Tag Archives: parking

hidden parking costs

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Hidden parking costs drive up the cost of rent in U.S. metropolitan areas by an average of 17% according this article. The implication is that people are paying for housing and parking together, and don’t realize it. By separating the two, the cost of housing would be reduced, and people would be free to choose to pay for parking, or use the money saved on other transportation options.

Hidden Costs and Deadweight Losses: Bundled Parking and Residential Rents in the Metropolitan United States

There is a major housing affordability crisis in many American metropolitan areas, particularly for renters. Minimum parking requirements in municipal zoning codes drive up the price of housing, and thus represent an important potential for reform for local policymakers. The relationship between parking and housing prices, however, remains poorly understood. We use national American Housing Survey data and hedonic regression techniques to investigate this relationship. We find that the cost of garage parking to renter households is approximately $1,700 per year, or an additional 17% of a housing unit’s rent. In addition to the magnitude of this transport cost burden being effectively hidden in housing prices, the lack of rental housing without bundled parking imposes a steep cost on carless renters—commonly the lowest income households—who may be paying for parking that they do not need or want. We estimate the direct deadweight loss for carless renters to be $440 million annually. We conclude by suggesting cities reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements, and allow and encourage landlords to unbundle parking costs from housing costs.

more Donald Shoup!

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Like I keep saying, you can never get too much Donald Shoup. Urban policy can get so complicated, but getting rid of minimum parking requirements would just be such a simple and easy thing to do, and have so many benefits.

Minimum parking requirements create especially severe problems. In The High Cost of Free Parking, I argued that parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion and carbon emissions, pollute the air and water, encourage sprawl, raise housing costs, degrade urban design, reduce walkability, damage the economy, and exclude poor people. To my knowledge, no city planner has argued that parking requirements do not have these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown they do have these effects. We are poisoning our cities with too much parking…

Parking requirements reduce the cost of owning a car but raise the cost of everything else. Recently, I estimated that the parking spaces required for shopping centers in Los Angeles increase the cost of building a shopping center by 67 percent if the parking is in an aboveground structure and by 93 percent if the parking is underground.

Developers would provide some parking even if cities did not require it, but parking requirements would be superfluous if they did not increase the parking supply. This increased cost is then passed on to all shoppers. For example, parking requirements raise the price of food at a grocery store for everyone, regardless of how they travel. People who are too poor to own a car pay more for their groceries to ensure that richer people can park free when they drive to the store.

It’s one of those issues where the evidence is clear, but it may take a generation for professionals, bureaucrats, and politicians to pay attention to the evidence, reach the right conclusions, and act on them. Why is this so hard?

May 2016 in Review

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3 most frightening stories

  • There are scary and seemingly reckless confrontations going on between U.S. and Russian planes and ships in the Indian Ocean. And yet, it is bizarrely humorous when real life imitates Top Gun.
  • The situation in Venezuela may be a preview of what the collapse of a modern country looks like.
  • Obama went to Hiroshima, where he said we can “chart a course that leads to the destruction” of nuclear weapons, only not in his lifetime. Obama out.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • I try not to let this blog get too political, really I do. But in an election season I just can’t help myself. This is a blog about the future of civilization, and the behavior of U.S. political, bureaucratic, and military elites obviously has some bearing on that. In May I mused on whether the U.S. could possibly be suffering from “too much democracy“, Dick Cheney, equality and equal opportunity, and what’s wrong with Pennsylvania. And yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, TRUMP IS A FASCIST!
  • The world has about a billion dogs.
  • It turns out coffee grounds may not make good compost.

Donald Shoup

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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

more on Tesla and buttock thrusting

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Mr. Money Mustache has taken a ride in a Tesla. He says a number of things that were news to me. First, he says the car in question, the $75,000 Tesla S, was the best-selling luxury car in the United States in 2015, claiming over 25% of market share. It’s electric, powered by a rechargeable battery. You can drive about 3 hours and then have to stop to charge for 30 minutes. Tesla has built a network of thousands of free, solar-powered chargers “in the U.S. Europe, China, and elsewhere”. And this car is self-driving right now on the highway, although a person has to take control in the city. All these were things I expected to see commercially widespread in maybe 5-10 years, with skeptics saying 20+ years, but I had no idea they were widespread and commercially available (okay, to be honest, available to the rich) right now. Prices will come down.

