Tag Archives: parking

alternatives to minimum parking

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Seattle has a brilliant, and in retrospective obvious, idea for an alternative to required minimum parking requirements for development. Instead of taking them out of the code entirely, allow developers or landlords to provide transit passes or car share memberships instead. This makes perfect sense. If you wanted to be more equitable, you could channel some or all of the money into a fund that low-income people in the neighborhood could use for transportation. For those who are just catching up, most cars sit parked most of the time and take up enormous amounts of space, generally equal or greater than the space taken up by housing. By reducing this wasted space, you create more space for housing, businesses, parks, or some combination. Depending on what you convert the land to, you can also reduce water pollution, flooding, and heat; reduce stress; improve physical health; improve appearance and property values; and maybe even grow some food. It’s an obvious win for everyone – why are we still letting car industry propaganda drive our culture and shape our cities?

parking craters

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This video is about how surface parking lots have crowded out actual development in many U.S. downtowns. An interesting thing is happening in Philadelphia, where I live. Surface parking lots that have been here as long as I have (1999) are suddenly turning into development sites, all over turn. This tells me that they were being held in a holding pattern waiting for the next boom. This works in Philadelphia because there were never huge areas of parking in the central city, just smaller lots scattered here and there. But there must be some critical mass where you have so much parking that you no longer have a city at all, and maybe it is hard to recover from that.

The lots that are “temporary” for only a few decades still cause environmental problems of course. Philadelphia has the good sense to charge industrial and commercial landowners by the square foot of pavement for stormwater management, a good policy that more cities should consider (disclosure: I have some professional ties to this program). This general idea of tieing taxes and fees to external costs – in this case the environmental impact of building materials – is basic textbook economics and it works!

In theory, you could cap and trade the right to pave. Initially the credits could be sold to real estate development companies. Then, when the cap is hit, a new development would have to buy enough credits from somebody else who is willing to part with an equal amount of pavement. The alternative would be to use porous materials or low impact development techniques. Credits could be retired over time – either because the government or non-profit groups buy them and retire them, or they could be retired when an owner goes bankrupt or falls behind on property taxes. Maybe they could even be accepted as payment for certain fees or taxes (for example, fees that would have been spent on stormwater management anyway), then retired. Set up a system like this and entrepreneurs would find ways to get in on the game, putting the private sector to work on behalf of the environment.

Donald Shoup retirement

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Here is a nice tribute to Donald Shoup, who is retiring from the University of California.

Shoup’s most notable contribution to America’s planning landscape is in highlighting the consequences of underpricing parking. In The High Cost of Free Parking, he demonstrated that minimum parking requirements artificially inflate building costs by adding the costs of accommodating parked cars to new development and then giving away those benefits to drivers who park for free. These costs can be substantial: As Shoup has pointed out repeatedly, free parking at work is often worth more than if employers filled up their workers’ gas tanks. Shoup highlighted the true price of this invisible subsidy and unveiled new ways for city planners to encourage public transit use and address environmental concerns.

As technology evolved, Shoup folded new innovations into his ideas. In April 2011 San Francisco launched SFpark, a system based on Shoup’s work that adapts the price of street parking spaces to match demand. Adjustments according to time of day, location and day of the week allow smart parking meters to change their prices, with a target of keeping 15% of spaces vacant on any block. Drivers searching for parking can use their smartphones to find a space at a distance from their destination at a price they’re willing to pay. By more closely matching the price of a space with demand, drivers waste less time and fuel circling the block looking for a spot to park. The system has helped the city manage meter occupancy effectively and has reduced circling for parking by 50%, according to a 2014 study, and “smart parking” programs are appearing in Los Angeles and other cities. “His ideas have largely defined what is considered best practice for much of the field of parking management, ideas that increasingly are being put in place in cities around the world,” SFpark program director Jay Primus says.

Removing parking minimums from the zoning code seems like such an easy, obvious step. But what causes political opposition, at least where I live, is the perception that if new developments are built without parking, then people will just buy cars anyway and crowd out on-street spaces for people who already live there. I don’t necessarily buy this. If parking is truly valuable to people, they should be willing to pay more for a development that includes a parking space. If they are not doing this, it tells us that the demand for parking is not actually there. If they can walk safely to work, school, and shopping, and parking is expensive, many people will make the choice not to own cars, especially with options like car share and Uber becoming more accessible every day. Where I live, this is definitely happening.

