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Los Angeles, United States
Chapter 13
Los Angeles, United States Michael Manville University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Chapter Outline Introduction: parking in Los Angeles Transport and mobility Social trends Land use Technology
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Planning policies Conclusion References Further reading
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Introduction: parking in Los Angeles Parking is the tail that wags Los Angeles’ dog. Los Angeles has a reputation as the ultimate driving city, but a driving city must also be a parking city. When everyone drives everywhere, the landscape must bristle with places to store all the cars, both at home and when people arrive. As a result, parking quietly dominates Los Angeles’ planning: all development is conditional on the provision of ample parking (Manville and Shoup, 2005; Shoup, 2011). To paraphrase Fulton (2001), in Los Angeles, developers do not build housing or commercial or industrial structures. They first build parking, and then get permission from the city to build something that will finance that parking. The abundance of parking in Los Angeles is both a cause and a consequence of the region’s travel behavior. Local governments require parking because people like to drive. Yet people choose to drive, in part, because there is so much parking. When parking is plentiful and affordable, driving is relatively easy. “Relatively easy”, of course, is not the same as “pleasant.” Los Angeles has terrible traffic congestion. But as awful as that congestion can be, for many if not most trips travel by private vehicle is easier than moving around in other ways. The prevalence of parking eliminates a great uncertainty about urban driving—“where can I put my car when I arrive?”—
Parking: An International Perspective. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815265-2.00013-3 © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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and also pushes apart destinations, which means that walking, cycling, and riding transit are slower and less pleasant. Parking is plentiful and affordable in Los Angeles for the same reason it is plentiful and affordable in other places: local governments, through their zoning codes, force developers to provide parking with every structure they build. In Los Angeles, these parking requirements help explain not just travel behavior, but also some of the region’s signature architecture. This includes dingbat apartments (which are the cheapest way to build multifamily housing with a requirement for covered parking) and strip malls (not unique to Los Angeles, but the cheapest way to build retail with a parking requirement). Parking requirements are applied at the parcel level, but their cumulative effect is regional. Because parking is expensive to build, and demands large amounts of land or capital, the Los Angeles region is less intensively developed than it might otherwise be. This makes housing less affordable and public transportation less effective. Los Angeles continues to grow, but parking has stunted its growth, thus preventing the development of a truly dense urban core, and producing a pattern of consistently moderate density. This pattern robs density of some of its advantages while ignoring or even exacerbating some of its weaknesses. In places where Los Angeles is dense, for example, it is rarely walkable, because the sidewalks are lined with curb cuts: anyone out for a stroll must be constantly alert for vehicles sliding in and out of garages and parking lots. Conversely, Los Angeles’ dense neighborhoods are likely to have worse congestion than other equally dense places, because dense new development is forced by law to make room for storing vehicles (Manville and Shoup, 2005; Manville et al., 2013). Parking has helped to give Los Angeles “the worst of all worlds” (Eidlin, 2005): a landscape not quite dense enough to move around without driving, but dense enough to make driving miserable. How many on-street parking spaces does Los Angeles have? No one knows. The City of Los Angeles has made some guesses, but guesses are all they are. A 2011 audit by the city controller revealed that the city’s Department of Transportation did not even know how many parking meters it had, let alone total parking spaces (Greuel, 2011). How many off-street spaces does the region have? Again, no one knows. Local governments unfailingly require parking with new development, but they do not keep systematic records of how much parking each parcel provides. One reasonable estimate suggests that 14% of Los Angeles County’s land area is off-street parking, but again, this is only an estimate (Chester et al., 2015). Most of Los Angeles’ parking is free, at least to drivers. Residential parking in Los Angeles is often bundled in with the purchase price of housing, and customers and employees often park free in (publicly mandated) private lots. Parking policy in Los Angeles has been defined, with rare exceptions, by inattention to prices, inattention to data, and an implicit belief that while parking can often be in deficit, it can never be in surplus.
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Before continuing, a quick note about geography. Los Angeles is both a city and a county. The city of Los Angeles has about 4 million people, while the county includes 88 cities, (one of which is the City of Los Angeles), and over 10 million people. Most of the time, when I discuss Los Angeles, I am referring to Los Angeles County, which is essentially the Los Angeles region. I discuss the region because transportation and land use issues are generally regional, and a great deal of personal travel—to work and recreation and school—crosses local but not regional boundaries. At the same time, parking mandates (minimum parking requirements) are local: it is cities that impose them. If these mandates help shape travel behavior (and they do), then regional travel behavior is in part the sum of local zoning. As such, a discussion of regional travel that completely ignored local jurisdictions would be inappropriate. Thus when I discuss parking requirements, I am usually referring to the parking requirements of a particular locality.
Transport and mobility When people in Los Angeles move around, they drive. This fact will not surprise anyone personally familiar with the region, or familiar with it only by reputation. Southern California, and Los Angeles in particular, has been popularly defined by the car. Architectural aficionados will recall critic Reyner Banham’s claim that he learned to drive so he could “read Los Angeles in the original.” Countless films have depicted Los Angeles’ famous freeways. (Somewhat fewer have depicted its infamous traffic jams). The main character in Steve Martin’s LA Story is sufficiently tethered to his car that he gets relationship advice by talking to a freeway traffic sign, and he visits his next door neighbor by driving over. Literary types might remember Maria Wyeth, the doomed heroine of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, who tried to escape her demons by driving Los Angeles’ freeway system “as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its rhythms, its deceptions” (Didion, 1970, 16). And consumers of less-highbrow culture may know a skit from Saturday Night Live that mocks Angelinos for being unable to discuss anything but the different routes they use to drive around. Are these characterizations exaggerated? Yes. Are there are important exceptions? Yes again. Los Angeles is a big city in a big region. Each day, people in Los Angeles County take millions of transit trips. Dedicated cyclists bravely zip around the city’s streets, and—famous pop songs notwithstanding—lots of people do walk. But these are exceptions. Given the size and density of Los Angeles, as well as its topography and climate— largely flat, weather lovely—the proportion of people who move around only when encased in their own private ton of steel is remarkable. Data from the US Census show that in 2016, 84% of commuters in Los Angeles County drove to work, and 74% did so alone. Another 10% carpooled and about 6% used public transport. These figures were largely
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unchanged since 2005, with the important exception that transit commuting had declined. Solo driving is slightly less common in the City of Los Angeles: 70% of the city’s commuters, as opposed to 74% of the county’s, regularly drive to work alone. Commutes are a minority of overall trips, but the 2012 California Household Travel Survey (CDOT, 2015), which provides more detailed data on daily travel, shows that the overwhelming majority of trips taken in the Los Angeles region are by car. Almost two-thirds of Los Angeles County residents take public transportation only rarely, or never. Do these proportions justify Los Angeles’ reputation as a place where people are uniquely enslaved to automobiles? Not really. Compared to Americans overall, or even residents of other big US cities like Atlanta or Phoenix, people in Los Angeles do not drive an inordinately large amount. Indeed, in the United States in 2016, 76% of commuters drove alone, a share slightly higher than Los Angeles city or county. What makes Los Angeles stand out is not the extent to which its residents rely on automobiles, but the juxtaposition of that automobile reliance combined with the region’s relatively high density. Los Angeles is unique for being both dense (for an American urban region) and automobile-oriented. Figure 13.1 shows this car-oriented density, and the role of parking in creating it (Most of the discussion here is drawn from Manville (2017). The figure uses data from the metropolitan samples of the 2003 07 American Housing Surveys, and from the Texas Transportation Institute (2011). Each of the figure’s five panels shows, for a sample of large US metropolitan areas (MSAs), the relationships between population density (measured as persons per square mile), driving [measured as vehicle miles traveled (VMT)], vehicle ownership (measured as the share of zero-vehicle households), and the presence of parking (measured as the share of housing units that include at least one parking space with the rent or purchase price, known as “bundled” parking spaces). The figure’s first panel shows that as population density rises, driving falls, but that the relationship between these variables is modest. (The coefficient of determination, or R2, between population density and VMT, is 0.3). The second panel shows that as density rises vehicle ownership falls, and that this relationship is considerably stronger (R2 5 0.7). Neither of these findings is surprising. What matters here is that in both panels, Los Angeles is an outlier. In Panel 1, Los Angeles sits well above the regression line, and in Panel 2 it sits well below. New York, meanwhile, also stands out in both panels, but in a manner almost exactly opposite to Los Angeles. Where Los Angeles has more driving and fewer carless households than its density would predict, New York has much less driving, and many more carless households, than its density would suggest. Panel 3, which plots the relationship between population density and the share of housing units with bundled parking, suggests an explanation for these anomalies. Most American MSAs have low levels of density and high
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FIGURE 13.1 Relationships between density, driving, and parking in American MSAs. Reproduced from Manville, M., King, D., Smart, M., 2017 The driving downturn: a preliminary assessment. J. Am. Plan. Assoc. 83 (1), 42 55.
