The Parking Minute

A minute of parking news and commentary

Why cities should cut parking meter rates.

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Performance-based parking goes both ways, let your city’s first adjustment be a rate decrease.

Demand for central city parking is, most likely, at all-time lows in many cities due to COVID-19 concerns and stay-at-home orders. It’s too soon to tell how long this disruption will last, but if no one is going downtown, should cities be charging current rates for on-street parking?

Performance-based parking management means charging the right price based on demand. Cities that have been waffling on implementing performance-based parking policies because raising rates is unpopular should take advantage of the situation now and LOWER rates first, but only if they have a policy in place to increase them once demand picks up.

Photo by Dean Hergert on Unsplash

As an example, Portland, Oregon passed a performance-based parking management policy almost two years ago and has yet to make their first adjustments. Given the current state of affairs it is unlikely that any increases recommended by pre-Coronavirus occupancy data would be implemented any time soon. Meanwhile, someone who drives downtown for a pickup or delivery will pay $2.00/hour to park on the empty streets. Temporarily reducing rates to $1.00 wouldn’t be to increase demand, we’re not trying to attract new customers to downtown during the pandemic, but to affirm that data-driven rate policy isn’t a money grab, it’s common sense.

Unfortunately, Portland’s performance-based policy, like that of several other cities, is not nimble enough, rates are only supposed to be adjusted once a year, up or down by a maximum of $0.60. Now would be a good time to toss those timelines and restrictions out the window. Portland has waited years to make the first adjustment, based on extensive studies. If Portland had a shorter cycle for increasing or decreasing rates, it wouldn’t matter if the adjustment in one zone was off a little, it would get corrected easily. The benefit of quicker iteration is you don’t have to get it perfect the first time.

So cities should probably cut their rates now, all the data they need is to look out the window. If they have a performance-based policy already, they should adjust it to ensure that rates don’t stay low for a year, check in every month for a while! If a city doesn’t have a data-driven rate setting plan, they should set an end date for the rate cut (say 60 days) and get to work passing a dynamic pricing policy.

One more thing, dynamic pricing has been done in a number of cities already. There’s several flavors to choose from. Don’t waste time and money re-inventing the wheel. It’s more like ECON101 than rocket science. Just put it on the books, give people price relief now, and start turning your parking spaces into bus-only lanes.

Portland takes one more step toward zero parking requirements

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As of March 1st, every new high-density residential project in Portland has a path to ZERO parking requirements and the low-density requirements are on their last legs.

Portland’s parking requirement situation is a bit more complicated than other cities claiming to have no parking requirements. Near transit, defined as within 500 feet of frequent service bus lines or 1500 feet of a light rail station, zero parking has been required for buildings with 30 or fewer homes since 2013. Since 2017, remaining requirements were waived for larger projects near transit if they contained inclusionary affordable housing (IH) and IH is mandatory for projects with 20+ homes, setting the effective ratio for parking near transit at zero.

Parking lot with two cars

But for projects 501+ feet from a frequent service bus line, parking requirements remained. In mid-December, Portland City Council approved the Better Housing by Design project, which adopted form-based codes for multi-family residential zones. The proposal called for cutting remaining requirements in half, new apartment buildings that were deemed too far from transit would only have to build one parking space for every two homes. 

Advocates were able to organize and make the case that the transit-proximity requirement was more trouble than it was worth. Only a small percentage of multi-family or commercial zones were “too far” from transit and it was hard to defend the damage from the occasional project caught up in red tape because of it. Mayor Ted Wheeler agreed and proposed a successful amendment to waive parking requirements for any project that provides affordable housing. Every project has a path to zero parking in Portland city limits.

Sometime in April, City Council will vote on another zoning project, the Residential Infill Project (RIP). Expected to pass and go into effect in October, RIP will eliminate all parking requirements, citywide, for low-density residential zones. At that point, Portland will join the small, but growing, list of American cities with no required residential parking.

Developers should pay more to build parking

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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!

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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

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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.

The “largest, most useable Open Green Space!”

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!