Tag Archives: parking

parking cash out

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I like this idea. It’s the kind of idea cowardly city councils across the USA can get behind because it costs them zero dollars. Just require employers providing “free” or discounted parking to their employees to let their employees opt out and receive the cash value instead. This makes more sense to me than free bus service, which is often not configured well for our urban areas (i.e., our urban areas are not configured right for transportation, but we don’t think of it this way, do we?).

“Conservatives” will support this because it is a free market solution, right? Don’t force people to pay extra taxes and fees to support other peoples’ subsidized parking. Let the market set the price of driving, parking, and all other modes of transportation. No, I’m not this naive. Conservatives generally support the status quo, even if it is demonstrably, logically and indisputably anti-free-market.

solar panels over parking lots in France

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France is requiring solar panels over surface parking lots with 80 or more spaces. This makes sense for a lot of reasons. But not mentioned in the article is acting as a sort of tax on surface parking lots. I don’t know if it happens in France, but in the U.S. a land speculator can buy a property in the middle of a neighborhood, sit on it for years or decades waiting for a chance to flip it for a profit, and pave it over and make a few bucks on parking in the meantime. This makes neighborhood less walkable, hotter, and contributes to flooding and pollution. So I say make them give something back. Or they can use that land for something better (even a multi-story car garage if this is really needed). And in the meantime, you are producing energy from a renewable source that can even be used to charge the vehicles parked there.

minimum parking requirements – just get rid of them!

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This Vice article makes a pretty strong case that minimum parking requirements should just be gotten rid of. There are so many complicated problems cities are grappling with. This one isn’t all that complicated. Seriously, just get rid of them. This isn’t banning parking, it is just letting the market decide. Free parking is not free, it is expensive and the cost is shared between car owners and non-car owners, but car owners have come to feel entitled to these subsidies and take them for granted. If you want to pay for a car and pay for parking, go ahead and do so. If you don’t, you can spend your money on other things.

March 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • One large sprawling city could be roughly the economic equivalent of several small high-density cities. This could potentially be good news for the planet if you choose in favor of the latter, and preserve the spaces in between as some combination of natural land and farm land.
  • The problems with free parking, and solutions to the problems, are well known. This could potentially be good news if anything were to be actually done about it. Self-parking cars could be really fantastic for cities.
  • The coal industry continues to collapse, and even the other fossil fuels are saying they are a bunch of whining losers. And yes, I consider this positive. I hope there aren’t too many old ladies whose pensions depend on coal at this point.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

self-parking cars

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Wired explains why cars that can park themselves are going to be so awesome, whether or not they are allowed to cruise the public streets and highways just yet.

Parking is a problem that engineers reckon self-driving cars can solve. Send the robot to find a space, after it drops you off at your destination. Summon it back later when you’re ready to leave.

The fatal accident in Arizona this week, in which an Uber autonomous test vehicle killed a pedestrian pushing a bike across the street, highlights some of the dangers of robo-driving at regular speeds. But low-speed movement, with scanners running on full, in a fixed area, is a much safer way to apply the tech. Building owners could have high resolution maps made of their parking lots, geo-fence them, and designate them as no-human zones, so cars can do their thing. It’ll be just like dropping your car at a valet stand, except you don’t have to dig around for singles. More cars will fit into each lot: Because doors don’t need to be opened, the vehicles can squeeze tightly together.

Being a tech magazine and not an urban planning magazine, they don’t realize the significance of the short phrase “More cars will fit into each lot”. Because most cars are parked most of the time, and they take up such enormous amounts of space, this could fundamentally change the land use in cities over time by opening up enormous amounts of space to other uses. And that is assuming people own the same number of cars they do now. As the incentive to own a private vehicle decreases, more of the fleet will be in motion at any given time and less will be parked, accelerating the virtuous cycle of reduced car demand even more. What kind of uses could be better than parking? Well, any – such as housing, commercial space, parks (the kind with soil and plants), natural areas, solar panels. Now might be a good time for cities and suburbs to start thinking about what they want to do with all this public real estate other than just letting it sit there generating heat, stormwater and pollution. As a start, installing separated bike lanes might not seem such a daunting problem, and just opening up some existing parking as temporary loading zones for deliveries, contractors, the elderly and disabled would be an enormous help in many cities.

what’s going on with parking in Australia

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This article summarizes the problems with free parking pretty well. Then it goes on to lament that Australian cities aren’t moving faster to implement the policies that planners and engineers know (or should know) would work.

The third major approach is characterised as responsive. This approach is based around pricing parking to account more accurately for actual demand, to incentivise use of active and sustainable modes of transport, and advocating generally for more efficient publicly-shared spaces (not exclusively used by cars) and area-based planning. It can be said to include Donald Shoup’s well-known reforms, as well as Paul Barter’s adaptive and walkable parking reforms…

Parking can directly compromise the adoption of active and sustainable modes of transport. Firstly, free and easily accessible parking contributes to induced driving and car ownership. For example, researchers from Oslo’s Institute of Transport Economics found that access to private household parking facilities triples the likelihood of car ownership, whereas increasing the distance between parking and destinations reduces car mode share. This means planners must disincentivize convenience (including factors of distance, time and pricing), and reduce its domination of urban space. Secondly, on-street parking can directly compete for limited road space, inhibiting the ability to reallocate street space to improved pedestrian or cycling infrastructure (such as bicycle lanes), or to create priority lanes for road-based public transport (such as buses or trams). Additionally, on-street parking spurs congestion from “cruising” for parking spaces, and movements in and out of spaces, and well as increasing the risk of “dooring” cyclists.

