Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Parking Wreck

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by

James A. Bacon
in

Free parking, like free lunch, is not truly free. Someone pays for it, whether they know it or not. Outside of downtown areas, the cost of parking is usually embedded in the price of real estate, and passed along in the form of higher leases, rents and prices for products and services. Donald Shoup, a UCLA urban planner and arguably the nation’s foremost academic expert on parking, estimates that the capital value of parking facilities — parking decks, parking lots, on-street parking — equals that of motor vehicles and roads combined.

“Free” parking has at least two pernicious consequences: (1) by reducing the cost of driving, it encourages people to drive more often than they would otherwise, and (2) by separating buildings spatially, it reduces the number of buildings that fall within the 1/4-mile pedestrian shed of bus and transit stops, thus undermining the economics of mass transit.

As I argue in my column this week, at the root of this problem is the universal practice of local governments to set minimum parking-space requirements for every conceivable land use. Although a free market would provide a lot of “free” parking, it would provide significantly less of it than under the current regime. Yes, thanks to government regulations, American landowners have over invested in parking spaces to the tune of tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars, kneecapped mass transit and subsidized traffic congestion!

The very first thing we should do is repeal minimum parking-lot requirements and let property owners make their own calculations of how much parking they should provide. A free market, I suggest, would encourage property owners to devise creative solutions, such as clustering land uses that generate peak traffic demand during different times of the day: apartments at night, offices during the day, shops and restaurants in the evening.

The second thing we should do is embrace emerging GPS satellite technology that will simplify tracking and billing for parking services. Parking managers soon will have the latitude to apply a wide range of creative pricing strategies that will maximize parking-space utilization and charge motorists the full cost of their driving. For this article, I had the opportunity to interview Bern Grush, the visionary founder of Skymeter, a Canadian start-up that has solved the technical problems that had made satellite metering impracticable. Grush is taking Shoup’s academic thinking about parking and figuring out how to apply it in the real world.

Grush has some must-read ideas related to congestion pricing and other transportation-related topics that I will share in due course. For now, make sure you check out “No Such Thing as a Free Park.“

(Photo credit: Richmond parking lot after Hurricane Gaston.)

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10 responses to “Parking Wreck”

  1. Scott Avatar
    Scott

    While I like the GPS idea, I have to wonder just how naive you are about entities establishing their own minimum parking.

    Case in point: Virginia Commonwealth University

    Their solution to their student traffic and parking is to just close more streets and pass the buck to the surrounding neighborhoods, businesses, and City.

    Because they are a quasi-state entity, they get away with it, over and over again.

    VCU could work with the City to establish better mass transit, but that is not in their master plan.

  2. Jim Hoeft Avatar
    Jim Hoeft

    There you go again, Jim, advocating for the free market. I would have thought you that you would have learned your lesson by now.

  3. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    There’s another aspect to parking lots that we treat as if they are separate issues and that is storm water runoff.

    Scientists now believe that one of the most significant damages to the Bay – comes from storm water runoff.

    Think of the nasty fluids – not just nasty but downright toxic that find their way into our rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.

    Would you or I dump a gallon of dead anti-freeze or used motor oil in a creek? Probably not on purpose – but we do so as a result of – as individuals – not recognizing and not demanding that local governments hold developers toes to the fire on this issue.

    The biggest sources of Storm Water Runoff are impervious services – and guess what – there ARE designs that divert the runoff water into the ground to be filtered rather than directly into waterways – but the same governments that REQUIRE the parking .. will NOT REQUIRE LID (Low impact design) parking lots.

    so.. it comes down to money – again – and we cut developers a break.. to help them keep costs down – that directly harm streams and rivers and the Bay.

    One would think that if something was a root cause of congestion, bad air quality and bad water quality – that we – as a people – would act – especially since virtually everyone I know claims to be “green”.

  4. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Scott, What happens when entities like VCU fail to create sufficient parking space in the absence of transportation alternatives? They cut their own throats. I would rather entrust VCU with figuring out how best to move students in and out of the campus than the City of Richmond. VCU knows better than anyone else what the optimum mix is of parking spaces, buses, vans, carpools, bicycles and on-campus dormitories. VCU knows how to juggle the competing priorities of space (for parking) vs capital for buses, dorms, etc.

