The Case for Eliminating Disabled Parking Placards

In many major cities across the United States, the abuse of disabled parking placards is at least a minor problem. Government officials and reporters in Boston [PDF], Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia have called attention to the practice in the recent (to semi-recent) past. The situation is particularly bad in Los Angeles: a 2010 investigation by the local NBC news team found disabled passes in 80 percent of parked cars in a 10-block radius downtown. Voter ID fraud may or may not exist, but disabled placard fraud sure does.

The problem seems harmless enough, but in fact it's quite costly for just about everyone except the perpetrators. For starters, as the "prophet of parking" Donald Shoup has shown, cruising for street spaces creates an enormous amount of urban congestion — not to mention an enormous amount of local air pollution. At a broad level the practice weakens all government programs by reducing city revenue. At an individual level it makes finding a parking spot harder for the actual disabled people that placards intend to help.