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Parking: not as bad as you think, worse than you realize
Chapter 10
Parking: not as bad as you think, worse than you realize Rachel Weinberger Weinberger & Associates, Brooklyn, NY, United States
1 Introduction Automobile parking and how cities regulate it lie at the intersection of land use and transportation planning. This is because off-street parking, though part of the transportation system, is typically regulated through zoning, a land use tool. Given the strong connection between parking availability and mode choice, parking policy is a potentially strong lever to affect natural environment outcomes—roughly 30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are due to the transport sector. Private automobile transport is responsible for over 20% of GHG emissions in the United States and significant air and water pollution as well. Parking supply is a critical determinant of auto ownership and use. It’s widely understood that convenient—usually abundant—parking at either end of a given trip has a strong association with automobile mode choice; and while parking shortages can result in excess VMT, and frustration, as would-be-parkers “cruise” looking for parking, the implications of abundant parking infrastructure and its impact on mode choice is potentially more damaging. Insufficiently nuanced approaches to the “parking problem” have made it difficult for municipalities and other jurisdictions to respond with appropriate policy. For example, off-street and on-street parking are complements in a parking supply system yet they are seldom coordinated. Indeed, the former is typically governed by city planning departments, property owners or managers, and commercial operators while the latter is managed by departments of transportation or public works. Cruising for parking (typically understood as a circuitous search for available parking where parking is scarce) is routinely estimated to be a more significant problem than it may actually be, encouraging oversupply. Finally, parking is often poorly located and poorly related to street design, leading to queuing, congestion, and utilization problems.
Transportation, Land Use, and Environmental Planning. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815167-9.00010-4 Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Because parking regulation is a potentially powerful lever to affect mode choice, parking and its regulation, also have a tremendous potential impact on the natural environment. A recent survey of New York City residents who own cars asked whether the hassle of parking or the hassle of traffic was the bigger deterrent to additional trip making. Overwhelmingly, they responded that parking, or lack thereof, was the bigger concern when deciding whether or not to use their automobile for any given trip. Parking supply based on current rules and the projected housing in New York’s 2008 sustainability plan, PlaNYC, has been forecasted to induce driving that would produce 500,000 tons of CO2 annually (Weinberger, Johnson, & Seaman, 2009). Without increasing parking supply, the resulting VMT and related carbon emissions would be less than half that number. This chapter explores the “parking problem” and how the definition of that problem has evolved. It reviews some the solutions that have been offered, examining the effectiveness and unintended consequences of those solutions, and discusses how parking management can impact driving, car ownership, emissions of GHG and criteria pollutants, and housing affordability.
2 The parking problem Since the beginning of mass automobile production, the question of where to store the vehicles has loomed. In some of the older cities in the Northeastern part of the United States, one can see horse stables converted to parking garages, a quaint reminder of technology displacement. Shoup (2005) cites studies in Detroit dating to the 1920s wherein policy makers seek to quantify the share of vehicles that are driving around searching for parking as opposed to those actually going somewhere. Over the years several similar studies have been undertaken to gain a measure of how much traffic is due to parking search. A persistent myth has taken hold that suggests, on average, 30% of urban traffic is searching for parking (Samuelson, 2015; Zimmerman, 2011) catapulting the question of parking search into a high tier of importance. In an era where the prevailing belief was that every trip should be able to be served by car, the idea that any traffic, much less 30%, would have to search for parking or that there are even localized or temporal shortages led to the conclusion that more parking could, and should, be provided. There is no particular scientific or economic rationale underlying the approach but there was an ethos that the parking demand of any given land use should be prevented from spilling-over onto the parking supply for other land uses, whether commercial or residential, the idea that everything should devote space to accommodate its own needs was heavily promoted. Little matter that “need” was undefined. There was also concern, on the part of city leaders that lower density, suburban development where land was cheap and surface parking was free and plentiful was drawing away urban shoppers and that to compete with the suburbs cities had to provide the same level of parking amenity.
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The typical response has been to call for and create more off-street parking spaces, even when nearby off-street spaces are underutilized. Through the 1950s and 1960s cities began to incorporate off-street parking minimum requirements in their zoning codes. By the 1970s, parking minimums were required almost everywhere. Houston, Texas, a city famous for not employing zoning, joined the chorus by including minimum parking requirements in their building code. The promise of off-street minimums was an end to cruising, and an end to the negative externalities associated with spillover. It was also believed that copious free parking was critical to the continued success of commercial centers and necessary for the success of residential developments. In hindsight, the problem of searching for parking is ill-defined and poorly understood. Hence, the solution has not solved the problem; indeed it may have caused other problems and exacerbated the perceived problem it was intended to fix.
3 Problem: your parking demand impinges my supply and 30% of traffic is searching for parking There is no doubt that poor parking management, including mispricing supply, can lead to excess driving in search of a parking space. “How much?” becomes an important question. The simplest, and most commonly used, strategy to estimate cruising for parking is to intercept drivers in the area of concern and ask if they are looking for parking or if they are going somewhere (Schaller, 2006; Transportation Alternatives, 2007). To understand the origin of the 30% estimate and show some pitfalls of the approach it is instructive to review these two studies. Both were conducted in New York City, a place renowned for difficult parking. The 2007 study was conducted in Park Slope, a predominantly residential neighborhood in Brooklyn; the surveys were taken along a well-established commercial street that serves the local area. The 2006 study was done in Soho, a shopping district in Manhattan with a regional draw. In the neighborhood study, 45% of all respondents and 65% of local respondents said they were looking for parking. In the Soho study, 28% of respondents were looking for parking. These results are not surprising. All car trips, excluding those that end in a driveway or otherwise guaranteed parking spot, involve some portion of “looking for parking.” Depending on the driver’s appetite for risk and knowledge of an area they will look for parking prior to reaching their destination or once they have arrived. I take the neighborhood case first and look at the finding that 65% of local respondents said they were looking for parking, thus we are limited to the case of people who live in the neighborhood, and hypothetically, consider restricting reserved parking to zero, that is, assume everybody looks for parking for some portion of their trip home. For the particular case, there is in fact very low reserved parking (about 4.5% of houses in that area have off-street, reserved parking). In this case, the driver in a moving vehicle is either coming home or going out. As everybody lives there, a surveyor should expect at least
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50% of local drivers who are randomly stopped to be leaving the area “going somewhere” or arriving to the area “looking for parking.” It is likely that drivers looking for parking will be traveling more slowly which makes them more likely to be intercepted, so you could expect those looking for parking to exceed 50%. It is also conceivable that parking is scarce and those searching for it may drive longer than they would, if parking were readily available. Finally, a resident is less likely to be actually looking for parking on the commercial street (even though a space may be available) because that space will most likely be metered and time restricted. Once they are approaching the survey point, they will be looking for parking, writ large, but will not have taken an available space on that block. They may have begun to search on a block parallel to the street where they live and could be traversing the commercial street to reach their own block to continue the parking search. In this context, the finding that 65% of vehicles are looking for parking is not surprising, it might suggest that somewhere between zero and 15% are driving excess distance in their parking search. Likewise, in the Soho case, the much lower percentage of people looking for parking reflects that there is a much greater proportion of traffic that is passing through and not destined for the neighborhood. It is worth noting that 91% of people visiting Soho arrive by transit, active modes, or livery. Only 9% are driving and expecting to park. The general finding that 30% of traffic is looking for parking results from taking the average in a series of studies such as the ones described earlier. They are all conducted in areas that are known to have parking shortages and that tend to be “destination” oriented; then they are abstracted broadly across entire regions. Nevertheless, the reality is that parking shortages do create inefficiencies and they can cause excess travel. The user experience is such that more people are drawn to the same locations, which is what makes them crowded; more people are subject to crowding, by definition. I use a bus example to illustrate: If a city operates two 50 passenger capacity buses and endeavors to serve 100 passengers, unless the passengers are evenly split the bus with more passengers will be over capacity. In the extreme case one schedule is more desirable than the other and 100 passengers ride that bus while the other bus runs empty. Even though there is sufficient capacity to serve all the passengers comfortably, 100% of the passengers experience over-crowding. If 25 passengers choose the other bus, 75 passengers are still subject to over-crowding. Applying that to parking, one can think of a city of just two streets with one having all the land uses and the next surrounded only by vacant land, everyone’s natural destination is the street with development. Even with ample parking nearby, the drivers experience a parking shortage. Fig. 10.1 shows a typical downtown utilization inventory where some parts of the system are over-subscribed while there is ample, unused capacity nearby in both lots and on street. While there is available parking nearby, frequently on the next street, the perception persists that there is insufficient parking in the area.
