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October 02, 2007
Managing Parking
Salon's article on how parking regulations are Ruining America is interesting stuff. I didn't know, for instance, that parking regulations tend to demand four spaces for every 1,100 square feet of office space, which means you can't build structures very close together, effectively ending any hopes of a Main Street-style drag. I'd never much thought about the fact that malls and churches build parking to accommodate their busiest days of the year, leaving their lots empty most of the time. And apparently, cities are noticing these distortions. "Some cities, like Seattle and Petaluma, Calif., are loosening or chucking their minimum parking requirements. Great Britain found that minimum parking requirements bred such bad land-use policies that the nation recently outlawed them entirely." Take that!
Of course, building insufficient parking just leads drivers to circle around endlessly, causing gridlock and pollution (a recent study in Park Slope, Brooklyn found 45 percent of the drivers on the road were looking for parking). You need to push towards either different parking patterns or less driving. So some cities are experimenting with increasing prices the closer you get to the destination. If folks know the parking five blocks out is free and plentiful, while the parking near the mall is costly and rare, they begin to adjust. Additionally, it's not a bad idea to cause some discomfort in the short-term: That's how you build pressure for public transportation options (which can be funded, in part, by the new parking fees).
October 2, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
Is there a link for that Park Slope study? Because I live there and although I believe it, I want proof.
Posted by: Antid Oto | Oct 2, 2007 3:08:45 PM
My wife drives me nuts when she constantly insists on driving through the closest parking lane to wherever we're going hoping for a spot or finding someone about to vacate a space when, four lanes and less than 60 feet away there is plenty of parking that is easier to get into and out of and we would end up in the store, on average, much faster. What makes this especially infuriating is that she is not lazy or out of shape and thus there is no need for her (at least physically) to park as near as possible to the store.
Posted by: Ugh | Oct 2, 2007 3:36:45 PM
Ugh:
If memory serves me right, your wife employs the George Costanza strategy: try first for the optimal spot, then expand in concentric circles.
Posted by: UberMitch | Oct 2, 2007 3:50:45 PM
I don't understand why zoning regulations mandate the building of underground parking. Wouldn't that solve everything at once? Is it that it would make development too expensive and unacceptably slow growth?
Lastly, the mention of looking for parking in Park Slope reminds of how in The Squid and the Whale Jeff Bridge's character is always pissed someone took his parking spot when he returns hours later.
Posted by: UberMitch | Oct 2, 2007 3:54:05 PM
"So some cities are experimenting with increasing prices the closer you get to the destination."
How do they know where I'm going?
Posted by: Trevor | Oct 2, 2007 4:08:12 PM
Trevor: You're probably going to the mall/stadium/whatever rather than the residential neighborhood 3/4 of a mile away.
Posted by: Dan Miller | Oct 2, 2007 4:37:37 PM
Nottingham in the U.K. is putting a charge of around $700 per year on every office parking space in the downtown. They're hoping it will be an easier to implement version of London's congestion charge, and they can then pour a bunch of extra cash into public transport alternatives.
I'm not 100% sure of just how much impact that fee will have on commuters' behaviour, but it should be interesting to watch.
Posted by: Sam | Oct 2, 2007 5:13:04 PM
I don't understand why zoning regulations [don't?]mandate the building of underground parking. Wouldn't that solve everything at once? Is it that it would make development too expensive and unacceptably slow growth?
I think the answer is "yes". An architect friend of mine told me that even above-ground parking structures have *very* slow payback times. If they are so expensive, I imagine underground space has to be much worse.
Posted by: Captain Goto | Oct 2, 2007 5:20:09 PM
I've always wondered why stores don't set themselves up against the street and put parking in back - put the lots in the center of a block, rather than putting the buildings in the center and the lots on the perimeter.
Posted by: Sara | Oct 2, 2007 5:22:35 PM
Never mind. I JustFuckingGoogledIt myself. Here's the PDF for anyone else who was curious.
Posted by: Antid Oto | Oct 2, 2007 5:29:55 PM
Responding to UberMitch @3:54 on underground parking. This comment is based on a conversation I had with the head of the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority concerning parking construction rates in Pittsburgh in either 2002 or more likely 2003 in non-Central Business District properties:
surface lot: ~$1,000/space
simple 2 story deck: ~$5,000/space
parking garage: ~$10,000/space
underground parking structure: ~$30,000/space
Posted by: fester | Oct 2, 2007 5:36:52 PM
An architect friend of mine told me that even above-ground parking structures have *very* slow payback times. If they are so expensive, I imagine underground space has to be much worse.
That. It's also an issue of the risk of not getting paid back. Parking is actually something that I think needs a lot of public investment in to start changing things--it needs to lead businesses into reshaping an area, rather than lag them.
That said, as someone mentioned, the first step is getting the buildings in the right place. Even putting parking on the side is better (drivers can see it; I've never heard developers say that visible parking is important, but it's not hard to imagine it), since you can fill in and it's easy to re-orient entrances to buildings from side to front.
Posted by: greg claxton | Oct 2, 2007 5:42:19 PM
How about abolishing planning regulations, and allow land owners to decide if it is more valuable to have parking spaces, or buildings?
