The choices parking forces

Pedestrian mall by Baruch College, New York City (Wikimedia commons)

What kind of city are you? A big draw with densely-populated mixed-use downtowns? A large city with a natural barrier to growth like a mountain range or an ocean? A legacy industrial city with miles of under-performing areas? Or a small city without a big name but with plenty of cheap land and no natural barriers to expansion?

Where you sit strongly affects where you stand on issues like traffic and parking. Some cities, like New York, San Francisco or Seattle have the crowds and the confidence to consider closing streets, instituting congestion pricing for auto traffic (see also Trumm 2019 on Seattle), and charging market rates for parking (Shoup 2005).

The brilliant work of Professor Donald Shoup, and articles like this one from Grist with the headline "Cities Finally Realize They Don't Need to Require So Much Damn Parking," are centered in this first category of towns. Grist's examples are Chicago, New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C.--though they also note Buffalo and Fayetteville have eliminated ordinances requiring parking minima for development. Shoup, a professor at UCLA, does a lot of his empirical research in his hometown of Los Angeles.

Legacy industrial cities, on the other hand, are staring into the abyss of obsolescence; they need more traffic, and have plenty of parking. Ditto many small towns and rural areas.

Surface parking lot on a Tuesday afternoon, New Bohemia neighborhood

Towns like mine (pop. 132,228) are in neither of those categories: We have some demand, but are nervous about sustaining it, and are without physical--or, for the moment, economic--barriers to spreading. Land is cheap, and it's easier to overdo the parking and out of anxiety there might one day be too little.

Parking areas in downtown Peoria, Illinois (Source: Urban 3)

Too many people in and out of city government place too much concern about parking, preferably free-of-charge and easy to find. How many people express this concern is hard to say without doing opinion research, which I have not done--not even a measly focus group. But it's a lot: The subject of parking inevitably comes up in conversations about development, even about areas where there are already huge swaths of surface lots.

Strip mall parking lot, Black Friday 2015

Note that the problem is really not city-imposed parking minima, where the city demands private developers provide more parking than the developers would otherwise provide, but a more generalized anxiety. We are not LA or New York, and we know it. I have had someone tell me with a straight face that parking in downtown Cedar Rapids is a "disaster;" resident concerns about parking, along with traffic and noise, frighten the City Council away from infill development (see Kaplan 2017); and parking lots have caused the destruction of historic structures in potentially-productive parts of town (see SaveCRHeritage 2013a, 2013b). Parking lots predominate in our core areas, and of course are ubiquitous along our commercial stroads like Collins Road, Edgewood Road, Mt. Vernon Road, and 16th Avenue. And yet there's never enough.

I would characterize the pro-parking argument this way: The city needs to provide the largest amount of parking space it can, free of charge, because: (1) shoppers, employees and those who attend events have come to appreciate the convenience of door-to-door driving; (2) Cedar Rapids consumer businesses are mostly competing on price and convenience (with the strip malls and big-box stores, with the Internet) rather than on vibe or experience; and (3) there's no particular reason not to.

Shoup's empricial study of the Westwood Village area of Los Angeles found drivers spending an average of 3+ minutes looking for parking. His answer is to charge the market price for parking, which he defines as the price that leaves one meter free on every block. Cedar Rapids residents, goes the argument, have a market price for parking that is near zero, and little appetite to search for spaces, because they have choices. So anything other than plenteous free parking will doom businesses and piss off voters.

Free on-street parking, 3rd St SE

Done right, parking for cars can actually contribute to walkability. Speck (2018: 150-151) argues that on-street parallel parking helps to calm traffic while supporting mixed uses. Angle parking...

Lincoln Square, North Lincoln Avenue, Chicago
Note that placement on this one-lane, one-way block reduces car-bike conflict

..."increases the parking supply and slows traffic, both of which are great for urban retail" (p. 154). Taken in moderation, parking can indeed support other uses of the street, particularly when they bring customers to businesses, so they can remain in business, so we can walk or bike to them.

