The Parking Minute

Developers should pay more to build parking

July 12, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Mexico City charges fees for excess parking supply and your city should too.

More car parking in our cities is an invitation for more cars and the congestion, pollution, and sprawl that those cars bring with them are a cost borne by everyone (whether they drive or not), particularly the poor and disenfranchised.

Each of these stalls is a threat to our environment.

Despite this reality, airport operators, development agencies, and many developers want to build large amounts of new structured parking, in the face of climate, housing, and traffic emergencies.

Reforms to parking requirements are becoming more common, but too often these reforms are structured as if building less parking is a bad thing for the neighborhood or city center. Developers who build little-to-no parking are required to provide bus passes, permanently affordable housing, additional street trees, or other supposed mitigations. Those are all critical things to provide, but not building parking, alone, makes housing cheaper and more abundant, fights climate change, and discourages driving to work.

When Mexico City eliminated minimum parking requirements citywide in 2017, they took things one step further and imposed a parking impact fee on developers who build lots of new parking. The city has relatively generous parking maximums (about 3 stalls per housing unit) but if a developer builds more than 1 stall per unit, they have to pay a fee:

For 50-75% of the maximum parking allowance, a developer pays approximately $4,000 per stall.
For 75-100% of the allowance, the fee is about $8,000 per stall.
Residential-only developments are allowed to build above the maximum, for an additional $12,000 per stall fee.

These fees are used to improve public transit in the city, but other good uses would be to fund public affordable housing or plant additional trees at developments where no parking is built.

Parking impact fees would be a smart way to discourage excess parking without restricting the freedom of developers, airports, and agencies that insist on building large amounts.

News: Car dependency, ride hailing, and the Fed hits a parking stumbling block!

July 9, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

A few months back, University of Iowa School of Law professor Greg Shill released a comprehensive paper titled “Should Law Subsidize Driving?” The paper explains, in infuriating detail, the many ways, some more obvious than others, that we;be built a society that essentially forces people to own and drive cars.

Photo of parking garage behind chain link fence. — Do cars give us freedom or just fence us in?

It’s a great work of scholarship and everyone should read it, but it’s over 90 pages long and most people aren’t in grad school! Fortunately, Professor Shill wrote a condensed version of the paper for The Atlantic and the result, ”Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It,” is a must read. Share it widely, share it often!

A Balanced View On TNCs

Uber and Lyft, often referred to as Transportation Network Carriers (TNCs) are controversial services with potentially dubious business models. But given the forced reliance on automobiles, TNCs provide options for people who can’t drive, and a way out of personal ownership for people who can.

A recent study from the University of Connecticut looked at aggregate data for TNC trips in New York City (from 2014-2107) and found “[r]ideshare trips starting in the outer boroughs have exploded, increasing to 56 percent of the market in neighborhoods that are typically home to minority and low-income households that do not own vehicles of their own.”

Professor Carol Atkinson-Palombo, the lead author, says the study may show unmet demand for transit and other services. Relying on these companies is problematic, according to Atkinson-Palombo, because “mobility is so important and you can’t be held to ransom….they’re not accountable to anybody and, at the end of the day, their remit is not to provide public transit. Their remit is to make profit.”

Sounds a lot like the pre-TNC status quo!

Ramp Halted in Minneapolis!

And now for some exciting parking news! Folks in Minneapolis have been organizing to oppose the Federal Reserve Bank’s plan to build an 800 stall parking garage (or ramp in the local parlance) on the bank of the Mississippi River.

It sounds like the hearing was a great one, full of strange claims by the Fed and lots of good testimony and zingers. I can’t wait until it’s online. A write up by Wedge Live! tells the story with good context and details.

In the end, the planning commission denied all the requests from the Fed. The proposal isn’t dead, but it’s certainly going back to the drawing board.

Activists Oppose Federal Reserve Bank Parking Project In Minneapolis

July 1, 2019 By Tony Jordan 2 Comments

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has proposed an 800 stall parking garageon the bank of the Mississippi River. The justification for the project, which requires a variance, is that new redevelopment of nearby surface lots has made parking too frustrating for bank employees and visitors.

Rendering of new garage in the context of the city.

The plan for the garage contains all sorts of good-feeling stuff like the “largest, most useable Open Green Space” which “can be developed to help interpret the past history of the site,” currently a surface parking lot. While this certainly will be a ramp to visit for a garage aficionado like myself, I wonder how pleasant a park with a massive driveway running through it will be?

The Fed doesn’t seem to have published the expected cost of the garage, but the nearby airport is currently constructing an 11 story garage with 5,000 stalls for $240 Million. At a comparable $48,000 per stall, this garage would cost around $38 million dollars.

Fortunately, the good folks of Minneapolis are aware of the problems more auto infrastructure will bring to their city and a group of them have begun organizing to “Halt the Ramp” (link requires facebook) online and in the streets! The group has been gathering signatures and encouraging letters to the City Planner Lindsey Silas, Mayor Jacob Frey, and Third Ward Council Member Steve Fletcher. Today, July 1st, is the last day to send letters so they will be seen by the planning commission.

The local Sierra Club has written a letter opposing the project and is seeking signatures to an online petition.

The proposed garage is certain to bring more traffic and congestion to the area.

Every new parking stall is a 30 year commitment to undermine climate action, housing affordability, and traffic goals. The Federal Reserve Bank should expose more of the cost of parking to employees and visitors, offer additional compensation for employees who don’t drive to work, and aggressively pursue transportation demand management programs.

It is unclear at this time how much, if anything, employees at the bank pay to park in the nearby lots and the existing garage, but the Careers page for the bank says “parking is available in the Bank garage for all officers and select other employees.” According to the 2018 Fed report, there are 63 officers at the Minneapolis Fed and 927 full time employees. The bank provides a “commuter subsidy program that provides tax savings” and free indoor bike parking for workers who don’t drive.

The City of Minneapolis should develop a comprehensive performance-based on-street parking management program. No one should be building 800 stall standalone garages in the middle of a vibrant city.

Sign the Sierra Club North Star Chapter’s petition and Reject the Ramp!

On The Road: Parking Ramp Tourism

June 20, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

I’m on a road trip from Louisville, KY to Portland, OR. (Follow me on https://www.instagram.com/parkingminute/)

As I’ve been traveling across the country I’ve visited a number of parking garages in small (and big) towns. It started kind of as a cheeky thing to do, but I’ve found that it’s a good way to see these places from a different angle, with often great panoramic views.

Panoramic View from garage deck in Davenport, IA

I’ve also noticed that these top decks are often empty, but they must have cost millions to build! Best to get SOME use out of them!

I’ll compile a more comprehensive post, but in the interim I am posting a lot of my parking garage tourism at the Parking Minute instagram, so check it out! https://www.instagram.com/parking-minute/

On the Road: #CNU27 in Louisville, KY

June 12, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

This week I am at CNU27 in Louisville, the annual gathering of members of the Congress of the New Urbanism.

I will be giving a short talk on Saturday as part of an Open Innovation panel on transportation. My presentation is titled: “Parking Reform: It won’t just happen, you have to work at it.” I’ll be making the case that the missing link in parking reform efforts is plain old organizing and elbow grease. It’s Saturday at 1pm, if you’re attending.

This conference is also a bit of a soft launch for an organization I, and parking reform colleagues Lindsay Bayley (Chicago), Jane Wilberding (Chicago), and Mike Kwan (D.C), are bootstrapping called the Parking Reform Network.

I’ll be tweeting about the conference at @twjpdx23 and posting my thoughts (and photos from parking garages) on the Parking Minute throughout the week!

And with that, enjoy this photo of a sunset from the parking deck next to the Seelbach Hotel, relatively unobstructed by any cars.