So the Tribune Review as an article today remarking on the deteriorated parking structures the Parking Authority owns.
What is most interesting to us is the brief statement by the Authority's Director, Dave Onorato:
The authority this year earmarked $4.8 million for maintenance and repairs, Onorato said, but he said it's not enough to undo 50 years of wear and not even close to covering the average cost of building a parking structure, which experts say is about $18,000 per parking space.
E I G H T E E N T H O U S A N D D O L L A R S
Interesting figure. But the real question is, what's the long-term maintenance cost per space. I guess it's "something greater than $5MM/<#of PA garage spaces>."
The 18,000 up front can be amortized over the lifetime of the structure, and in theory is figured in to the parking fee. Obviously, parking garages can be profitable businesses, so it must work out.
(I'll bet the cheap brick one-car garage behind my house would cost about 18,000 to rebuild.)
$59 + shipping
parks 2 bikes.
I bet you could squeeze at least three onto that thing. The 6-bike racks in front of BST3 routinely hold 10 or so 
These sorts of figures amaze but don't surprise me at all.
@erok: funny, but not really fair. You still have to bolt it to something. A bicycle-only parking garage would be far cheaper than an automobile parking garage, but still a good deal more than $30/bike. How much did that facility in DC cost?
I've heard shipping is pretty expensive on those things too, like almost as much as the rack
Structured parking is unbelievably expensive. A surface lot can average around $10,000... that's just your average asphalt ocean kind of thing. Underground parking structures are great, in that they preserve space above ground for more productive uses of the land, but are typically twice as expensive as these above-ground garages.
But no, let's let people drive downtown from the suburbs and charge fifty cents a day.
I've mentioned Donald Shoup before, and this study has a lot of information about parking and land use: http://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0504.pdf
Donald Shoup is the best.
I think parking rates should be jacked sky-high, with the proceeds going towards more bike lanes.
With all those parking structures on the north shore, as a perspective, look at what the nederlanders do for parking to support a 1700 seat music venue.
