Many readers of this blog know that government subsidizes driving- not just through road spending, but also through land use regulations that make walking and transit use inconvenient and dangerous.  Gregory Shill, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, has written an excellent new paper that goes even further.

Of course, Shill discusses anti-pedestrian regulations such as density limits and minimum parking requirements.  But he also discusses government practices that make automobile use far more dangerous and polluting than it has to be.  For example, environmental regulations focus on tailpipe emissions, but ignore environmental harm caused by roadbuilding and the automobile manufacturing process.  Vehicle safety regulations make cars safer, but American crashworthiness regulations do not consider the safety of pedestrians in automobile/pedestrian crashes.   Speeding laws allow very high speeds and are rarely enforced.

If you don’t want to read the 100-page article, a more detailed discussion is at Streetsblog.

The post A great new paper on how government fights walking appeared first on Market Urbanism.

The post Three Policies for Making Driverless Cars Work for Cities appeared first on Market Urbanism.

It’s an understatement to say that zoning is a dry subject. But in a new video for the Institute for Humane Studies, Josh Oldham and Professor Sanford Ikeda (a regular contributor to this blog) manage to breath new life into this subject, accessibly explaining how zoning has transformed America’s cities. From housing affordability to mobility to economic and racial segregation to the Jacobs-Moses battle, they hit all the key notes in this succinct new video. If you need a go-to explainer video for the curious new urbanists, this is the one. Enjoy!

The post New Video: How Zoning Laws Are Holding Back America’s Cities appeared first on Market Urbanism.

One way of examining the issue is to find out whether seniors in fact drive more than everyone else.  Happily, the 2016 American Community Survey comes to our rescue here.  In Manhattan where I live, there are just over 129,000 senior-headed households with no car, and just over 36,000 with a vehicle available.  So contrary to car-lobby conventional wisdom, only about 22 percent of senior-headed households have a car.  How does that compare with other age groups?  On the one hand, only about 25,000 out of 200,000, or 12 percent, of millennial-headed households (that is, households headed by someone under 35) have a vehicle.  But among Manhattan households headed by persons between 35 and 64, about 28 percent (just over 109,000 out of just over 386,000)  have a vehicle- more than senior-headed households, to my surprise.

So I rate the “Old People Need Cars” claim as Mostly False: most seniors here in Manhattan don’t have cars, even though they are more likely to own cars than millenials.  On the other hand, the latter fact suggests that seniors are rarely physically incapable of using cars.

The post The “Old People Need Cars” Argument- Myth or Fact? appeared first on Market Urbanism.

The Center for Market Urbanism released its first policy report in partnership with Abundant Housing Los Angeles.  The paper, written by The Center for Market Urbanism’s Nolan Gray and Emily Hamilton, recommends eliminating minimum parking requirements as part of DTLA 2040, a process which will update both the Central City and Central City North community plans.

The draft concept for the DTLA 2040 plan calls for eliminating parking requirements for the Central City and Central City North neighborhoods.  This would build upon the success of Los Angeles’ adaptive reuse, allowing new developments to facilitate affordable, dense, walkable neighborhoods.

The paper discusses the history of parking requirements, burdens and damage caused by current parking requirements, and benefits of reforms:

Combined with demand-based pricing for on-street parking, the elimination of parking requirements will allow for downtown neighborhoods that are more walkable while also reducing congestion for drivers.

Read the Center for Market Urbanism/Abundant Housing LA Policy Paper here

The Center for Market Urbanism is a 501c3 organization dedicated to expanding choice, affordability, and prosperity in cities through smart reforms to U.S. land-use regulation.

Abundant Housing LA is 501c3 organization which is committed to advocating for more housing. We want lower rents and a more sustainable and prosperous region, where everyone has more choices of where to live and how to pursue their dreams. LA is one of the most diverse, vibrant cities in America, and we are fighting to keep it that way for current Angelenos, our children, and those who come here to pursue their dreams.

The post New Report by CMU and AHLA: The Case for Ending Parking Requirements in Downtown Los Angeles appeared first on Market Urbanism.

You wake up thirty minutes before your alarm, jerking up after having a nightmare about a car crash. Reluctantly, you clean up, eat breakfast, and hop into your car. Work is only three mile away—easy biking distance—and there are 15 or so people in your neighborhood who work where you work—enough for a commuter bus make sense. But alas, the city required the developer to provide two parking spaces for your townhouse and the cost is hidden somewhere in your mortgage, so why not use it?

