Land Use Policy 91 (2020) 104054
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Land Use Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol
Parking futures: An international review of trends and speculation Jeffrey Rosenblum, Anne W. Hudson, Eran Ben-Joseph
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MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7-337, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Parking Architecture Autonomous vehicles Street design Dynamic pricing Transportation network companies Transportation demand management
The explosion of low-cost, on-demand taxi services and the anticipation of an autonomous vehicle future has made transportation the center of debate and discussion for the first time since the massive expansion of the US highway system in the 1950s. Yet the realm of parking boasts innovations and developments far beyond the high-profile issues of TNCs and AVs. Rather, innovation in parking is happening in many cases quietly on a wide variety of fronts, including technology, public policy, and design. This paper serves an overview of emerging trends in parking, primarily within the US context. We identify and outline five developments and the pertinent technologies helping to catalyze change: unbundling parking costs, reducing parking minimums, pricing and allocating curb space dynamically, designing hybrid parking structures, and preparing for the autonomous era and “mobility as a service.” This paper presents these trends with illustrative examples highlighting current practices, governance challenges, and possible future scenarios.
“To be fully dynamic, the American city must now accommodate the automobile. This is the vital factor of our new age. The poor little parking meter is not by itself the solution to automobile problems. The forward-looking city is conscious of the automobile and automobile traffic as key factors. Often building [parking structures] skyward to create the urgently needed space. We are applying full ingenuity to the task, and with good results. Self-parking is accomplished in the San Francisco downtown garage by an ingenious use of concentric ramps making it possible for the motorist to park and remove his own car.” (Baskaw, 1956) 1. Introduction Although the governance of parking might be famed for its vexing and politically controversial nature, the past half century has seen remarkably little change or innovation in the realm of parking policy. Nonetheless, recent developments in information and communication technology (ICT), including ubiquitous sensing and real-time data accessibility, combined with an explosion of low-cost on-demand taxi services (also called transportation network companies or ride-hailing services) and the pending arrival of autonomous vehicles have opened the door for new policy approaches. This, in turn, has resulted in a unique opportunity for city governments in the US to consider a future with far less parking than is required today. Although the nascence of parking regulations in the United States dates as far back as the beginning of the century (1910: the first curb ⁎
parking regulation; 1923: the first off-street parking regulations required through zoning), the integration of parking requirements with zoning regulations became commonplace only in the 1950s (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 2003; Ben-Joseph, 2012). Acknowledging that on-street parking spaces alone would not suffice for parking demand, developers were mandated to provide off-street parking in the form of minimum parking requirements. In many ways, not much has changed in parking’s regulatory structure since that time, even while car ownership and vehicle miles traveled have both increased exponentially. The resultant demand for parking has, in turn, led to a rapid growth in its supply. Today, estimates put the number of on- and off-street parking spaces in the US at nearly 800 million—about three spots for each registered vehicle in the country and more than two per adult (Chester et al., 2010). Structured parking in cities costs more than $20,000 per space to build (Cudney, 2017), impacting the cost of development. The land-use implications are also significant, with 14 percent of land in Los Angeles, for example, dedicated to vehicle parking (Chester et al., 2015; Ben-Joseph, 2012). In addition, there is an important relationship between parking supply and consumer demand with an estimated 30% of the traffic in busy urban areas caused by people in vehicles searching for places along the curb to park or pull over (Shoup, 2007). After more than a half century of orienting cities toward the personal automobile, the mythology of car ownership as the key to freedom and prestige may be beginning to fade (Urry, 2004). The rate of car ownership in the US is declining (Sivak, 2018) as is the
Corresponding author. E-mail addresses:
[email protected] (J. Rosenblum),
[email protected] (A.W. Hudson),
