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The Internet has made possible all sorts of wondrous new things, including my ability to reserve and pay for a parking spot at BART, the Bay Area's commuter rail system, the night before I have to go in to San Francisco ridiculously early in the morning. I guess I am showing my age a bit to think this is cool, but in fact until very recently parking at BART was free and could not be reserved. The BART system was built in the 1970s, long before I moved to California, and the question of paying for parking was a hot-button issue for BART's board of directors. Even though it cost money to build and maintain the parking lots around all but the most urban BART stations, the riding public generally felt entitled to free parking. Because parking at BART was free, it was heavily used. When I started commuting to San Francisco in 1992, the parking lot at my local BART station was completely full by 8 a.m. Later it would fill up by 7:50 . . . then 7:45 . . . then 7:30. At some parking lots farther out in the suburbs the parking lots filled even earlier. BART is used all day long, but this meant that only very early morning commuters could park their cars at stations. This situation changed several years ago when BART was confronted with deficits and an aging system that needed to be refurbished. After long debate and contentious hearings, BART finally decided to charge for parking at its lots. In the current system, you can reserve a space the night before, reserve a space for a month at a time, or even park at BART for several days if you are flying out of San Francisco Airport. Commuters don't have to get to the station ridiculously early, there are spaces available later in the day, and the system get some revenue from parking. Economists reading this article are probably smiling by now because this is, of course, an example of a market-based system for allocating parking spaces. Market solutions for environmental problems have been around for some time, and have been more or less popular depending on the prevailing political winds. They are currently in vogue, with debt-for-nature efforts to save rainforests, water marketing, and discussion of a "cap-and-trade" system for managing carbon dioxide emissions in California and among a number of states. Here at the Coastal Conservancy we are increasingly interested in using some market approaches to help conserve California's fisheries. It's no secret that our oceans and the fish that live in them are in deep trouble. The newspapers are filled with gloomy predictions, and this issue of Coast & Ocean features an article on shifting baselines, the notion that our basic ideas about plenty and scarcity are warped by our lack of historical knowledge. As an industry, commercial fishing is a classic example of the "tragedy of the commons." Individual fishermen have every incentive--including, until recently, some created by government action--to catch as many fish as they can as fast as they can, and beat the other guy to market. This is often called the "race to fish," which depletes stocks early in the season, depresses prices, and benefits nobody but the processors. Market solutions to overfishing usually include some kind of dedication of fishing privileges. That is, each individual fisherman gets a "share" in the fishery, a proportion of the total amount of fish that can be caught in a year. The total amount is calculated to meet a goal of biological sustainability. In this scenario there is no race. Fishermen can wait for a good market price to fish and, in one of the world's most dangerous professions, they can stay in port during storms. This also gives an incentive to practice conservation, since if the fishery grows as a whole, each share of it becomes more valuable. It sounds simple, but of course it is complicated to set up. Like the BART converting to paid parking, changing a fishery from open access to shares is difficult and requires many tedious and contentious meetings. Nevertheless, at the Coastal Conservancy we are quite interested in this transition. As many of our readers know, we are the staff to the Ocean Protection Council (http://resources.ca.gov/copc/), a new multiagency, cabinet-level part of state government charged with coordinating state policy for oceans and finding innovative solutions to ocean problems. The Council is interested in new thinking to reform California's fisheries, and is considering establishing a sustainable-fishery fund to help capitalize change. I served on the California Fish and Game Commission for five years, and became very familiar with the good, the bad, and the ugly of how we currently regulate our fisheries. Most of that time we were coping with decline, and had to deliver a lot of bad news to our hardworking fishermen and women. I hope that the injection of some market mechanisms into the current situation will help reverse the downward spiral of fewer fish, tighter regulations, and less fishing. We certainly need to try something new, and if it helps get me a space at the BART parking lot tomorrow morning, how bad can the market be? Sam Schuchat is the executive officer of the Coastal Conservancy.
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