[Carfreeliving] Pave paradise? No, ditch the parking lot

[Jason Henderson]

 From the April/May 2005 <http://www.newurbannews.com/AprMay05.html> 
issue of /New Urban News/

http://www.newurbannews.com/ParkingInsideApr05.html

Pave paradise? No, ditch the parking lot

PHILIP LANGDON

For years urbanists have tried a wide assortment of tactics to reduce 
the damage that parking inflicts on communities. Now comes UCLA urban 
planning professor Donald C. Shoup with a radical, yet carefully argued 
prescription: Governments should stop requiring off-street parking. In 
/The High Cost of Free Parking/, Shoup systematically attacks ingrained 
ideas that have prevented urbanists from asking the most basic question 
of all: Why should governments require parking other than on the streets?

“Few people now recognize parking requirements as a disaster because the 
costs are hidden and the harm is diffused,” Shoup says in the 734-page, 
$59.95 hardcover from APA Planners Press. He contends that “parking 
requirements cause great harm: they subsidize cars, distort 
transportation choices, warp urban form, increase housing costs, burden 
low-income households, debase urban design, damage the economy, and 
degrade the environment.” His verdict: “Off-street parking requirements 
have all the hallmarks of a great planning disaster.”

A Yale-trained economist and former director of the Institute of 
Transportation Studies at UCLA, Shoup says the longstanding municipal 
practice of assigning parking requirements is nonsense. “Urban planners 
set minimum parking requirements for every land use, but the 
requirements often seem pulled out of thin air or based on studies that 
are poorly conceived,” he says. “In turn, these faulty standards and 
policies are perpetuated as they are copied from one city to the next.” 
The planning profession, in its eagerness to be comprehensive, has 
identified more than 600 different uses, each with its own parking 
requirement. “A gas station must provide 1.5 parking spaces per fuel 
nozzle, and a mausoleum must provide parking spaces per maximum number 
of interments in a one-hour period. Why?” he asks. “Nobody knows.”

Shoup has written a biting volume that presents detailed examples and 
exhibits high ambition. His goal is to transform future debates about 
parking and save cities and towns from what he sees as misguided 
attempts to make parking “free” and plentiful. After they have 
considered the evidence, Shoup says, “I believe planners will eventually 
admit that off-street parking requirements are a well-intentioned folly 
similar to lead therapy — a poison prescribed as a cure.”

In assailing the parking-requirement enterprise, Shoup argues:
• “Off-street parking requirements encourage everyone to drive wherever 
they go because they know they can usually park free when they get 
there.” Those who don’t drive nonetheless subsidize the parkers, through 
higher prices that are charged to everyone for goods and services.
• “Parking requirements create especially severe problems in older 
commercial areas,” where it is often impossible to erect new buildings 
at traditional densities while satisfying municipal parking ratios. 
Shoup says such requirements “have hindered the rebuilding of Los 
Angeles’s older retail corridors that were destroyed in the 1992 riots.”
• “Off-street parking requirements especially harm low-income and renter 
families because they own fewer cars but still pay for parking 
indirectly.” Nonprofit developers in San Francisco have estimated that 
parking requirements add 20 percent to the cost of each affordable 
housing unit and reduce the number of units that can be built on a site. 
“We’re forcing people to build parking that people cannot afford,” 
observes Amit Ghosh, the city’s chief of comprehensive planning. A study 
in Oakland, California, found that requiring one parking space per 
dwelling “increased housing costs by 18 percent and reduced density by 
30 percent.”
• “Past some critical point, more parking spaces harm rather than help” 
the central business district. They reduce compactness and proximity — 
chief advantages of an urban location.
• “Popular historic styles like courtyard housing cannot be replicated 
with today’s parking requirements.”

NEW URBANIST, ALSO

New urbanists need to pay close attention to parking, Shoup says. He 
notes that the SmartCode produced by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company and 
intended to facilitate urban development nonetheless includes parking 
requirements, such as three spaces per 1,000 square feet of retail in a 
city center. “Even at the fountainhead of new urbanist thinking, parking 
requirements dictate density, and cars rule the city,” Shoup asserts.

Much of the solution to the parking morass lies in letting the market 
decide how much parking is provided, and where, Shoup suggests. 
Presumably the result will be fewer parking lots, a higher density of 
development, and a shift toward mass transit, bicycling, walking, and 
other forms of movement. The money saved can be put to other uses. He 
notes, “In 2002, the total subsidy for off-street parking was somewhere 
between $127 billion and $374 billion a year. If we also count the 
subsidy for free and underpriced curb parking, the total subsidy for 
parking would be far higher.”

“Reducing or removing off-street parking requirements … can increase the 
supply and reduce the price of /all/ housing, without any subsidy,” 
Shoup contends. “Many brownfield sites that are now difficult to 
redevelop may suddenly find economic uses if cities remove off-street 
parking requirements.”

If less off-street parking were supplied, wouldn’t motorists tend to 
park on the streets, especially where spaces are free? Yes, Shoup 
acknowledges. So he suggests changing municipal policies on curb 
parking, too. “I recommend charging for curb parking (which does not 
necessarily require conventional parking meters, of course) whenever 
there would be a shortage of curb spaces in the absence of charging,” 
Shoup told /New Urban News/. If parking is not in short supply when it’s 
free, there is no reason to charge for it, according to Shoup. “I 
recommend the classic Goldilocks method of setting the prices for curb 
parking: the price is too high if too many spaces are vacant, and the 
price is too low if no spaces are vacant. When about 15 percent of the 
spaces are vacant, the price is just right.”

Charging market-rate prices for on-street parking would bring in revenue 
from parkers and, in his view, it would discourage unnecessary 
automobile use. He notes that free or low rates at meters encourage 
motorists to cruise the streets, generating congestion and pollution 
while looking for spaces that are cheaper than those in parking garages. 
Cities could review their parking rates and adjust them to the demand. 
In entertainment and shopping districts that stay busy until late in the 
evening, meters might charge $2 an hour during the day, $3 in the 
evening, and become free after 2 a.m.

One way to make the shift from free on-street parking palatable would be 
to establish “parking benefit districts.” These are organizations, 
possibly at the neighborhood level, that would decide the rates for curb 
parking in their area and receive at least part of the revenue. They 
could spend the money on public benefits for the neighborhood, Shoup says.


-- 
Jason Henderson 
San Francisco CA 
(415)-255-8136
jhenders at sbcglobal.net 

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