as Industrial Organization Theory, Institutional Economics, Regulation Economics and so forth. Afterwards, it produces and presents the solution by introducing into the parking management system an advanced technical instrument — parking meter that meets the trends, overcome the agency problems and compromise companies' profits with the city planning under the government policy. The application of parking meter helps improve companies' efficiency and their capability of securing the resources, and also save very much expense in social cost.