After spending thirty minutes traveling three miles on the freeway—at least we live in the Golden Age of Podcasting, right?—you arrive at your suburban office park and pull into the garage. The parking is “free,” meaning that your pay has already been docked to cover the cost of the space, so why not use it?

Your girlfriend calls shortly after lunch, asking if you want to go on a double dinner date with her friends to a new BBQ place downtown. You agree to join. You’re starving—you left lunch at home and it’s just too time consuming to drive to a decent place—so you hustle downtown. You arrive first, only to find out that there is only on-street parking. Downtown is, after all, exempt from parking requirements, and since street parking is “free,” it’s impossible to find a space during dinner time.

You call your dinner partners—each of them is driving separately from work—and suggest another BBQ place downtown that offers subsidized garage parking. This place is a little more expensive, since the restaurateur has to cover some of the cost of offering parking, but you’re all hungry and don’t want to deal with the headache of cruising for street parking. Eventually you all meet and enjoy a nice meal, speculating about how traffic and parking has gotten to be so bad in your city. Later that night, sitting in traffic on the way home, you write a review of the BBQ place on Yelp: “Delicious food. Friendly service. No free parking. 2 stars”

—

Minimum parking requirements ultimately hold back even otherwise walkable neighborhoods. As has been extensively documented in the academic literature, minimum parking requirements drive up the cost of housing, drive down the density of cities, and generally lead to a lot of wasted land and capital. To put it bluntly, they make urban life next to impossible wherever they are binding, or above whatever the market would naturally provide.

Some planners and policymakers seem, aware of this issue, have carved out areas of town where there are no minimum parking requirements. Take the case of Houston: while the city generally has very relaxed land-use regulation, it maintains conventional, restrictive minimum parking requirements in vast swaths of the city. But to make urbanism viable in at least some part of the city, policymakers have removed all parking requirements from the city’s downtown. There should be way less parking than outside of downtown, right?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Like nearly all U.S. downtowns, Houston has acres and acres of surface parking and parking garages in its downtown. Then surely, since minimum parking requirements aren’t present, all this parking must be a reflection of market demand, right? Not exactly.

Consider the wholly conventional story I told at the beginning of this post. In Houston, parking is required at nearly every house, townhouse, apartment, office building, and factory. Had our hero convinced his girlfriend and her friends to go to a BBQ joint outside of downtown, there would have been “free” parking there too. At every stage of the average Houstonian’s day, they are provided with what looks like free parking. Of course, the “free” parking at home is bundled into a mortgage or rent. The “free” parking at work is skimmed off of your salary. The “free” parking at restaurants is bundled into the price of your meal.

This uniquely American arrangement has unfortunate results: Since you are paying for parking—one of the most substantial costs associated with urban car-ownership— almost no matter what, you may as well use it. With parking costs off of the table, you only have to consider the cost of owning and operating a car, which is fairly competitive with transit fares, especially given the added speed and comfort of a private car.

In this way, minimum parking requirements help to make car dependence the norm, regardless of special regulatory carve outs for certain areas of town. Are you really going to go through the trouble of figuring out and riding transit on the odd day that you visit downtown? Unless your city’s transit is amazing—and if you’re in the U.S., it probably isn’t—that’s pretty unlikely. You are going to drive there, and if the business doesn’t have parking, you will either pass it over or complain about it. Hence the acres of surface parking and blocks of parking garages in otherwise liberalized downtowns.

This is why we can say non-required downtown parking isn’t exactly the result of “the market.” If I am a restaurateur and I want overwhelming car-dependent Houstonians to visit, if I am a business owner and I want to attract talent from all over town, or if I am a developer and I want my residential tower to appeal to most prospective residents, the fact remains the same: I basically have to provide parking. Non-market forces—minimum parking requirements everywhere else in the town—have inflated the demand for parking, building up the expectation in the minds of residents of unlimited, unpriced, immediately available parking wherever they go.

Cities, as they exist today, are shaped by an entangled mess of decades of conflicting federal, state, and local policies. As urbanists start untangling and scrapping these distortionary policies and liberalizing our cities, they should avoid giving up halfway and conceding to baloney about the status quo reflecting “revealed preferences.” Surely, there is some degree of demand for downtown parking. But until we eliminate minimum parking requirements in the vast majority of the city, there is really no way of knowing. Anyone who wants to allow great urban neighborhoods and great downtowns to emerge and survive should press for on the citywide elimination of minimum parking requirements.