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FIGURE 10.1 Parking inventory City of Oxnard (2009). (Downtown Oxnard Mobility and Parking Plan.)
4 Solution: provide more off-street parking With the expectation that more parking would end cruising and spillover and support a robust local economy, cities around the world adopted laws requiring provision of a minimum amount of parking for housing and commercial uses. Municipalities have also provided public parking lots, often at the urging of local business interests. In some cases, private operators also provide public lots, either as a permanent land use or as an interim use while an area is developing. The impact of these regulations was an explosion of parking. In a study of six cities McCahill and Garrick (2014) show growth in parking supply of 50%– 90% from 1960 to 1980. One city in their study increased its parking supply 160% between 1960 and 2000 even while its population decreased. Estimates of parking spaces in the United States vary from three non-residential off-street
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spaces per vehicle (Pijanowski, 2007) to as many as eight (including on-street) spaces per vehicle (Shoup, 2005). In a study assessing the energy and emissions from providing parking infrastructure, Chester, Horvath, and Madanat (2010) multiply these estimates to suggest there are between 840 million and 2 billion parking spaces across the United States. Parking minimums are set in a pseudo-scientific frame as a function of some characteristic of the property. For example, residential parking requirements may be set as a function of the number of bedrooms in a home. Looking at the life cycle of a typical family inhabiting a three-bedroom home, there may be need for zero, one, two, or more parking spaces at different life-cycle stages. To cover the most extreme case, given the goal of avoiding spillover, the zoning requirement might be three spaces, one space per bedroom. But a family with children will usually have just one or two cars for most of their lives with a brief period of having a teenage or young adult driver adding an additional car. At retirement, this family might need just one car. In a hypothetical case where a family occupies a particular home for 40 years, they might have three cars for 3 or 4 years, two cars for the prime working years, maybe 30 years, and just one car for 10 years. A three-car requirement implies that parking at this home will be over-supplied by at least one space 90% of the time and by two spaces 25% of the time. Sometimes, the characteristic is arbitrary. Frequently it is a function of square feet of development. A convenient commercial example is how restaurant parking is set. In about 60% of the US cities restaurant parking is a function of the square footage of the restaurant (Goodman, 2018). Two restaurants with the same seating capacity and same staffing but with different floor plans—one may have a larger kitchen, for example, will have different amounts of parking required. There is no reason why a larger kitchen would imply a need for more parking facilities. A more reasonable characteristic could be seating capacity, but that should also depend on other factors, such as the density of the surrounding area—higher density locations would require less parking per activity than lower density areas do—and accessibility by other modes, such as transit, cycling, and walking. Seating capacity is also very mutable. The restaurant may change its format from fine dining, for example, requiring ample spacing between tables to fast food where the tables can be much closer thus increasing the seating capacity. But without altering the site plan, the format change may be legally infeasible. It is also the case that buildings are durable and land uses are not particularly so. An establishment that is a restaurant today may be something very different in the future. Examples include a former bowling alley in Berkeley, CA that was transformed into a grocery store and then into an outdoor gear retail outlet; a former church in New York City that was transformed into a nightclub and is now a retail mall, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris which was once a train station and now a museum of fine art and Usina de Arte, a power station transformed into performance space in Buenos Aires. In each case, the building and property footprints are fixed, in some cases with a fixed amount of land devoted to parking.
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5 Impact of more parking The reality is that the solution has fallen short of the promise. The impact of more parking is more car ownership and more driving. In many cases parking is supplied well in excess of normal demand and frequently in excess of peak demand (Weinberger & Karlin-Resnick, 2015). The impact on cruising is mixed, other externalities like increased pollution, and compromised safety have been introduced, and the lower development densities that necessarily go hand in hand with increased parking is potentially devastating to urban commercial centers.
5.1 Developer impacts Developers typically provide only the minimum amount of parking required which suggests that the requirement is binding on the development and implies that the requirement is likely in excess of what the developer believes would be required (absent the legal requirement) for a successful development and may even increase the development cost to the point where it becomes infeasible (McDonnell, Madar, & Been, 2010). Structured parking can be quite costly with estimates of the average ranging between $34,000 and $45,000 per space. Depending on land cost and other issues, such as seismic concerns, the price can be higher (or lower). Litman (2019) estimates that provision of one parking space per residential unit can increase the cost of construction by 6% and the provision of two is more costly by 16%. Depending on the market, this cost is absorbed by the consumer—a study in San Francisco shows that an on-site parking space translates to a 12% increase in cost to the consumer (Jia and Wachs, 1999) but other research suggests that the increased value of the unit does not cover the increased cost due to the parking (Jung, 2009). The differential depends on scarcity, hence, ubiquitous parking would not create a value differential. Sometimes the amount of built parking, without opportunities to expand it on-site, locks out development. One example from St. Paul, MN is of a local restaurateur who proposed a wine bar in the space formerly occupied by a toy store. His development was blocked. The toy store requirement had been three spaces and the wine bar would require nine. For want of six on-site spaces the building remained vacant.
5.2 Parking and car ownership Several studies show that car ownership is more prevalent when people have dedicated parking spots. A study using the Norwegian National Travel Survey showed that people with dedicated parking are 3 times more likely to own cars than those without dedicated parking spaces (Christiansen, Fearnly, Hanssen, & Skollerud, 2017). Similarly, New Yorkers with dedicated parking are more likely to own cars (Weinberger, 2012); on- versus off-street parking in the Northern New Jersey suburbs was a very strong determinant of auto ownership, stronger than transit availability (Chatman, 2013) and Manville, using the American
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Housing Survey, shows that households who have “bundled” parking, that is, dedicated parking automatically included with their homes, are 2–3 times more likely than others to own and use cars (Manville, 2017). Bundling essentially loads part of the cost of car ownership onto the cost of home-ownership. When a home is rented or purchased with parking in the bundle the buyer/renter is simultaneously paying for car storage. Gabbe and Pierce (2017) looking at garage parking in metropolitan areas of the United States, find that bundling increases housing price to the consumer by 17%. Including parking creates a market distortion wherein housing costs are made higher and auto-ownership costs lower. Both are normal goods and markets tend to respond as behavioral economics would predict. Less housing and more automobility are consumed under this policy than would be the case if minimums were relaxed and parking unbundled. Gabbe and Pierce also estimate a deadweight loss to society of people paying for parking but not owning cars. Though some jurisdictions, notably San Francisco, CA and Arlington County, VA, have banned bundled parking, the ubiquity of bundled parking means that someone in the housing market is almost automatically also in the parking space market. Units built as parking requirements were introduced are most likely to have bundled parking, so, while in theory a family that doesn’t own cars could look only at [older] units without bundled spaces, a family looking for modern housing with modern amenities might have no choice. Further, if a family preferred not to own a parking space, as a practical matter, it could be very difficult. Over 90% of units in the United States have bundled parking (Manville, 2017). An estimated 71% of carless households live in units with bundled parking and spend an estimated $440 million/year on garage parking that they don’t use for automobile storage (Gabbe & Pierce, 2017).
