FREE PARKING ISN'T FREE

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010266.html

By Seth Zeren

When does a Prius have the same environmental impact as a Hummer? The 95 percent of the time it’s parked.

Most people don't spend time thinking about parking spaces unless they're looking for one. But these 9' by 18' rectangles of urban real estate have a vast impact on North American communities. They affect the economy, land use patterns, the design of cities and even individual lifestyles.

A small group of urban planners, economists, and community advocates are committed to changing the way Americans think about and plan for parking. Their claim is bold and powerful: minimum parking requirements should be considered one of the foremost contributors to suburban sprawl and the hollowing out of urban cores in the United States (in addition to the usual culprits of white flight, FHA mortgage redlining, and the interstate highway system).

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, as automobile use became prolific in the United States, parking became a problem, congesting streets and overflowing into neighbors' lots. In response, most municipalities instituted off-street parking minimums requiring developers to provide all the parking that the residences or shops would need on-site. This seemingly sensible notion has created a cascade of problems. It encourages sprawl by spreading buildings apart to make room for more parking (requirements usually demand more area for parking than the building it supports). It also weakens urban design, as urban buildings are torn down to make room for desolate surface lots, and hulking parking garages sprouted in downtown areas. It discourages revitalization of existing historic buildings, since developers have trouble meeting modern parking requirements in neighborhoods that were built before auto dominance. And the requirements drive up the cost of development: parking spaces can cost between $10,000 and $50,000 – typically more than the cost of the car that occupies it. High parking requirements can raise the price of homes and apartments by $50,000 to $100,000, a serious challenge to affordability.

Urban economist Donald Shoup argues that parking requirements are one of the costliest hidden subsidies in US cities today. Shoup, who teaches urban planning at UCLA and authored the recent book, The High Cost of Free Parking, is one of the leaders in the flight to reclaim cities for people, not parking. His writings on parking and planning have fanned such passion that he even has a Facebook fan-group, “The Shoupistas.” Though dense (at 600 pages), his book is a thorough, and hard-hitting analysis of where cars spend 95 percent of their time -- going nowhere.

He first takes aim at the basis for parking requirements: the parking demand surveys conducted by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Because surveys are often conducted in “pure” auto environments (malls or office buildings with free parking that are inaccessible by other modes), and because they measure the absolute peak of demand, these standards often result in an enormous abundance of parking. Malls, for example, are required to build sufficient parking for the busiest day each year – with the consequence that for the other 364 days, many parking spots stand empty, a poor capital investment. Worse still, because many urban planners lack training or understanding of parking requirements, they tend to replicate models from other municipalities or expert studies, and apply them across their entire city uniformly. Drivers think of free parking as a right; planners take parking requirements as a given.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Vauban, a suburb of Freiberg, Germany, has deliberately become nearly car-free. Connected to the city center by tram, Vauban has become a model of suburban living without auto-dependence. And it's been able to achieve this despite its relatively mild population density: with 5,500 residents on approximately one square mile, it compares to St. Louis, not Manhattan. Any cars that residents choose to own must be parked in two garages at the edge of the development. A main, auto-accessible thoroughfare provides shops and services for the local residents while on side streets children play in safety. Indeed many of the residents of the high efficiency row houses are families who moved there because it was safer for their children, rather than any high-minded idealism about a car-free world.

The free parking that Americans love isn’t really ‘free’ at all. A recent parking garage project in New Haven, Conn., for example, cost more than $30 million for almost 1,200 spaces – that’s more than $25,000 per space. If you were to finance it using a mortgage, the actual cost would be over $40,000 per space. This breaks down to roughly $135 a month, or $1,600 a year per space – not including externalities like the air pollution and congestion created by increased trips drawn by cheap parking. Even when garages and meters charge for parking, they rarely charge the real value of the parking space. (In Vauban, by contrast, drivers must purchase a parking space in the garages at $40,000 each.) All this amounts to a massive subsidy. Shoup calculates that in 2002 the total subsidy just for off-street parking was between $127 and $374 billion (for comparison, the budget for national defense that year was $349 billion).

Who pays for this? Everyone. The cost of building all that parking is reflected in higher rents, more expensive shopping and dining, and higher costs of home-ownership. Those who don’t drive or own cars thus subsidize those who do.

Free parking can become a drain on city coffers. According to a study (PDF) by Bruce Schaller, deputy commissioner of planning and sustainability at the NYC Department of Transportation, the city was losing more than $45 million in parking meter revenue annually as a result of the free parking privileges commonly offered to city employees. But the costs are more than economic: free parking also changes behavior, encouraging us to take more trips and drive alone more often. According to the same study, without that free parking, 19,200 fewer vehicles would enter Manhattan every day, easing congestion.

Why do Americans drive everywhere? Because everything’s far apart. Why’s it far apart? Often because there’s so much parking in between! In the end, creating bright green cities will require undoing the damage created by mandating free parking. But it won’t be easy. Urban form is path dependent. If municipalities just changed the zoning ordinances tomorrow, many drivers would raise political hell over their lost right to free parking, and many developers would go on providing free parking because that’s what the market expects. Fixing the problem will require not only a regulatory change, but also a behavioral change.

Those working on the issue would do well to remember the words of Jane Jacobs and pursue incremental “retrofitting” of the existing landscape incrementally rather than grand master-stroke plans (of the sort that failed in Urban Renewal). We in the United States don't just need to cut back on parking spaces; we need to build new buildings and infrastructure that enable easy mobility without cars.

There are already some signs that the winds are changing. Just this summer, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement calling for the redesigning of communities to promote physical activity and health in children. Perhaps the lesson of Vauban’s child-friendly, car-free streets can be applied in the United States, allowing safer play outdoors in residential neighborhoods. There are some efforts to replicate the success of Vauban in the United States, including Quarry Village in Hayward Calif., but they have run into problems with zoning codes, financing, and skeptical buyers. San Francisco is leading the way to creating a next-generation parking management system in a pilot project called SFpark Smart Parking Management System. The pilot area includes more than 12,000 parking spaces with sensors that detect occupancy, variable parking rates that respond to demand, and real time information on parking availability. These are hopeful signs, but the transformation of our parking infrastructure and culture to one that accurately reflects its costs will take a generation at least.

Want to take a stand? If parking is a problem in your community, here are some helpful things that you can advocate for at the local level:

* Eliminate zoning requirements for off-street parking. This will allow developers to design projects to appropriately meet market demand and aid the infill and redevelopment of older areas, necessary to create the density required for walkability and transit options.

* Charge market rates for curbside parking at meters. This will make the land pay its value, reducing trips and cruising for parking and providing revenue for neighborhoods and maintenance.

* Create Parking Benefit Districts that return meter revenues to neighborhoods. Businesses and residents will be much more supportive of market rate curb parking if they receive direct benefits in streetscape improvements, trash cleanup, and paving. Cars should subsidize people and places, rather than the other way around.


Seth Zeren is a masters student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies where he studies the relationship between land use and sustainability.

Image credits: flickr/striatic, amazon.com, flickr/thienzieyung, flickr/c7r, all flickr licensed by Creative Commons.