He goes on to talk about how self-driving, solar-powered cars could change cities:

Although only multimillionaires should even consider buying a car this expensive, there’s nothing inherently expensive about electric car technology in general. Almost half of the cost of this car is in the battery, and the price of that technology has been dropping like a stone – down by over 80% in just the last 10 years. Tesla just announced their next car, the Model 3, which is almost as good by any reasonable standard and will sell for $35,000. General Motors has a competing model called the Bolt that will be ready much sooner, and all the other car companies are scrambling to catch up…

But the real way to win the car game is not to play it. The best life is spent not sitting on your buttocks within the confines of a car, but using the fine muscles within that curvaceous piece of engineering to thrust your legs downward as you provide your own propulsion. And that’s why I’m excited about what Tesla is doing.

They started deliberately at the top of the market by making prestigious and fun toys for rich people, because we’ll buy anything. But in the long run, the cars are destined to become ever-cheaper, and to be bought by the million by fleet companies like Uber. With cheap autonomous driving at our fingertips, you can summon a car for the time you need it, and then it can promptly go off and serve somebody else. Thus, won’t need to consume our cities with large parking lots, and we won’t need huge garages at home. It might even replace the expensive hassle of local-scale public transportation that we’ve struggled with for so long.

I for one am looking forward to hearing friends and neighbors fret less about parking, get out there and thrust those buttocks!

autonomous vehicles displacing traditional vehicles

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If self-driving cars come into their own, will they reduce the total amount of vehicles on the road, or will everybody who owns a car now just buy a self-driving one? This study set in Austin says that each self-driving car will displace 9 normal cars. So even if the same or more cars are in motion at any given time, there will be a lot less land required for parking. That land can be used for something else – housing, commerce, habitat, recreation, gardening/farming, or some combination. Bring it on!

economics of parking and commuting

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The economics of commuting and parking are gradually shifting.

What tenants want in an office building is changing, and the old model of the isolated suburban office park is going the way of the fax machine. That’s according to a new report from Newmark, Grubb, Knight and Frank [PDF], one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the world.

The old-school office park does “not offer the experience most of today’s tenants are seeking,” according to NGKF. As a result, the suburban office market is confronting “obsolescence” on a “massive scale.” More than 1,150 U.S. office properties — or 95 million square feet — may no longer pencil out, the authors estimate, though a number of those can be salvaged with some changes.

“Walkability and activated environments are at the top of many tenants’ list of must haves,” the report states. Office parks in isolated pockets without a mix of uses around them must have “in-building amenities” –including a conference center, a fitness center, and food service — to remain competitive, according to NGKF: “If tenants are not going to be able to walk to nearby retail or a nearby office property to get lunch, they had better be able to get it at their own building.”

Meanwhile the economics of city center parking is also shifting, but city politics are often holding back the changes.

The idea that building more parking capacity will only increase the number of cars in a neighborhood, or conversely, that removing parking spaces can reduce the number of cars often gets short shrift at neighborhood zoning meetings, but the evidence here suggests this is basically how things work.

When parking lots go away, parking conditions tighten, driving becomes more unpleasant, and some people respond to this by ditching their cars. Rather than enduring permanent traffic jam conditions, neighborhoods simply level down to a new equilibrium with fewer parking spaces, fewer cars, and higher “alternative” mode share as parking gets tighter…

Because [Philadelphia] City Council and the PPA set the prices for curb meters and residential permits so much lower than the rates for off-street parking, drivers have a strong incentive to seek out free or cheap curb parking first, before ultimately relenting and parking in a garage when things get desperate. The George Costanza parking strategy is a great example of a “smart for one, dumb for all” practice that makes sense in terms of individual incentives, but in the aggregate just adds up to a lot of unnecessary traffic congestion.