levels of parking: few people per square mile and most housing units including parking. New York, in contrast, is America’s only high-density/low-parking MSA, and Los Angeles is the country’s only MSA with high population density and a high share of bundled parking. In its levels of residential parking provision, Los Angeles resembles metropolitan areas that have less than half its residential density. Panels 4 and 5 show that, if we account for the share of bundled parking, neither Los Angeles nor New York are outliers in VMT or vehicle ownership. Panel 4 shows that the prevalence of parking is more strongly
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associated with VMT than is population density (R2 5 0.50), and that plotting VMT against parking, instead of against density, pulls Los Angeles back onto the regression line. Similarly, Panel 5 shows the extremely strong relationship (R2 5 0.91) between the share of housing with bundled parking and vehicle ownership. And once again, accounting for parking pulls both New York and Los Angeles back onto the regression line. What does this all mean? The puzzle of why people in Los Angeles drive much more than the region’s density would suggest is resolved by accounting for Los Angeles’ inordinately high (for its density) parking provision. By the same logic, people in New York drive much less than the region’s density would suggest because parking there is so scarce. All of this is sensible. Parking is a large part of the price of automobility. Owning and operating a car is cheaper—in money, time, and stress—when storing it is easier. Plentiful parking lowers the price of owning and operating a vehicle in Los Angeles, while scarce parking raises it in New York.
Social trends Los Angeles features some of the heaviest use of ride sourcing or Transportation Network Companies like Uber and Lyft. The region is also in the middle of a massive expansion of its public transportation system. These factors, in combination, could be expected to create less personal vehicle use and thus less demand for parking. Yet that seems not to be the case. The current trend in Los Angeles is toward more driving, more vehicle ownership, and less transit use. Between 2004 and 2013, driving in Los Angeles fell, as it did in much of the United States and Europe. This driving downturn led some observers to hypothesize that cities had reached “peak car,” and to speculate that social media, and other forms of information and communication technology, would replace travel (Lyons, 2014; Van Wee, 2015; Schwartz, 2015). These hypotheses were never supported empirically, and subsequent events have revealed them to be little more than wishful thinking. Driving in the United States fell between 2004 and 2013 largely because gas prices skyrocketed, the economy collapsed, and the early years of the economic recovery were highly uneven (Manville et al., 2017). During the driving downturn transit use did not rise, either in the United States overall or in Los Angeles in particular—despite Los Angeles, during this time, opening two new light rail lines and a bus rapid transit line. Per capita public transport ridership in Los Angeles has, in fact, been falling steadily since 2007 (Manville et al., 2018), and in 2018 it was more than 40% lower than its 1985 peak (Manville, 2019). The precise reason for public transport’s recent steep decline is unknown; however, following 2000, vehicle ownership grew, especially among people who traditionally are most likely to take public transport (Manville et al., 2018). In 1990, 11% of households in Los Angeles County had no vehicles:
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in 2000, 12.5% were carless. By 2015 the share of households without a vehicle had fallen over 25%: only 8% of households did not have a vehicle available. These average declines, moreover, mask much deeper drops in carlessness among households most likely to use public transportation. Los Angeles’ transit system has always been primarily a social service—in 2017 the median household income of an Los Angeles Metro rider was just over US$16,000, compared to over US$57,000 for county households overall (LA Metro, 2017): at the same time, auto access grew most among lower income people, and particularly the lower income immigrants that contribute disproportionately to its use of public transportation. In the five-county Southern California region, the share of zero-vehicle households fell 42% among foreign-born households from 2000 to 2015, and 66% among foreign-born households from Mexico, a group that has traditionally provided much of Los Angeles’ public transport riders (Manville et al., 2018). While the mechanism by which these households acquired cars remains uncertain (incomes among these groups did not rise noticeably at this time, but vehicle financing did become more affordable), the motive for the acquisition is no mystery. The automobile remains the best way to move around Los Angeles, so almost anyone with the means to acquire a vehicle will be better off for doing so. Similarly, while ride sourcing offers a new and convenient way of moving around, to date it has not convinced many people to forgo personal vehicle ownership, and instead have become a good option for the occasional trips to where parking is scarce (e.g., airports) or to places where people will consume alcohol. The hope that public transport and ride sourcing will reduce the demand for parking may be backward: it is more likely that these two options will thrive if parking becomes scarcer. But Los Angeles is not moving in that direction. Los Angeles County has invested heavily in new public transport, but these transit lines are being laid over a built environment that continues to be designed largely for the car. The region’s prominent spending on public transportation, and its embrace of ride sourcing, is more than counterbalanced by its continuation of land use policies that support private automobiles. The largest and most consequential of these policies are minimum parking requirements. I turn to this issue next.
Land use If one looks only at average densities, Los Angelesis the densest urban area in the United States. But it lacks the attributes often associated with higher density, such as one or more very dense core areas that support walking and transit use, and that permit everyday life without a car. Los Angeles maintains a high average density without a dense core by having inordinately dense suburbs. New York, Boston, and Chicago have very dense central areas surrounded by low-density development. Los Angeles has a moderately dense core surrounded by only-slightly-less-dense suburbs (Manville and Shoup, 2005; Eidlin, 2005).
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How did this unusual land use pattern come about? Los Angeles began as a low-density suburban region, sprawling outward along streetcar tracks— the city at one time had the largest rail system of any city on earth. The streetcars enabled the region’s initial outward expansion, but in Los Angeles as elsewhere, the heyday of the streetcars was short-lived, and by the 1920s the largest traction companies were in a precipitous decline (Wachs, 1996; Jackson, 1985). In their place rose a transportation culture, and a land use pattern, built around private automobility. A tension lurked within this low-density land use pattern. Los Angeles grew rapidly and continuously within a constrained land area bounded by ocean on one side and by mountains on the others. As the region grew denser, its zoning made only limited concessions to urbanity: instead, it struggled to remain suburban even as urbanization crept forward (Fulton, 1994). Despite its growth, the region remained predominantly zoned for detached single-family homes, and it became harder, not easier, to build multifamily housing without some sort of discretionary approval (Fulton, 1994; Morrow, 2013; Whittemore, 2011). Today, the region remains dominated by single-family homes, with even the center city defined by single-family zoning. Although detached single-family homes account for only about 36% of the city’s housing units, single-family zoning accounts for between 60% and 70% of the city’s residential land area. Low-density zoning is car-oriented zoning. Almost all detached singlefamily homes have multiple parking spaces in the form of driveways, carports, and garages. Even in the few areas that allow multifamily dwellings, local governments in Los Angeles County require plentiful parking. Figure 2 showed that Los Angeles stands out for its combination of higher density and very high parking provision. The source of all this parking, in turn, is Los Angeles’ land use policies, and especially its minimum parking requirements. Housing in Los Angeles comes with so much parking largely because local governments require it. Consider the City of Los Angeles, which as the region’s center city, has the most potential to create a walkable, transit-oriented landscape. The city requires 2.25 2.5 parking spaces per unit for condominium developments. The lowest residential parking requirement in Los Angeles, which applies to apartments in and near the city’s downtown, is 1 space per unit with less than three habitable rooms, and 1.25 spaces per unit for three or more habitable rooms. A kitchen is considered a habitable room, so a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen must have two parking spaces. And remember that these are the lowest requirements. The zoning in North Westwood Village, near the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), requires 2.5 spaces for any unit with four habitable rooms or less, and 3.5 spaces for any unit with more than four habitable rooms. So a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen must come with 2.5 parking spaces—even though it may well be occupied by university students who live within walking distance of campus.
