STEPHEN L. CARTER: It’s strange that Americans make it cheap and easy to clog their own cities with cars. But very American.

Planners hate cars; drivers love them. Drivers have more votes than planners, so parking stays cheap.

At least, cheap in dollars. In congested cities, we ration parking by restricting the number of spaces. The problem is, it doesn’t really work — not if the intention is to reduce the number of drivers. Okay, yes, limits are bound to have an effect at the margin. But according to city-by-city measurement by the Federal Highway Administration, streets remain as congested as ever. A committed driver will burn fossil fuels for half an hour circling the block to search for an opening, not so much to save money as to proclaim the remarkable synergy between himself and his beloved automobile.

The love affair is easy to relate to. Small surprise, then, that we turn out to be weirdly territorial about parking. Here’s Vanderbilt again: “Studies have shown that people take longer to leave a parking spot when another driver is waiting, even though they predict they will not.” True, if you glance at the underlying study, the added wait is only an average of 7 seconds, but those precious seconds raise the time to exit a space from about 32 to about 39 seconds — a jump of 21 percent, bound to be noticed if you’re the one waiting. The same study also found that male drivers move faster when a car perceived as “high status” is waiting; for women there was almost no difference. This might suggest that women are, in parking lots at least, more territorial than men; or it might suggest that men, even when ensconced behind the wheels of their big mean machines, more readily yield to indicia of status and power.

Which brings us back to my parking ticket. Nobody has more status and power than the state, so why didn’t I pay my ticket at once? Because the state’s status and power are not strongly signaled. The face value of the ticket was relatively low — $20 — and paying late increased the fine only by $5. Now imagine increasing both by a factor of 100. Were the fine $2,000 and the late fee $500, most of us would pay on time. As a matter of fact, we’d go out of our way never to be ticketed. We might even forego our beloved cars and turn to public transportation.

Except that we wouldn’t. We’d rise in revolt instead, demanding a return to cheap parking. We’d be wrong, but we’d win.

Good.