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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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20 Feb 08

» The Hidden Jewel of Hull • Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape

Interview with Marc Dube, "owner of most of the parking lots in downtown Hull." Parking lots are lucrative, as Dube's start in the business illustrates: "In the mid 1980s, Dubé and two others planned to open a restaurant in downtown Hull. The financing fell through after they had already signed the lease on a building. Dubé realized an alternate source of income: he could demolish the building and put in a parking lot. Since his partners weren’t interested, he began the business on his own." Read on from there.

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spacing.ca surface_parking_lots toronto urban_design urban_renewal

As he explained it: “We were three waiters that were supposed to renovate an old building into a restaurant…It was some kind of a deviation from the original idea.” Needless to say, his deviation was a success:

Well, 22 years ago the parking industry was not known at all here – like it was in Montreal, Toronto, busier cities, Ottawa. And now everybody knows about this business; but before, nobody. It was like a hidden jewel. It was something that nobody knew at that point and I just had the opportunity to go into that industry. And now, everybody wants to, would love to have parking because it’s a low maintenance company. Like once you add your trees and your paving and your booth you just wait for your customer to come in. It’s a simple industry. It’s not a complicated industry. And the beauty of it is that you get revenues that pay for your land, and your land keeps taking value. So then in 10, 12 years it’s a retirement fund, pension plan.
Not every parking lot he opened did well. When asked if there are ever unsuccessful lots that people just don’t use, Dubé replied, “Yes, because some of them are too far from the activity. So if you have to walk five miles after you park your car, it’s not convenient. So the people at that point are going to go to plan B, which is the bus or the train.”
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- How did Dubé manage to build all of those parking lots without intervention from Hull residents, from the city, or from anyone else?
- Dubé says his parking lot clients are “mostly government people, business people, industry surrounding the government people – like the fax, photocopiers reparation, things like that. At night restaurants, bars –that’s mostly the clientele”. Hull’s lots were not built for the neighbourhood – although local entrepreneurs and businesses feel they need parking in order to have customers.
  - Yikes, sounds like Victoria's m.o. from late-70s, into 80s and beyond, now thank heavens changing because of residential pressures. - on 2008-02-20
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- In Dubé’s eyes, parking lots are temporary spaces biding their time storing cars before being developed into condos. Parking lots are spaces that change; owners don’t necessarily conceive of them as permanent. Eventually someone turns them into something else.
  - - their silver lining, I guess (unless they displaced older heritage buildings, in which case, "no lining for you, bub'..." - on 2008-02-20
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Putting Parking into Reverse - InTransition

» The Hidden Jewel of Hull • Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape

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