Climate Change

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.

New public parking is bad for our budgets as well as our environment

May 31, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Earlier this week an article in the Willamette Week shed some light on a $200K study the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) commissioned to explore adding up to 392 parking stalls at a cost of nearly $18M to a public parking garage on the waterfront in Old Town.

I was quoted in the article, making the case that the city has no business investing in parking amid the growing climate crisis. But that’s not the only problem with the project.

Fiscally, it should be a non-starter. Spending up to $60,000 of public money per stall to replace private parking stalls lost to redevelopment is not only risky because of the possibility of disruptive transportation changes, but it would be money spent directly undermining the city’s own climate action and transportation goals.

PBOT is simultaneously working to implement a $60M plan called Central City In Motion which includes protected bike lanes and priority transit lanes to serve the same area of town as the parking garage. Most of those projects aren’t funded, yet. A quarter of the project could be built for this same cost, and those priority bus lanes would benefit more than 392 commuters.

The article caught the attention of John Van Horn (JVH), publisher of Parking Today magazine and kicked up a little dust. There have been several op-Eds published as a result. I’ve met John and Parking Today is willing to platform all sides of the transportation discussion and I’ve posted a reply you can read here.

But John is a anthropogenic climate change skeptic, he doesn’t believe that all the sprawl we’ve built and the driving it necessitates are sufficiently proven to be a threat we can address. I think he bases this skepticism on the Climatic Research Unit email controversy known as Climategate. Climate change denial makes it hard to establish a foundation for debate on parking policy. Fortunately, there are plenty of other reasons to be anti-car culture. Sprawl, air pollution, wasted time and money, and traffic violence to name a few.