Posted by: Marcin Tustin | Oct 2, 2007 6:58:58 PM
Calvin Trillin has written the ultimate treatise on the subject of Parking: "Tepper Isn't Going Out." Ezra doesn't even mention Good for Tomorrow.
Posted by: Bob Munck | Oct 2, 2007 8:04:38 PM
I live in Rome and spent much time tonight looking for a place to park and not daring even to dream of minimum parking requirements.
Of course I'm lucky to live in such a beautiful city.
Posted by: Robert Waldmann | Oct 2, 2007 8:58:42 PM
Those parking regs came about for a reason -- when new retail or residential space was added, existing parking got cramped when that space was in peak use. The trouble is that it is not always in peak use. Take churches -- on Sunday, they need lots of parking, but the rest of the week they don't.
Residential parking is a different matter. If someone replaces ten single-family homes with a 100-apartment complex the street parking is going to get cramped.
Pricing it is not going to eliminate sprawl, though. It will encourage it. More people will move to suburbs if urban parking is too costly. Urban businesses will suffer -- if you need to go to two stores located 3 miles apart in a city, how much are you going to pay? It would be nice if you could walk to your grocery store, but if you can't and if your city's transportation authority bans bags in aisles on buses or trains, what are you suppose to do? Oh, right, hire cabs.
That's not to say that Americans don't have a car fetish. I remember in Garreau's Edge City that malls did not want too much parking space for fear that customers would park outside one store, then go back to their cars and drive around the mall to the next store.
Posted by: c.l. ball | Oct 2, 2007 9:55:24 PM
How about abolishing planning regulations, and allow land owners to decide if it is more valuable to have parking spaces, or buildings?
You could stop bitching about that and simply move to Houston if that's what you want. Until I see the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, the AEI, and Forbes Magazine relocate out of their hyper-planned urban centers and into Houston, I'll assume that their advocacy of such ideas is pretty empty.
Biggest parking annoyance: big box store complexes in which you have to drive between stores in the same complex. You know, sometimes I want to go to BestBuy AND Target and wouldn't mind walking between the two.
Posted by: Tyro | Oct 3, 2007 1:11:18 AM
Err, this is why the parking meter was invented. To price spaces near the stores. Seriously, go look it up. Charge people for the scarce resources they are using.
Posted by: Tim Worstall | Oct 3, 2007 6:29:55 AM
Ah, economics. You've got to love a 'science' where every problem has the same solution: Make life harder on poor people.
And yet people still wonder why economists are so widely despised outside of the elite.
Posted by: soullite | Oct 3, 2007 8:13:12 AM
...parking regulations tend to demand four spaces for every 1,100 square feet of office space, which means you can't build structures very close together, effectively ending any hopes of a Main Street-style drag....
If folks know the parking five blocks out is free and plentiful, while the parking near the mall is costly and rare, they begin to adjust....
If the problem is that government mandates parking spaces for new construction, then pricing it more dearly is not going to make much of a difference. Eliminating the regulation will, however, reduce the problem at the price of greater inconvenience for residents. However, the downside is that without sufficient parking, some retailers will be loathe to locate in downtowns. The real question is how non-retail businesses will react -- will firms that densely pack their space w/ employees set up their own shuttle services or back public transportation? (The non-retail won't leave: if paying to build parking was too dear, they would already have located elsewhere). But many urban planners don't want to see cities that are filled w/ office space primarily -- they are very dead places on evenings and weekends.
Des Moines -- not a very large city -- actually has an interesting system. City parking garages charge during the week, so those who drive to work pay, but are free on weekends, drawing customers into the downtown then, and away from the suburban and ex-urban big-box complexes and malls.
Posted by: c.l. ball | Oct 3, 2007 8:40:41 AM
I seem to remember that Clean Air Act regulations limit the number of parking spaces in cities. I wonder what kind of tension this creates in development when trading off parking requirements with parking restrictions.
Posted by: Tyro | Oct 3, 2007 10:02:49 AM
And don't forget the value of giving developers freebies as a way of building support for public transport. If developers within a quarter mile of a fixed transport corridor stop/station are allowed to claim a certain share of the capacity of that corridor as part of their "parking" requirement, then developers will save money if they get on pro-public transit movements, rather than getting behind the formation of anti-public transit astroturf groups.
Posted by: BruceMcF | Oct 3, 2007 12:25:15 PM
This is actually a long discussed issue in Smart Growth or New Urbanist circles. Parking places actually represent an economic distortion because where you have free parking you essentially must provide approximately 6 parking places per car, and with almost one car per person you begin to see why we have gross misallocation in land use. We would be better off (maybe even on a national level given that transportation represents about a third of CO2 tonnage) forbidding local zoning from requiring any parking places, gradually increasing a per place tax on existing spaces, and using that tax for mass transit, sidewalks, bike paths, and good urban design.
It's a huge shift in thinking for Americans, but it's pretty much how Europe works, and I have to say, since I lived here for quite a while, it's pretty nice, there's very little traffic, and a little grocery store withing five minutes in any direction.
Posted by: Paula | Oct 3, 2007 2:18:06 PM
Ez
How can you mention parking without giving props to your boy Don Shoup. I expect you will be getting a call from the new chancellor in the near future.
http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/
Posted by: westwood | Oct 4, 2007 5:57:47 AM
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