6 The impact of parking on the built environment, travel behavior and downtown economies Most of the research on parking and travel behavior is focused on parking price and then easily couched in terms of the generalized cost of travel (Hess, 2001; Newmark & Shiftan, 2007). But parking, under conditions of oversupply, is difficult to price as the oversupply naturally drives the price to zero. In addition to money cost, generalized cost of travel includes time cost, which also measures convenience. With the goal of having trips accommodated on each site, the access time to parking is forced to a very low value as well thus giving automobile travel an additional time advantage. Urban planners and other policymakers apply a standard for transit access that suggests a 5–10-minute walk is acceptable while the auto-access standard requires on-site parking availability. Parking is also very space intensive and forces lower density development. As new parking facilities are added to the urban landscape, other uses are typically removed. Some cities, Hartford CT, for example, (McCahill & Garick, 2012) have gutted themselves taking down buildings and adding parking facilities.
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With more parking and fewer active uses, the built environment is less conducive to walking and transit and tilts more to automobile as the primary access, thus a cycle of automobile dependence is fed in which more parking begets more car travel which in turn demands more parking. A study looking simply at the design dimension of parking placement found that when controlling for autoownership, neighborhood density and walkability, and parking supply, people were more likely to drive when parking surrounded a given use. The comparator case was development that fronted the street where parking was in structures above or below the development (Maley & Weinberger, 2011). Recent research shows that parking is supplied, on average, about 60% more than it is actually used (Weinberger & Karlin-Resnick, 2015). This evidence suggests that levels of parking provision are unmoored from demand, travel behavior, pricing, or other dimensions where theory suggests there would be a relationship. As early as the 1980s, if not earlier, transportation engineers and planners understood that additional parking spaces would engender more automobile traffic and three US cities introduced parking maximums, to curb growth in car use and ownership, as part of their programs to comply with the Clean Air Act amendments. Additional efforts have looked at parking and “downtown destruction or regeneration”, that is, where parking policy can be used as regenerative and/or where parking restraint may be damaging to local economies. Marsden (2006) reviews the literature and concludes that there is little evidence to suggest that parking restraint in town centers is a major contributor to economic decline, indeed other research shows that economic decline and CBD parking capacity increases may track very closely and consistently (McCahill and Garrick, 2010; Nelson\Nygaard,2005).
7 Is the problem well defined? There are two primary components to the question of whether or not the parking problem is well defined. The first is whether there exists a parking shortage, to address this; the ideas of supply and demand and geographic scope have to be well examined. The second is how much driving is cruising and what motivates the cruising.
8 Is there a parking shortage? In some places, at some times, there are acute parking shortages. But most of the time, even where shortages are perceived, there is available parking as Fig. 10.1 showed. The image shows on-street and off-street parking in Downtown Oxnard, CA—the illustration is typical and the same pattern can be found in almost any small or medium city downtown commercial district. Although some streets show no parking available, in every case there is available parking on an adjacent street. Two public off-street facilities are full but many more are less than 50% occupied. Fig. 10.2 shows a metered area in New York City where the same
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FIGURE 10.2 Street by street parking occupancy (New York City DOT).
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pattern is observed. Here there are consistent shortages in the very center of the area with parking available on nearby streets. With a national inventory of three to eight parking spaces per automobile, parking shortages can only be localized and then, generally speaking the shortage is for free parking. Augmenting supply cannot address that problem.
9 How much driving is cruising after all? Using GPS traces of automobile trips and defining a trip as cruising when a vehicle traverses the same street segment multiple times, results in an estimate of cruising trips in San Francisco to occur in about 2.2% of all trips and in about 1.8% of trips in Ann Arbor. A more inclusive definition of cruising, i.e. when the true vehicle path exceeds the shortest path by a threshold of 200 meters, results in estimates of cruising in San Francisco and Ann Arbor of 4.9% and 5.8% respectively (Weinberger, Millard-Ball, & Hampshire, 2017). In addition to shortages, cruising can be exacerbated by price differentials between garage prices, on-street metered parking and on-street free parking. Frequently a cruising driver is actually looking for free, or less expensive parking rather than a parking space per se. It is typical that garage parking is both more expensive and less convenient than on-street parking. In the example where off-street parking is $12 an hour and metered parking is $1 an hour, a 20-minute investment in cruising saves the driver $22 in parking costs for a 2 hour stay. By searching for 20-minutes, the driver has essentially just paid him/ herself $22. This is a very rational move for most travelers. The most typical pricing scheme is shown in the left panel of Fig. 10.3. The scheme that better
FIGURE 10.3 Price differentials complicate selection of a parking spot. (TransitCenter)
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utilizes existing supply, reducing double-parking and excess parking search, is illustrated on the right panel. This is a problem that SFpark, San Francisco’s effort to eliminate cruising, has addressed. In that project meter prices have been adjusted to meet a “curb performance” objective so that there is always a parking space available. Where demand appears to overwhelm capacity, meter prices are raised thus driving parkers to other locations; simultaneously meter rates are lowered on blocks where demand is below capacity thus drawing parkers to the areas of unused supply. One result is that public garage prices were consistently lowered to attract parkers that were otherwise hunting for relative bargains on the street.
10 Parking problem redefined With persistent angst over parking availability, cities have had to rethink the parking problem. The belief that free parking to meet peak demand of each individual use as an appropriate supply threshold has been called into question by a growing chorus of urbanists; in recent years, even greater doubt has taken hold. Ironically, the “new” problems of parking are the old ones but now supplemented by the unintended consequences of mandated parking minimums, the ill-conceived solution to spot shortages. Parking problems are increasingly recognized as poor management manifest in uneven demand even within relatively small areas. Minimums have caused an over-supply, which leads to underpricing; the artificially low prices result in inflated demand. Design aspects, such as the quantity of parking provided and its relationship to the street and the use have also gained attention as policy levers to affect better outcomes. Finally, it is increasingly recognized that outcomes of the status quo in parking [mis] management induce car ownership and use. The complement of this last fact is that current policy disproportionately burdens carless households (a strong corelate of low income) and undermines environments needed to foster active and public transportation modes. Poor management of the curb leads to double-parking, which in turn obstructs traffic flow. Obstructed traffic implies delays to transit as well as private vehicles. Poor management also leads to illegal parking, such as blocking fire hydrants—which is dangerous in the event of a fire—blocking bus stops which prevents bus drivers from pulling out of traffic when passengers are boarding and alighting, thus interrupting traffic flow. Finally, poor management may lead to excess VMT in pursuit of a parking bargain or any parking space at all.
11 Solutions redefined Cities have a limited but effective set of policy levers to address parking. They can address the cost; the length of time a vehicle is permitted to stay in a space, the supply, and the placement of the parking within a site. Before exploring how cities can implement these tools it is worth noting the language and assumptions
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around parking “demand.” There is no demand for parking per se, there is demand for access to destinations.To the extent that driving is the only, or the best, option, the demand for access translates directly to demand for parking. Often what makes driving the best option is the fact that there is free or underpriced parking. The concepts of supply and demand are typically understood with price mediating. However, free parking has become such the norm that parking demand is generally understood as demand for free parking. By and large, there is little understanding of parking demand in the usual sense of microeconomics. When and if parking is priced to reflect the cost of providing it or by a more typical market strategy, policymakers can then begin to understand parking demand.