Even larger parking areas can in some cases support urbanist development, if they're moved away from the action (Kaplan 2015). Using the example of 2nd Street SE downtown, Ben notes, "This stretch of downtown is all parking lots, loading zones, and blank walls. It's also necessary. This space functions as a repository for all the stuff you need to help 1st Street and 3rd Street be great streets." Similar phenomena can be observed on 15th and 17th Avenues SW, flanking the re-emergent heart of Czech Village that is 16th Avenue; the lengthy and capacious Lot 44 (pictured above), on the river side of New Bohemia; and Henry Street in Decorah, which makes Water Street possible. Rochester, Minnesota has incredibly dense development around the Mayo Clinic, facilitated by emptier areas that surround it, though as the Downtown Master Plan (2010: 31) notes, "the fringe areas... often exhibit a pattern of development, including many blocks of surface parking lots, which does not provide either a gentle transition from Downtown or a strong edge." In 2019, we need parking areas, but too much parking can strangle development.

Edge of downtown Rochester

There are reasons not to go the route of acres of free parking. Shoup (2005, ch 5) cites several negative impacts of excessive, free-of-charge parking:

• it warps urban form, because there are parking lots where there could be housing, stores or restaurants; 
• it removes potentially productive land from use;
• it frustrates walkers by placing destinations farther apart;
• it amounts to a subsidy of driving by non-drivers, because the parking spaces are paid for with tax money; and so
• it incentivizes driving of private cars, as opposed to other, more environmentally- and fiscally-friendly forms of transportation.

As Shoup argues, there are tradeoffs between parking space and productive space, between accommodating cars and encouraging walking, between subsidizing parking and everything else in the city budget, between parking and financial productivity. I'll allow these tradeoffs are not the same in a town like Cedar Rapids as they would be in a big-name, densely-populated city, and even that the consequences of developing some of these parking lots are going to be different here than there. But we need to acknowledge the choices, and recognize there are costs (opportunity as well as financial) to an obsession with parking.

Strip malls and big-box stores are not financially productive places (Quednau 2017); let's stop building them, and let's stop subsidizing their existence. We could charge market prices for parking, and use the revenue to fund improvements in the area (Shoup 2005, chs 15-21)--including, if the situation warrants, municipal parking garages--compatibly designed, of course.



Nevada City, California, recently raised their meters to $1/hour from 25 cents, with the revenue dedicated to fire protection; even then, it should be said, merchants and residents are ambivalent (Bliss 2019).

More housing and offices closer to "the action" will provide a 24-hour population that doesn't need to drive to get there. Encourage owners of large parking lots needed at different times (churches, clinics, restaurants) to share facilities rather than having their separate lots vacant most of the time (Herriges 2018). Improve public transportation near active places, like between Kingston Village and New Bohemia. Provide non-financial support for local business development (Mitchell 2017). Help, or at least allow the core areas of our town to become places where people want to be, and where businesses need to be.

Town and Country Mall, Black Friday 2015

Cedar Rapids, like most towns its size and in its region, has been built around the automobile to such a degree that to get around any other way requires considerable effort. Our vast parking infrastructure reflects that, of course, and to change that is akin to altering the flow of a powerful river. The effort and cost occur right away, and the long-term benefits are... long-term. And yet...

We need to acknowledge that the places we build, and how they evolve in the future, result from choices--not inevitability, not nature, but our choices. If we are not making the choices, someone else is making the choices for us. So, what kinds of places are we choosing? The great Danish architect-designer Jan Gehl says in the documentary "The Human Scale:"

We have known this about the motorcar: If you make more roads, you will have more traffic. Now we know about cities: If you make more places for people, you will have more public life. In cities that have done away with their public spaces, life has become totally privatized (quoted at Borys 2018).

So, what kinds of places are we choosing to build? What values are we choosing with? You can't parking lot your way to public life.

Former K-Mart, Black Friday 2017

SOURCES:
Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking (Planners Press, rev ed, 2011)
Jeff Speck, Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places (Island Press, 2018)

PREVIOUS POSTS:
"Hiking the (Parking) Crater," 25 January 2018
"Black Friday Parking 2017: After the Ball is Over," 24 November 2017
"Downtown vs. Parking," 29 September 2013
"The Parking Dilemma," 31 July 2013

One more video: