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11 Mar 09

Putting Parking into Reverse - InTransition

"Professor’s Theories Influence Cities to Reconsider Pervasive Free Parking" : on how free parking has distorted urban centers.

intransitionmag.org/...Free_Parking.html - Preview

intransition parking cars cities urban_design surface_parking_lots

UCLA Planning Professor Donald Shoup has written 733 pages that say otherwise. Because when cars aren’t going, they are parked somewhere, and when they are parked in one place, an average of six spaces per car nationwide stand vacant. Shoup considers the proliferation of parking spaces to be a plague on American cities, and because the vast majority lie open for the taking, they represent the largest devaluation of real estate short of the subprime mortgage crisis.
If America’s streets were a Monopoly board, it would be a dull contest indeed, with almost every space “Free Parking.” Each of the country’s roughly 200 million vehicles typically demands spaces at home and work, with shares of countless spaces at the market, restaurant, post office, mall and every other imaginable destination. Eighty-seven percent of all trips are made by personal vehicle and 99 percent of those trips arrive at a free parking space.
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- Many of these spaces stem from carelessly planned street parking schemes and arbitrary minimum parking requirements, by which cities dictate the number of spaces that different types of land uses must provide for tenants and customers.
- “That makes parking artificially abundant and therefore cheap and does in some ways tend to subsidize auto use when people would otherwise make other choices,”
- Shoup has waged a campaign to convince cities to revolutionize their parking policies, from charging higher meter prices to allowing communal lots to reducing sacrosanct minimum parking requirements. Such efforts, he says, could speed the flow of traffic, encourage denser development, rehabilitate pedestrian environments and even make it easier to find a place to park. Now, four years after his book’s publication, cities across America are devising ways to stop parking in its tracks.
- Car Culture “Ruined the City”
- As parking requirements facilitate the use of cars, total travel increases, public transit use decreases, buildings scoot farther away from each other, density diminishes, central cities go into tailspins and sprawl increases—all of which, in turn, increases the need for more parking.
- “I’m really saying that cities are doing everything wrong, when it comes to parking,” Shoup said. “I firmly believe that. For 75 years we’ve made terrible mistakes with nobody noticing.”
- “Parking is the most glaring example of how we have systematically subsidized an auto-driven landscape and systematically devalued the pedestrian landscape.”
- A “pseudoscience” was created out of assigning precise requirements to everything from convents to batting cages, and couching them in terms of “requirements” implied that they must be provided free of charge.
- the absence of a price does not equate to an absence of cost.
- Though Shoup himself gives only the occasional informational lecture and admits that his book is nearly unreadable in its entirety, it has turned into a manifesto for a growing movement of planners, public officials and other loyal revolutionaries who decry the degradation of the urban landscape. These self-styled “Shoupistas” (yes, there is a Facebook group) have created a cult of personality and rationality around Shoup and his straightforward, elegant approach to healing American cities.
- Rather than focus on the supply side of the parking equation, Shoup focuses on the demand side and on the heretical notion that, even in a consumerist society, it might be all right to implement policies that would reduce demand.
- The fundamental change that cities need to make, according to Shoup, is to charge a price for metered parking that would be expensive enough to create roughly a 15 percent vacancy rate. At that rate, Shoup said, many drivers will either park in private lots or use other means of transportation, and those drivers who want to park on the street will find readily available spaces without “cruising” endlessly.
- Indeed, one of Shoup’s studies claimed that in a variety of high-traffic areas in Los Angeles, curb parking was always cheaper than pay parking, by as much as a factor of 10. In Westwood Village alone, this disparity leads to “cruising” that “creates enough vehicle travel to make 38 trips around the earth.”
  - yikes... - on 2009-03-11
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- One group likely to raise protests, though, are businesses owners who may fear that higher prices will drive away patrons. In fact, Shoup contends that higher turnover (prompted by higher rates) will benefit some businesses, and he ensures that the benefits will be more than just theoretical.
- Shoup proposes “parking benefit districts” by which revenue at the meters would be re-invested in the immediate neighborhood for upgrades such as sidewalk improvements, signage and other amenities that would make the areas more comfortable for pedestrians and less comfortable for cars.
  - - that's an excellent idea, and fits in well w/ studies that show how urban forests/ plantings improve commerce, lend an air of ease and pleasure to a district and raise its overall profile/ value. - on 2009-03-11
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- He recommends that cities “let the prices do the planning.”
- Leading the pack is San Francisco, where the new SFPark program has received $23 million in federal funding. SFPark takes nearly the entire suite of Shoupisms to heart and is implementing them in an 18-month pilot project that will apply to 7,000 curbside and over 11,000 off-street spaces. It will rely heavily on cutting-edge meter and data-gathering technology to adjust rates and reduce congestion.
- Still, Shoup’s optimism extends even to the typology that most revels in parking excess: the big box store. Convinced that urbanism can emerge in the backwash of sprawl, Shoup contends that if big boxes, malls and even strip malls were allowed to reduce their parking and replace excess spaces with something more useful, suburbanites might embark on the greatest land reclamation scheme this side of the Netherlands. He envisions apartment buildings and townhouses sprouting on the edges of malls parking lots and thereby creating nearly fully formed neighborhoods in place of vacant asphalt.
  - - this is what's supposed to be going up at Town & Country Mall right here in Victoria/ Saanich (if the current $-downturn hasn't killed the project...) - on 2009-03-11
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01 May 08