11.1 Performance parking One of the easiest responses to apparent on-street shortages has been to change meter prices and time limits in order to ensure that the curb meets an established performance standard. A typical goal is one or two free spaces on any given block at any given time. Early adopters of performance pricing include Budapest, Mexico City, Pasadena, California (one of the earliest documented cases), and San Francisco. By tempering the popularity of a location with price differentials these cities have been able to even out parking demand and increase the probability that a driver will find a space on any given block. Performance parking has not been uniformly successful, particularly in places where prices have been historically well below the level consumers are willing to pay and where competitive alternatives to driving do not exist (Deakin, 2018). While the strategy has proved effective at reducing double-parking—Boston just reported a 14% decrease in double parking after a year-long performance pricing pilot project (City of Boston, 2018)—and increasing parking availability (City of Boston, 2018; Millard-Ball, Weinberger, & Hampshire, 2014), an unstudied aspect is whether performance pricing, by more effectively utilizing all the available parking, generates more trips and more traffic.
11.2 Controls on supply, unbundled, and shared parking The status quo on supply controls is the mandate of minimum amounts of parking. As discussed extensively in this chapter that has led to an oversupply of underpriced parking sometimes at the expense of development. The solutions discussed in this section allow cities to reduce their parking supply in some cases without causing any change in user behavior, in some cases precipitating a change by making the cost of parking more transparent. Some jurisdictions have introduced maximums in select areas, some have dropped parking requirements altogether, again in certain neighborhoods, often under an adaptive re-use ordinance. Typically, these places see new development.
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The City of Buffalo, NY may be the first city in the United States to have completely dropped parking supply requirements, allowing developers to determine the quantity of parking they judge to be appropriate to support the development. Some jurisdictions require that parking spaces be leased or sold separately, that is, unbundled, from the primary use served by the parking. This strategy establishes a market for parking spaces thus providing some insight into parking demand when parking is priced. Invariably, it leads to lower levels of auto-ownership; early, unpublished evidence in Arlington County shows that people in buildings where parking is unbundled are less likely to commute by automobile than their counterparts with bundled parking. Different land uses have different patterns with respect to peak demand. This can translate directly to peak parking demand and suggests that the parking spaces of one enterprise can be used by others during the off-peak period of the first use (Smith, 2005). For example, hardware stores cater to customers in the daytime, a movie theater, on the other hand, caters primarily in the late afternoon and evening. When these two users share their parking supply, the spaces are used more effectively and fewer need be provided. Even unpriced parking in mixed use districts can be reduced, one project in Long Beach California estimated a modest decrease of 6% (Linscott, Law and Greenspan Engineers, 2017), a more dramatic decrease, 44% was shown in a Long Island development (Walker Parking Consultants, 2008). The reductions will depend on the land use mix.
12 Conclusion Automobile storage has presented a challenging problem since the beginning of mass automobile production. Where spot shortages were observed the problem was defined as inadequate supply. Secondary problems were driver frustration, added time cost of automobile travel and added traffic due to drivers circling around an area looking for a place to park. The solution, predicated on the normative notion that anyone who wished to make any trip by automobile should be able to, was mandated off-street parking concomitant with new development. Cities began to include comprehensive requirements for minimum numbers of parking spaces with new development. The strategy made driving a more attractive access option than the alternatives. Not only was auto-access made easier and cheaper in relative terms but the provision of abundant parking had the compounding impact of making alternatives less attractive in absolute terms: for example, the parking lot surrounding a business makes it uncomfortable and dangerous for pedestrian access. In the development scenario wherein the business is accessible from the sidewalk, it is easy for a pedestrian and, possibly, more challenging for a driver. Likewise, where every use requires its own full complement of parking, densities are typically driven down to the point where public transit service becomes impractical.
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As policymakers and citizens, alike, have come to understand the unintended consequences of minimum parking requirements they have begun to question the goal of accommodating all trips by automobile. A growing number of jurisdictions have begun to introduce reforms including changing policy on parking supply and pricing that bring a modern rationale, consistent with modern visions of urban places to the parking realm. Finally, many people have high hopes that the advent of autonomous vehicles will greatly reduce, if not eliminate the need for parking—particularly in city centers. Some places have reported, anecdotally, that Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) have had an impact on parking demand as people find the convenience and cost savings of leaving personal automobiles behind and utilizing these services (Matthew & Geiger, 2018). To the extent that autonomous vehicles are used as livery, similar to TNCs, it seems very likely that parking in high priced markets will be reduced. And it is logical to assume that once autonomous vehicles are the norm for private car ownership that people can simply “send their cars home” to avoid parking at their [crowded] destinations. The excess traffic and VMT implied in these scenarios must be carefully considered in decisions for parking and the rest of the transportation system. Ultimately, even where it is “notoriously hard to park,” there is usually space available—available space may not be as convenient as the prime spots and with no off-setting advantage to non-prime spots (price differential or differences in permitted length of stay) people often opt to invest the time looking for a prime spot. With better management availability is more transparent, under different price schemes parking demand will also change. Hence, it is not as bad as policy makers and their constituents tend to think. Readily available parking, as it has been historically mandated and managed has proved to be a tremendous inducement to drive. The advantage accorded private vehicle operation due to the provision of parking brings with it additional pollution, GHG emissions, safety concerns and generally contravenes some of the current ideas about livability, walkability, and stewardship of the natural environment. Hence, parking may be much worse than we realize.
References Chatman, D. (2013). Does TOD need the T? Journal of the American Planning Association, 79(1), 17–31. Chester, M., Horvath A., & Madanat, S. (2010). Parking infrastructure: energy, emissions, and automobile life-cycle environmental accounting. Environmental Research Letters, 5, 1–8. Christiansen, P., Fearnley, N., Hanssen, J. U., & Skollerud, K. (2017). Household parking facilities: relationship to travel behavior and car ownership. Transportation Research Procedia, 25. 4185–4195. City of Boston (2018). 2017 Pilot report. Available from: https://www.boston.gov/transportation/ performance-parking-pilot. City of Oxnard. (2009). Downtown Oxnard mobility and parking plan. Available from: https:// www.oxnard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Downtown-Mobility-and-Parking-Plan.pdf.
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Deakin, E. (2018). Parking limits: Lean demand management in Berkeley. In D. Shoup (Eds.), Parking and the city. New York: Routledge. Gabbe, C.J., & Pierce, G. (2017). The hidden cost of bundled parking. Access, 51(Spring). Available from: http://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2017/the-hidden-cost-of-bundled-parking/. Goodman, S., (2018). The United States of parking. In D. Shoup (Eds.), Parking and the city. New York: Routledge. Hess, D. B. (2001). Effect of free parking on commuter mode choice—evidence from travel diary data. Transportation Research Record, 1953, 35–42. Jia, W., & Wachs, M. (1999). Parking requirements and housing affordability: case study of San Francisco. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 1685, 156–160. Jung, O. (2009). Who is really paying for your parking space? Estimating the marginal implicit value of off-street parking spaces for Condominiums in Central Edmonton, Canada, Department Of Economics, University of Alberta. Available from: www.vtpi.org/jung_parking.pdf Litman, T. (2019). Parking requirement impacts on housing affordability. Victoria Transport at Policy Institute. Available from: https://www.vtpi.org/park-hou.pdf Linscott Law and Greenspan (LLG) Engineers. (2017). Parking demand analysis 2nd + PCH Project. City of Long Beach. Available from: http://www.lbds.info/civica/filebank/blobdload. asp?BlobID=6524. Maley, D., & Weinberger, R. (2011). Food shopping in the urban environment: parking supply, destination choice and mode choice. Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2010. Manville, M. (2017). Bundled parking and vehicle ownership: Evidence from the American Housing Survey. Journal of Transport and Land Use, 10(1), 27–55. Marsden, G (2006). The evidence base for parking policies—a review. Transport Policy, 13(6), 447–457. Matthew F., & Geiger D. (2018). Uber and Lyft crushed taxis—is the commercial parking industry next? Crain’s New York Business. McCahill, C., & Garrick, N. (2012). Automobile use and land consumption: empirical evidence from 12 cities. Urban Design International, 17(3), 221–227. McCahill, C., & Garrick, N. (2010). Influence of parking policy on built environment and travel behavior in two New England cities, 1960 to 2007. Transportation Research Record, 2187, 123–130. McCahill, C., & Garrick, N. (2014). Parking supply and urban impacts. In Ison and M. Emerald (Eds.). Parking issues and policies. United Kingdom: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. McDonnell, S.T., Madar, J., & Been, V. (2010). A continuing role for minimum parking requirements in a dense growing city? Evidence from New York City. NYU Law and Economics Research Paper No. 10-16. Available from: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1594247 or http://dx.doi. org/10.2139/ssrn.1594247. Millard-Ball, A., Weinberger, R.R., & Hampshire, R.C. (2014). Is the curb 80% full or 20% empty? Assessing the impacts of San Francisco’s parking pricing experiment. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 63, 76–92. Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates. (2005). Center City Parking Policy Evaluation. Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Newmark, G. L., & Shiftan, Y. (2007). Examining shoppers’ stated willingness to pay for parking at suburban malls. Transportation Research Record, 2010, 94–103. Pijanowski, B. (2007). Parking spaces outnumber drivers 3-to-1, drive pollution and warming, Purdue University (www.purdue.edu). Available from: www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2007b/ 070911PijanowskiParking.html.