[email protected] (E. Ben-Joseph).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104054 Received 18 September 2018; Received in revised form 11 June 2019; Accepted 12 June 2019 0264-8377/ © 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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percentage of young people with a driver's license (Sivak and Schoettle, 2012). This is commonly attributed to the changing preferences of Millennials who own fewer cars than previous generations. Many are choosing jobs in core urban areas where owning a car is unnecessary or even a liability—in many cases a direct result of the challenges of parking (Klein and Smart, 2017). The rate of those under 24 who drive to work in large metro areas has fallen by nearly 1.3 percent from 2007 to 2014. Empty nesters and retirees, similarly, have been returning to cities for improved accessibility without the need for car ownership. Nonetheless, the permanence of these trends remains up for debate: Scholars question whether Millennials will stay in the urban core to raise families, for example, or whether they will eventually head to the suburbs in search of bigger homes and better school districts (Kane and Tomer, 2014). Technology, meanwhile, has been changing the way that we think about mobility and accessibility, helping to alleviate the burden of parking. Car-sharing options launched in the early 2000s enabled carfree and “car-lite” lifestyles for families. Daylighting the struggles with urban residential parking was an important part of early marketing efforts by car-sharing companies. “350 h/year having sex. 420 looking for parking. What’s wrong with this picture?” asked a Zipcar advertisement in 2002 (AdWeek, 2002). The results were impressive: Four years after the introduction of City CarShare in the San Francisco, 30% of carshare members reduced the number of cars in their household (Cervero et al., 2007). Similarly, a survey of carsharing members throughout the US found a reduction from 0.47 to 0.24 vehicles per household (Martin et al., 2010). The recent growth of on-demand, low-cost taxi services, even in places not previously considered viable for car-free living, has the potential to further suppress car ownership and as a result, parking demand. While the concept of a taxi is nothing new, on-demand taxi services, or Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), are significantly more convenient, easy to use, and less expensive than traditional taxi services. The integration of AVs into the TNC model, meanwhile, has the potential to build on these trends, as discussed in greater depth later in this paper. For decades, UCLA Professor Donald Shoup has been arguing that parking is mismanaged and parking pricing in need of rethinking. He contends that demand management should supplant reliance solely on supply management, challenging the traditional paradigm that attributes the problem simply to a shortage of parking. The solution, according to this paradigm, is simply building more (preferably free) places to park, where the cost of parking provision is born indirectly by municipalities or property developers. Shoup, meanwhile, asserts that parking demand can be dampened significantly by integrating various parking management strategies. He proffers that a combination of unbundling the cost of parking, introducing dynamic parking pricing, and enforcing demand management regulatory regimes can reduce the number of parking spaces needed by 30–50%. And, if integrated with improvements to public transit and bicycling infrastructure, the reduction can reach as high as 60% (Litman, 2018b). Changing parking policy has traditionally been viewed as an insurmountable challenge. The public has been uneager to give up the advantages associated with the underpriced asset and cities are hesitant to confront the potential mess of inadequate parking provision combined with an excess of vehicles. Yet today, technology and business innovations are combining with evolving paradigms to challenge that notion. There is a small, but strong movement in select US cities to institute innovative approaches to parking. To examine this issue, we reviewed the literature and city plans of the 300 largest American cities to identify new trends in parking sparked by innovations in technology and policy. This paper serves as an overview of policy and technology innovation that, based on the authors’ expertise, a survey conducted with city officials, and a rigorous review of the literature on the subject, have the opportunity to change the concept of parking as we know it today. The five trends explored
include the unbundling of parking costs, the reduction in parking minimums, dynamic pricing and mobility as a service, the building of hybrid parking structures, and the coming of the autonomous era and mobility as a service (MaaS). These trends are presented below with illustrative examples highlighting current practices, governance challenges, and possible future scenarios. 2. Unbundling parking costs Parking is expensive. An underground parking garage, for example, can nearly double the cost of a new shopping center in LA (Shoup, 1999). Yet those costs are passed along only indirectly to consumers, interrupting the natural interplay of supply and demand. More directly, many consumers experience parking as a ‘free’ resource, resulting in a demand disproportionate to parking’s costs. Recent academic research is exploring ways to ‘unbundle’ that cost—to more directly link the consumer experience with the costs of parking. In 2016, for example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) eliminated annual parking permits, instead charging daily payas-you-park pricing. In order to incentivize a shift to transit (and reward those already taking transit), MIT simultaneously began offering its ten thousand employees a fully-subsidized local transit pass. This increased the salience of the cost of parking, giving participants the daily choice of using a free transit pass or paying a fee for parking. Parking could no longer be treated as a ‘sunk cost’ once the yearly fee was paid. The net result has been an eight percent reduction in parking demand in the first year and a ten percent increase in transit ridership among MIT employees. The annual net cost of the program to the Institute, meanwhile, was only about $200 per employee (Rosenfield et