There is something else happening where I live though. On-street parking is incredibly cheap, and as a result there is more demand for it than supply. People feel incredibly indignant about this, which makes it politically very difficult to limit parking or raise parking prices. There is a legitimate argument that if you raise parking prices, the rich will be able to have cars and the poor will not. If the city provided excellent walking, biking, and public transportation in all neighborhoods though, this would not be a problem.

So here is my solution, right out of an economics textbook: completely deregulate parking prices so it is all market all the time, including street spaces. You might want to do this gradually and limit the fluctuations that can occur, just so it doesn’t get too crazy. Then take the public revenues, tax the private revenues, and invest the proceeds dollar for dollar in pedestrian infrastructure, bike infrastructure, and public transportation, making sure the benefits are highly visible in neighborhoods that need them most. To do this you probably need a single unified agency or authority in charge of parking and all modes of transportation, and under the control of local leaders with some guts. There are a few more policies that might nudge the system even more, like property taxes and stormwater fees that discourage land speculators from turning vacant lots into parking and holding onto them for decades.

free parking and why good people are misled by the forces of darkness

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Here’s a nice quote from a blog called Saporta Report:

Parking causes sprawl. The vast amounts of parking required at locations push businesses and other uses further and further apart. Free parking encourages us to drive to the grocery store, and we insist on having ample amounts of parking.

As the amount and size of our parking lots decreases, our businesses can move closer together. A business that couldn’t previously open in a neighborhood as a corner grocery because of required parking minimums could now open to serve walk-up customers.

This is exactly right. Free parking is an enormous hidden subsidy to unsustainable land use practices and unhealthy lifestyles. It does all of us far more harm than good. If we eliminated these subsidies and let our cherished “free market” set a fair price on parking, the equation would be fundamentally changed.  The problem is that a majority of people still don’t see this. They perceive (correctly in many cases) that the way their community is designed, they would be unable to get around quickly or safely without a car, and they can’t envision their community changing its design, or living in another community with a different design. Even in places where walking and cycling are relatively safe and fast, like in or near Center City Philadelphia (see this Washington Post* article), and many people understand that 100%, the voices of the car culture are still louder and more politically influential at the moment. Here in Philadelphia, I see that being characterized in the media sometimes as an old vs. young, rich vs. poor, black vs. white struggle, which is very unfortunate because that is not what it is about at all. It is about health, safety, sustainability, community, competitiveness, innovation, and joy.

* Note that the Washington Post article above is unfortunately titled “Why cars remain so appealing even in cities with decent public transit”. It goes on to conclude that it can take a long time to get around by public transit, if you live far from your job. Then it concludes that walking and cycling are better than both driving and public transit, if you live near your job. But busy people who only have time to read headlines are likely to miss that point entirely, aren’t they?

parking design

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ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking

As I mentioned recently, I will return frequently to urban design and urban infrastructure issues because I think these are key to long-term sustainability – and I am talking about sustainability in the dictionary sense of a system (in this case, our human civilization here on Earth) that is built to last. I think of urban sustainability as having two major sides, which are obviously intertwined. The first is green infrastructure, which I am convinced is the answer to managing water and ecosystems. The second is the built environment – buildings and the manmade infrastructure we need to move people and stuff around (roads, rail, pipes, electric lines, and so on).

In the short term, we might think of land use as driving the type of transportation systems we build. But in the longer term, it is really a chicken and egg problem – the way we choose to get around will have a big effect on how urban areas are built. Parking is a big part of this, because currently most cars sit idle most of the time and take up enormous amounts of space that is then taken out of the picture for any other kind of use. Not only that, but car parking takes up so much space that we then need to use cars just to cross the distances taken up by other cars – stuff is just so far apart that walking is not as practical, not to mention hot, dangerous, and deadly boring.

So on that note, here is a new book about parking. Here is the Amazon description:

There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So too is Earth’s supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It’s official: we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In ReThinking a Lot, Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking’s future. Parking lots, he writes, are ripe for transformation. After all, as he points out, their design and function has not been rethought since the 1950s. With this book, Ben-Joseph pushes the parking lot into the twenty-first century.

Can’t parking lots be aesthetically pleasing, environmentally and architecturally responsible? Used for something other than car storage? Ben-Joseph shows us that they can. He provides a visual history of this often ignored urban space, introducing us to some of the many alternative and nonparking purposes that parking lots have served–from RV campgrounds to stages for “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.” He shows us parking lots that are not concrete wastelands but lushly planted with trees and flowers and beautifully integrated with the rest of the built environment. With purposeful design, Ben-Joseph argues, parking lots could be significant public places, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks, or plazas. For all the acreage they cover, parking lots have received scant attention. It’s time to change that; it’s time to rethink the lot.