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Samuelson, T. (2015). National Public Radio Marketplace: The tricky practice of pricing parking. Schaller, B. (2006). Curbing Cars: shopping, parking and pedestrian space in SoHo. Available from: https://www.transalt.org/sites/default/files/news/reports/2006/soho_curbing_cars.pdf. Shoup, D. (2005). The high cost of free parking. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17, 3–20. Available from: www.planning.org. Smith, M. (2005). Shared parking (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute. Transportation Alternatives. (2007). No vacancy: park slope’s parking problem and how to fix it. Available from: https://www.transalt.org/sites/default/files/news/reports/2007/novacancy.pdf. Walker Parking Consultants. (2008). Shared parking analysis lighthouse at Long Island. Available from: https://toh.li/files/pdfs/th_lighthouse/31_s3.61_21_7_Build2019MitAMPMSAT.pdf. Weinberger, R. (2012). Death by a thousand curb-cuts: evidence on the effect of minimum parking requirements on the choice to drive. Transport Policy, 93–102. Weinberger, R., & Karlin-Resnick, J. (2015). Parking in mixed-use U.S. districts: oversupplied no matter how you slice the pie. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2537, 177–184. Weinberger, R., Seaman, M., & Johnson, C. (2009). Residential off-street parking impacts on car ownership, vehicle miles traveled, and related carbon emissions: New York City case study. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2118, 24–30. Weinberger, R., Millard-Ball, A., & Hampshire, R.C. Parking search-caused congestion: where’s all the fuss? (2017). Washington, DC: Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting. Zimmerman, E. (2011). CNN Money. Quoting Zia Youssef. Available from: http://money.cnn. com/2011/04/29/technology/streetline/.
Parking: not as bad as you think, worse than you realize Rachel Weinberger Weinberger & Associates, Brooklyn, NY, United States
1 Introduction Automobile parking and how cities regulate it lie at the intersection of land use and transportation planning. This is because off-street parking, though part of the transportation system, is typically regulated through zoning, a land use tool. Given the strong connection between parking availability and mode choice, parking policy is a potentially strong lever to affect natural environment outcomes—roughly 30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are due to the transport sector. Private automobile transport is responsible for over 20% of GHG emissions in the United States and significant air and water pollution as well. Parking supply is a critical determinant of auto ownership and use. It’s widely understood that convenient—usually abundant—parking at either end of a given trip has a strong association with automobile mode choice; and while parking shortages can result in excess VMT, and frustration, as would-be-parkers “cruise” looking for parking, the implications of abundant parking infrastructure and its impact on mode choice is potentially more damaging. Insufficiently nuanced approaches to the “parking problem” have made it difficult for municipalities and other jurisdictions to respond with appropriate policy. For example, off-street and on-street parking are complements in a parking supply system yet they are seldom coordinated. Indeed, the former is typically governed by city planning departments, property owners or managers, and commercial operators while the latter is managed by departments of transportation or public works. Cruising for parking (typically understood as a circuitous search for available parking where parking is scarce) is routinely estimated to be a more significant problem than it may actually be, encouraging oversupply. Finally, parking is often poorly located and poorly related to street design, leading to queuing, congestion, and utilization problems.
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Because parking regulation is a potentially powerful lever to affect mode choice, parking and its regulation, also have a tremendous potential impact on the natural environment. A recent survey of New York City residents who own cars asked whether the hassle of parking or the hassle of traffic was the bigger deterrent to additional trip making. Overwhelmingly, they responded that parking, or lack thereof, was the bigger concern when deciding whether or not to use their automobile for any given trip. Parking supply based on current rules and the projected housing in New York’s 2008 sustainability plan, PlaNYC, has been forecasted to induce driving that would produce 500,000 tons of CO2 annually (Weinberger, Johnson, & Seaman, 2009). Without increasing parking supply, the resulting VMT and related carbon emissions would be less than half that number. This chapter explores the “parking problem” and how the definition of that problem has evolved. It reviews some the solutions that have been offered, examining the effectiveness and unintended consequences of those solutions, and discusses how parking management can impact driving, car ownership, emissions of GHG and criteria pollutants, and housing affordability.
2 The parking problem Since the beginning of mass automobile production, the question of where to store the vehicles has loomed. In some of the older cities in the Northeastern part of the United States, one can see horse stables converted to parking garages, a quaint reminder of technology displacement. Shoup (2005) cites studies in Detroit dating to the 1920s wherein policy makers seek to quantify the share of vehicles that are driving around searching for parking as opposed to those actually going somewhere. Over the years several similar studies have been undertaken to gain a measure of how much traffic is due to parking search. A persistent myth has taken hold that suggests, on average, 30% of urban traffic is searching for parking (Samuelson, 2015; Zimmerman, 2011) catapulting the question of parking search into a high tier of importance. In an era where the prevailing belief was that every trip should be able to be served by car, the idea that any traffic, much less 30%, would have to search for parking or that there are even localized or temporal shortages led to the conclusion that more parking could, and should, be provided. There is no particular scientific or economic rationale underlying the approach but there was an ethos that the parking demand of any given land use should be prevented from spilling-over onto the parking supply for other land uses, whether commercial or residential, the idea that everything should devote space to accommodate its own needs was heavily promoted. Little matter that “need” was undefined. There was also concern, on the part of city leaders that lower density, suburban development where land was cheap and surface parking was free and plentiful was drawing away urban shoppers and that to compete with the suburbs cities had to provide the same level of parking amenity.
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The typical response has been to call for and create more off-street parking spaces, even when nearby off-street spaces are underutilized. Through the 1950s and 1960s cities began to incorporate off-street parking minimum requirements in their zoning codes. By the 1970s, parking minimums were required almost everywhere. Houston, Texas, a city famous for not employing zoning, joined the chorus by including minimum parking requirements in their building code. The promise of off-street minimums was an end to cruising, and an end to the negative externalities associated with spillover. It was also believed that copious free parking was critical to the continued success of commercial centers and necessary for the success of residential developments. In hindsight, the problem of searching for parking is ill-defined and poorly understood. Hence, the solution has not solved the problem; indeed it may have caused other problems and exacerbated the perceived problem it was intended to fix.