So Philadelphia, a first step would be to get rid of mandatory parking minimums in private development and just let the market decide. A second would be to let the market decide prices for on-street parking too. The politics of this can be difficult in residential neighborhoods, because that is where the voters are, whereas the office workers are a mix of voters and suburban commuters. But many of Philadelphia’s residential neighborhoods are pretty close to employment centers, making walking a very viable option. Most of the others are very well served by public transportation (that is, public transportation is pretty frequent and goes pretty much everywhere, which is not to say it is always fast or clean or the people running it all have a fantastic attitude). Protected bike lanes and secure bike parking might help people make those trips that are a bit long to walk, and also help people access public transit stops better. There is also the phenomenon of reverse commuting, where service industry jobs in the suburbs can pay better than those in the city, so city residents have an economic incentive to make the trip, but these commutes can be tough and are much easier by car. Boosting the minimum wage and promoting tourism in the city might help a little here, but the service industry is probably not the employment growth industry of the future, The long-term solution here is the thorny one that has alluded our country for decades – educate our children, provide them with the mental tools and marketable job skills they need to make an income, and help them build assets.

self-parking cars

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This article in Governing makes the case that a big impact of self-driving cars will be on the amount of land used for parking:

First, self-driving cars need less room to self-park, making it possible to squeeze more cars into a garage — up to 60 percent more, according to Audi. Second, parking garages would no longer have to be located downtown — drivers and their passengers could exit the vehicles in the city and the cars would self-drive to the garages on the downtown’s periphery. Third, with garages capable of storing more cars, cities wouldn’t need to devote so much space for curbside parking, freeing up valuable land for public transit, pedestrians and bicyclists, and reducing the congestion that comes from drivers searching for a place to park…

Self-driving technology can park a car so precisely that lanes with a width of three meters are adequate, leaving just 10 centimeters of space between the mirrors of parked cars, according to Audi. By packing more cars into less space, the company says that the amount of parking can be reduced by as much as 60 to 80 percent in some cases.

May 2015 in Review

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Negative stories:

  • MIT says there is a critical long term decline in U.S. research and development spending, while spending is increasing in many other parts of the world.
  • Lake Mead, water supply for Las Vegas and several other major western U.S. cities, is continuing to dry up. The normal snowpack in Washington State is almost completely absent, while much of Oregon has declared a state of emergency. As the drought grinds on, recycled water (sometimes derided as “toilet to tap”) is becoming more common in Calfornia. This is not bad in itself – on the contrary it is an example of technological adaptation and closing the loop. It does have a cost in money and energy though, which are resources that are then not available for other things like education or infrastructure or whatever people need. In other words, drought makes us all a little bit poorer.
  • We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.
  • There may be a “global shortage of aggregate demand“, and most countries are not dealing with it well. In many developed countries, increases in average longevity could lead to a trend of long-term deflation. This could eventually happen in almost all countries.
  • Climate change is going to make extreme weather more frequent and more damaging in U.S. cities. The 2015 El Nino could break records.
  • There just isn’t a lot of positivity or hope for better passenger rail service in the U.S.
  • Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.
  • Unfortunately there is no foolproof formula to make education work.

Positive stories:

  • Less leisure time could mean less sustainable outcomes, because people just have less time to think and act on their good intentions. I’m putting this in the positive column because although people in the U.S. and many other countries still work long hours, the trend so far is less work and more wealth for human population as a whole over very long periods of time. Obviously the transition is not smooth or painless for all workers all of the time.
  • I found a nice example of meta-analysis, which aggregates findings of a large number of scientific and not-so-scientific studies in a useful form, in this case in the urban planning field.
  • May is time to pull on the urban gardening gloves.
  • Melbourne’s climate change adaptation plan focuses on green open space and urban tree canopy.
  • Painless vaccines may be on the way.
  • The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world. Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.
  • Commercial autonomous trucks are here.
  • The UK may have hit “peak car“.
  • Seattle is allowing developers to provide car share memberships and transit passes in lieu of parking spaces.