Michael J. Smith lives in Portland’s West End.

Free parking and cheap gasoline are the twin Holy Grails of American culture. So we can expect some pushback to the City Council’s decision to expand paid parking hours in Portland.

Previous experience suggests that we’ll hear a lot of Chicken Little alarmism about non-
Portlanders boycotting Portland restaurants — $5 for parking, on top of $200 for a modest dinner for two and a glass of wine apiece, is just too damn much.

Now personally, I think it’s best for us Portlanders if Portland restaurants cater more to us than to people from away. But I bet most Portland restaurants do, in fact, exactly that.

So this nightmare scenario — pennywise suburbanites passing up the blackened somefish and indifferent Pinot Grigio because they have to pay for parking, ruin hence ensuing to the Portland restaurant scene — it’s chimerical.

Of course nobody likes the price of anything going up, a very rational response. But also, nobody likes a handout to other people (though we all like handouts to ourselves). And free or underpriced parking is a huge, glaring handout to the car-borne; a massive subsidy to a group of people who own a big, expensive machine, and want someplace to put it without paying for the extra space it occupies, above the baseline space any human being takes up.

In the U.S., an average parking space occupies about 180 square feet. An average rental apartment in Portland is around 600 square feet, or three-and-change parking spaces. This average apartment costs about $2,000 a month. Do the arithmetic: Market price for the parking space should realize, for the city, at least $600 a month. OK, the car doesn’t need a sink or a toilet, so call it $500.

We pay for the space we live in. Why shouldn’t we pay for the space we park in?

Now it’s true that there are things we don’t pay for. We don’t pay to walk on the sidewalk,
for example. (Or not directly; we do, of course, pay for it in our municipal taxes.) But a pedestrian in motion takes up, in North America, anyway, about 8 square feet. A car in motion occupies about 1,000, at city speeds (much more than a stationary car, obviously).

In principle, we could toll the sidewalks. And then, of course, to be fair, we’d have to toll the city streets too. At about a 12-to-1 ratio.

But beyond the logistics and economics of it, there’s a moral aspect. People have been walking since Lucy first lifted her aspiring head 3 million years ago. It’s part of our natural endowment as human beings. If we’re entitled, as people, to do anything, walking is surely such a thing. It’s baseline.

By contrast, people have only been driving cars for about 150 years. A walker is doing what people by nature do. But a driver has brought to the party a big, recently invented machine, because he wants or needs to go farther and faster than he could do on foot.

Fair enough. But it’s not unreasonable to ask people to pay for their extra consumption of public space, beyond baseline. The driver doesn’t pay more in municipal taxes than the walker does, but he takes up a lot more space.

Maybe you don’t believe that the market should rule everything, or that everything should cost at margin. I’m with you; I don’t believe that either. But when we make things free, or subsidize them, there’s usually an arguable social purpose for it. For instance, a baseline need, like food, or shelter, or walking.

But what, exactly, is the social purpose of subsidizing cars?