parking minimums

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Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Parking requirements had been copied from other cities, distorted by misleading evidence, and implemented without examination, where they had molded a half century of architecture literally built around (or, more often, surrounded by) parking minimums. The American modernist Louis Sullivan said form follows function; Don Shoup said form follows parking requirements. “Free parking has become the arbiter of urban form, and cars have replaced people as zoning’s real density concern,” he wrote. In 2019, fourteen years after Shoup’s book came out, ITE president Bruce Belmore renounced the idea of mandatory parking minimums in a preface to the organization’s monthly journal. “Parking minimums make some broad assumptions, including the idea that all homeowners can afford a car, want to pay for a parking stall, and that the car is their preferred mode of transportation,” the engineers’ president wrote.

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Shoup wanted San Francisco to create a parking market that would raise prices high enough to ensure free spaces on every block, as opposed to the familiar first-come-first-served system that leads to that lurching style of driving known as “cruising” for a spot—“parking foreplay,” per Shoup—as well as countless altercations. The second was an end to the parking-minimum laws that required new parking spots in every new or renovated building. “Half the profession thought I was crazy and the other thought I was dangerous,” he told me, a little dramatically. * * * — The idea of parking minimums, proposed in the twenties, rolled out in the thirties, and expanded nationwide in the forties and fifties, was obviously enticing: cities could force the private sector to fix the parking problem.

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Every city planner in America has a reference book of parking formulas that dictate, with the confidence, specificity, and evidence of a medieval alchemist, exactly how much parking must accompany a given land use. Their exactitude is mathematical. But the parking minimums that govern development in every American city, Shoup discovered, were not very good. The idea was bad and the execution was worse. Instead, he wrote in High Cost, parking minimums displayed “a breathtaking combination of extreme precision and statistical insignificance.” A typically prolix and arcane document governed construction in the city of Detroit, which requires one off-street parking space for every “tumbling apparatus” at a tumbling center; employee at a youth hostel; pool table in a pool hall; two employees in an emergency shelter; three beds in a fraternity; four beds in a nursing home; four seats in a theater; five beds in a boarding school; and six seats in a stadium, church, chapel, mosque, synagogue, or temple; and one off-street parking space per: 100 square feet in an armory, substance abuse facility, assembly hall, beauty shop, or golf course clubhouse; 150 square feet in a courthouse or customs office; 160 square feet in a police station; 200 square feet in a food stamp distribution center, bank, laundromat, or medical marijuana caregiver center 200 square feet of water in a swimming pool (plus one per six seats of spectator seating) 400 square feet in a library, museum, ice-skating rink, or aquarium.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Relative to what came after, it was actually rather efficient, and did provide relatively cheap housing, something now extraordinarily rare in Los Angeles, where the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is around $2,100 per month. In 1965, the city raised the parking requirement again, to 1.5 spaces per apartment, bringing to an end much of the dingbat boom. Many apartments in the city are now required to have two parking spaces, not one. It is not just apartments. Office buildings come with parking minimums, as do retail stores. There are parking minimums for almost anything, in fact. It is not the free market that results in American buildings being surrounded by oceans of tarmac for storing vehicles, it’s the law. Read Los Angeles’s planning documents and you get a sense of how this works now. It is exhausting. The West Hollywood municipal code dictates that, for example, “senior housing” (nursing homes) must have 0.5 spaces for every resident, as well as one space for guests for every 10 residents.

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Fears about global warming in particular are helping to press people to think about how to do without driving as much, something that Shoup finds strange, since climate change is surely less visible to people than air pollution and congestion. Across America, more and more cities are beginning to replace parking minimum rules with parking maximum rules—something most British cities did in the early 2000s. Even California has removed parking minimums near public transit stops. But the trouble, in much of the world, is what Shoup and other economists call “path dependency.” Or in other words, the decisions to prioritize driving were made long ago, and now American cities are so sprawling it is hard to pack them back in again.

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In lots of places, on both sides of the Atlantic, that rhetoric is at least partially being backed by action. Cities across America, even including ones like Houston and Los Angeles, are beginning to roll back parking minimums, and to reduce the amount of suburban “single family” homes being built in favor of denser, more city-focused development near transport. Minneapolis has built thousands of new apartments since it eliminated parking minimums in 2018. In Europe, biking has taken off in a spectacular fashion, and not just in Paris. Even my hometown, Birmingham, one of the most automobile-obsessed cities in Europe, is beginning to change.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But before we beat that city up too badly, let’s turn our accusing gaze back to the Green Metropolis itself, where the New York City Housing Authority still maintains parking minimums for its publicly assisted housing stock. These minimums have caused the city to abandon plans to add much-needed street-edge buildings to several of its 1960s “tower in the park” projects. Currently, one such project, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, hangs in the balance. It would replace surface parking lots with housing, shops, schools, and gardens, but it is being held up by parking minimums—despite being directly adjacent to two stops of the 2, 3, 4, and 5 subway lines straight to Manhattan.

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From February through July, average peak use never rises above three hundred cars, and at no time does occupancy top 47 percent.21 This was an expensive lesson, a $100,000/month I told you so for the District and its taxpayers—now in its fifth year—as parking revenues fail to cover debt service on the garage. It was just the kick in the pants the city needed to finally rewrite its fifty-year-old regulations to eliminate parking minimums for new shops, offices, and apartments near Metro stations.22 They have decided to leave commercial parking provision to the free market, as Donald Shoup recommends. Even smaller suburban cities are beginning to find that their parking requirements are routinely too high. A useful experiment was conducted in progressive Palo Alto, California.