    It goes without saying that VCU should work closely with the City of Richmond on land use and transportation master plans.

    But if VCU allows too little parking, from a green point of view, that’s a good thing, right? It forces people to seek alternate transportation modes. How can you object?

    Jim Hoeft: Right on, baby! So often in our society, the greatest problems are not failures of the marketplace but failures of government to permit the marketplace to work.

    Larry G: I agree totally. I address the issue of run-off in my column. I propose a “run-off” tax for parking spaces. Such a tax would (a) raise funds for mitigation, and (b) encourage people to create fewer parking spaces. Perhaps the tax could be refundable if the landowner used a permeable surface material or took other measures to mitigate run-off.

  5. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    If free parking isn’t free, then what’s the problem?

    Just like roads, parking IS paid for by someone, and mostly because it makes a profit. The difference with roads is that the profit is not quite so obvious.

    This has got to be the dumbest and least supported argument anywhere. Free parking does not reduce the cost of driving, it just transfers that cost to another entity, frequently one who is willingly providing that support in order to gain the commerce it brings. In the case where parking is not free, it is an additional cost to driving which offsets the other argument, AND, it is a free enterprise business in which the parking is paid for and provided based on demand.

    Just as farms pay taxes and require no services, so do parking lots, only they pay a lot higher taxes. Based on the way we promote money losing farms as open space, you would think we would be standing in line to get parking lots to locate in our communities.

    As for the run-off tax, you already have it. Run off regulations requires drainage ponds to mitigate runoff, and those areas are also open space on which taxes are paid but require no services.

    There are plenty of businesses that will build their own parking lot and pay taxes on it just so they can be within a quarter mile that they control, and whihc will be populated by people wealthy enough to own cars. If the same pedestrian shed within reach of transit was so valuable, businesses would be standing in line to locate there, and some actually are.

    But go look at the businesses. Coffee Shops, boutiques, drycleaners, tax preparers, maybe a dentist. How many welding shops, printers, craftsmen, or construction companies do you see?

    Sometimes I look around at the world you describe and I think we must be on different planets. Certainly I don’t unsderstand you selectivity with regard to free market thinking.

  6. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    I’ll bet everyone here has been to a Home Depot or Lowes, etc.

    Have you EVER seen the parking lot so full that you could not find a parking place?

    … and if you did.. how many days out of 365 did that happen?

    But that one day – HD is LOATHE to loose a sale to Lowes for want of a parking place.

    This is the point that Ray is making (I believe).

    but let me also point out that they are SIZING their lots for PEAK HOUR usage when that event almost never occurs.

    but runoff happens on that entire lot – with impacts – every time it rains.

    and let me ask – what if local governments REQUIRED that half or more of those lots have pervious paving techniques?

    if the runoff standards were set to require NO oil or antifreeze runoff – period -(a legitimate restriction based on the pollution of waterways that do not belong to the developer) AND the locality removed parking lot size requirements and THEN let the developer use free market principles to determine the most cost effective way to build

    .. THEN we WOULD have what Ray is advocating and THEN developers WOULD use flow-through paving vice asphalt.

    The name for this methodology is called Pre-development Hydrology.

    What it basically advocates is that in terms of runoff – the developer is free to choose whatever methods that will result in runoff that is no higher in volume or pollution than when the area had no impervious surfaces – pre development. This is not near a radical approach as some might initially think … read on.

    The basic philosophy is to let the market place do it’s thing – but not on the back of the environment nor on the backs of taxpayers to pick up the environmental damage repair costs.

    Ray mentions “backfitting” development that was built previously to much lower standards. Who Pays for that?

    I’m not advocating ZERO Discharge but I am advocating something very close – determined by who picks up the costs for degraded water quality and excess runoff.

    There ARE some places where development is going to be hugely expensive because of what would be required to mitigate runoff but instead of sticking to the regs… localities often cut developers substantial slack – on the premise that if the enterprise is non-residential that it brings in excess dollars … they do.. but think does the locality use those excess dollars to mitigate the excess runoff? nope.

