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TNC

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. 

Filed Under: Climate Change, Parking Garages, TNC

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

April 8, 2019 By Tony Jordan 1 Comment

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. 

Filed Under: Autonomous Vehicles, Parking Garages, TNC

Ride Hailing & Parking Study Sheds Light On Passenger Priorities

March 13, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Image by flikr user ctj71081

A few months back, a study by Denver-based researcher Dr. Alejandro Henao found results suggesting that “ride-hailing adds a significant amount of VMT (+83.5%) to the system when accounting for dead-heading, induced travel, and substitution of more sustainable modes.“(https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/c7a0b1_3f9ac82d761c4a87ba9e17b21cf7757c.pdf)

The data for that study were collected by Dr. Henao by signing up to drive for Lyft and Uber and then recording all sorts of information about the routes, the time between routes, and the people hailing the ride.

It was apparently a pretty fruitful 14 weeks of driving for Henao. After he picked passengers up, he asked them to complete a survey about their vehicle ownership and motivations for hailing a ride. After dropping off the passenger, he looked for a parking spot near their destination, noting the time it took to find one and estimating the time cruising and walking that the Lyft ride saved the passenger.  Last month a companion study using that data was published in The Journal of Transportation and Land Use titled “The Impact of ride hailing on parking (and vice versa).” (https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/1392)

There’s good stuff in the paper, and I encourage you to check it out, but a few findings stuck out for me:

  • 46.8% of his passengers would have driven or been driven (by taxi or other means) compared to 34.1% who would have taken transit or walked/biked
  • 12.2% of his passengers wouldn’t have made the trip at all if they didn’t take a TNC
  • Avoiding drinking and driving is the main reason his passengers took a TNC (36.6%) and parking difficulty/cost was second (20.7%)
  • On average, passengers spent more money on rides that didn’t require cruising for parking and walking
Image from “Impact of Ride Hailing on Parking” study showing reasons to use ride hailing grouped by self-reported driving frequency of rider.

I think this paints a bit more of a sympathetic picture for TNCs than we’ve been seeing lately.  Drivers substituting TNC for driving are generally doing so either because they don’t want to drink and drive (good) or, for at least some, because their city isn’t managing parking very well. 

Non-drivers are substituting some transit rides, to be sure, but probably because of time constraints.  And for every two rides taken from transit, there seems to be one ride a person takes via TNC that they couldn’t have taken because transit doesn’t go where they were headed. 

Ironically, Dr. Henao works for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, owner of the worlds “greenest” parking garage (https://pdxshoupistas.com/how-green-is-my-free-parking-structure-not-very/).

Filed Under: TNC

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