al., 2018). A recent study in Arlington County, meanwhile, found that residential buildings that charge a separate fee for parking had 6 percent fewer vehicles per unit and 13 percent fewer vehicles per adult resident compared with buildings where free parking was automatically included. It also found that the unbundling led to a higher use of public transit: 12 percent higher for commute trips and 40 percent higher for non-commute trips (Mobility Lab, 2018). Similarly, efforts to make employer-provided commute benefits mode neutral have been shown to change behavior. Parking cash-out is a mechanism to daylight the value of parking benefits provided to employees (Kaufman et al., 2018). Under this scheme, employers that provide subsidized parking also offer employees the option to receive a cash payment in lieu of the parking subsidy. Operating as an incentive, this rewards employees for not driving while not penalizing employees who choose to drive. California in fact requires employers that offer subsidized parking to also offer parking cash out to employees while Rhode Island requires employers in close proximity to public transit to provide a free monthly transit pass. Academic studies of cash-out programs in California and Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area showed a 10 to 12 percent reduction in drive-alone trips resulting from parking cash out programs (Shoup, 2005b; Van Hattum, 2009). These experiments and their proven success were notably enabled through technological advances that ease the process of collecting a daily parking fee as well as a growing body of innovative policy literature that explores how to use the theory of behavioral economics to ‘nudge’ citizens towards better behavior and choices. These findings, however, have yet to be applied in the municipal context. Residential parking permits were initially developed to protect neighborhood parking by offering access only to residents of a defined area. In fulfillment of this goal, they are, therefore, provided for free or at minimal cost. As shown in Fig. 1, most on-street parking permits for major cities around the US are under $50 per year. Remarkably, New York City does not have a permit program at all, yet over half of surveyed residents would be willing to pay on average $400 per year (Guo and McDonnell, 2013). Boston, the only major city to provide permits to eligible residents for free, is building political momentum to reconsider. Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu has recently pointed out that: “We need to 2
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minimums). Several major US cities have adopted parking maximums in certain areas or for certain land uses, including Boston, Chicago, New York City, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Seattle (Mukhija and Shoup, 2006). Seattle, Washington allows for the reduction of its minimum parking requirements by up to 40% if developers introduce transportation demand management elements such as carpool spaces, transit passes, and bicycle parking spaces. San Francisco has an ordinance requiring residential developments with 50 or more units and on-site parking to provide dedicated carsharing spaces at no cost to the carsharing organization. The City of New Rochelle, located just outside of New York City, allows developers to replace three individually-designated car spaces for every car-sharing space that they create (Medium, 2017). Nonetheless, the reduction of minimum parking requirements still faces considerable public opposition. This is reflected in research conducted by Freemark et al in 2019, where researchers asked bureaucratic officials whether or not they personally supported policies that reduced minimum parking requirements—as well as whether or not there was political support in their cities to do so. Over 70 percent of respondents expressed personal support for the policy yet only 44 percent felt that there was political support to do so. This lack of political support likely expresses a strong resistance to reducing parking minimums among citizens who, as a result, face the increased burden of a reduction of parking supply despite similar parking demand (at least in the near term) (Fig. 2) Contingency-based parking planning is a growing concept serving as a bridge for municipalities who do not yet have the political support to eliminate or reduce minimum parking requirements (Litman, 2018a). Palo Alto, California, for example, allows parking requirements to be reduced by up to 50 percent if the site plan has a ‘landscaped reserve’ area that could be used to address additional demand if needed. To date, none of these landscaped reserves have been necessary to provide additional parking (Shoup, 2005a). The overabundance of parking in many cities and suburbs is generally attributed to the peak-hour parking occupancy metric used in stipulating minimum parking standards—a metric that has received increased criticism (Shoup, 1999). Standard practice in the US relies on the ITE parking standards guide, despite the guide’s reliance on small samples and dated information. It has been suggested that a time-of-day metric, for example, would instead allow for more thoughtful and customized parking requirements in conjunction with other demand management interventions (Thigpen, 2018). Reducing off-street parking minimums for residential developments can prove challenging when nearby on-street residential parking is underpriced resulting in parking shortages. Existing users of on-street parking argue that it is unfair for residents of the new dwellings to
Fig. 1. Residential permit parking rate comparison among major US cities.