3 Problem: your parking demand impinges my supply and 30% of traffic is searching for parking There is no doubt that poor parking management, including mispricing supply, can lead to excess driving in search of a parking space. “How much?” becomes an important question. The simplest, and most commonly used, strategy to estimate cruising for parking is to intercept drivers in the area of concern and ask if they are looking for parking or if they are going somewhere (Schaller, 2006; Transportation Alternatives, 2007). To understand the origin of the 30% estimate and show some pitfalls of the approach it is instructive to review these two studies. Both were conducted in New York City, a place renowned for difficult parking. The 2007 study was conducted in Park Slope, a predominantly residential neighborhood in Brooklyn; the surveys were taken along a well-established commercial street that serves the local area. The 2006 study was done in Soho, a shopping district in Manhattan with a regional draw. In the neighborhood study, 45% of all respondents and 65% of local respondents said they were looking for parking. In the Soho study, 28% of respondents were looking for parking. These results are not surprising. All car trips, excluding those that end in a driveway or otherwise guaranteed parking spot, involve some portion of “looking for parking.” Depending on the driver’s appetite for risk and knowledge of an area they will look for parking prior to reaching their destination or once they have arrived. I take the neighborhood case first and look at the finding that 65% of local respondents said they were looking for parking, thus we are limited to the case of people who live in the neighborhood, and hypothetically, consider restricting reserved parking to zero, that is, assume everybody looks for parking for some portion of their trip home. For the particular case, there is in fact very low reserved parking (about 4.5% of houses in that area have off-street, reserved parking). In this case, the driver in a moving vehicle is either coming home or going out. As everybody lives there, a surveyor should expect at least
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50% of local drivers who are randomly stopped to be leaving the area “going somewhere” or arriving to the area “looking for parking.” It is likely that drivers looking for parking will be traveling more slowly which makes them more likely to be intercepted, so you could expect those looking for parking to exceed 50%. It is also conceivable that parking is scarce and those searching for it may drive longer than they would, if parking were readily available. Finally, a resident is less likely to be actually looking for parking on the commercial street (even though a space may be available) because that space will most likely be metered and time restricted. Once they are approaching the survey point, they will be looking for parking, writ large, but will not have taken an available space on that block. They may have begun to search on a block parallel to the street where they live and could be traversing the commercial street to reach their own block to continue the parking search. In this context, the finding that 65% of vehicles are looking for parking is not surprising, it might suggest that somewhere between zero and 15% are driving excess distance in their parking search. Likewise, in the Soho case, the much lower percentage of people looking for parking reflects that there is a much greater proportion of traffic that is passing through and not destined for the neighborhood. It is worth noting that 91% of people visiting Soho arrive by transit, active modes, or livery. Only 9% are driving and expecting to park. The general finding that 30% of traffic is looking for parking results from taking the average in a series of studies such as the ones described earlier. They are all conducted in areas that are known to have parking shortages and that tend to be “destination” oriented; then they are abstracted broadly across entire regions. Nevertheless, the reality is that parking shortages do create inefficiencies and they can cause excess travel. The user experience is such that more people are drawn to the same locations, which is what makes them crowded; more people are subject to crowding, by definition. I use a bus example to illustrate: If a city operates two 50 passenger capacity buses and endeavors to serve 100 passengers, unless the passengers are evenly split the bus with more passengers will be over capacity. In the extreme case one schedule is more desirable than the other and 100 passengers ride that bus while the other bus runs empty. Even though there is sufficient capacity to serve all the passengers comfortably, 100% of the passengers experience over-crowding. If 25 passengers choose the other bus, 75 passengers are still subject to over-crowding. Applying that to parking, one can think of a city of just two streets with one having all the land uses and the next surrounded only by vacant land, everyone’s natural destination is the street with development. Even with ample parking nearby, the drivers experience a parking shortage. Fig. 10.1 shows a typical downtown utilization inventory where some parts of the system are over-subscribed while there is ample, unused capacity nearby in both lots and on street. While there is available parking nearby, frequently on the next street, the perception persists that there is insufficient parking in the area.
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FIGURE 10.1 Parking inventory City of Oxnard (2009). (Downtown Oxnard Mobility and Parking Plan.)
4 Solution: provide more off-street parking With the expectation that more parking would end cruising and spillover and support a robust local economy, cities around the world adopted laws requiring provision of a minimum amount of parking for housing and commercial uses. Municipalities have also provided public parking lots, often at the urging of local business interests. In some cases, private operators also provide public lots, either as a permanent land use or as an interim use while an area is developing. The impact of these regulations was an explosion of parking. In a study of six cities McCahill and Garrick (2014) show growth in parking supply of 50%– 90% from 1960 to 1980. One city in their study increased its parking supply 160% between 1960 and 2000 even while its population decreased. Estimates of parking spaces in the United States vary from three non-residential off-street
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spaces per vehicle (Pijanowski, 2007) to as many as eight (including on-street) spaces per vehicle (Shoup, 2005). In a study assessing the energy and emissions from providing parking infrastructure, Chester, Horvath, and Madanat (2010) multiply these estimates to suggest there are between 840 million and 2 billion parking spaces across the United States. Parking minimums are set in a pseudo-scientific frame as a function of some characteristic of the property. For example, residential parking requirements may be set as a function of the number of bedrooms in a home. Looking at the life cycle of a typical family inhabiting a three-bedroom home, there may be need for zero, one, two, or more parking spaces at different life-cycle stages. To cover the most extreme case, given the goal of avoiding spillover, the zoning requirement might be three spaces, one space per bedroom. But a family with children will usually have just one or two cars for most of their lives with a brief period of having a teenage or young adult driver adding an additional car. At retirement, this family might need just one car. In a hypothetical case where a family occupies a particular home for 40 years, they might have three cars for 3 or 4 years, two cars for the prime working years, maybe 30 years, and just one car for 10 years. A three-car requirement implies that parking at this home will be over-supplied by at least one space 90% of the time and by two spaces 25% of the time. Sometimes, the characteristic is arbitrary. Frequently it is a function of square feet of development. A convenient commercial example is how restaurant parking is set. In about 60% of the US cities restaurant parking is a function of the square footage of the restaurant (Goodman, 2018). Two restaurants with the same seating capacity and same staffing but with different floor plans—one may have a larger kitchen, for example, will have different amounts of parking required. There is no reason why a larger kitchen would imply a need for more parking facilities. A more reasonable characteristic could be seating capacity, but that should also depend on other factors, such as the density of the surrounding area—higher density locations would require less parking per activity than lower density areas do—and accessibility by other modes, such as transit, cycling, and walking. Seating capacity is also very mutable. The restaurant may change its format from fine dining, for example, requiring ample spacing between tables to fast food where the tables can be much closer thus increasing the seating capacity. But without altering the site plan, the format change may be legally infeasible. It is also the case that buildings are durable and land uses are not particularly so. An establishment that is a restaurant today may be something very different in the future. Examples include a former bowling alley in Berkeley, CA that was transformed into a grocery store and then into an outdoor gear retail outlet; a former church in New York City that was transformed into a nightclub and is now a retail mall, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris which was once a train station and now a museum of fine art and Usina de Arte, a power station transformed into performance space in Buenos Aires. In each case, the building and property footprints are fixed, in some cases with a fixed amount of land devoted to parking.
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5 Impact of more parking The reality is that the solution has fallen short of the promise. The impact of more parking is more car ownership and more driving. In many cases parking is supplied well in excess of normal demand and frequently in excess of peak demand (Weinberger & Karlin-Resnick, 2015). The impact on cruising is mixed, other externalities like increased pollution, and compromised safety have been introduced, and the lower development densities that necessarily go hand in hand with increased parking is potentially devastating to urban commercial centers.
