The Parking Minute

A minute of parking news and commentary

On the road: Portland Airport’s Parking Plans

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This morning I took TriMet to PDX on my way to San Francisco for the National Planning Conference.

Image Port of Portland – Rendering of new terminal. On left is 9 year old, $156M 3,000 stall Long Term Garage.

I’ve been coming to and from the Portland Airport since I was a teenager and the number of times I’ve parked here could be counted on one hand and it’s been over 10 years. Generally the MAX to the terminal is the best option and off-hour arrivals or departures are usually handled by a neighbor or TNC (or combo of that and public transit).

But there are 2,400+ people who park, for free (and more who park for less than a dollar a day), at PDX every day… Port of Portland employees and airport vendors.

This is a significant figure because the Port is currently proposing to build another 2,400 stalls at the airport, ostensibly to meet rising demand for parking (the airport is expanding it’s D terminal as I write this).

According to the Port, this new parking is needed because “two or three days per week, the Long-Term Parking Garage is either full or near capacity.” When that happens, customers may use the Short-Term garage, “pushing the Short-Term Parking Garage closer to capacity!”

The Long-Term Parking Garage is, itself a $156 million expansion completed in 2010. At the time it was opened, during the recession, the Port had to close surface lots to push demand into the garage so it wouldn’t be empty.  The new project will cost another $265 million, the Port insists rental car concessions and parking fees will pay for it. I think long-term prospects for rental car businesses at airports might not be so rosy.

And as for passengers, certainly the Port wants to provide accommodating experiences for all visitors, but we have light-rail to the terminal. Will an entity with such large debt to recover from parking be incentivized to push transit as the best way to get to and from the airport? Providing a TriMet day pass with every ticket would be great, but when the Port needs that parking money flowing in, why would they offer that to passengers?

The Port should start by charging higher earning employees market rates for parking at the airport. Perhaps a mix of that and some more encouragement for passengers to take MAX would allow them to muddle through with only 17,000 stalls. 

Update: Port of Portland PIO Kama Simonds provided the following statement: “Employees have a choice: they can park in the airport employee parking lot on Alderwood (Road) for free, pay $20/month to park in the surface lot due east of the air traffic control tower, or pay $80/month to park in the parking garages.”

The Alterwood Road lot contains 2,400 stalls. The $20/month surface lot contains 450 stalls.

Upcoming: National Planning Conference 2019

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Photo of San Francisco Skyline
NPC 2019 is in San Francisco. Let’s meet up and talk about parking!

In a few days I’m heading to San Francisco for the National Planning Conference. I was on a panel a few years ago for the Oregon/Washington Joint Planning Conference, but this is my first time attending the American Planning Association’s annual event.

On Sunday I will on a panel for an interactive session titled Parking Maximums: Development Barriers and Opportunities. I’ll be joined by fellow parking reformers Lindsay Bayley and Jane Wilberding, who developed the great Better Parking 101 handout. We’ll have a friendly debate about parking maximums with Ranadip Bose and Malek Abdulsamad, who will bring a developer/finance perspective to the conversation. 

Professor Donald Shoup is included on two sessions Saturday that I definitely plan to check out: Zoning Reforms to Boost ADU Development and a panel on Parking and the City.

There are several other parking sessions, including: From Parking Lots to Places, A Decade of Demand Responsive Parking, and Valuing and Managing the Public Right-of-Way.

I’ll be taking notes and dispatching a few Parking Minutes from the conference. If you’re attending and would like to meet up to talk about parking reform (or whatever), please get in touch!

We’ve got too much parking now and it’s about to get worse

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Many new luxury cars can already parallel park and car companies are working on more advanced parking assist technology. Tesla commercials portray a near future where drivers exit at the entrance to a parking facility and the car does the rest. 

Photo by Pathum Danthanarayana on Unsplash

Soon, some parking garages will be adapted with sensors or special paint to assist vehicles, using currently available technology, to stack up in garages, millimeters away from one another. As cars become more networked with one another, it’s easy to imagine 150 cars parking in a space that currently holds 50, with the cars shuffling out of one another’s way to allow one of their own to return to its owner.

At the same time, companies like Citifyd in Portland are developing systems that allow for under-ulitilized private parking to be more-easily made available to the public. City centers might see a rapid inflation in the effective supply of parking, undercutting efforts to reduce car trips to downtowns and business districts. 

Parking demand at airports, hotels, and entertainment destinations is already being reduced because of new ride share, ride hailing, and car share services. We could see a rapid shift in the economics of downtown parking with demand dropping as supply is increasing. Some lots and garages would be redeveloped, but much parking in city centers is under productive buildings, it’s here to stay for a long time.

This narrative should make any developer or development agency think twice about investing in new long-term parking assets. Operators of newer structures will be at a major disadvantage, due to debt service, when competing with older facilities. 

Transportation officials should consider the impact such a shift would have, parking prices at private garages could drop rapidly, including more driving in the short run. Entry-exit parking surcharges could discourage driving, particularly during peak hours.

Parking reformers should seize on this narrative when working to oppose new publicly funded parking structures and when arguing against existing parking requirements. Every new stall built is a bet against both these emerging technologies and against our efforts to combat climate change and congestion. We’ve probably already built more parking then we’ll actually need, and we definitely built more than we should have. 

Residential Permit Programs: Parking Management or Protectionism?