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Compared to other urban centers, these parking requirements are high. A 20-unit apartment building in most of Manhattan, or downtown San Francisco or central London, requires no parking, and is likely to be subject to a parking maximum. In the lowest density parts of New York City, a 20-unit apartment building would require at most 20 parking spaces. In the highest density part of Los Angeles, it would require at least 20 spaces, and elsewhere in Los Angeles could require as many as 50 (Manville et al., 2013). Los Angeles’ parking requirements are not only high for residences. The city government requires large amounts of parking with office buildings, retail uses, and entertainment venues as well. Manville and Shoup (2005) observe that for a downtown convention center Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, 50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as a maximum. As a result, San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center, which is located in the downtown and has almost 1.4 million square feet (1.3 km2) of usable space, has no parking. The Los Angeles Convention Center, in contrast, which is also downtown and slightly smaller (770,000 ft2, or 0.07 km2, of exhibit space and 54 meeting rooms) has 5600 on-site parking spaces, most of them in large surface lots surrounding the buildings. Similarly, Louise Davies Hall, home to the San Francisco Symphony, has 2743 seats and very little parking. It shares a 618-space city-operated garage with the nearby Opera House. While Disney Hall, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is smaller than Davies Hall (2265 seats) but sits atop a 2188space subterranean parking structure (Manville and Shoup, 2005). These designs have consequences. When cities require ample parking attached to every individual building, they create, by accident or intent, neighborhoods that reward driving and punish other ways of moving around. When most residents can park their car at or under where they live or visit, driving becomes easier and pedestrian street life becomes unnecessary. Large surface lots make driving more appealing, but push destinations apart, making walking or biking less feasible and safe. It is not surprising that people often drive to the Los Angeles Convention Center, but often walk or take transit to San Francisco’s Moscone Center. People likewise drive to Los Angeles’ symphony hall. They park in the underground garage and ride up into the hall on an elaborate “escalator cascade.” If at the end of the concertthey perform the same routine in reverse, they will have traveled into the heart of Los Angeles’ downtown, visited one of its landmark buildings, and yet never walked on one of its streets (Manville and Shoup, 2005). This is not a recipe for vibrant urbanism.
Technology Most parking in Los Angeles, both on- and off-street, is unpriced. The City of Los Angeles has been a leader, however, in using technology to improve what little priced parking exists. In 2009 the city launched a pilot program in
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its downtown called Expresspark. Expresspark covered about four square miles (10 km2) and has 7000 parking meters. It tested the idea of “performance-priced” street parking, which is curb parking where the price varies according to demand. Funded largely by the federal government, Expresspark installed digital smart meters that accepted payment via phone and credit card, and whose prices could be adjusted by a central server. It paired these meters with sensors embedded in street spaces that could detect vehicle occupancy. The meters and sensors together relayed data to the central servers, and transportation officials used this information to correlate prices with occupancy and vacancy by time and place. The correlations were used to adjust prices (Ghent et al., 2012). Expresspark is a good example of how cities can use technology to improve parking, but also an example of how technology interacts with, and may be constrained by, existing norms and institutions. The program has now been in operation for almost a decade, and the city has expanded it to some additional neighborhoods. Expresspark’s goal was to reduce both the overuse and underuse of street parking. By lowering prices where spaces were seldom used, and raising them in places where spaces were congested, the program sought to redistribute vehicles and use scarce street space more efficiently. Expresspark has been evaluated twice, and both examinations suggest that it is half successful: it reduced underuse, not overuse. After 2 years, blocks that began with many vacancies saw more occupancy, but those that began congested did not see more vacancy. Prices fell on average—60% of spaces saw their prices decline (De la Vega, 2013)—but even where prices rose, vacancy did not consistently follow. In fact, between June 2012 and 2014, the share of time that spaces were over 90% occupied rose as prices increased (Zoeter et al., 2014; De Ruitjer, 2015; Ghent, 2018). Why couldn’t Expresspark clear congestion? The problem laynot with the technology, nor with the basic idea—when prices rise, people do consume less—but with existing laws about parking and how they were enforced. The problem, put simply, was nonpayment. Many people park without paying, and do so with impunity. A basic assumption of efficient pricing is that the price itself binds: people who do not pay cannot consume the good for sale. With parking, this assumption is only sometimes valid. Parking nonpayment is a longstanding and widespread problem. It is a particular problem in California (Palomino, 2013; SFMTA, 2014; Chatman and Manville, 2014, 2018) and a rampant problem in Los Angeles (e.g., Manville and Williams, 2012, 2013; Neumann, 2013). Nonpayment usually has two sources: scofflaws who choose to not pay and hope they are not caught, and people who use credentials (usually a disability permit or placard) that exempt them from paying. Both forms of nonpayment are common, and both can undermine performance pricing. Placards, however, pose the larger problem. Scofflaws who do not pay must
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worry about enforcement officers, and as a result usually park for short periods of time. Drivers with credentials, however, can park without paying for unlimited duration, and consume much more time as a result. Thus even a small number of placard-holders can dilute the price signals on a block—and placard use in Los Angeles is not restricted to a small number of users. Before Expresspark began, street surveys by Manville and Williams (2012) found high levels of nonpayment (up to 70%) and particularly placard use, in both the Expresspark zone and other Los Angeles neighborhoods. One year into Expresspark, a consultant found that placard use was common, and that rising prices generated more placard use rather than more vacancy: a US$1 price increase was associated with a 10% increase in placard use. In areas where parking was US$5 per hour or more, 87% of nonpayment was from placards (Neumann, 2013). In 2014, Expresspark’s analysts concluded that over the program’s first 2 years it was nonpayment, and especially placard nonpayment, that accounted for the program’s inability to create vacancies. “In [many] areas rate changes will have little effect on parking patterns,” the analysts wrote, “because the majority of parking is by motorists who do not pay” (Clinchant et al., 2015). The same analysts assessed nonpayment in 2015, and the problem had worsened. Now 43% of vehicles in Expresspark were not paying, with at least 80% of this nonpayment resulting from placard use (Ghent, 2013). The nonpayment, moreover, seems to explain the persistence of congestion throughout the trial (De Ruitjer, 2015). Anecdotal evidence suggests that many placards are being used illegally, but placard fraud is time-consuming and difficult to prove, and much of it likely goes unpunished (Manville and Williams, 2012, 2013; Lopez, 2012). Illegal use, however, arises almost entirely because placards offer an exemption from meter payment. The obvious reform is to eliminate the exemption from payment for most or all placards, as some states have now done. In California, however, such reform has been slow, and the road to parking reform has thus been slow as well.
Planning policies I have already described the dominant planning policies for parking in Los Angeles: high minimum parking requirements for off-street parking, and low or no prices for most street parking. These planning policies have combined to create the current parking policy problem. At the same time, there are some promising, albeit halting, efforts at reform. One, described in the previous section, is the use of technology to improve street pricing, although the benefits of this step will be limited if the nonpayment problem remains unaddressed. The second potential reform, which is arguably more significant, is the effort to reduce or remove minimum parking requirements. It would be an understatement to call this step controversial. Parking requirements are
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popular with neighbors who worry that new residents will compete with them for street spaces, and with existing property owners who fear that new development will change a neighborhood’s character and/or reduce property values. Somewhat surprisingly, parking requirements are also popular with affordable housing activists, who see the requirements as bartering chips: market-rate developers are more willing to build affordable units if cities reduce their parking requirements in return. Activists value the parking requirements, in other words, not for what they do, but for what developers will do to escape them (Manville and Osman, 2017). The combination of antidevelopment activists and affordable housing activists has created an unusual but strong constituency for keeping parking requirements intact. For this reason, progress toward reform has been slow. Nevertheless, the limited experiments with deregulation that have occurred have shown promise. In 1999 the City of Los Angeles passed an Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (ARO), which was designed to help convert vacant commercial and industrial buildings into housing. The ARO gave three specific zoning exemptions to developers who owned qualifying buildings. The first exemption was an alternative life safety code. The second was a by-right provision. The third, and most relevant for our purposes, was an exemption from minimum parking requirements. Although developers could not remove any existing parking, they also did not have to add any. And if developers supply parking, they did not have to do so on-site. Nor was the parking required, as it was with conventional zoning, to be reserved solely for residents. ARO developers could lease spaces to commuters, nearby businesses, or visitors (City of Los Angeles Municipal Code, 2013b). A simple prediction about this deregulation was that it would lead to more housing with less parking. This prediction has been largely borne out (Manville, 2013). Developers used the ARO to convert scores of old, underused commercial buildings into housing. Precise counts vary of the total ARO housing stock, because the city does not keep systematic records, but all estimates are high. Even conservative counts suggest that in less than 10 years the ARO by itself created more downtown housing than had been created in the previous 30 years. Much of this new housing was concentrated in a single, previously disinvested Census tract. The housing units built with the ARO had less parking, and the units with less parking had lower prices (Manville, 2013). The law was an important part of revitalizing downtown Los Angeles. The ARO is a model for parking deregulation and a strong illustration of the way that parking requirements constrain density and the housing supply. Reduced off-street parking requirements, however, have yet to spread to other parts of the city, despite recommendations from some advocates (e.g., Council of Infill Builders, 2017). Parking deregulation was easier in downtown Los Angeles for two reasons. First, the downtown was lightly populated, and at the beginning of the 2000s many of its residents actually
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wanted more housing. People who want more development welcome parking deregulation, while neighborhoods hostile to new development—which describes many other Los Angeles neighborhoods—do not. Second, downtown Los Angeles has virtually no unregulated street parking. Almost every street is metered all day, and parking is prohibited on most streets overnight. As a result, one common concern about reduced parking requirements—that they would lead to congestion of unregulated on-street parking—was alleviated. The lesson here is that deregulated development requires regulated streets. Thus far, however, Los Angeles has been reluctant to increase regulation of on-street parking, and as a consequence it may have trouble removing its off-street parking requirements.
