The University of California recently conducted the first study to try and quantify just how much parking exists in America. The conclusion? There are about 800 million spaces, or three spaces for every car.

Parking is a significant land-use and construction cost that contributes to polluted-water runoff and the urban-heat-island effect. Burdens that are priced for free or at subsidized rates to the consumer encourage wasteful use of resources—which, in turn, contributes to the demand for even more parking.

Also, parking is, frankly, nearly always ugly to look at. On that last note, I will give Santa Monica credit for some recent efforts to try and make some of its garages less of an eyesore.

Two complaints I hear often in Santa Monica are that there is too much traffic and not enough car parking. The conundrum of tackling these two dilemmas is that if we listen to the parking expansionists' call for more spaces, more lots and bigger garages, we would likely attract new car trips and compound the problem of gridlock on streets with finite space.

The truth is, if you really look at the data, there is no shortage of available parking in Santa Monica on most days at most times. The city devotes an enormous amount of public and private real estate to storing cars, and we have hundreds, even thousands, of public spaces that are empty much of the day.

You might not believe me. I know many people who have been skeptical when I say there is plenty of parking. They may recount moments of bitter difficulty trying to find parking in town. But if you want evidence that we do in fact have plenty of parking, the real-time data of most public lots is available for all to see on the city’s Park Here Now Web site.

Being the transportation geek that I am, I find myself checking this site pretty often, even though it is rare that I drive. What I've noticed is that there are clear patterns of parking inefficiency as certain lots fill up to their maximum, while many nearby lots have unused spaces.

I illustrated this point in a slide at a recent city council discussion of plans for expanding Parking Garage 6. At 5 p.m. on the day of council discussion, Parking Garage 6 was full, while one block away, Parking Garage 8 had 576 spaces available. This is typical of these garages. They are so very close, yet one goes unloved and the other is regularly maxed out. I’m sure the people who fill out those last remaining spaces in Garage 6, driving 'round and 'round, get the impression that parking is extremely scarce. They may never know how many hundreds of spaces sit empty a few buildings down.

Santa Monica has taken some steps toward acknowledging this problem. The city has implemented some pricing tweaks, made attempts to call attention to parking availability through digital signage and launched the Park Here Now site. Since parking is clearly still not being efficiently utilized, however, the city must go further.

Parking rates should incrementally go up where capacity is strained and lowered where capacity is plentiful, balancing things out. It’s basic market economics, but in America, we have tended to treat parking as an entitlement program, with abundant spaces and subsidized pricing the expected norm. Enlightened cities are beginning to realize the inefficiency of treating parking this way and the consequences it has on a city.

Santa Monica has raised the rates at some of its garages, while ones such as the underground lot at the Main Library—which often has spare capacity—remain lower to encourage its use. Equally important to the success of pricing changes is promoting awareness of those changes and advertising availability. I think it is still the case that many visitors to Santa Monica’s downtown are not clued in to where all the readily available parking is.

As for on-street parking, its scarcity on some blocks is largely the product of poor pricing incentives as well. Economist Donald Shoup, famous for his theories on parking policy and author of The High Cost of Free Parking, calls for an 85 percent solution to the pricing of on-street-parking. That is, pricing should be adjusted to try and maintain 85 percent occupancy on any block. This results in abundant use, which is good for business, but means there is always a spot somewhere close by.

The circling patterns of drivers on the hunt for parking are wiped out entirely by implementing such pricing. The impact on traffic congestion that hunting for spaces has is not inconsequential. In one of Shoup’s studies in downtown Los Angeles, 40 percent of surveyed drivers who stopped at lights were not on their way to their destination but circling in search of street parking. In many cases, they avoided garages that were priced higher than the cheap on-street rates.

You might be thinking these ideas are just about trying to jack up parking rates, but keep in mind some rates would go down as well. It’s all about distributing demand, which also reduces the bunching of traffic when everyone tries to park on the same block.

Another proposal for which Shoup advocates is that, once you price parking appropriately, you can get rid of most arbitrary parking time limits created to force turnover, because a proper incentive to turn over spaces would be built into the pricing. This would mean fewer parking tickets, which also would not have to be as high to cover management costs.

Expanding garages and building new ones are projects that can cost tens of millions of dollars, so it also makes sense financially that we try to get the full use of our existing capacity before building a lot more of it. During a time with increasingly tight budget concerns, we cannot afford to spend on new large infrastructure projects when existing facilities are only being used at a fraction of their potential.

Walker Parking Consultants outlined many of these ideas and suggestions in their study of Santa Monica in 2009. Since then, the city's policy has been going in the direction of more sophisticated parking management, but cautiously.

Parking can be a hot-button issue for many. However, with the right tweaks, I believe Santa Monica can pull off a hat trick of actually making parking more convenient while reducing gridlock and working toward our LUCE goals.