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:

The parking dilemma

Shoup in Paris (Source: shoup.bol.ucla.edu)

Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking (Planners Press, 2005)

Donald Shoup is an economist at UCLA who in 2005 published the definitive book on motor vehicle parking. It is a massive work (which alert readers will recognize as code for "I didn't read all of it"), painstakingly describing studies by himself and others. But it comes down to this: free curb parking creates all manner of problems for society. The solutions are to allow fewer parking spaces, charge more for parking, and (maybe) require limits on parking spaces.

Shoup lists in chapter 5 a number of ways free parking creates harms: it subsidizes cars (all taxpayers provide a resource that decreases the cost of car-driving), distorts transportation choices (because driving is cheaper), warps urban form (all those parking spaces) and debases urban design, increases housing costs, burdens low-income households, damages the economy and degrades the environment. In busy areas free curb parking means individual drivers "cruise" for an open space, sometimes for several blocks, adding to traffic congestion, as Shoup explains in this clever video. His own study of the Westwood Village area of Los Angeles found drivers spend an average of 3.3 minutes to find a curb space, which translates over the course of a year into 100,000 hours of cruising-for-parking by all drivers, going a total of 945,000 miles and wasting 47,000 gallons of gasoline (ch. 14).

One way towns have dealt with demand for parking on the street has been to require businesses (including medical facilities, schools and apartment buildings) to provide parking lots. This has resulted in a massive use of land for car-parking, particularly in certain areas. Surface parking lots are physically unattractive, waste space (and the money used to build them), and create vast empty areas in the town. Empty areas mean more space between places people are going, making people more likely to use cars; and they make those parts of town as a whole less attractive to people. If you're in Cedar Rapids and need a specific example, look at the area between 5th and 12th Sts, running pretty much from the interstate to the river, with a spur between New Bohemia and downtown. That's a lot of territory, and it is full of parking lots; if I had more time and research assistants, I'd count them, but it must run into multiple thousands of spaces.



There are several reasons for this phenomenon, but the most basic cause is city zoning requirements. Part I of the book (chs 2-10) details the extent of parking requirements for new construction, based on shaky or no data, and almost always excessive. Developers who wish to provide less parking must petition for an exemption, with uncertain prospects for success. Why governments persist in this irrationality is not clear, but it's probably some combination of (a) demands from the public, especially shoppers who want to park for free, and neighbors who want the shoppers parking somewhere besides in front of their houses; (b) impressive but false precision marketed by planning agencies; and (c) inertia.

It's not clear, though, that if governments backed off, the problem would vanish. (If so, Houston, Texas, which has no municipal zoning to speak of, would have solved this problem, to the envy and wonderment of all.) Developers and business owners have their own reasons for liking parking lots. In a society where a huge proportion of trips are made by motor vehicle, parking lots give customers somewhere to put their vehicles while they shop. Again, Cedar Rapids provides some instructive examples. The parking lot on the site of the former First Christian Church, and the one that required the closing of a block of 2nd Av, were initiated by the medical facilities, not by the city. Both have detracted from the urban fabric, but it's certainly easy to park there when you need to.

Shoup suggests several solutions, some small and some large. Cities should repeal minimum parking requirements; can provide central space(s) for public parking instead of requiring separate lots for each business; and/or encourage developers to provide incentives to customers and employees not to drive. More intensive solutions include market prices for parking spaces (explained in the video linked above, and detailed in chapters 15-21 of The High Cost of Free Parking). Today's technology allows for better adjustment of prices to varying demand at different times of day, and for more efficient collection of fees. (Many's the time I've lacked the right change to park at an open meter.) Political resistance to market-priced parking can be overcome by dedicating the revenue to pay for public services in the neighborhood.

Westwood Village is an example of an area with what Randolph T. Hester calls "impelling form" (a phrase I'm in love with, you may have noticed). A city is "impelling" when people are willing to endure some cost or inconvenience to get there. (The impelling nature of Chicago explains why businesses there haven't decamped en masse to Indiana, even though Indiana's taxes are lower than Illinois'.) As applied to parking, it matters enough to people to visit UCLA and/or the businesses around it that they are willing to pay market price for parking or take public transportation or walk. Pasadena has done even better than Westwood Village, coming from farther back (pp. 413-418). The vicious cycle described by Shoup that has dominated American towns since World War II--excessive supply of parking incentivizes driving while increasing space between businesses, thereby making walking harder and places less lively--is in such places reversed. Then it becomes a virtuous cycle, as parking lots are replaced by residences and businesses, making for a more lively and impelling town.

I, however, write to you from an under-confident college in an under-confident town. The under-confidence of Cedar Rapids is exemplified by our "Song of Dedication," which is written from the perspective of someone moving away. "Time and my life are like the river"... We'll miss this lovely town, but we're leaving. It's hard for the city to stand up for development when we're afraid businesses will leave for the hinterlands, and businesses are afraid they'll lose customers to outlying strips, if there isn't beaucoup parking. We don't get on the virtuous cycle if everyone deserts before we have a chance to become impelling. Shoup suggests Business Improvement Districts, like the Medical SSMID in Cedar Rapids, can be vehicles for collecting and spending parking revenue. But my conversations with Medical SSMID folk in May suggest they are more concerned with providing adequate amounts of parking for out-of-town patients than with filling in what is already a parking-rich empty quarter.

 (These are rather poor pictures. You'd have to see the whole area from above to get the full effect.)

(This was taken at 11:00 on a Wednesday morning. Certainly we have no shortage of parking, just maybe not in exactly the right spots.)

Coe faces a quandary similar to that faced by the City of Cedar Rapids and the Medical SSMID. A few years ago, we built a parking lot that runs for two blocks along 14th St. There are some trees around it, but even so it's not pretty, and creates something of a barrier between Coe and the Mound View neighborhood.

(The lot is mostly empty during the summer, but filled to capacity during the school year.)

In the hearing before the Board of Adjustment, Coe's representative expressed concern that the cars had to go someplace, and better a big parking lot than all over the streets. A city person wondered why Coe students had to all have cars. After all, Northwestern University bars students from having cars on campus for at least a year. Well, our representative responded, we're not Northwestern. And it's true that students aren't willing to endure as much to attend Coe as Northwestern students are willing to endure to attend Northwestern. Just so, Cedar Rapids isn't Chicago. And few churches around town would say they have a surplus of congregants. So they all build parking lots, too. How do towns like ours get off the vicious cycle?

OTHER STUFF

Donald Shoup website

"Freakonomics" podcast on parking's pricing problem (March 2013)

"The Shoupistas" Facebook group

Alan Durning, "What's in Your Garage?," Sightline Daily, 5 June 2013 [http://daily.sightline.org/2013/06/05/whats-in-your-garage/]... addresses parking requirements at individual residences, which I don't get into above, but which surely are an additional zoning absurdity. Thanks to John Heaton for sending this my way.