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Aug 8 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
What German Liberals should say re: free parking to be true to their free-marketeering credentials, and what they actually say about it.

A THREAD #Lindner #9EuroTicket #Gratismentalitaet #Parkraumbewirtschaftung
What they should say / 1: "By making public space available for storing private cars for free, the State is losing a lot of money. Think of all the revenue that you could make by renting out that space at market prices. If we waste money that way, we'll have to cut elsewhere"
What they should say /2: "People who don't have cars would subsidize car users. I don't think that's fair. Especially if we consider that households without cars have lower income - up to 50% of low-income households are without cars"
What they should say /3: "Making so much public space available for free does not cover the costs of providing & maintaining parking spaces. It's "redistribution". Drivers have this #Gratismentalitaet à la unconditional basic income when it comes to parking but that's wrong"
What they should say /4: "Currently the costs of providing, maintaining parking & enforcing parking rules are paid for with general taxation. That includes those who don't own cars, and are forced to rely on public transport & cycling. I don't think that's fair"
What they should say / 5: "What costs nothing is worth nothing. Nowadays people look at parking spaces as something worthless. We can do better with our urban public space. And if you live without a car, you get nothing from free parking, but you have to pay. That will not do".
What they actually say / 1: "We are strictly against parking pricing. These plans unilaterally disadvantage citizens who need their cars and who often have no other parking space available. The parking situation is tight already & will get worse"
What they actually say /2 (from Unna)
What they actually say /3 (from Elmshorn)
What they actually say/3 (from Celle)
What they actually say /4 (from Leverkusen)
[NB all the English-language screenshots are automatically translated from German by Google or Twitter. That's why they sound clumsy] [END]

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More from @giulio_mattioli

Giulio Mattioli Profile picture
Aug 7
Leader of German Liberals against a continuation of heavily discounted #9EuroTicket for public transport. He says high subsidies to public transport are unfair towards those who don't/can't use it

I actually like this *framing*. Let me explain (thread)
tagesschau.de/inland/9-euro-…
Any transport investment or taxation decision that governments do has distributional consequences.

If we subsidise air travel, or exempt it from certain taxes (as we do), we are redistributing money away from those who don't fly and towards those who do fly.
Also in a way they redistribute money from those who use that mode little to those who use it a lot.

For example, investment in motorway building does not benefit those who don't have/use cars. AND it disproportionately benefits those who use the car a lot.
Read 9 tweets
Giulio Mattioli Profile picture
Jun 12
I saw this tweet and checked the EU stats on the share of people who say they do not own a car because they cannot afford it.

And was (slightly) suprised to find that Danemark is actually relatively high there (ca.8%, third highest in West EU) ec.europa.eu/eurostat/fr/we… (THREAD)
Making sense of this is actually quite instructive about car dependence, transport affordability, etc. so here we go.

There is no clear pattern to the ranking except for Eastern EU countries having the highest rates (because of still low motorisation and lower income) but...
But among the countries with the *lowest* share of people who can't afford cars we find Cyprus, Malta & Italy: countries where motorisation is very high despite income not being that high. Car-dependent countries.
Read 12 tweets
Giulio Mattioli Profile picture
Apr 8
I worry that many abroad will look at this ⬇️ discrepancy and think it's due to selfishness and ill-intent. When in fact I think it's more down to a combination of ethnocentrism, status-quo bias and superiority complex, which is not unique to Germany (thread)
Let's say you think that your society in its present state is well-organized, in fact better organized than most.

Then you look at foreign societies, with their foreign ways (say, earlier retirement!), and you see them having systemic problems.
A reflexive reaction will be "well of course they just need to model their society on our successful example, what's the big deal, that can be done quickly and it's obviously in their own interest as well".
Read 7 tweets
Giulio Mattioli Profile picture
Mar 15
German climate emissions from transport have increased between 2020 and 2021 and are 3 million tonnes more as compared to the government emission reduction pathway umweltbundesamt.de/presse/pressem…

A #Tempolimit would have reduced transport emissions by 1.9Mt (130km/h) - 5.4Mt (100km/h)
Figures on both emission trends and #tempolimit emission reduction potential from German Environment Agency
Note: this is important since many in the public, the media and politics have claimed that the emission reduction of motorway speed limits would be so negligible that it's not even worth doing.

Instead it turns out it would have filled the emission gap for this year.
Read 4 tweets
Giulio Mattioli Profile picture
Mar 15
What happens to people's expenditures when motor fuel prices spike? Here's what we found.

For those low-income households (ca. half of them) who already spent a high share of income on running vehicle costs (dark blue in the graph), the share of expenditure explodes BUT...
Expenditure on running motor vehicles does *not* explode for the other half of low-income people (orange), who either spend zero on cars (because they have none) or very little & are more able to reduce car use accordingly (higher elasticity of demand)
Expenditure on running motor vehicles does not explode for higher-income (=non-poor) households (light blue & yellow) either because: they start off with higher income, mostly spent lower % on vehicles already, and/or are more able to reduce car use accordingly
Read 5 tweets
Giulio Mattioli Profile picture
Mar 14
This ⬇️. For months I've heard things along the lines of "we don't need to do anything on transport, its inclusion in ETS will sort it". And now this.

Makes you wonder how honest the ETS-only approach was, and whether maybe it was a sort of discourse of climate delay.
On policy perfectionism as a discourse of climate delay see here
See this viewpoint as well
Read 4 tweets

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