![\"DeKalb](\"https:\/\/www.myparkingsign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/DeKalb-County-Courthouse.jpg\")
The lovely DeKalb County Courthouse, in equally lovely Sycamore, Illinois. Image from Teemu008<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n As is the case with a lot of apparently questionable decisions: marketing. The articles about Sycamore’s<\/a> parking management<\/a> highlight the goodwill and public interest generated by the tiny fees. Let’s take a look at the claims made on behalf of parking meters that charge less than they cost:<\/p>\n According to the Journal Gazette, Sycamore’s city manager thinks that the revenues gained from charging more would eventually mean less business for Sycamore’s downtown. The city manager’s proposition is testable, but as far as we can tell, hasn’t been tested. We do know with some certainty that “people who use active transportation modes to reach commercial areas shop there more often, and frequent more shops per trip,” as NACTO puts it. The study suggesting this took place in Bristol, and just as a cat is not a dog, an Englishman is not an American. It is possible<\/em>, though, that structuring local\u00a0planning decisions around car access loses the city money.<\/p>\n Besides that, $0.01 wasn’t always the barely-worth-considering sum that it is today. It’s possible that generating revenue a penny at a time valued the land appropriately at some point in the past.<\/p>\n As marketers, we’re always looking for ways to get people to come to our e-commerce sites – and more importantly, to come back. We’re skeptical about this claim, though. Does the antiques store that cited this strategy have to remind people regularly that parking in their town is virtually free?<\/p>\n We don’t know how many tourists Sycamore gets, but how likely is it that a potential customer (a) has already liked a shop in downtown Sycamore in order to be susceptible to a marketing push; and (b) would be dissuaded from making a purchase by the $0.50\u00a0that it might take to park in a more conventional parking environment?<\/p>\n For\u00a0tourists, Sycamore’s parking prices mark a windfall, but not one that they’re likely to know about until they’ve already parked. Locals, on the other hand, don’t often pick up and move\u00a0due to parking prices that are much higher.<\/p>\n We just don’t see how a $0.01 parking fee helps, marketing-wise.<\/p>\n Bringing up Chicago in any discussion of parking management is like talking about politics and calling the first person who disagrees with you a Nazi.<\/p>\n This is a classic logical fallacy, immortalized in the West Wing episode\u00a0Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n
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