talk about how we’re giving away a very precious public resource for free” (Vaccaro, 2018). 3. Reducing parking minimums Minimum parking requirements have been a standard feature of US zoning regulations since the 1950s in order to ensure that developments offer adequate off-street parking spaces for the assumed parking demand generated by the developments’ use. This one-size-fits-all approach has come under considerable criticism in recent years, however, as the number of vehicles per capita continues to decline and mobility patterns begin to change. Many places, in fact, face an over-supply of parking (McCahill et al., 2014). Occupants of higher-end apartments and townhouses, particularly in walkable urban neighborhoods, tend to require just one vehicle per dwelling. Occupants of lower-priced housing in dense urban areas, meanwhile, typically only require between 0.2 and 0.4 vehicles per housing unit (Barter, 2018). Yet parking minimums generally require parking supply significantly in excess of these numbers. Municipal policy has shown itself increasingly responsive and innovative in its approach to reducing this mandated oversupply of parking. Portland, Oregon, for example, eliminated minimum parking requirements in its urban core as early as 2000. More recently, Buffalo, New York and Hartford, Connecticut have eliminated parking minimums for commercial and residential developments. Other cities have removed parking minimums for at least one part of the city or have lowered (or removed) minimums for certain uses (See Litman, 2018b for an interactive map of US municipalities reducing parking
Fig. 2. Policy support to “Reduce Minimum Parking Requirements” from Freemark et al. (2019). Respondents were directors of planning and transportation from a representative sample of the 300 largest US cities. 3
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exacerbate the existing scarcity. Some argue that there is a growing demand for residential units without parking but no legal mechanism to prevent renters or owners from parking vehicles on the street. A developer in Somerville, Massachusetts attempted to incorporate a clause into the deeds of new housing micro-units to preclude occupants from obtaining city-issued residential parking permits in order to obtain a variance waiving the parking requirement. The city solicitor, though, suggested that it would be illegal for the city to withhold city services to a tax-paying household rendering the deed-restriction arrangement ineffective. We have not been able to locate any examples of such a legal mechanism in place. In conclusion, cities can boast considerable innovation in their efforts to reduce minimum parking requirements so long codified in municipal zoning regulations. The goal, in fulfillment of Shoup’s counsel, is a reduction in supply in pursuit of a reduction in demand. Nonetheless, considerable challenges, including strong public opposition in many municipalities, still remain.
Fig. 3. Parking meter rate comparison among major US cities.
