Parking Garages

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/

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.

It’s time to stop building more parking

April 23, 2019 By Tony Jordan 5 Comments

There is a lot of development that happens in the USA, nearly a trillion dollars were spent in 2018 on new private construction and, unfortunately, we can assume most of that development adds more parking supply to our communities.

I was on a panel at the APA National Conference last week debating parking maximums with a few great folks who were representing the “developer perspective.” The argument against restricting new parking development is that if an area doesn’t have good transit or density, then disallowing new parking supply will kill the project.

Maybe that’s good.

Every new structured parking space is a 30 year commitment to undermine climate action goals.

We’ve got a dozen years to turn the tide on climate change. This isn’t a drill. Every new structured parking space is a 30 year commitment to undermine climate action goals. The cost of parking is much higher than the $30-50,000 a stall it might cost to construct and maintain.

The bank, or the NIMBYs, or the local transportation bureaucracy will say: “This part of town doesn’t have sufficient transit to support a building with no parking.” But if we build enough parking to support more people in a transit-desert, we are guaranteeing the transit will never be sufficient.

If the project is a new development in on a multi-acre suburban greenfield, it’s an even bigger problem. “This isn’t the city,” they will say, “this project won’t get built unless we build hundreds of parking spaces.” It’s probably better for everyone if it isn’t built, except for the investors who were hoping to squeeze a few more percentage points of return out of car culture.

I support market rate development and I think markets are a good way to gauge parking demand, but I don’t think the cost of climate change is priced into these decisions. If a site is too risky to develop because there’s no way to get there without driving, then don’t develop it. Most cities have plenty of (often wealthy) neighborhoods with good transit access to upzone, let’s do that instead.

I’m told that I’ll never win over enough people by being so radical and I’m not so sure, I think there’s not enough people telling the truth. In either event, I think I’d rather lose after trying to win than lose by default through bad compromise.