5.1 Developer impacts Developers typically provide only the minimum amount of parking required which suggests that the requirement is binding on the development and implies that the requirement is likely in excess of what the developer believes would be required (absent the legal requirement) for a successful development and may even increase the development cost to the point where it becomes infeasible (McDonnell, Madar, & Been, 2010). Structured parking can be quite costly with estimates of the average ranging between $34,000 and $45,000 per space. Depending on land cost and other issues, such as seismic concerns, the price can be higher (or lower). Litman (2019) estimates that provision of one parking space per residential unit can increase the cost of construction by 6% and the provision of two is more costly by 16%. Depending on the market, this cost is absorbed by the consumer—a study in San Francisco shows that an on-site parking space translates to a 12% increase in cost to the consumer (Jia and Wachs, 1999) but other research suggests that the increased value of the unit does not cover the increased cost due to the parking (Jung, 2009). The differential depends on scarcity, hence, ubiquitous parking would not create a value differential. Sometimes the amount of built parking, without opportunities to expand it on-site, locks out development. One example from St. Paul, MN is of a local restaurateur who proposed a wine bar in the space formerly occupied by a toy store. His development was blocked. The toy store requirement had been three spaces and the wine bar would require nine. For want of six on-site spaces the building remained vacant.
5.2 Parking and car ownership Several studies show that car ownership is more prevalent when people have dedicated parking spots. A study using the Norwegian National Travel Survey showed that people with dedicated parking are 3 times more likely to own cars than those without dedicated parking spaces (Christiansen, Fearnly, Hanssen, & Skollerud, 2017). Similarly, New Yorkers with dedicated parking are more likely to own cars (Weinberger, 2012); on- versus off-street parking in the Northern New Jersey suburbs was a very strong determinant of auto ownership, stronger than transit availability (Chatman, 2013) and Manville, using the American
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Housing Survey, shows that households who have “bundled” parking, that is, dedicated parking automatically included with their homes, are 2–3 times more likely than others to own and use cars (Manville, 2017). Bundling essentially loads part of the cost of car ownership onto the cost of home-ownership. When a home is rented or purchased with parking in the bundle the buyer/renter is simultaneously paying for car storage. Gabbe and Pierce (2017) looking at garage parking in metropolitan areas of the United States, find that bundling increases housing price to the consumer by 17%. Including parking creates a market distortion wherein housing costs are made higher and auto-ownership costs lower. Both are normal goods and markets tend to respond as behavioral economics would predict. Less housing and more automobility are consumed under this policy than would be the case if minimums were relaxed and parking unbundled. Gabbe and Pierce also estimate a deadweight loss to society of people paying for parking but not owning cars. Though some jurisdictions, notably San Francisco, CA and Arlington County, VA, have banned bundled parking, the ubiquity of bundled parking means that someone in the housing market is almost automatically also in the parking space market. Units built as parking requirements were introduced are most likely to have bundled parking, so, while in theory a family that doesn’t own cars could look only at [older] units without bundled spaces, a family looking for modern housing with modern amenities might have no choice. Further, if a family preferred not to own a parking space, as a practical matter, it could be very difficult. Over 90% of units in the United States have bundled parking (Manville, 2017). An estimated 71% of carless households live in units with bundled parking and spend an estimated $440 million/year on garage parking that they don’t use for automobile storage (Gabbe & Pierce, 2017).
6 The impact of parking on the built environment, travel behavior and downtown economies Most of the research on parking and travel behavior is focused on parking price and then easily couched in terms of the generalized cost of travel (Hess, 2001; Newmark & Shiftan, 2007). But parking, under conditions of oversupply, is difficult to price as the oversupply naturally drives the price to zero. In addition to money cost, generalized cost of travel includes time cost, which also measures convenience. With the goal of having trips accommodated on each site, the access time to parking is forced to a very low value as well thus giving automobile travel an additional time advantage. Urban planners and other policymakers apply a standard for transit access that suggests a 5–10-minute walk is acceptable while the auto-access standard requires on-site parking availability. Parking is also very space intensive and forces lower density development. As new parking facilities are added to the urban landscape, other uses are typically removed. Some cities, Hartford CT, for example, (McCahill & Garick, 2012) have gutted themselves taking down buildings and adding parking facilities.
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With more parking and fewer active uses, the built environment is less conducive to walking and transit and tilts more to automobile as the primary access, thus a cycle of automobile dependence is fed in which more parking begets more car travel which in turn demands more parking. A study looking simply at the design dimension of parking placement found that when controlling for autoownership, neighborhood density and walkability, and parking supply, people were more likely to drive when parking surrounded a given use. The comparator case was development that fronted the street where parking was in structures above or below the development (Maley & Weinberger, 2011). Recent research shows that parking is supplied, on average, about 60% more than it is actually used (Weinberger & Karlin-Resnick, 2015). This evidence suggests that levels of parking provision are unmoored from demand, travel behavior, pricing, or other dimensions where theory suggests there would be a relationship. As early as the 1980s, if not earlier, transportation engineers and planners understood that additional parking spaces would engender more automobile traffic and three US cities introduced parking maximums, to curb growth in car use and ownership, as part of their programs to comply with the Clean Air Act amendments. Additional efforts have looked at parking and “downtown destruction or regeneration”, that is, where parking policy can be used as regenerative and/or where parking restraint may be damaging to local economies. Marsden (2006) reviews the literature and concludes that there is little evidence to suggest that parking restraint in town centers is a major contributor to economic decline, indeed other research shows that economic decline and CBD parking capacity increases may track very closely and consistently (McCahill and Garrick, 2010; Nelson\Nygaard,2005).
7 Is the problem well defined? There are two primary components to the question of whether or not the parking problem is well defined. The first is whether there exists a parking shortage, to address this; the ideas of supply and demand and geographic scope have to be well examined. The second is how much driving is cruising and what motivates the cruising.
8 Is there a parking shortage? In some places, at some times, there are acute parking shortages. But most of the time, even where shortages are perceived, there is available parking as Fig. 10.1 showed. The image shows on-street and off-street parking in Downtown Oxnard, CA—the illustration is typical and the same pattern can be found in almost any small or medium city downtown commercial district. Although some streets show no parking available, in every case there is available parking on an adjacent street. Two public off-street facilities are full but many more are less than 50% occupied. Fig. 10.2 shows a metered area in New York City where the same
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FIGURE 10.2 Street by street parking occupancy (New York City DOT).
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pattern is observed. Here there are consistent shortages in the very center of the area with parking available on nearby streets. With a national inventory of three to eight parking spaces per automobile, parking shortages can only be localized and then, generally speaking the shortage is for free parking. Augmenting supply cannot address that problem.
9 How much driving is cruising after all? Using GPS traces of automobile trips and defining a trip as cruising when a vehicle traverses the same street segment multiple times, results in an estimate of cruising trips in San Francisco to occur in about 2.2% of all trips and in about 1.8% of trips in Ann Arbor. A more inclusive definition of cruising, i.e. when the true vehicle path exceeds the shortest path by a threshold of 200 meters, results in estimates of cruising in San Francisco and Ann Arbor of 4.9% and 5.8% respectively (Weinberger, Millard-Ball, & Hampshire, 2017). In addition to shortages, cruising can be exacerbated by price differentials between garage prices, on-street metered parking and on-street free parking. Frequently a cruising driver is actually looking for free, or less expensive parking rather than a parking space per se. It is typical that garage parking is both more expensive and less convenient than on-street parking. In the example where off-street parking is $12 an hour and metered parking is $1 an hour, a 20-minute investment in cruising saves the driver $22 in parking costs for a 2 hour stay. By searching for 20-minutes, the driver has essentially just paid him/ herself $22. This is a very rational move for most travelers. The most typical pricing scheme is shown in the left panel of Fig. 10.3. The scheme that better
FIGURE 10.3 Price differentials complicate selection of a parking spot. (TransitCenter)
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utilizes existing supply, reducing double-parking and excess parking search, is illustrated on the right panel. This is a problem that SFpark, San Francisco’s effort to eliminate cruising, has addressed. In that project meter prices have been adjusted to meet a “curb performance” objective so that there is always a parking space available. Where demand appears to overwhelm capacity, meter prices are raised thus driving parkers to other locations; simultaneously meter rates are lowered on blocks where demand is below capacity thus drawing parkers to the areas of unused supply. One result is that public garage prices were consistently lowered to attract parkers that were otherwise hunting for relative bargains on the street.