4. Pricing and allocating curb space dynamically
responsive parking meter pricing pilot from 2011 to 2013. Sensors and interconnected “smart” meters were installed to continuously monitor parking utilization. Officials adjust meter prices every few months to achieve a target of one or two free spaces per block—or about 80% occupancy. Over the course of the pilot, about one-third of the meter prices increased and one-third decreased making it overall a revenue neutral program (Pierce and Shoup, 2013). The program now covers all metered parking, both on- and off-street, in San Francisco. The program is successful in part because it de-politicizes parking pricing by setting prices transparently. As dynamic parking pricing infrastructure and policies become more commonplace, the logical next step is to add the ability to dynamically allocate curb space. In a similar fashion to parking pricing, cities have been crudely differentiating uses of curb space by time-ofday for decades, such as allowing vehicular travel in a lane during rushhour and parking during off-peak, or allowing commercial loading in the morning and customer parking in the afternoon. While the tool itself is thus not alien, it is revolutionized by the newfound ability to increase the permutations and frequency of changes in response to a combination of historic and real-time data inputs. This new tool notably comes at a time when cities are struggling to solve the problems caused by a significant increase in demand for curbside use by TNC companies seeking to pick up and drop off passengers. Since these activities interfere with bicycle lanes, bus stops, or travel lanes, there is growing pressure to change curb space currently designated for parking into pick-up and drop-off locations for TNC use. In response, Washington, DC is experimenting with a year-long pilot program that changes the designation of 60 parking spaces along one corridor to pick-up and drop-off zones between Thursday evening and Sunday morning (Schneider, 2017). Uber’s new Express Pool service provides a glimpse of a future where curbside pick-up and drop-off locations could be dynamically priced. Express Pool riders are directed to pick-up points within two blocks of their origin and dropped off within two blocks of their destinations at a discounted rate (Siddiqui, 2018). Uber believes that users’ willingness to walk short distances will reduce the need for driver detours. One can easily imagine a future where cities charge TNCs dynamically for the use of curb space for pick-up and drop-off to manage the scarce resource. Locations in high demand, such as at the front door of an evening music venue, would charge a higher price for drop-off than one a few blocks away. Just as consumers are given the choice of a solo trip or a shared ride trip with differing prices, they could be presented with various drop-off pricing options. Although technology is helping to revolutionize curb pricing, however, it is important to emphasize that parking governance is not simply a technocratic exercise searching for the optimal solution.
While innovations in policy are helping to reduce excessive parking supply, developments in technology are offering new ways to properly price the remaining provision of parking, most notably in the realm of dynamic curb pricing. Dynamic pricing in the transportation sector more generally is perhaps not entirely new, yet technological innovation is helping cities to apply the concept to how curb space specifically is allocated and priced. There are two general categories of technical prerequisites necessary to be able to implement dynamic parking governance: inputs to the decision-making algorithm and outputs to be used by the consumer to inform their decision-making. The inputs include a complete spatial representation of the curb, utilization history, real-time conditions, and predicted future demand. These elements are traditionally not part of a city’s repertoire and therefore will take time to develop. The outputs for the consumer, meanwhile, primarily include price and availability for each location. Albeit complex, companies are increasingly offering tools to surmount these challenges as, significantly, cities start to demand them. The first step is to digitally map a city’s curb. In the US, Washington, DC acts as the leader in this space, having inventoried all 600 of its commercial loading zones. Existing loading zone occupancy data was obtained from the cellphone payment system currently being used to charge commercial vehicles (FHWA, 2017). Once digitized, the data needs to be made publicly available. The private sector is notably becoming active in software development platforms in the mobility space, including curbside management. Coord.co, for example, has an application programming interface (API) that allows developers to access data on how curbs can be used in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle. Technology is similarly easing communication with the consumer through improving the system’s information output. Traditionally, information regarding acceptable use of the curb was communicated to the consumer via physical signage. With parking regulations and prices growing more varied, there emerges the challenge of providing the necessary information to drivers in a clear and coherent manner for them to make informed decisions. High rates of smartphone penetration coupled with standardized open-data formats have made the ability to communicate rules and prices as easy as it is to change them. Spotangels, for example, is a smartphone app that provides real-time information on current parking regulation and meter pricing schemes for about 25 cities in the US and Europe. Dynamic changes to pricing curbside parking spaces is an early example of the utilization of rapidly maturing ICT. Though metered parking rates vary from city to city throughout the US (Fig. 3), they are generally the same price within each city and throughout the day. San Francisco was the first to challenge this by implementing a demand4
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Fig. 4. Noordwal Automated Parking Facility in Den Haag, Netherlands. Source: Gemeente Den Haag.
