https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/11/18/ask-r-moses-how-can-i-make-the-case-against-more-parking

 

ASK R. MOSES: HOW CAN I MAKE THE CASE AGAINST MORE PARKING?

 

I think you'll have the most success arguing against additional parking if you make the financial case for why it's robbing our cities of wealth.

 

Let me lay this out: To construct a parking garage costs about $15,000 to $20,000 per parking space, not including the land which can be quite expensive in a downtown area.  Then there is the maintenance and operation costs. The average parking space requires over 300 square feet to store a car while the car is not being used, and then you also have the space not being used when the car is here instead of there, or there, or there, since under this logic, there must be a space wherever and whenever the car goes somewhere.

 

300 square feet would be a pretty nice executive office, a small apartment or even a tiny house. But in this case, it is being used to warehouse a car that is not in use. Financially, the return on investment for storing cars is much less than just about any other use that could go in a downtown area, yet this use is considered necessary, often mandatory. Then we have the loss of a welcoming street and storefront if this is built at the edge of the street and sidewalk, which they often are. There's nothing in a parking garage to attract people, only cars. 

 

And we can expand this argument to consider all the expenses of auto-orientation in our communities: If a city is going to base all of its development around the idea that everybody will get there through single-occupancy vehicles, then the city will require a large amount of infrastructure to deal with the cars (in both moving and storing them).

 

It would be valuable to invite your local leaders to consider the total cost of having an auto-dependent city (with many parking garages) vs. the total cost of having a walkable city. Typically the walkable city comes out as the better cost option; especially when you start to include costs to time, health, environment, and value lost when building infrastructure that does not directly support human activities (i.e. parking garages).

 

One challenge with changing our parking paradigm, though, is the transitional period.  When a downtown has been built around auto-dependence, how do we change the rules without significant disruption to downtown, likely including business failures?  Every downtown is unique, so there is no single answer. I think that's a challenge worth facing, though, if we want to turn our cities into Strong Towns instead of economically failing municipalities.

"That building is built like a fortress," Pacella said. "I'm sure it structurally could handle it. It wouldn't be cheap. But it's an interesting idea as downtown has become under-parked."

 

Under-parked??  There's no such thing when it comes to a traditional downtown. A downtown is either under-walked or under-transited. It is never, ever under-parked.

When the majority of people in your overall market live in suburban areas and are used to the suburban experience, there's definitely a such thing as "under-parked"

 

Then the suburbs end up destroying a pleasant downtown experience. Since building a moat around downtown isn't feasible, the reasonable solution is to continue developing downtown housing while managing parking supply at current or lesser levels.

I should have posted this stat here, instead of in Cleveland parking craters thread, so that more Ohioans would see it.....

 

Like much of the modern transportation system, motorists enjoy the benefits of convenient parking without realizing the hidden costs and subsidies that support it. That’s tough to grasp, knowing that cars are immobile 95 percent of the time.

 

A study published in July by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia calculated the actual cost of parking at $2,400 a year per car, considering cost of land, construction, maintenance and operations. But most Americans spend $85 annually on parking. If we paid the actual cost of parking, Americans would drive about 16 percent less, or about 500 billion fewer miles a year, according to a projection by the study’s author.

Parking isn't as important for restaurants as the owners think it is

https://theconversation.com/amp/parking-isnt-as-important-for-restaurants-as-the-owners-think-it-is-74750

In San Francisco, there's a proposal for 1,1100 homes - half of them affordable - on a parking lot next to transit and a city college.

 

Naturally, NIMBYs have launched a ballot measure to block the project in hopes of saving 500 parking spots....

 

http://www.sfexaminer.com/homes-people-important-homes-cars/

 

How progressive of them

I think San Fransisco is more libertarian than progressive these days.

Haha this initiative is even less libertarian than it is progressive.

I think NIMBYism crosses the entire political spectrum.

It does... but it manages to be hypocritical under all political ideologies.

I believe that much of the opposition to this proposal is that public land would be turned over to private ownership or that at the very least a private company would profit from it, even if the land itself remains publicly-owned. 

EDITORIAL: Parking Requirement Removal Should Be First Step In Broader Reform

http://www.urbancincy.com/2018/07/editorial-city-should-remove-parking-requirements/ … via @UrbanCincy

Portland, OR, just did one simple thing that could revolutionize their city budget. And their example might help your city solve a huge and common challenge: how to minimize the money you devote to unnecessary excess parking without making residents mad.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/20/getting-parking-right-in-portland

Idea. If an entity, be it governmental or private or combination thereof, created and strategically placed large "free" parking structures connected to shuttle service thru downtown, wouldn't that be a good way to devalue surface lots? You've now got thousands of fish in a barrel, so to speak. You could recapture some of the expense by leasing out a variety of retail there, perhaps with enough momentum these places become their own destination. Eventually you build residential on top, like the glorious Beacon bldg in CLE. What's stopping this from happening?      

 

 

 

 

 

Just as adding lanes adds more traffic, adding more parking adds more driving.....

 

 

Not quite on topic, but couldn’t think where else to post this. Enjoy. 

 

 

 

24 minutes ago, KJP said:

 

Not really reasonable. If you are in position to offer a fringe benefit becuase of the nature of your business, you should not be required to pay extra for those who do not elect to take part in that fringe benefit. It is like asking airlines to compensate their employees more if they choose not to take advantage of the free flights available to them or requiring colleges to pay professors more if their children do not take advantage of the free or discounted education benefits of the institution available to employees.

It is bad policy. 

^ It's a very lazy, uncreative fringe benefit. Meanwhile...

 

 

 

 

People of the world -- Europeans, Asians, South Americans, Africans, Australians -- are going to be baffled if not horrified when they encounter this. They will run back to civilization screaming....

 

Free parking?  16% of Americans now have $1,000/mo payments:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/car-owners-strain-more-loan-144203764.html

 

 

Quote

The need for a perfect parking space has shaped the country’s physical landscape. It has become the organizing principle of American architecture, making our designs bigger, uglier, and farther apart, from the parking-first design of the strip mall, to office towers sitting atop their garage pedestals, to the house itself, in which the garage is often the largest room.

 

[Laws requiring every building to include parking] prevent us from creating more housing—especially affordable housing—because parking costs so much to construct and takes up so much space. If the Empire State Building had been built to the minimum parking requirements of a contemporary American city, the surface area of its parking lot would cover twelve blocks. . . .

 

As a result, [parking] requirements have helped to trigger an extinction-level event for bite-size, infill apartment buildings like row houses, brownstones, and triple-deckers; the production of buildings with two to four units fell more than 90 percent between 1971 and 2021.

 

The apartments that do get built are clustered in megastructures whose designs are dictated by parking placement. One popular model is the “Texas donut,” in which a ring of apartments encircles a five- or six-story parking garage (this is the type of building you see in the cool neighborhoods of growing cities). Another is the “parking podium,” like Chicago’s corncob Marina City, in which the housing sits atop the parking.

 

Requiring parking spaces is essentially levying a tax, one that drives up the cost of new homes and stops a countless number from being built at all—precisely in the neighborhoods where it is possible to live happily without a car.

Go read the whole article. I plan to buy the book it is excerpted from.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/04/henry-grabar-paved-paradise/

 

Strong Towns:  End Parking Mandates and Subsidies:

https://www.strongtowns.org/parking

Induced demand applies to parking, too:

"An increase in parking provision from 0.1 to 0.5 parking space per person was associated with an increase in automobile mode share of roughly 30 percentage points."

 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3141/2543-19