10 Parking problem redefined With persistent angst over parking availability, cities have had to rethink the parking problem. The belief that free parking to meet peak demand of each individual use as an appropriate supply threshold has been called into question by a growing chorus of urbanists; in recent years, even greater doubt has taken hold. Ironically, the “new” problems of parking are the old ones but now supplemented by the unintended consequences of mandated parking minimums, the ill-conceived solution to spot shortages. Parking problems are increasingly recognized as poor management manifest in uneven demand even within relatively small areas. Minimums have caused an over-supply, which leads to underpricing; the artificially low prices result in inflated demand. Design aspects, such as the quantity of parking provided and its relationship to the street and the use have also gained attention as policy levers to affect better outcomes. Finally, it is increasingly recognized that outcomes of the status quo in parking [mis] management induce car ownership and use. The complement of this last fact is that current policy disproportionately burdens carless households (a strong corelate of low income) and undermines environments needed to foster active and public transportation modes. Poor management of the curb leads to double-parking, which in turn obstructs traffic flow. Obstructed traffic implies delays to transit as well as private vehicles. Poor management also leads to illegal parking, such as blocking fire hydrants—which is dangerous in the event of a fire—blocking bus stops which prevents bus drivers from pulling out of traffic when passengers are boarding and alighting, thus interrupting traffic flow. Finally, poor management may lead to excess VMT in pursuit of a parking bargain or any parking space at all.
11 Solutions redefined Cities have a limited but effective set of policy levers to address parking. They can address the cost; the length of time a vehicle is permitted to stay in a space, the supply, and the placement of the parking within a site. Before exploring how cities can implement these tools it is worth noting the language and assumptions
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around parking “demand.” There is no demand for parking per se, there is demand for access to destinations.To the extent that driving is the only, or the best, option, the demand for access translates directly to demand for parking. Often what makes driving the best option is the fact that there is free or underpriced parking. The concepts of supply and demand are typically understood with price mediating. However, free parking has become such the norm that parking demand is generally understood as demand for free parking. By and large, there is little understanding of parking demand in the usual sense of microeconomics. When and if parking is priced to reflect the cost of providing it or by a more typical market strategy, policymakers can then begin to understand parking demand.
11.1 Performance parking One of the easiest responses to apparent on-street shortages has been to change meter prices and time limits in order to ensure that the curb meets an established performance standard. A typical goal is one or two free spaces on any given block at any given time. Early adopters of performance pricing include Budapest, Mexico City, Pasadena, California (one of the earliest documented cases), and San Francisco. By tempering the popularity of a location with price differentials these cities have been able to even out parking demand and increase the probability that a driver will find a space on any given block. Performance parking has not been uniformly successful, particularly in places where prices have been historically well below the level consumers are willing to pay and where competitive alternatives to driving do not exist (Deakin, 2018). While the strategy has proved effective at reducing double-parking—Boston just reported a 14% decrease in double parking after a year-long performance pricing pilot project (City of Boston, 2018)—and increasing parking availability (City of Boston, 2018; Millard-Ball, Weinberger, & Hampshire, 2014), an unstudied aspect is whether performance pricing, by more effectively utilizing all the available parking, generates more trips and more traffic.
11.2 Controls on supply, unbundled, and shared parking The status quo on supply controls is the mandate of minimum amounts of parking. As discussed extensively in this chapter that has led to an oversupply of underpriced parking sometimes at the expense of development. The solutions discussed in this section allow cities to reduce their parking supply in some cases without causing any change in user behavior, in some cases precipitating a change by making the cost of parking more transparent. Some jurisdictions have introduced maximums in select areas, some have dropped parking requirements altogether, again in certain neighborhoods, often under an adaptive re-use ordinance. Typically, these places see new development.
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The City of Buffalo, NY may be the first city in the United States to have completely dropped parking supply requirements, allowing developers to determine the quantity of parking they judge to be appropriate to support the development. Some jurisdictions require that parking spaces be leased or sold separately, that is, unbundled, from the primary use served by the parking. This strategy establishes a market for parking spaces thus providing some insight into parking demand when parking is priced. Invariably, it leads to lower levels of auto-ownership; early, unpublished evidence in Arlington County shows that people in buildings where parking is unbundled are less likely to commute by automobile than their counterparts with bundled parking. Different land uses have different patterns with respect to peak demand. This can translate directly to peak parking demand and suggests that the parking spaces of one enterprise can be used by others during the off-peak period of the first use (Smith, 2005). For example, hardware stores cater to customers in the daytime, a movie theater, on the other hand, caters primarily in the late afternoon and evening. When these two users share their parking supply, the spaces are used more effectively and fewer need be provided. Even unpriced parking in mixed use districts can be reduced, one project in Long Beach California estimated a modest decrease of 6% (Linscott, Law and Greenspan Engineers, 2017), a more dramatic decrease, 44% was shown in a Long Island development (Walker Parking Consultants, 2008). The reductions will depend on the land use mix.
12 Conclusion Automobile storage has presented a challenging problem since the beginning of mass automobile production. Where spot shortages were observed the problem was defined as inadequate supply. Secondary problems were driver frustration, added time cost of automobile travel and added traffic due to drivers circling around an area looking for a place to park. The solution, predicated on the normative notion that anyone who wished to make any trip by automobile should be able to, was mandated off-street parking concomitant with new development. Cities began to include comprehensive requirements for minimum numbers of parking spaces with new development. The strategy made driving a more attractive access option than the alternatives. Not only was auto-access made easier and cheaper in relative terms but the provision of abundant parking had the compounding impact of making alternatives less attractive in absolute terms: for example, the parking lot surrounding a business makes it uncomfortable and dangerous for pedestrian access. In the development scenario wherein the business is accessible from the sidewalk, it is easy for a pedestrian and, possibly, more challenging for a driver. Likewise, where every use requires its own full complement of parking, densities are typically driven down to the point where public transit service becomes impractical.
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As policymakers and citizens, alike, have come to understand the unintended consequences of minimum parking requirements they have begun to question the goal of accommodating all trips by automobile. A growing number of jurisdictions have begun to introduce reforms including changing policy on parking supply and pricing that bring a modern rationale, consistent with modern visions of urban places to the parking realm. Finally, many people have high hopes that the advent of autonomous vehicles will greatly reduce, if not eliminate the need for parking—particularly in city centers. Some places have reported, anecdotally, that Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) have had an impact on parking demand as people find the convenience and cost savings of leaving personal automobiles behind and utilizing these services (Matthew & Geiger, 2018). To the extent that autonomous vehicles are used as livery, similar to TNCs, it seems very likely that parking in high priced markets will be reduced. And it is logical to assume that once autonomous vehicles are the norm for private car ownership that people can simply “send their cars home” to avoid parking at their [crowded] destinations. The excess traffic and VMT implied in these scenarios must be carefully considered in decisions for parking and the rest of the transportation system. Ultimately, even where it is “notoriously hard to park,” there is usually space available—available space may not be as convenient as the prime spots and with no off-setting advantage to non-prime spots (price differential or differences in permitted length of stay) people often opt to invest the time looking for a prime spot. With better management availability is more transparent, under different price schemes parking demand will also change. Hence, it is not as bad as policy makers and their constituents tend to think. Readily available parking, as it has been historically mandated and managed has proved to be a tremendous inducement to drive. The advantage accorded private vehicle operation due to the provision of parking brings with it additional pollution, GHG emissions, safety concerns and generally contravenes some of the current ideas about livability, walkability, and stewardship of the natural environment. Hence, parking may be much worse than we realize.
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