Tag Archives: donald shoup

minimum parking requirements – just get rid of them!

This Vice article makes a pretty strong case that minimum parking requirements should just be gotten rid of. There are so many complicated problems cities are grappling with. This one isn’t all that complicated. Seriously, just get rid of them. This isn’t banning parking, it is just letting the market decide. Free parking is not free, it is expensive and the cost is shared between car owners and non-car owners, but car owners have come to feel entitled to these subsidies and take them for granted. If you want to pay for a car and pay for parking, go ahead and do so. If you don’t, you can spend your money on other things.

Donald Shoup

I can never get enough Donald Shoup. Here are some policies he suggested at a recent talk in Philadelphia:

  • parking benefit districts, where parking revenues go to street and pedestrian improvements, so people can see what they are paying for
  • parking permit blacklists – essentially, people who move into new buildings without parking are not allowed to apply for city parking permits. This might seem unfair, but in my neighborhood in Philadelphia one way existing residents are able to hold up new development is by raising parking concerns with their elected politician. So this could be politically practical in that it might remove one of the sticking points between long-established residents and newcomers. At least, alleviating this one concern might allow people to move on and tackle others. It would force the new developments to either provide onsite parking, or just develop in places and ways where people are not going to demand as much parking. You could drop any minimum parking requirements and let the market decide.
  • Parking cash-out – employees who choose not to use company-paid parking can opt for a cash payment instead. California has done this apparently and it makes sense to me. It removes a perverse incentive for some people to choose driving to work over other options.
  • build transit passes into University fees

fixing sidewalks at point of sale

You can require homeowners (actually home sellers) to fix sidewalks when they sell their property (“point of sale”). Los Angeles does this, which Donald Shoup says is a great idea. Philadelphia has a similar legal framework where the homeowner technically owns and is responsible for the sidewalk, but does not require point of sale repairs. The city can write you a ticket for a broken sidewalk if they want to, just like any other code violation, but that is not too often done because the public outcry would be pretty severe. Also, it’s the transportation agency that is supposed to do this and not the code enforcement agency, so may not fit clearly within their mission and priorities. One more interesting thing the article mentions is that if sidewalks were made more clearly a code violation, this would show up in real estate records, and there would then be some pressure from mortgage and insurance companies to fix them.

Another option, of course, would be for the city to take over the sidewalk, along with street trees and infrastructure up to the house line. This could be part of a grand vision for how to implement 21st century urban infrastructure – complete streets, better materials than tired old concrete and asphalt, urban forests, public spaces, modernized water, sewer, gas, electric, and communications infrastructure. I for one would be indifferent to paying slightly higher taxes rather than being ticketed for code violations for I have very little control over, and this would also be more equitable. But it’s easier for the politicians to pin in on the private owner and say it has “zero cost”.