Conclusion In its official rhetoric, Los Angeles aspires to a future that is more urban and environmentally sustainable. City documents lay out a vision of more housing and more density, and less driving, more walking, more cycling, and more transit use. Many other cities in Los Angeles County have similar agendas, spurred by both California’s ambitious climate policy goals and the generally progressive outlook of their local electorates. The city’s mundane regulatory actions, however, quietly undermine its lofty rhetoric. Nowhere is this more evident than with parking. By continuing to give away curb space for free—and continuing to legislate vehicle storage with virtually all new development—Los Angeles city (and the other jurisdictions in Los Angeles County) are creating a future with less density and more driving than would otherwise be the case. Los Angeles was built automobile, has been zoned for the automobile, and is now fighting the reality that it may have outgrown the automobile. Efforts exist to alter this status quo, but they are slow. Inertia is a powerful force, in policy as in other arenas, and so the machinery of abundant parking grinds on even as the political rhetoric changes. As housing prices climb higher, and congestion worsens, the region will need at some point to have a reckoning with its continued zoning for the car.
References California Department of Transportation, 2015. California Household Travel Survey. 2015 2020. Author, Sacramento, CA. Chatman, D., Manville, M., 2014. Theory versus implementation in congestion-priced parking: an evaluation of SFpark, 2011 2012. Res. Transport. Econ. 44 (C), 52 60. Chatman, D., Manville, M., 2018. Equity in congestion-priced parking. J. Transport. Econ. Policy 52 (3), 239 266. Chester, M., Fraser, A., Matute, J., Flower, C., Pendyala, R., 2015. Parking infrastructure: A constraint on or opportunity for urban redevelopment? A study of Los Angeles County parking
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supply and growth. Journal of the American Planning Association 81 (4), 268 286. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2015.1092879. City of Los Angeles Municipal Code. 2013b. Section 12. 22-A26, Downtown adaptive reuse projects. Amended by Ord. No. 174, 315, Effective December 20, 2001. Clinchant, S., Dance, C., de Ruitjer, T., Ghent, P., Zoeter, O., 2015. Using analytics to understand on-street parking. In: Paper Presented at the ITS World Congress, Bordeaux, France, October 5 9. Council of Infill Builders. 2017. Wasted Spaces: Options to Reform Parking Policy in Los Angeles. Council of Infill Builders and TransitCenter. http://www.councilofinfillbuilders. org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Wasted-Spaces-May-2017.pdf. De la Vega, J. 2013. Extension of LA Expresspark Program Downtown and Expansion to Westwood Village. City of Los Angeles Inter-departmental Memorandum, June 20. De Ruitjer, T., 2015. A Big Data View of On-Street Parking (Master’s thesis in Computer Science). Radboud University. Didion, J., 1970. Play It as It Lays. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York. Eidlin, E., 2005. Los Angeles and the emerging reality of dense sprawl. J. Transport. Res. Board 1902, 1 9. Fulton, W., 1994. The Reluctant Metropolis. CA: Solano Press, Ventura. Fulton, W., 2001. Guide to California Planning. CA: Solano Press, Ventura. Greuel, W., 2011. Audit of the City’s Parking Meter Collection Process. Ghent, P., Mitchell, D., Sedadi, A., 2012. LA Express Park: curbing downtown congestion through intelligent parking management. In: 19th ITS World Congress, Vienna Austria, October 22 26. Ghent, P., 2018. LA Expresspark. In: Shoup, D. (Ed.), Parking and the City. Routledge Press. Jackson, K., 1985. Crabgrass Frontier. Oxford University Press, New York. Lopez, S., 2012. A peculiar parking pattern. Los Angeles Times January 25. Lyons, G., 2014. Transport’s digital age transition. J. Transport Land Use 8 (2), 1 19. LA Metro (Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority), 2017. Ridership Statistics. https://www.metro.net/news/ridership-statistics/ Manville, M., 2017. Bundled Parking and Vehicle Ownership. Journal of Transport and Land Use 10 (1), 27 55. Manville, M., 2019. Measure M and the potential transformation of mobility in Los Angeles. UCLA ITS Report to the Transitcenter, January 16. Manville, M., Taylor, B.D., Blumenberg, E., 2018. Falling transit ridership: California and Southern California. UCLA ITS Report to the Southern California Association of Governments. Manville, M., King, D., Smart, M., 2017. The driving downturn: a preliminary assessment. J. Am. Plan. Assoc. 83 (1), 42 55. Manville, M., 2013. Parking requirements and housing development: regulation and reform in Los Angeles. J. Am. Plan. Assoc. 79 (1), 49 66. Manville, M., Beata, A., Shoup, D., 2013. Turning housing into driving: parking requirements and density in Los Angeles and New York. Housing Policy Debate. 23 (2), 350 375. Manville, M., Williams, J., 2012. The price doesn’t matter if you don’t have to pay: legal exemption as a barrier to market-priced parking. J. Plan. Educ. Res. 32 (3), 289 304. Manville, M., Williams, J., 2013. Parking without paying. Access. 42 (Spring), 10 16. Manville, M., Shoup, D., 2005. People, parking and cities. J. Urban Plan. Develop. 131 (4), 233 245.
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Manville, M., Osman, T., 2017. Motivations for growth revolts: discretion and pretext. City Commun. 6 (1), 66 85. Morrow, G., 2013. The Homeowner Revolution: Democracy, Land Use and the Los Angeles Slow-Growth Movement, 1965 1992 (UCLA Urban Planning dissertation). Neumann, R., 2013. Will California’s Disabled Placard Payment Exemption Doom LA ExpressPark to Failure? Walker Parking Consultants, Inc. Palomino, J., 2013. Do disabled motorists need free parking? East Bay Express. May 1. Schwartz, J., 2015. Report finds Americans are driving less, led by youth. New York Times (accessed November 20). Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/us/reportfinds-americans-are-driving-less-led-by-youth.html. SFMTA, 2014. SFpark Pilot Project Evaluation. San Francisco, CA. Shoup, D., 2011. The High Cost of Free Parking. Planners Press, American Planning Association, Chicago, IL. Texas Transportation Institute, 2011. Urban Mobility Report: Data and Trends. College Station, TX. https://mobility.tamu.edu/umr/data-and-trends/. Van Wee, B., 2015. Peak car: the first signs of a shift towards ICT-based activities replacing travel? A discussion paper. Transport Policy 42 (August), 1 3. Wachs, M., 1996. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. UC Press, Berkeley, CA. Whittemore, A., 2011. Requiem for a growth machine: homeowner preeminence in 1980s Los Angeles. J. Plan. History 11 (2), 124 140. Zoeter, O., Dance, C., Clinchant, S., Andreoli, J.M., 2014. New algorithms for parking demand management and a city-scale deployment. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1819 1828.
Further reading Baynham, R., 1971. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Ghent, P., 2012. Los Angeles Express Park a demonstration of how new parking technology may reduce congestion and provide other benefits to the public. In: Presentation of ITS-NY Nineteenth Annual Meeting and Technology Exhibition, June 7, 2012. Ghent, P., 2014. Optimizing performance objectives for congestion pricing parking projects. Transportation Research Board, TRB 15-1895. Ghent, P., 2013. Memo to City Council. Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Manville, M., 2014. Parking pricing. In: Mully, C., Ison, S. (Eds.), Parking: Issues and Policies. Emerald Press.