In Defense of Townhouses — Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool)

- great article by Eric de Place on why so many new TH developments are so ugly. As his lede says, "How parking laws make housing expensive. And ugly."

daily.sightline.org/...in-defense-of-townhouses - Preview

sightline_daily seattle urban_design urbanplanning cars parking architecture

Some of the new townhouse developments are pretty bland, and many seem divorced from the street. But why are the designs so flawed?
Here's one explanation. Nearly every townhouse in the city is required by law to provide offstreet parking. Since cars don't fly, the practical effect of the minimum parking regulations is that each and every townhouse has a garage on the bottom floor. And these garages are often the prime culprit in walling off the townhouses from the street, and of sending the residents upstairs.
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- because the garages are small and the driveways are tight, the residents who have cars often end up parking on the street anyway. All this puts city planners in a lose-lose situation.
- One obvious solution would be to strip out the parking requirements, which would revolutionize the design possibilities. But so far, the city's modest attempts to remove minimum parking mandates in a few urban areas have been greeted with howls of protest from angry mobs wielding pitchforks and torches.
- Contrary to the screeching of some neighborhood activists, the reason that townhouses are sprouting up everywhere is not because developers are part of a notorious cabal dedicated to ruining Seattle's aesthetics. No, the reason is because people want to buy them.
- Not only are single-family homes about 25 percent more expensive, on average, but the single-family homes are more often older, requiring expensive fixes and upkeep. (Believe me, I know). Meanwhile the townhouses are sparkling new, very energy efficient, and often within walking distance of services and transit. As a result, the true price differential is much greater than the sale prices suggest.
- But now there's a push to subject townhouses to more extensive permitting, increased design scrutiny, and more neighborhood input. And while those may or may not be wise public policy decisions, they are precisely the sort of regulations that -- bit by bit -- increase the price of housing.
- Another possibility is simply to downzone neighborhoods, so that it's illegal to build townhouses. But that kind of supply-side restriction -- already common throughout much of Seattle's land-base -- is likely one big contributing factor to unaffordable housing.
- minimum parking requirements -- the ones that foul up townhouse design -- they may also make the townhouses more expensive. In fact, it's been estimated that parking requirements can add tens of thousands to the price of a condo, and it's fair to think that a similar price hit happens with townhouses.
- And free parking is ugly too.