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Austin planner Meghan Skornia tipped me off to an article she wrote (which was inspired by a magnificent screencap from a PDX city council hearing a few years back) about residential parking permits (RPP). 

Austin has a permit program, approved by council in 1996. The program is similar to most RPP: cheap, exclusionary, and protectionist. Permits cost $15 (4 cents a day!) plus sales tax a year. Residents of multi-family buildings with more than 6 units are excluded, if the building was permitted after 1959 when minimum parking requirements came to be in Austin. The purpose of the program is entirely to protect the convenience of residents to park. It does not appear, unlike Portland, that limited time stay parking is permitted for the public in permit zones. 

Meghan is very critical of this program, for good reasons, but I think the problem is that very few permit programs are actually trying to manage parking for the general good.

Do permits privatize public space?

I don’t think it’s a given that RPP privatize space so long as: the permits cost a market rate, they are available to anyone with a legitimate interest in parking in the area, some amount of time-stay parking is allowed. Do most permit programs operate this way? NO! But they should.

Do permits raise the cost of development?

I think this is the weakest critique in the article. Even Austin’s permits are only implemented if parking on the street is congested. Parking permits should (and I know they usually don’t) go hand-in-hand with eliminating parking requirements. Structured parking is expensive, permanent, and takes up space that could be used for housing. It’s much preferable to manage the on-street supply with a market-based approach than to require on-site parking.

If a permit is available to all people who live in the zone & is priced appropriately, then some parking may be built, but it would still likely be very much less than with minimums.

Are permit programs unfair to low-income residents?

I do think we need to be sensitive about impacts on low income people, but those concerns must be held in context of the impact of new structured parking on housing costs and supply. Also, given that time is money, allowing people to choose what their time is worth is fair. 

Of course no parking minimums and no permits is also fine, but if the parking is actually congested, then the city should be implementing a permit/metering zone to make sure that people can access the area if they need to drive.

If the city is doing it right, they will limit the permits sold to some percentage of the actual supply, if permits are warranted, this will lead to higher prices for permits. How that money is spent is the key. Portland has a great program called the Transportation Wallet. 

I advocate for direct redistribution to low income residents. This might be in the form of transit passes or other subsidies (like the transportation wallet), but I would say it should actually be a cash rebate sent to SNAP recipients or some other such identifier. What I don’t like to see is discounts for permits, a subsidy only for car owning low income people. 

What’s the future of permits?

I think technology can be used wisely to allow for pretty dynamic “virtual permitting,” particularly in areas impacted by commercial parking. In these zones, visitors (be they customers or airBnB guests) could purchase neighborhood parking at market rates w/o meters. This raises more revenue for transit subsidies!

 In the end, it’s like  @DonaldShoup  says: “All may park, all must pay.”

If there’s more demand than supply for parking we should use markets to manage it. I’m a socialist for healthcare, education & housing. I’m a capitalist for parking. 

Five Parking Stories We Wish Were Jokes

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Former Vancouver, BC chief planner, Brent Todarian suggested on twitter today that, instead of fake stories, we share #ThingsWeWishWereAprilFoolsJokes, so here are five parking stories that we wish were jokes.

Historic Parking Lot

Picture of a parking lot.
Neighbors claimed this was an historic parking lot.

In 2015, some residents in Washington, D.C.’s Spring Valley neighborhood objected to a retail development on the grounds that the parking lot it was replacing was an historic landmark. The parking lot was adjacent to an historic shopping center and neighbors argued that the “adequacy of parking is also a factor in determining the property to be historic.”

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s LEED Platinum Parking Garage

I covered this last week when I was on spring break in Colorado, but it’s definitely a parking story I wish was a joke. The scientists and researchers who are working hard to save us from dependency on fossil fuels enjoy free ample parking at a brand-new $31.5M, 1,800 stall, LEED-Platinum certified parking garage. Electric shuttle buses would have been my guess for how they’d spend the money.

Light Rail, Heavy Parking

Here in Oregon, TriMet, Portland Metro’s regional transit agency, is planning a new light rail line along our Southwest Corridor. The line, which would go online sometime in the mid-late 2020s is planned to be served by at least five new “free” parking structures containing over 3,000 stalls. Voters recently approved a housing bond containing $65M for low-income housing near transit. The potential cost of the park-and-rides is conservatively $160M and will likely be closer to $300M.

Parking Garage Nearly Bankrupts Spokane

In the mid-1990s, the civic leaders in Spokane, WA backed construction of a parking garage with $31.5M in bonds in order to facilitate development of a $110M shopping center. Consultants promised the parking garage would make money and when it didn’t City Council defaulted on the loan, causing the city’s bond rating to plummet. Parking meter money in Spokane will be paying off the loan until 2027. 

Privatizing Public Parking In Chicago

In 2008, Chicago’s Mayor Daley engineered a deal to lease the city’s on-street parking franchise to a Wall Street backed consortium for $1.16 billion in cash. While the deal has allowed for some removal of political machinations from parking pricing, overall it’s been a disaster. The lease will last until 2083 and if the city wants to remove on-street parking before then, be it temporarily for construction or to facilitate bus-only lanes or bike lanes, it has to pay Chicago Parking Meters, LLC for lost revenue. 

So there you have it, five lessons for us all in what NOT to do (hint: don’t build new parking garages).