Los Angeles, United States Michael Manville University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Chapter Outline Introduction: parking in Los Angeles Transport and mobility Social trends Land use Technology
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Planning policies Conclusion References Further reading
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Introduction: parking in Los Angeles Parking is the tail that wags Los Angeles’ dog. Los Angeles has a reputation as the ultimate driving city, but a driving city must also be a parking city. When everyone drives everywhere, the landscape must bristle with places to store all the cars, both at home and when people arrive. As a result, parking quietly dominates Los Angeles’ planning: all development is conditional on the provision of ample parking (Manville and Shoup, 2005; Shoup, 2011). To paraphrase Fulton (2001), in Los Angeles, developers do not build housing or commercial or industrial structures. They first build parking, and then get permission from the city to build something that will finance that parking. The abundance of parking in Los Angeles is both a cause and a consequence of the region’s travel behavior. Local governments require parking because people like to drive. Yet people choose to drive, in part, because there is so much parking. When parking is plentiful and affordable, driving is relatively easy. “Relatively easy”, of course, is not the same as “pleasant.” Los Angeles has terrible traffic congestion. But as awful as that congestion can be, for many if not most trips travel by private vehicle is easier than moving around in other ways. The prevalence of parking eliminates a great uncertainty about urban driving—“where can I put my car when I arrive?”—
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and also pushes apart destinations, which means that walking, cycling, and riding transit are slower and less pleasant. Parking is plentiful and affordable in Los Angeles for the same reason it is plentiful and affordable in other places: local governments, through their zoning codes, force developers to provide parking with every structure they build. In Los Angeles, these parking requirements help explain not just travel behavior, but also some of the region’s signature architecture. This includes dingbat apartments (which are the cheapest way to build multifamily housing with a requirement for covered parking) and strip malls (not unique to Los Angeles, but the cheapest way to build retail with a parking requirement). Parking requirements are applied at the parcel level, but their cumulative effect is regional. Because parking is expensive to build, and demands large amounts of land or capital, the Los Angeles region is less intensively developed than it might otherwise be. This makes housing less affordable and public transportation less effective. Los Angeles continues to grow, but parking has stunted its growth, thus preventing the development of a truly dense urban core, and producing a pattern of consistently moderate density. This pattern robs density of some of its advantages while ignoring or even exacerbating some of its weaknesses. In places where Los Angeles is dense, for example, it is rarely walkable, because the sidewalks are lined with curb cuts: anyone out for a stroll must be constantly alert for vehicles sliding in and out of garages and parking lots. Conversely, Los Angeles’ dense neighborhoods are likely to have worse congestion than other equally dense places, because dense new development is forced by law to make room for storing vehicles (Manville and Shoup, 2005; Manville et al., 2013). Parking has helped to give Los Angeles “the worst of all worlds” (Eidlin, 2005): a landscape not quite dense enough to move around without driving, but dense enough to make driving miserable. How many on-street parking spaces does Los Angeles have? No one knows. The City of Los Angeles has made some guesses, but guesses are all they are. A 2011 audit by the city controller revealed that the city’s Department of Transportation did not even know how many parking meters it had, let alone total parking spaces (Greuel, 2011). How many off-street spaces does the region have? Again, no one knows. Local governments unfailingly require parking with new development, but they do not keep systematic records of how much parking each parcel provides. One reasonable estimate suggests that 14% of Los Angeles County’s land area is off-street parking, but again, this is only an estimate (Chester et al., 2015). Most of Los Angeles’ parking is free, at least to drivers. Residential parking in Los Angeles is often bundled in with the purchase price of housing, and customers and employees often park free in (publicly mandated) private lots. Parking policy in Los Angeles has been defined, with rare exceptions, by inattention to prices, inattention to data, and an implicit belief that while parking can often be in deficit, it can never be in surplus.
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Before continuing, a quick note about geography. Los Angeles is both a city and a county. The city of Los Angeles has about 4 million people, while the county includes 88 cities, (one of which is the City of Los Angeles), and over 10 million people. Most of the time, when I discuss Los Angeles, I am referring to Los Angeles County, which is essentially the Los Angeles region. I discuss the region because transportation and land use issues are generally regional, and a great deal of personal travel—to work and recreation and school—crosses local but not regional boundaries. At the same time, parking mandates (minimum parking requirements) are local: it is cities that impose them. If these mandates help shape travel behavior (and they do), then regional travel behavior is in part the sum of local zoning. As such, a discussion of regional travel that completely ignored local jurisdictions would be inappropriate. Thus when I discuss parking requirements, I am usually referring to the parking requirements of a particular locality.
Transport and mobility When people in Los Angeles move around, they drive. This fact will not surprise anyone personally familiar with the region, or familiar with it only by reputation. Southern California, and Los Angeles in particular, has been popularly defined by the car. Architectural aficionados will recall critic Reyner Banham’s claim that he learned to drive so he could “read Los Angeles in the original.” Countless films have depicted Los Angeles’ famous freeways. (Somewhat fewer have depicted its infamous traffic jams). The main character in Steve Martin’s LA Story is sufficiently tethered to his car that he gets relationship advice by talking to a freeway traffic sign, and he visits his next door neighbor by driving over. Literary types might remember Maria Wyeth, the doomed heroine of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, who tried to escape her demons by driving Los Angeles’ freeway system “as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its rhythms, its deceptions” (Didion, 1970, 16). And consumers of less-highbrow culture may know a skit from Saturday Night Live that mocks Angelinos for being unable to discuss anything but the different routes they use to drive around. Are these characterizations exaggerated? Yes. Are there are important exceptions? Yes again. Los Angeles is a big city in a big region. Each day, people in Los Angeles County take millions of transit trips. Dedicated cyclists bravely zip around the city’s streets, and—famous pop songs notwithstanding—lots of people do walk. But these are exceptions. Given the size and density of Los Angeles, as well as its topography and climate— largely flat, weather lovely—the proportion of people who move around only when encased in their own private ton of steel is remarkable. Data from the US Census show that in 2016, 84% of commuters in Los Angeles County drove to work, and 74% did so alone. Another 10% carpooled and about 6% used public transport. These figures were largely
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unchanged since 2005, with the important exception that transit commuting had declined. Solo driving is slightly less common in the City of Los Angeles: 70% of the city’s commuters, as opposed to 74% of the county’s, regularly drive to work alone. Commutes are a minority of overall trips, but the 2012 California Household Travel Survey (CDOT, 2015), which provides more detailed data on daily travel, shows that the overwhelming majority of trips taken in the Los Angeles region are by car. Almost two-thirds of Los Angeles County residents take public transportation only rarely, or never. Do these proportions justify Los Angeles’ reputation as a place where people are uniquely enslaved to automobiles? Not really. Compared to Americans overall, or even residents of other big US cities like Atlanta or Phoenix, people in Los Angeles do not drive an inordinately large amount. Indeed, in the United States in 2016, 76% of commuters drove alone, a share slightly higher than Los Angeles city or county. What makes Los Angeles stand out is not the extent to which its residents rely on automobiles, but the juxtaposition of that automobile reliance combined with the region’s relatively high density. Los Angeles is unique for being both dense (for an American urban region) and automobile-oriented. Figure 13.1 shows this car-oriented density, and the role of parking in creating it (Most of the discussion here is drawn from Manville (2017). The figure uses data from the metropolitan samples of the 2003 07 American Housing Surveys, and from the Texas Transportation Institute (2011). Each of the figure’s five panels shows, for a sample of large US metropolitan areas (MSAs), the relationships between population density (measured as persons per square mile), driving [measured as vehicle miles traveled (VMT)], vehicle ownership (measured as the share of zero-vehicle households), and the presence of parking (measured as the share of housing units that include at least one parking space with the rent or purchase price, known as “bundled” parking spaces). The figure’s first panel shows that as population density rises, driving falls, but that the relationship between these variables is modest. (The coefficient of determination, or R2, between population density and VMT, is 0.3). The second panel shows that as density rises vehicle ownership falls, and that this relationship is considerably stronger (R2 5 0.7). Neither of these findings is surprising. What matters here is that in both panels, Los Angeles is an outlier. In Panel 1, Los Angeles sits well above the regression line, and in Panel 2 it sits well below. New York, meanwhile, also stands out in both panels, but in a manner almost exactly opposite to Los Angeles. Where Los Angeles has more driving and fewer carless households than its density would predict, New York has much less driving, and many more carless households, than its density would suggest. Panel 3, which plots the relationship between population density and the share of housing units with bundled parking, suggests an explanation for these anomalies. Most American MSAs have low levels of density and high
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FIGURE 13.1 Relationships between density, driving, and parking in American MSAs. Reproduced from Manville, M., King, D., Smart, M., 2017 The driving downturn: a preliminary assessment. J. Am. Plan. Assoc. 83 (1), 42 55.