Rather, it is complemented by “deliberative” social and political inputs. While these elements have always been a part of the policy-making process, the shift from a static to a dynamic regime significantly increases the complexity for decision-making. Periodic parking meter price increases, though contentious, are relatively straightforward to understand and debate. But the development of an algorithm to set the price dynamically in real-time is complicated. If responsibility lies in the hands of local government, as would be expected given that onstreet parking is a public resource, the algorithm can be open. This contrasts with, for example, TNCs’ proprietary dynamic pricing algorithm.
with the vehicle entrance adjacent to the main entrance to be able to better accommodate pick-up/drop-off needs as well as the queuing of driverless cars in the future. LMN Architects, meanwhile, designed a 1.2 million square foot skyscraper in Seattle with 1200 apartments, 150 hotel rooms, office space, and retail. Located on land previously occupied by parking garages, the new tower will include eight floors of standard underground parking, but an additional four levels of abovegrade parking pre-designed for easy conversion to apartments and offices. In order to incentivize similar retrofit designs, several cities are considering tax credits for developments where future retrofits or transit expansion are planned. Automation and the integration of embedded technology, meanwhile, serve as new tools to help designers minimize the footprint of the parking garage. Today, the average garage requires three to six times more square feet than the dimensions of a car in order to accommodate driving aisles, ramps, and standard parking space dimensions. The integration of a mechanized-robotic system in parking structures can save almost 60% of that space. When human drivers are out of the parking equation, parking structures can be designed with significantly lower headspace clearance; vehicle elevators eliminate the need for ramps; ramps themselves can be constructed out of steel so as to be removable or cantilevered outside the building to later be demolished. Automated parking facilities are becoming commonplace in Germany, Japan, China, and, increasingly, the US. Japan alone boasts an estimated 1.6 million automated parking spaces (McDonald, 2012). A seven-story fully automated parking system was recently built in the San Francisco Bay Area, meanwhile, accommodating 39 cars on a 1,600-square-foot site that would otherwise only provide space for seven standard parking spaces. In the Netherlands, Den Haag completed a fully automated 160-space parking garage in 2016 as part of a street reconstruction project that reinstated a canal—which had been paved over for a parking lot in the 1950s. The project thus freed up space that was subsequently used to improve the public realm (see Fig. 4). Designers and developers are also taking advantage of embedded technology and ubiquitous sensing capabilities to increase the efficiency of parking itself. By syncing parking guidance systems with new AV navigation systems and adding parking garage availability sensors and parking reservation apps, parking garages can better communicate with consumers to reduce time spent searching for parking. To address differing spatial needs across vehicles, precise measurements and matching by vehicle size could create greater efficiency and save time. Technology and innovation are also enabling the exchange of energy between electric cars (EV) and a parking provider, which, in turn, could enable vehicle owners to sell some of their vehicle’s power in exchange for parking—in lieu of the fee (Mearian 2016).