Note: I don’t mean to pick on Houston. In fact, I really like Houston, which is why I talk about it. Plus, they have great urbanists there who are working hard on these issues and might actually ease up on citywide parking requirements!

The post How Suburban Parking Requirements Hold Back Downtown appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Marcos Paulo Schlickmann, a transportation specialist and collaborator at Caos Planejado, our Brazilian partner website, recently interviewed Professor Donald Shoup, who answered questions about private and public parking issues.

Private parking

Marcos Paulo Schlickmann: What is your opinion on legal parking minimums? 

Donald Shoup: In The High Cost of Free Parking, which the American Planning Association published in 2005, I argued that minimum parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion, pollute the air, encourage sprawl, increase housing costs, degrade urban design, prevent walkability, damage the economy, and penalize poor people. Since then, to my knowledge, no member of the planning profession has argued that parking requirements do not cause these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown they do cause these harmful effects. Parking requirements in zoning ordinances are poisoning our cities with too much parking. Minimum parking requirements are a fertility drug for cars.

MPS: What would happen if we were to abandon parking minimums?

DS: Reform is difficult because parking requirements don’t exist without a reason. If on-street parking is free, removing off-street parking requirements will overcrowd the on-street parking and everyone will complain. Therefore, to distill 800 pages of The High Cost of Free Parking into three bullet points, I recommend three parking reforms that can improve cities, the economy, and the environment:

• Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers.
• Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages. Prices will balance the demand and supply for on-street parking spaces.
• Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can make demand-based prices for on-street parking politically popular.

Each of these three policies supports the other two. Spending the meter revenue to improve neighborhood public services can create the necessary political support to charge the right prices for curb parking. If cities charge the right prices for curb parking to produce one or two open spaces on every block, no one can say there is a shortage of on-street parking. If there is no shortage of on-street parking, cities can remove the off-street parking requirements. Finally, removing off-street parking requirements will increase the demand for on-street parking, which will increase the revenue to pay for public services.

MPS: Is abundant and free parking at destinations an incentive for driving and a disincentive for using other modes?

DS: Consider the three main elements of city planning. First, divide the city into separate zones (housing here, jobs there, shopping somewhere else) to create travel between the zones. Second, limit density to spread everything apart and further increase travel. Third, require ample off-street parking to spread everything even farther apart and make cars the easiest and cheapest way to travel. Cities have unwisely adopted these three car-friendly policies. Separated land uses, low density, and ample free parking create drivable cities but prevent walkable neighborhoods. Although city planners did not intend to enrich the automobile and oil industries, they have shaped our cities to suit our cars.

Parking requirements in zoning ordinances are particularly ill advised because they directly subsidize cars. We drive to one place to do one thing, and then to another place to do another thing, and then finally drive a long way back home, parking free almost everywhere.

MPS: What is your opinion on park-and-ride programs?

DS: I think park-and-ride schemes are another way to subsidize cars. It would be better to devote the land around transit hubs to denser development. If parking is provided, it should be on the periphery of the development, not adjacent to the transit stop, so commuters walk past all the stores and restaurants on their way to and from their cars. And drivers should pay the market price for parking, so transit riders who don’t drive to the transit stations don’t have to subsidize the transit riders who do park at the stations.

MPS: Many employers supply a parking space for free for their employees. Why might this not be a good policy and what might be a suitable alternative?

DS: Employer-paid parking is an invitation to drive to work alone. It subsidizes many commuters who would have driven to work anyway, but it also persuades more commuters to drive to work alone instead of carpooling, riding public transit, biking, or walking to work.  A survey of 5,000 commuters and their employers in downtown Los Angeles showed that, on average, employer-paid parking stimulated a 34 percent increase in the number of cars driven to work.

In 1992, California enacted legislation that directly addresses the problems caused by employer-paid parking. California requires employers who provide a parking subsidy to employees to offer employees the option to choose a cash allowance to an employee equivalent to the parking subsidy that the employer would otherwise pay to provide the employee with a parking space.

The employer must offer an employee the option to take cash in lieu of a parking subsidy only if the employer makes an explicit cash payment to subsidize the employee’s parking. Therefore, the employer saves the cash paid for the parking if the employee takes the cash allowance instead. The employer’s avoided parking subsidy directly funds, dollar for dollar, the employee’s cash allowance, so there is no net cost for the employer when an employee forgoes the parking and takes the cash. The employer must offer the cash allowance only to each employee who is offered a parking subsidy. And each employee’s cash allowance is equal to the parking subsidy offered to that employee, so if some employees are offered smaller parking subsidies than other employees, their required cash allowance is smaller. Thus, the law is tightly written to avoid imposing a net cost on employers.