levels of parking: few people per square mile and most housing units including parking. New York, in contrast, is America’s only high-density/low-parking MSA, and Los Angeles is the country’s only MSA with high population density and a high share of bundled parking. In its levels of residential parking provision, Los Angeles resembles metropolitan areas that have less than half its residential density. Panels 4 and 5 show that, if we account for the share of bundled parking, neither Los Angeles nor New York are outliers in VMT or vehicle ownership. Panel 4 shows that the prevalence of parking is more strongly
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associated with VMT than is population density (R2 5 0.50), and that plotting VMT against parking, instead of against density, pulls Los Angeles back onto the regression line. Similarly, Panel 5 shows the extremely strong relationship (R2 5 0.91) between the share of housing with bundled parking and vehicle ownership. And once again, accounting for parking pulls both New York and Los Angeles back onto the regression line. What does this all mean? The puzzle of why people in Los Angeles drive much more than the region’s density would suggest is resolved by accounting for Los Angeles’ inordinately high (for its density) parking provision. By the same logic, people in New York drive much less than the region’s density would suggest because parking there is so scarce. All of this is sensible. Parking is a large part of the price of automobility. Owning and operating a car is cheaper—in money, time, and stress—when storing it is easier. Plentiful parking lowers the price of owning and operating a vehicle in Los Angeles, while scarce parking raises it in New York.
Social trends Los Angeles features some of the heaviest use of ride sourcing or Transportation Network Companies like Uber and Lyft. The region is also in the middle of a massive expansion of its public transportation system. These factors, in combination, could be expected to create less personal vehicle use and thus less demand for parking. Yet that seems not to be the case. The current trend in Los Angeles is toward more driving, more vehicle ownership, and less transit use. Between 2004 and 2013, driving in Los Angeles fell, as it did in much of the United States and Europe. This driving downturn led some observers to hypothesize that cities had reached “peak car,” and to speculate that social media, and other forms of information and communication technology, would replace travel (Lyons, 2014; Van Wee, 2015; Schwartz, 2015). These hypotheses were never supported empirically, and subsequent events have revealed them to be little more than wishful thinking. Driving in the United States fell between 2004 and 2013 largely because gas prices skyrocketed, the economy collapsed, and the early years of the economic recovery were highly uneven (Manville et al., 2017). During the driving downturn transit use did not rise, either in the United States overall or in Los Angeles in particular—despite Los Angeles, during this time, opening two new light rail lines and a bus rapid transit line. Per capita public transport ridership in Los Angeles has, in fact, been falling steadily since 2007 (Manville et al., 2018), and in 2018 it was more than 40% lower than its 1985 peak (Manville, 2019). The precise reason for public transport’s recent steep decline is unknown; however, following 2000, vehicle ownership grew, especially among people who traditionally are most likely to take public transport (Manville et al., 2018). In 1990, 11% of households in Los Angeles County had no vehicles:
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in 2000, 12.5% were carless. By 2015 the share of households without a vehicle had fallen over 25%: only 8% of households did not have a vehicle available. These average declines, moreover, mask much deeper drops in carlessness among households most likely to use public transportation. Los Angeles’ transit system has always been primarily a social service—in 2017 the median household income of an Los Angeles Metro rider was just over US$16,000, compared to over US$57,000 for county households overall (LA Metro, 2017): at the same time, auto access grew most among lower income people, and particularly the lower income immigrants that contribute disproportionately to its use of public transportation. In the five-county Southern California region, the share of zero-vehicle households fell 42% among foreign-born households from 2000 to 2015, and 66% among foreign-born households from Mexico, a group that has traditionally provided much of Los Angeles’ public transport riders (Manville et al., 2018). While the mechanism by which these households acquired cars remains uncertain (incomes among these groups did not rise noticeably at this time, but vehicle financing did become more affordable), the motive for the acquisition is no mystery. The automobile remains the best way to move around Los Angeles, so almost anyone with the means to acquire a vehicle will be better off for doing so. Similarly, while ride sourcing offers a new and convenient way of moving around, to date it has not convinced many people to forgo personal vehicle ownership, and instead have become a good option for the occasional trips to where parking is scarce (e.g., airports) or to places where people will consume alcohol. The hope that public transport and ride sourcing will reduce the demand for parking may be backward: it is more likely that these two options will thrive if parking becomes scarcer. But Los Angeles is not moving in that direction. Los Angeles County has invested heavily in new public transport, but these transit lines are being laid over a built environment that continues to be designed largely for the car. The region’s prominent spending on public transportation, and its embrace of ride sourcing, is more than counterbalanced by its continuation of land use policies that support private automobiles. The largest and most consequential of these policies are minimum parking requirements. I turn to this issue next.
Land use If one looks only at average densities, Los Angelesis the densest urban area in the United States. But it lacks the attributes often associated with higher density, such as one or more very dense core areas that support walking and transit use, and that permit everyday life without a car. Los Angeles maintains a high average density without a dense core by having inordinately dense suburbs. New York, Boston, and Chicago have very dense central areas surrounded by low-density development. Los Angeles has a moderately dense core surrounded by only-slightly-less-dense suburbs (Manville and Shoup, 2005; Eidlin, 2005).
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How did this unusual land use pattern come about? Los Angeles began as a low-density suburban region, sprawling outward along streetcar tracks— the city at one time had the largest rail system of any city on earth. The streetcars enabled the region’s initial outward expansion, but in Los Angeles as elsewhere, the heyday of the streetcars was short-lived, and by the 1920s the largest traction companies were in a precipitous decline (Wachs, 1996; Jackson, 1985). In their place rose a transportation culture, and a land use pattern, built around private automobility. A tension lurked within this low-density land use pattern. Los Angeles grew rapidly and continuously within a constrained land area bounded by ocean on one side and by mountains on the others. As the region grew denser, its zoning made only limited concessions to urbanity: instead, it struggled to remain suburban even as urbanization crept forward (Fulton, 1994). Despite its growth, the region remained predominantly zoned for detached single-family homes, and it became harder, not easier, to build multifamily housing without some sort of discretionary approval (Fulton, 1994; Morrow, 2013; Whittemore, 2011). Today, the region remains dominated by single-family homes, with even the center city defined by single-family zoning. Although detached single-family homes account for only about 36% of the city’s housing units, single-family zoning accounts for between 60% and 70% of the city’s residential land area. Low-density zoning is car-oriented zoning. Almost all detached singlefamily homes have multiple parking spaces in the form of driveways, carports, and garages. Even in the few areas that allow multifamily dwellings, local governments in Los Angeles County require plentiful parking. Figure 2 showed that Los Angeles stands out for its combination of higher density and very high parking provision. The source of all this parking, in turn, is Los Angeles’ land use policies, and especially its minimum parking requirements. Housing in Los Angeles comes with so much parking largely because local governments require it. Consider the City of Los Angeles, which as the region’s center city, has the most potential to create a walkable, transit-oriented landscape. The city requires 2.25 2.5 parking spaces per unit for condominium developments. The lowest residential parking requirement in Los Angeles, which applies to apartments in and near the city’s downtown, is 1 space per unit with less than three habitable rooms, and 1.25 spaces per unit for three or more habitable rooms. A kitchen is considered a habitable room, so a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen must have two parking spaces. And remember that these are the lowest requirements. The zoning in North Westwood Village, near the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), requires 2.5 spaces for any unit with four habitable rooms or less, and 3.5 spaces for any unit with more than four habitable rooms. So a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen must come with 2.5 parking spaces—even though it may well be occupied by university students who live within walking distance of campus.