5. Designing hybrid parking structures In addition to innovations in public policy and technology within the realm of parking, a fourth trend involves innovation within the built form itself. Increasing urban land values, the advent of autonomous vehicles (AV), and a desire for improved use of public spaces are leading to innovations in parking structure efficiency and design. Some of the trends and strategies include designing mixed-use parking structures, the use of semi- to fully-automated garages, structure flexibility and conversion, the integration of embedded technology and environmental materials, and the reduction of construction and running cost (Callaghan, 2017; Wang, 2014). In the United States, organizations such as the International Parking Institute as well as real estate developers are partnering with cities to design and develop garages for more than just parking. The ground floor of parking garages is increasingly being used for retail and recreation, for example. Top floors are used for storage, and, in some cases, even housing. Yet projections that anticipate a reduced need for parking over time as technology evolves have also sparked designs that incorporate adaptability and the opportunity for retrofitting (Haahs, 2013; Wessel, 2016). More directly, the ability to allow for adjustments in later phases, based on demand, creates an opportunity to redevelop one phase when demand slows, without eliminating the entire parking structure. These designs may include raising the second level to accommodate alternative uses on the street level or the design of removable flexible facades that can easily change from permeable screen to solid. Adaptability also implies possible functionality shifts to better align with a multi-modal future. Newly designed parking structures are often designed for better integration with public transit, bike parking, and pedestrian networks. With the anticipated growth in shared mobility and autonomous vehicles, parking garages are incorporating drop-off/ pick up areas. In the US, there are a handful of architecture firms responding to this need. Gensler, for example, designed a building in Cincinnati where the three levels of integrated parking could be converted to office space as needed (Ohnsman, 2018). Facades for those floors match the rest of the building such that the current ventilation screens could simply be swapped out for windows. The building face was carefully designed
6. Preparing for the future of mobility Some have postulated that a drastic reduction in the need for urban parking will be a core beneficial side-effect of a world with autonomous vehicles (Sisson, 2016). In this scenario, cars would be primarily fleet5
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owned autonomous vehicles (AVs) and parking spaces would be a species threatened with extinction. A recent analysis of Singapore claims there can be an 85% reduction in the number of parking spaces while serving all trips made currently in private vehicles (Kondor et al., 2018). Based on these expectations, technologists view an AV future as a panacea for urban planning, claiming that space currently used for parking can be repurposed for significant economic and social gain. Existing parking garages could be turned into mixed-use developments with ground-floor retail, for example. On-street parking could be transformed into thriving sidewalks, green space, plazas, and space for European-style bicycle lanes protected from moving traffic (Kondor et al., 2018). While desirable, such a future should not be assumed. Rather, the redistribution of space freed up by reduced parking needs will be determined by public policy choices. There is, in fact, growing concern that an AV future will lead to the continued dominance of the automobile—even if the vehicles were to be shared. In the presumed shared scenario, AVs would be operated like today’s TNCs as managed fleets offering on-demand service. Yet today, apps like Uber and Lyft have already added about 6 billion miles of driving in the most populated cities in the US, which equates to more than a 1.5 factor increase in current driving on city streets. In Manhattan, Yellow cabs, Ubers, Lyfts, and other for-hire vehicles account for 50–80 percent of today’s traffic. If Uber and Lyft weren’t available, research has found that about 60 percent of users would take buses, trains, subways, walk, bike or not make the trip (Schaller, 2018). And taxi and ride-hailing trips are growing faster than transit trips in New York City, reversing a decades-long trend. Ridership on New York City’s subway has dropped for the past two years after reaching recordhigh levels in 2015, with the majority of the decline taking place in neighborhoods with rapidly growing usage of on-demand taxi services (Fitzsimmons, 2018). One concern is that road space created from reclaimed on-street parking spaces might be used to accommodate (or even induce) an increase in VMT. While it is hoped that the freed space will go to positive economic and social gains, it is entirely possible that on-street parking is instead converted to drop-off, pick-up, and delivery zones or, worse, more travel lanes to handle the increase in driving trips resulting from more ubiquitous car trips. This concern notably builds on the understanding that parking in dense urban areas today functions as a control valve for traffic congestion by increasing the inconvenience of vehicle use. In Boston, for example, parking limits were imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1973 in the form of a “parking freeze” to mitigate air quality compliance issues (Cervero et al., 2004). This shifted the city’s focus to mass transit and human-scale urban development and reduced VMTs. Not surprisingly, Boston now has the second highest monthly off-street parking cost (Fig. 5). Thus, when the need to pay for parking is lifted, individuals could switch away from transit options in the face of low-cost, high-convenience alternatives. In Boston, about 30% of bus riders have access to a car for their commute yet choose transit in order to avoid parking at their destination (MBTA, 2009). Most buses in Boston run in mixed traffic and therefore would experience the same level of traffic congestion as individuals traveling in AV, making any time-saving as a result of transit use minimal. As a result, it is not unreasonable to expect that AVs will cause bus ridership to decline significantly. In addition to the development of AVs, mobility is also moving towards a future of greater mode integration, dubbed Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Alongside the development of new modes, such as bikesharing, car-sharing, and ride-hailing, real-time information technology has sparked the possibility of (and a demand for) the integration of mode information, modes themselves, and, significantly, travel costs. Google’s ability to display travel time comparisons between different modes is the first step in moving towards a world where mobility is treated as a holistic service rather than a series of discrete choices.
