by James A. Bacon
The United States has hundreds of millions more parking spaces than it needs. As a result of this excessive supply, mandated by local government regulations across the country, acreage worth billions of dollars is tied up in unproductive land use. So-called “free” parking really isn’t free. It drives up the cost of housing, especially for lower-income Americans, makes commercial space more expensive than it otherwise need be and makes it difficult to build walkable communities.
That is the starting point of the book, “Parking Reform Made Easy,” by Richard W. Willson, a former student of parking guru Donald Shoup and now an urban planning professor at California Polytechnic University. Shoup has made a career of subjecting parking to rigorous economic analysis, and Willson follows in his shoes.
“Parking is a prodigious and inefficient consumer of land,” writes Willson. There are an estimated 820 million to 840 million parking spaces in the country, or about 3.4 spaces per vehicle. The overwhelming majority sit empty at any given time. Why such inefficiency? Because local governments impose stand-alone parking requirements for housing, offices, retailing and everything from churches to government buildings without considering the possibility that they could share.
Local parking policies often are arbitrary in nature, copied blindly from neighboring jurisdictions, which may have copied them from someone else. Minimum parking requirements also utilize parking ratios based on national data sets that may not replicate local supply-and-demand conditions. But the thinking is changing. Increasingly, municipalities regard parking requirements as an invisible subsidy for automobiles that hinders the development of pedestrian- and transit-friendly communities. Willson’s book is, in effect, a how-to manual for jurisdictions wanting to overhaul their parking policies.
Willson provides a 12-step “toolkit” for repairing obsolete parking requirements. He takes readers through a detailed, step-by-step process for calculating parking demand for multi-family housing projects, workplaces and transit-oriented development. Willson’s empirically driven approach appears to be entirely reasonable, and should prove invaluable to anyone whose job is to worry about government parking policy, although he does go into greater depth of analysis than any normal person would think possible (or really care to think about).
Readers with a more casual interest in smart-growth and urban-planning issues will find the book a tough slog. Still, the reform-minded may find the effort worthwhile for the many ideas the book contains.
One idea Willson explores is the sharking of parking. When builders are required to bake parking spaces into their projects, they have no incentive to find creative ways to economize, such as sharing spaces with complementary users. For example, offices tend to have peak day utilization while apartment buildings tend to have peak evening utilization. It makes sense for them to collaborate. In a mixed-use setting with multiple users, the opportunities for sharing are even greater. As a bonus, reducing the space devoted to parking brings down costs and reduces distances between destinations, a major plus for walkability.
Another good idea is unbundling parking from leasing and rentals. If office tenants gets parking spaces packaged as part of the lease, they tend to hand out spaces to employees with no questions asked. But if the property owner unbundles parking — making parking available but charging for utilization — a very different dynamic occurs. Instead of subsidizing employee parking, employers might decide, for example, to subsidize car-sharing, van pooling or mass transit. Employees are more likely to use their cars when they perceive parking as free; if they have to pay for it, they are more willing to consider alternatives to driving their car.
My main disappointment with “Parking Reform Made Easy” is that Willson spent little time exploring the dynamics of market-based pricing for parking, especially on-street parking. Parking is undergoing a technological revolution making it possible to fine-tune policy to an unprecedented degree. That’s the future of the industry, and Willson glides over it. Maybe he’s saving the topic for his next book. I hope so. I’m sure he would have something valuable to contribute to the conversation.
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