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Similarly, a thriving restaurant that wants to add sidewalk dining—something every city now says it wants—can’t do so without increasing its parking supply, often an impossibility.27 The only path to providing more parking in urban areas is typically to replace surface parking lots with multistory decks, at tremendous cost. That money is increasingly difficult to come by. This parking-induced commercial stasis is only half the story. The other half is the great burden that parking minimums place on affordability, especially for housing, and most especially in those communities that most need it. Developers in San Francisco estimate that the city’s one-space-per-unit requirement adds 20 percent to the cost of affordable housing. Shoup calculates that eliminating this requirement would allow 24 percent more San Franciscans to buy homes.

Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy (Bicycle) by Elly Blue

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autism spectrum disorder, big-box store, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, food desert, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, job automation, Loma Prieta earthquake, medical residency, oil shale / tar sands, parking minimums, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, science of happiness, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Car owners pay about a quarter of that cost directly; the rest is a subsidy which we all pay indirectly. Litman, T., “Transportation Cost and Benefit Analysis II – Parking Costs,” VTPI. 2012 97 Mieszkowski, K., “We Paved Paradise,” Salon. October 1, 2007 In England parking minimums been removed entirely, thanks to bipartisan efforts—conservatives like deregulation, and liberals like the multitude of public benefits. Portland, Oregon removed parking minimums in the 1980s in areas with frequent transit service, with good success (it has very recently reinstituted them after neighbors of a planned new development feared that on-street parking in that area, which is free, would become hard to find). 98 Gotschi, T., and Mills, K., “Active Transportation For America,” Rails to Trails Conservancy. 2008 99 Pucher, Handy, and Dill, “Infrastructure, programs, and policies to increase bicycling: An international review,” Preventive Medicine. online September 16, 2009 100 Lee and March (2010), Recognising the Economic Role of Bikes: Sharing Parking in Lygon Street, Carlton, Australian Planner Findings are per square meter of parking on retail heavy Lygon Street; 99% of parking space was for cars, 1% for bikes. 101 Ligeti, Eva “Bike Lanes, On Street Parking, and Business” Clean Air Partnership. 2009 102 Clifton, K “Business Cycles: Catering to the Bicycling Market,” OTREC 2012 103 Buck, Darren, “Bikeshare Equity Framework,” (bikepedantic.wordpress.com) November 29, 2012 104 .

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Shoup estimated the entire parking subsidy of free parking to be at least $127 billion in 2002—an amount that would put a nice dent in the cash-strapped transportation budget.96 We are quite literally paying people to drive. It’s not just taxpayers footing the bill, but businesses and housing developers. This is not always because they see it as a good investment. In fact, it’s prohibitive—the average cost to build structured parking in the U.S. is $15,000 per space. But most cities have had parking minimum laws on the books since the 1950s, requiring any new housing, workplaces, and commercial developments to provide a certain number of parking spaces whether or not their residents, employees, or customers drive. There is always some pushback against these requirements, partly as a matter of space and subsidy, and the huge costs involved.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Erick Trickey, “How Minneapolis Freed Itself from the Stranglehold of Single-Family Homes,” Politico, July 11, 2019, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/11/housing-crisis-single-family-homes-policy-227265/; Todd Gill, “Fayetteville Eliminates Minimum Parking Requirements,” Fayetteville (AR) Flyer, October 7, 2015, https://www.fayettevilleflyer.com/2015/10/07/fayetteville-eliminates-minimum-parking-requirements/; Angie Schmitt, “Hartford Eliminates Parking Minimums Citywide,” Streetsblog, December 13, 2017, https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/13/hartford-eliminates-parking-minimums-citywide/. 3. Certain experienced planners may prefer to skip this section as needlessly restating what they already know; certain lay readers may prefer to skip it for its unavoidable wonkiness. Both should resist the urge, as this constitutes the less-exciting-yet-necessary vegetables of the book!

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

If all the parking spaces in downtown Los Angeles were spread out in a single surface lot, they would cover 81 percent of the central business district’s land area (versus 31 percent in San Francisco)—the highest parking coverage ratio on earth. Free parking, as Shoup puts it, “is a fertility drug for cars.” He and his followers, the self-styled “Shoupistas,” believe that many urban congestion problems stem from civically mandated parking minimums. An enterprising mayor who wanted to permanently revolutionize the city’s form, and force a huge spike in transit ridership, would have to enact one simple policy change: limiting, or eliminating, off-street parking requirements in new developments. It would also be a good way to get tossed out of office.

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Saving our cities from the automobile is going to involve welcoming transit-oriented development, infill in old central city neighborhoods, and multifamily buildings and apartments in what were once low-density areas. It will mean brandishing the stick of congestion and more expensive parking to discourage drivers—a simple way to start would be to heed the “Shoupistas,” the followers of University of California professor Donald Shoup, and turn parking minimums into maximums in new developments—while dangling the carrot of safe, comfortable, and frequent transit to draw new riders. For cities, it will involve building high-quality bicycle lanes, pedestrian-oriented urban spaces, and the best public transport money can buy—without cutting back on the frequency or quality of bus service essential to keep rapid transit working.

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Prior to the 1990s, Zurich had parking regulations comparable to those in most other European and American cities. For every square foot of new construction, whether residential or commercial, some minimum amount of parking would likewise be required. In 1989, though, the city changed from a parking minimum to a parking maximum. And the maximums weren’t very maximal. For every 1,333 square feet authorized by a Zurich construction permit, developers were allowed to supply only a single parking space. In the United States, a comparable permit would require at least three spaces for the same amount of square footage.