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Compared to other urban centers, these parking requirements are high. A 20-unit apartment building in most of Manhattan, or downtown San Francisco or central London, requires no parking, and is likely to be subject to a parking maximum. In the lowest density parts of New York City, a 20-unit apartment building would require at most 20 parking spaces. In the highest density part of Los Angeles, it would require at least 20 spaces, and elsewhere in Los Angeles could require as many as 50 (Manville et al., 2013). Los Angeles’ parking requirements are not only high for residences. The city government requires large amounts of parking with office buildings, retail uses, and entertainment venues as well. Manville and Shoup (2005) observe that for a downtown convention center Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, 50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as a maximum. As a result, San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center, which is located in the downtown and has almost 1.4 million square feet (1.3 km2) of usable space, has no parking. The Los Angeles Convention Center, in contrast, which is also downtown and slightly smaller (770,000 ft2, or 0.07 km2, of exhibit space and 54 meeting rooms) has 5600 on-site parking spaces, most of them in large surface lots surrounding the buildings. Similarly, Louise Davies Hall, home to the San Francisco Symphony, has 2743 seats and very little parking. It shares a 618-space city-operated garage with the nearby Opera House. While Disney Hall, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is smaller than Davies Hall (2265 seats) but sits atop a 2188space subterranean parking structure (Manville and Shoup, 2005). These designs have consequences. When cities require ample parking attached to every individual building, they create, by accident or intent, neighborhoods that reward driving and punish other ways of moving around. When most residents can park their car at or under where they live or visit, driving becomes easier and pedestrian street life becomes unnecessary. Large surface lots make driving more appealing, but push destinations apart, making walking or biking less feasible and safe. It is not surprising that people often drive to the Los Angeles Convention Center, but often walk or take transit to San Francisco’s Moscone Center. People likewise drive to Los Angeles’ symphony hall. They park in the underground garage and ride up into the hall on an elaborate “escalator cascade.” If at the end of the concertthey perform the same routine in reverse, they will have traveled into the heart of Los Angeles’ downtown, visited one of its landmark buildings, and yet never walked on one of its streets (Manville and Shoup, 2005). This is not a recipe for vibrant urbanism.
Technology Most parking in Los Angeles, both on- and off-street, is unpriced. The City of Los Angeles has been a leader, however, in using technology to improve what little priced parking exists. In 2009 the city launched a pilot program in
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its downtown called Expresspark. Expresspark covered about four square miles (10 km2) and has 7000 parking meters. It tested the idea of “performance-priced” street parking, which is curb parking where the price varies according to demand. Funded largely by the federal government, Expresspark installed digital smart meters that accepted payment via phone and credit card, and whose prices could be adjusted by a central server. It paired these meters with sensors embedded in street spaces that could detect vehicle occupancy. The meters and sensors together relayed data to the central servers, and transportation officials used this information to correlate prices with occupancy and vacancy by time and place. The correlations were used to adjust prices (Ghent et al., 2012). Expresspark is a good example of how cities can use technology to improve parking, but also an example of how technology interacts with, and may be constrained by, existing norms and institutions. The program has now been in operation for almost a decade, and the city has expanded it to some additional neighborhoods. Expresspark’s goal was to reduce both the overuse and underuse of street parking. By lowering prices where spaces were seldom used, and raising them in places where spaces were congested, the program sought to redistribute vehicles and use scarce street space more efficiently. Expresspark has been evaluated twice, and both examinations suggest that it is half successful: it reduced underuse, not overuse. After 2 years, blocks that began with many vacancies saw more occupancy, but those that began congested did not see more vacancy. Prices fell on average—60% of spaces saw their prices decline (De la Vega, 2013)—but even where prices rose, vacancy did not consistently follow. In fact, between June 2012 and 2014, the share of time that spaces were over 90% occupied rose as prices increased (Zoeter et al., 2014; De Ruitjer, 2015; Ghent, 2018). Why couldn’t Expresspark clear congestion? The problem laynot with the technology, nor with the basic idea—when prices rise, people do consume less—but with existing laws about parking and how they were enforced. The problem, put simply, was nonpayment. Many people park without paying, and do so with impunity. A basic assumption of efficient pricing is that the price itself binds: people who do not pay cannot consume the good for sale. With parking, this assumption is only sometimes valid. Parking nonpayment is a longstanding and widespread problem. It is a particular problem in California (Palomino, 2013; SFMTA, 2014; Chatman and Manville, 2014, 2018) and a rampant problem in Los Angeles (e.g., Manville and Williams, 2012, 2013; Neumann, 2013). Nonpayment usually has two sources: scofflaws who choose to not pay and hope they are not caught, and people who use credentials (usually a disability permit or placard) that exempt them from paying. Both forms of nonpayment are common, and both can undermine performance pricing. Placards, however, pose the larger problem. Scofflaws who do not pay must
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worry about enforcement officers, and as a result usually park for short periods of time. Drivers with credentials, however, can park without paying for unlimited duration, and consume much more time as a result. Thus even a small number of placard-holders can dilute the price signals on a block—and placard use in Los Angeles is not restricted to a small number of users. Before Expresspark began, street surveys by Manville and Williams (2012) found high levels of nonpayment (up to 70%) and particularly placard use, in both the Expresspark zone and other Los Angeles neighborhoods. One year into Expresspark, a consultant found that placard use was common, and that rising prices generated more placard use rather than more vacancy: a US$1 price increase was associated with a 10% increase in placard use. In areas where parking was US$5 per hour or more, 87% of nonpayment was from placards (Neumann, 2013). In 2014, Expresspark’s analysts concluded that over the program’s first 2 years it was nonpayment, and especially placard nonpayment, that accounted for the program’s inability to create vacancies. “In [many] areas rate changes will have little effect on parking patterns,” the analysts wrote, “because the majority of parking is by motorists who do not pay” (Clinchant et al., 2015). The same analysts assessed nonpayment in 2015, and the problem had worsened. Now 43% of vehicles in Expresspark were not paying, with at least 80% of this nonpayment resulting from placard use (Ghent, 2013). The nonpayment, moreover, seems to explain the persistence of congestion throughout the trial (De Ruitjer, 2015). Anecdotal evidence suggests that many placards are being used illegally, but placard fraud is time-consuming and difficult to prove, and much of it likely goes unpunished (Manville and Williams, 2012, 2013; Lopez, 2012). Illegal use, however, arises almost entirely because placards offer an exemption from meter payment. The obvious reform is to eliminate the exemption from payment for most or all placards, as some states have now done. In California, however, such reform has been slow, and the road to parking reform has thus been slow as well.
Planning policies I have already described the dominant planning policies for parking in Los Angeles: high minimum parking requirements for off-street parking, and low or no prices for most street parking. These planning policies have combined to create the current parking policy problem. At the same time, there are some promising, albeit halting, efforts at reform. One, described in the previous section, is the use of technology to improve street pricing, although the benefits of this step will be limited if the nonpayment problem remains unaddressed. The second potential reform, which is arguably more significant, is the effort to reduce or remove minimum parking requirements. It would be an understatement to call this step controversial. Parking requirements are
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popular with neighbors who worry that new residents will compete with them for street spaces, and with existing property owners who fear that new development will change a neighborhood’s character and/or reduce property values. Somewhat surprisingly, parking requirements are also popular with affordable housing activists, who see the requirements as bartering chips: market-rate developers are more willing to build affordable units if cities reduce their parking requirements in return. Activists value the parking requirements, in other words, not for what they do, but for what developers will do to escape them (Manville and Osman, 2017). The combination of antidevelopment activists and affordable housing activists has created an unusual but strong constituency for keeping parking requirements intact. For this reason, progress toward reform has been slow. Nevertheless, the limited experiments with deregulation that have occurred have shown promise. In 1999 the City of Los Angeles passed an Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (ARO), which was designed to help convert vacant commercial and industrial buildings into housing. The ARO gave three specific zoning exemptions to developers who owned qualifying buildings. The first exemption was an alternative life safety code. The second was a by-right provision. The third, and most relevant for our purposes, was an exemption from minimum parking requirements. Although developers could not remove any existing parking, they also did not have to add any. And if developers supply parking, they did not have to do so on-site. Nor was the parking required, as it was with conventional zoning, to be reserved solely for residents. ARO developers could lease spaces to commuters, nearby businesses, or visitors (City of Los Angeles Municipal Code, 2013b). A simple prediction about this deregulation was that it would lead to more housing with less parking. This prediction has been largely borne out (Manville, 2013). Developers used the ARO to convert scores of old, underused commercial buildings into housing. Precise counts vary of the total ARO housing stock, because the city does not keep systematic records, but all estimates are high. Even conservative counts suggest that in less than 10 years the ARO by itself created more downtown housing than had been created in the previous 30 years. Much of this new housing was concentrated in a single, previously disinvested Census tract. The housing units built with the ARO had less parking, and the units with less parking had lower prices (Manville, 2013). The law was an important part of revitalizing downtown Los Angeles. The ARO is a model for parking deregulation and a strong illustration of the way that parking requirements constrain density and the housing supply. Reduced off-street parking requirements, however, have yet to spread to other parts of the city, despite recommendations from some advocates (e.g., Council of Infill Builders, 2017). Parking deregulation was easier in downtown Los Angeles for two reasons. First, the downtown was lightly populated, and at the beginning of the 2000s many of its residents actually
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wanted more housing. People who want more development welcome parking deregulation, while neighborhoods hostile to new development—which describes many other Los Angeles neighborhoods—do not. Second, downtown Los Angeles has virtually no unregulated street parking. Almost every street is metered all day, and parking is prohibited on most streets overnight. As a result, one common concern about reduced parking requirements—that they would lead to congestion of unregulated on-street parking—was alleviated. The lesson here is that deregulated development requires regulated streets. Thus far, however, Los Angeles has been reluctant to increase regulation of on-street parking, and as a consequence it may have trouble removing its off-street parking requirements.