Fig. 5. Off-street parking rate comparison among major US cities.
And the private sector is responding quickly. Ride-hailing company Lyft recently purchased Motivate, North America’s largest bike-share system. Uber, meanwhile, recently unveiled a deal with Masabi, a British company that provides mobile payment options for public transit systems. Users will soon be able to purchase public transit tickets from within Uber’s app. Daimler, similarly, hopes leverage its acquisition of Ridescout, a mode integration platform, to combine on-demand taxi and car-sharing options. Yet the question remains as to how the cost of parking will be incorporated into such holistic mobility provision schemes. There is currently a growth in startups aiming to help consumers streamline their parking experience. Paying for metered parking by smart phone is becoming the norm, opening the field for third-parties to step in and provide bundled packages to consumers. In such a scenario, cities could no longer use the price of parking as a signal to encourage mode switch. Rather, consumer choice would be based on overall cost and efficiency. The creates a policy challenge for municipalities: how can they best regulate and price mobility so as to ensure a sustainable and equitable yet efficient future? 7. Conclusion The explosion of low-cost, on-demand taxi services and the anticipation of an autonomous vehicle future has made transportation the center of debate and discussion for the first time since the massive expansion of the US highway system in the 1950s. Yet the realm of parking boasts innovations and developments far beyond the highprofile issues of TNCs and AVs. Rather, innovation in parking is happening in many cases quietly on a wide variety of fronts, including technology, public policy, and design. These developments are combining into a new, ‘quiet’ parking revolution, which promises to have a significant effect on the future of mobility and the public realm. If regulated properly, these innovations in parking could help to effectively steer today’s new mobility developments in a sustainable and equitable manner, yet, if ignored, an unregulated parking future could exacerbate many of today’s existing livability challenges. In this paper, we explore five of the most significant trends within the realm of parking: unbundling parking costs, reducing parking minimums, pricing and allocating curb space dynamically, designing hybrid parking structures, and preparing for the future of mobility. These trends are notably not happening in isolation, but rather supplement or, at times, even undermine each other. A movement towards bundling modes to offer MaaS, for example, promises the undermine any behavioral effects of unbundling parking costs. Allocating curb space for TNCs, meanwhile, if priced improperly, could increase the convenience of vehicle trips and unintentionally encourage mode shifts. 6
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Cities would be wise to determine overarching municipal priorities today and to develop and steer these trends in the direction of realizing those priorities—as opposed to eroding them. These trends—in some cases well-developed and in other cases still nascent—indicate a growing awareness that the problem is not one of parking shortages, but rather one of mismanagement of parking resources. Nonetheless, it should be pointed out that many vibrant downtowns in the US never fully embraced the old parking paradigm of shortage. Many already have extensive parking regulations, efficient pricing, and flexible mechanisms to stipulate the number of required parking spaces for new buildings. Yet new trends require new priorities and, significantly, new policies. And communities are famously resistant to change in the realm of parking, as individuals are concerned about further ‘impingement’ on the convenience of car use. Technology, design, and policy innovation might offer new tools to increase transparency and fairness in the realm of parking, yet the political will must exist in order to engage in conversation with communities as well. In many ways, it is thus the communities themselves where the challenges of continued progress in parking policy are greatest—and where it can be difficult to communicate the value of a new, more stringent approach to parking.
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