 

June 2017 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • The Onion shared this uncharacteristically unfunny observation: “MYTH: There is nothing mankind can do to prevent climate change. FACT: There is nothing mankind will do to prevent climate change”. It’s not funny because it’s probably true.
  • Water-related hazards including flood, drought, and disease have significant effects on economic growth.
  • There were 910 deaths from drug overdose in Philadelphia last year. Interestingly, I started writing a post thinking I might compare that to car accidents, and ended up concluding that the lack of a functioning health care system might be our #1 problem in the U.S.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • Tile is a sort of wireless keychain that can help you find your keys, wallet, and those other pesky things you are always misplacing (or your significant other is moving, but won’t admit it).
  • “Fleur de lawn” is a mix of perennial rye, hard fescue, micro clover, yarrow, Achillea millefolium, sweet alyssum, Lobularia maritima, baby blue eyes, Nemophila menziesi, English daisy, Bellis perennis, and O’Connor’s strawberry clover, Trifolium fragiferum.
  • Traditional car companies are actually leading the pack in self-driving car development, by some measures.

September 2016 in Review

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3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. and Russia may have blundered into a proxy war in Syria. And on a loosely related war-and-peace note, Curtis LeMay was a crazy bastard.
  • The ecological footprint situation is not looking too promising: “from 1993 to 2009…while the human population has increased by 23% and the world economy has grown 153%, the human footprint has increased by just 9%. Still, 75% the planet’s land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely intense, widespread and rapidly intensifying in places with high biodiversity.” Meanwhile, as of 2002 “we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green material) produced on Earth each year (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001). We consume 35% of the productivity of the oceanic shelf (Pauly and Christensen 1995), and we use 60% of freshwater run-off (Postel et al. 1996). The unprecedented escalation in both human population and consumption in the 20th century has resulted in environmental crises never before encountered in the history of humankind and the world (McNeill 2000). E. O. Wilson (2002) claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if every human consumed at the level of the average US inhabitant.” And finally, 30% of African elephants have been lost in the last 7 years.
  • Car accidents are the leading cause of death for children ages 5 to 24. The obsession with car seats may not be saving all that many lives, while keeping children out of cars as much as possible would be 100% guaranteed to save lives. And one thing that would be guaranteed to help us create more walkable neighborhoods and therefore save children’s lives: getting rid of minimum parking requirements in cities once and for all. And yet you don’t hear this debate being framed in moral terms.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • Monsanto is trying to help honeybees (which seems good) by monkeying with RNA (which seems a little frightening). Yes, biotech is coming.
  • Some people think teaching algebra to children may actually be bad. Writing still seems to be good.
  • There have been a number of attempts to identify and classify the basic types of literary plots.

minimum parking requirements

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Here’s a short, visually engaging video about the problem with minimum parking requirements. Apparently, this worked in Ottawa. I don’t want to be cynical, but I am not convinced the residents, politicians, and bureaucrats of my town would respond similarly to such a logical argument. I would love for everyone to prove me wrong.

parking benefit districts

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This article explains why eliminating minimum parking requirements is such a good idea, and suggests the idea of parking benefit districts as a way to get past misguided political and neighborhood opposition.

Eliminating existing requirements currently on the books in almost every city, namely that housing builders install lots of off-street parking spaces, is a key strategy for housing affordability. Most people wouldn’t guess it, but parking requirements (or “quotas”) raise the rent—and not just by a little, but by a lot. Here’s a full rundown of how they do so, but some major ways include:

  • Parking quotas raise the cost of building housing, especially inexpensive housing, and they suppress the number of apartments and houses that can fit on a lot—often by a quarter to a half.
  • Parking quotas block adaptive reuse of old buildings, such as vacant warehouses, to housing.
  • Parking quotas disperse housing by suppressing housing units per city block, which exacerbates sprawl and therefore distances traveled, which makes transit less practical and driving more common. And driving is expensive.

I’m all for it. The only concern I can think of is that neighborhoods with higher-cost parking (likely to be more desirable, richer, less diverse neighborhoods in most cities) would get greater benefits than other neighborhoods. So it seems like maybe a portion of it could stay in the neighborhood, and a portion could be shared across all neighborhoods in a city or even metro area that agree to the policy.

This is both a great example of progressive policy innovation, and a market-based way of aligning peoples’ economic incentives with the best policies. So it should be able to gain support across the political spectrum. But the article also talks about how bureaucrats at existing transit agencies can be an obstacle to this sort of policy (as they can to other good ideas like flexible bus routes). This is sad. In my ideal world, there would be a single agency in charge of getting people from point A to point B and using space in the most efficient, safest and healthiest ways, open to innovation and stakeholder input.