Conclusion In its official rhetoric, Los Angeles aspires to a future that is more urban and environmentally sustainable. City documents lay out a vision of more housing and more density, and less driving, more walking, more cycling, and more transit use. Many other cities in Los Angeles County have similar agendas, spurred by both California’s ambitious climate policy goals and the generally progressive outlook of their local electorates. The city’s mundane regulatory actions, however, quietly undermine its lofty rhetoric. Nowhere is this more evident than with parking. By continuing to give away curb space for free—and continuing to legislate vehicle storage with virtually all new development—Los Angeles city (and the other jurisdictions in Los Angeles County) are creating a future with less density and more driving than would otherwise be the case. Los Angeles was built automobile, has been zoned for the automobile, and is now fighting the reality that it may have outgrown the automobile. Efforts exist to alter this status quo, but they are slow. Inertia is a powerful force, in policy as in other arenas, and so the machinery of abundant parking grinds on even as the political rhetoric changes. As housing prices climb higher, and congestion worsens, the region will need at some point to have a reckoning with its continued zoning for the car.
References California Department of Transportation, 2015. California Household Travel Survey. 2015 2020. Author, Sacramento, CA. Chatman, D., Manville, M., 2014. Theory versus implementation in congestion-priced parking: an evaluation of SFpark, 2011 2012. Res. Transport. Econ. 44 (C), 52 60. Chatman, D., Manville, M., 2018. Equity in congestion-priced parking. J. Transport. Econ. Policy 52 (3), 239 266. Chester, M., Fraser, A., Matute, J., Flower, C., Pendyala, R., 2015. Parking infrastructure: A constraint on or opportunity for urban redevelopment? A study of Los Angeles County parking
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supply and growth. Journal of the American Planning Association 81 (4), 268 286. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2015.1092879. City of Los Angeles Municipal Code. 2013b. Section 12. 22-A26, Downtown adaptive reuse projects. Amended by Ord. No. 174, 315, Effective December 20, 2001. Clinchant, S., Dance, C., de Ruitjer, T., Ghent, P., Zoeter, O., 2015. Using analytics to understand on-street parking. In: Paper Presented at the ITS World Congress, Bordeaux, France, October 5 9. Council of Infill Builders. 2017. Wasted Spaces: Options to Reform Parking Policy in Los Angeles. Council of Infill Builders and TransitCenter. http://www.councilofinfillbuilders. org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Wasted-Spaces-May-2017.pdf. De la Vega, J. 2013. Extension of LA Expresspark Program Downtown and Expansion to Westwood Village. City of Los Angeles Inter-departmental Memorandum, June 20. De Ruitjer, T., 2015. A Big Data View of On-Street Parking (Master’s thesis in Computer Science). Radboud University. Didion, J., 1970. Play It as It Lays. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York. Eidlin, E., 2005. Los Angeles and the emerging reality of dense sprawl. J. Transport. Res. Board 1902, 1 9. Fulton, W., 1994. The Reluctant Metropolis. CA: Solano Press, Ventura. Fulton, W., 2001. Guide to California Planning. CA: Solano Press, Ventura. Greuel, W., 2011. Audit of the City’s Parking Meter Collection Process. Ghent, P., Mitchell, D., Sedadi, A., 2012. LA Express Park: curbing downtown congestion through intelligent parking management. In: 19th ITS World Congress, Vienna Austria, October 22 26. Ghent, P., 2018. LA Expresspark. In: Shoup, D. (Ed.), Parking and the City. Routledge Press. Jackson, K., 1985. Crabgrass Frontier. Oxford University Press, New York. Lopez, S., 2012. A peculiar parking pattern. Los Angeles Times January 25. Lyons, G., 2014. Transport’s digital age transition. J. Transport Land Use 8 (2), 1 19. LA Metro (Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority), 2017. Ridership Statistics. https://www.metro.net/news/ridership-statistics/ Manville, M., 2017. Bundled Parking and Vehicle Ownership. Journal of Transport and Land Use 10 (1), 27 55. Manville, M., 2019. Measure M and the potential transformation of mobility in Los Angeles. UCLA ITS Report to the Transitcenter, January 16. Manville, M., Taylor, B.D., Blumenberg, E., 2018. Falling transit ridership: California and Southern California. UCLA ITS Report to the Southern California Association of Governments. Manville, M., King, D., Smart, M., 2017. The driving downturn: a preliminary assessment. J. Am. Plan. Assoc. 83 (1), 42 55. Manville, M., 2013. Parking requirements and housing development: regulation and reform in Los Angeles. J. Am. Plan. Assoc. 79 (1), 49 66. Manville, M., Beata, A., Shoup, D., 2013. Turning housing into driving: parking requirements and density in Los Angeles and New York. Housing Policy Debate. 23 (2), 350 375. Manville, M., Williams, J., 2012. The price doesn’t matter if you don’t have to pay: legal exemption as a barrier to market-priced parking. J. Plan. Educ. Res. 32 (3), 289 304. Manville, M., Williams, J., 2013. Parking without paying. Access. 42 (Spring), 10 16. Manville, M., Shoup, D., 2005. People, parking and cities. J. Urban Plan. Develop. 131 (4), 233 245.
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Manville, M., Osman, T., 2017. Motivations for growth revolts: discretion and pretext. City Commun. 6 (1), 66 85. Morrow, G., 2013. The Homeowner Revolution: Democracy, Land Use and the Los Angeles Slow-Growth Movement, 1965 1992 (UCLA Urban Planning dissertation). Neumann, R., 2013. Will California’s Disabled Placard Payment Exemption Doom LA ExpressPark to Failure? Walker Parking Consultants, Inc. Palomino, J., 2013. Do disabled motorists need free parking? East Bay Express. May 1. Schwartz, J., 2015. Report finds Americans are driving less, led by youth. New York Times (accessed November 20). Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/us/reportfinds-americans-are-driving-less-led-by-youth.html. SFMTA, 2014. SFpark Pilot Project Evaluation. San Francisco, CA. Shoup, D., 2011. The High Cost of Free Parking. Planners Press, American Planning Association, Chicago, IL. Texas Transportation Institute, 2011. Urban Mobility Report: Data and Trends. College Station, TX. https://mobility.tamu.edu/umr/data-and-trends/. Van Wee, B., 2015. Peak car: the first signs of a shift towards ICT-based activities replacing travel? A discussion paper. Transport Policy 42 (August), 1 3. Wachs, M., 1996. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. UC Press, Berkeley, CA. Whittemore, A., 2011. Requiem for a growth machine: homeowner preeminence in 1980s Los Angeles. J. Plan. History 11 (2), 124 140. Zoeter, O., Dance, C., Clinchant, S., Andreoli, J.M., 2014. New algorithms for parking demand management and a city-scale deployment. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1819 1828.
Further reading Baynham, R., 1971. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Ghent, P., 2012. Los Angeles Express Park a demonstration of how new parking technology may reduce congestion and provide other benefits to the public. In: Presentation of ITS-NY Nineteenth Annual Meeting and Technology Exhibition, June 7, 2012. Ghent, P., 2014. Optimizing performance objectives for congestion pricing parking projects. Transportation Research Board, TRB 15-1895. Ghent, P., 2013. Memo to City Council. Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Manville, M., 2014. Parking pricing. In: Mully, C., Ison, S. (Eds.), Parking: Issues and Policies. Emerald Press.