My morning commute in Washington, D.C. should be almost ideal. My office is just over a mile from my home and there’s a city bus that goes almost door to door. However, I rarely take it; in most situations the bus ride saves me little time over the 25-minute walk.

The excruciatingly slow 1.2‑mile ride is only partly due to traffic congestion. The factor that really lengthens my commute—and that of thousands of others who regularly make the same trip—is all the parked cars that slow the bus at all hours of the day and night. It doesn’t take many cars to obstruct a bus; just a few will complicate merging, lengthen turns, and generally get in the way of a smooth commute home.

In essence, the city conserves street parking as if it were a precious natural resource. Eliminating even one spot where a car can park triggers a flurry of indignation and anger, even if the spot might cost each of the thousands of bus commuters that pass by more time than it saves the handful of drivers who actually use it on a given day. The blind deference given to drivers in D.C. belies any notion that we’re becoming a city of non–car owners.

For instance, at one intersection the bus driver must navigate a tighter-than-normal right turn, a result of the various non-perpendicularities in this town. The fact that legal parking begins just a few feet from the intersection exacerbates the tightness of the turn, forcing the bus to slow to a near-stop to navigate the narrow opening. The presence of that last parked car costs each bus an average of five to 10 seconds.

But that’s not the only parking complication at this intersection. If one additional car parks behind the last legal parking spot—a common maneuver in urban locales—the bus simply can’t make the turn. It and any traffic following it must wait until the owner comes to move the car.

In essence, the tradeoff the city makes is to get one more parking space (and save a handful of drivers each day a few minutes’ walk from the nearest parking garage) in exchange for extending the commute times of a couple buses’ worth of passengers each day by five or 10 minutes and a few thousand other commuters by several more seconds.

That is a tradeoff common in bus/​parking deliberations, which in D.C. are adjudicated by the city’s Department of Transportation, given the broad constraints set forth by the D.C. City Council. Two blocks north of this bottleneck sits another awkward intersection where two streets intersect the bus route about 25 feet from one another, and the bus stop sits just before the first intersection. The right lane of the short stretch of road between the two streets is, by default, given to two parking spaces. However, were it left as an extra lane (as it is during rush hour) it would allow buses to avoid having to wait for an opening in traffic before resuming their routes. Without such a runway, buses must invariably wait for a red light before entering into traffic, adding another 30–45 seconds to most trips. These two parking spots also happen to be within a two-minute walk of a parking garage.

The collective outcome of these decisions says volumes about the city’s perspective. The convenience of a dozen drivers outweighs the collective cost they impose on thousands of other commuters.

Scarcity reigns / A place with expensive housing—as is the case in nearly every residential neighborhood in D.C. within walking distance of a Metro stop—incentivizes developers to look closely at every nook and cranny to identify where they can put more housing. In my Northwest neighborhood over the last 10 years, they’ve replaced a gas station with apartments, subdivided and expanded numerous townhomes, and generally built up any available space they can get their hands on to the maximum extent that the government allows. That is a very real constraint because there is bitter opposition to any new development from the current homeowners in the area.

The pitched battles on this front—manifested by a local resident issuing a death threat to a developer in a zoning meeting earlier this year—owes to more than just the fear that more housing will reduce property values. The bigger issue for many of these people is that more local residents may create more competition for the nearly free on-street parking in the neighborhood. A residential parking permit in D.C. costs $25 a year, which is less than 1 percent of the cost of private off-street parking in the densest neighborhoods in town.

The sanctity of nearly free on-street parking—which is, of course, tremendously scarce, since demand greatly exceeds supply at the current price—has come to take precedence over all other interests. For instance, a proposed apartment building in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood recently ran into opposition when the developers revealed that it would remove two on-street parking spaces to make way for the driveway to underground parking for the development’s denizens, something that current zoning law requires. When people suggest a development that would create homes for hundreds of people in a heretofore middle-class neighborhood should be disallowed solely to preserve two on-street parking spaces, something is clearly out of whack.

Free parking’s high cost / The conservative mantra when it comes to mass transit is that it’s a wasteful subsidy, and in many places it is. However, the subsidy for D.C. bus riders is a pittance when compared to what the District (and other dense metropolitan areas across the country) provides for drivers. Set aside the fact that gasoline prices don’t cover the societal costs of automobiles in major metropolitan areas when congestion costs are taken into account; that we allow car owners to park their cars for next to nothing on city streets in dense urban neighborhoods may constitute the biggest government subsidy, on a proportional basis, that exists in the United States. Parking meters in business districts now charge a price above the pittance that was the norm a few years ago, but it’s still well below the price of parking garages and remains so low that finding an open meter most days and times requires either a modicum of luck or several minutes of cruising time.

On weekends in Georgetown, traffic grinds to a halt for hours. Opening up another couple of lanes—such as the ones currently occupied by parked cars—would solve the problem in a snap, but such a move would never be seriously considered. As a result, the congestion chases more shoppers away than those who come for the slight chance of almost free on-street parking.

Economists have a term they call “lexicographic preferences” to describe a situation where someone would rather have a little more of one thing than a lot of another thing. For instance, I like it when my daughter’s best friend does well in school, but I’d rather have my daughter get an “A” on her biology test than her friend win the Nobel Prize in biology. Lexicographic preferences aptly describe the city’s implicit preferences when it comes to parking and buses—or parking and home prices, as it turns out.

This mess undoubtedly is not the conscious result of any one government department or officeholder’s decisions. It is the collective result of lots of separate actions, no small number of which have to do with car owners complaining loudly to their local city councilman or other government representative about the lack of parking in the area, and a few people shouting whenever there is any development that potentially reduces on-street parking. As a result of the squeaky wheels, it becomes almost reflexive to allow on-street parking wherever there isn’t a compelling reason not to. No one notices (and few people complain) when one parked car causes a 10-second bus delay. Or two delays. Or three. But the consequence is that a few thousand commuters collectively lose hours each day to save a handful of drivers a few minutes’ walk to a parking garage.

The reflexive progressive attitude would be to argue that this discriminates against the poor or is racist (since a preponderance of Hispanics and African-Americans ride this particular transit line and buses in general in D.C.). But given that those who agitate for parking primacy in urban neighborhoods like mine are the ones who are most adept in turning policy issues into a class struggle, that card probably won’t get played.

A better perspective is simply that we all pay a high cost when government gives away a scarce asset it controls, whether it’s radio spectrum, mineral rights, or publicly owned land in major metropolitan areas. And the people who benefit from this are usually those who least merit such largesse.