    As stated in another thread – Virginia’s approach to this issue is fatally flawed because they do not set their regs to deal with CUMULATIVE IMPACTS – and things go to hell in a hand basket in areas where there is intensive development – areas where you will actually have one storm pond feeding into another… and then another…

    Believe it or not – when a storm pond is sized for design – it more often than not – NOT sized according to the percentage of upstream impervious surfaces – and the logic behind this is that it would be “unfair” for the applicant to build a pond big enough to handle his own runoff PLUS the upstream runoff from previous development.

    and I’d agree on the fairness issue but the point is that the receiving stream is ALREADY over it’s limits even before a new development is built – and then we allow it.. and it ADDs ADDITIONAL because the limits per facility are – as if – there is no existing pollution in the receiving stream. So stream damage accelerates even worse.

    So… the bottom line is… that development is being subsidized by the environment. Folks talk about level of service degradation with regard to development. The same thing happens to streams. Their Level of Service also is degraded by development – because in both cases – development is proceeding without be required to mitigate their impacts – on the premise that development is a good and needed activity that benefits more than it costs.

    Folks collectively wring their hands and cluck cluck about the Bay … and how to clean it up and how many BILLIONs of dollars to clean it up … and in reality… the problem is how we develop land both in the past and currently.

    Everyone is FOR the BAY – until the Bill for keeping it clean and healthy is presented then folks scatter quicker than a crowd seeing a preacher looking for new converts approaching.

    And almost all of this goes to parking because buildings.. do increase runoff volume – yes but that can be mitigated if we use LID engineering… but the parking lots are a different story…

  7. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Ray, You predictably reacted as if I had suggested banning free parking. Of course, I made no such suggestion. Indeed, I wrote:

    I certainly do not — repeat, do not, not, not — advocate artificially restricting the amount of parking in order to discourage automobile use. Rather, I think public policy in Virginia should be to let the marketplace decide how much parking is needed, to create a level playing field between transportation modes and to respect the resulting consumer choices.

    In which part of “not, not, not” did I fail to communication my meaning.

    What I called for was an end to regulations that set minimal parking requirements for landowners regardless of circumstances. Do you really want to defend municipal parking-space mandates?

  8. Scott Avatar
    Scott

    VCU is irresponsibly pushing its students’ parking into the neighborhooods around it. Residents are not just competing with students for parking, they are being overrun by traffic and parking problems.

    They are not being good neighbors, and that ain’t Green.

  9. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    I’m not suggesting you made that comment Jim, only that it is frequently made.

    Metro is sized for peak usage too, and that is th reason it is empty most of the time, with adverse consequences every time the train moves.

    So, take an empty ten acre parking lot and ten acres of one of my grassy fields. The parking lot will drain much faster, and probably into a catchment basin. But very little of the pavement leaves with the water. I can’t say the same for my field.

    As for antifreeze and oil, that isn’t the parking lot’s fault. Maybe wee need diapers for our cars, or better design standards, or smaller cars, but if you are looking to solve that problem, look to the source.

    By the way, the biggest amount of material from urban runoff is diesel soot and ground up tires. We would grind up a lot less tires with lighter and smaller vehicles.

  10. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    No – car’s don’t need diapers any more than people would if we decided to not have plumbing and sewage treatment plants.

    or.. would you also advocate that everyone have diapers over their tailpipes so we can have clean air?

    As long as we have cars WITHOUT diapers – we need to address the issue the same as we would if we would decide that sewage treatment plants wouldn’t need to be built if we delt with the Source of the stuff.

    A simple law would actually take care of oil/antifreeze – all parking must be covered or have porous paving.

    Also, please be advised that ground up tires and soot are not the same as liquid pollutants.

    Tire materials are solid and settle out in a basin but antifreeze and oil do not. Tire material can actually be used as a mulch/filter because it does not break down into harmful compounds. Next time you’re around a home with asphalt shingles – look at the gutter downspouts and you’ll see very similiar material. It stays right there…and does not find it’s way into waterways for the most part or even if it does.. it settles out fairly quickly. You won’t find ground up tire stuff from the DC Area floating in the Chesapeake Bay…

    Soot is more similiar to Mercury and sulfur Dioxide in the way that they are all airborne pollutants disbursed over wide geographic areas independent of receiving streams and waterways and they are not controlled by storm ponds.

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