Giving commuters a choice between a parking subsidy and its cash value reveals that free parking has a cost—the foregone cash. Commuters who forego the cash are, in effect, spending it on parking. Employers can continue to offer free parking, but the new option to take cash instead of parking will increase the share of commuters who walk, bike, or ride the bus to work.

Case studies of firms that have complied with California’s cash-out law found that for every 100 commuters offered the cash option, 13 solo drivers shifted to another travel mode. Of these 13 former solo drivers, nine joined carpools, three began to ride public transit, and one began to walk or bicycle to work. Overall, the share of commuters who drove to work alone fell from 76 percent before the cash offer to 63 percent afterward. These mode shifts reduced vehicle miles traveled and vehicle emissions for commuting to the eight firms by 12 percent. This reduction in vehicle travel is equivalent to removing from the road one of every eight cars driven to work at the case-study firms. The larger shift to carpooling than to transit shows that parking cash out can work even in places with limited public transit.

More information about parking cash out is available at this link:  http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/ParkingCashOut.pdf

Public parking

MPS: Why shouldn’t public/on-street parking be free and how should it be priced?

DS: Charging too much or too little for on-street parking can cause a lot of harm. If the price is too high and many curb spaces are vacant, adjacent businesses will lose customers, employees will lose jobs, and cities will lose tax revenue. If the price is too low and no curb spaces are vacant, drivers searching for a place to park will congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air. Consequently, the right price for curb parking is the lowest price that can keep a few spaces open to allow convenient access. This is the Goldilocks principle of parking prices—not too high, not too low, but just right.

With conventional parking meters, the price stays the same throughout the day but the occupancy rate varies. With dynamic parking meters, the prices vary but the occupancy rate stays the same—one or two spaces are open. Goldilocks prices will give all drivers great parking karma, and will guarantee front-door access to all businesses.

MPS: Please tell us a little bit about SFpark and smart parking systems.

DS: In 2011, San Francisco adopted SFpark, a pricing program that aims to solve the problems created by charging too much or too little for curb parking. In seven pilot zones across the city, with a total of 7,000 curb spaces, San Francisco installed sensors that report the occupancy of curb space on every block and parking meters that charge variable prices according to location and time of day. The meters were also the first in San Francisco to accept payment by credit cards, and this convenience provided good publicity for SFpark.

SFpark adjusts parking prices every six weeks in response to the average parking occupancy during the previous six weeks. If the occupancy rate on a block is higher than 80 percent during a time period (such as from noon to 3 pm), the hourly price of parking increases by 25 cents. If the occupancy rate is below 60 percent, the hourly price of parking decreases by 25 cents. Consider the resulting prices of curb parking on a weekday at Fisherman’s Wharf, a popular tourist and retail destination, after almost two years of price adjustments.

Before SFpark began in August 2011, the price for a space was $3 an hour at all times. With SFpark, each block can have different prices during three periods of the day—before noon, from noon to 3 pm, and after 3 pm. By May 2012, most prices had decreased in the morning hours. Some prices increased between noon and 3 pm—the busiest time of day—and most prices declined after 3 pm. Prices changed every six weeks, never by more than 25 cents per hour.

SFpark based these price adjustments purely on observed occupancy. City planners cannot reliably predict the right price for parking on every block at every time of day, but they can use a simple trial-and-error process to adjust prices in response to past occupancy rates. The only way to tell whether the price is right is to look at the results. Here is the link to a short article that explains how Sfpark has worked.

MPS: How can we have a low-cost version of SFpark/smart parking systems for cities with low smartphones/credit card penetration such as in Brazil?

DS: The technology used for demand-based pricing in San Francisco is getting both cheaper and more sophisticated. Other cities will therefore find it easier to mount similar programs. Berkeley and Oakland in California have begun to charge demand-based parking prices with simple technology. Boston and Washington, D. C. have also begun to charge demand-based parking prices with newer and cheaper technology.

The results in Los Angeles and San Francisco show that cities can make huge improvements even without frequently adjusting prices in response to demand. Simply extending the operating hours for existing meters into the evening in places with high demand rather than turning the meters off at 6 p.m. is a demand-based strategy, and it does not require any new investment. The meters are already there, so they will reduce parking and traffic congestion and bring in new revenue without any new cost.

In downtown San Francisco, the people who beg for a living are out until midnight but the parking meters quit work at 6 p.m. Why not run the meters during the times of high parking demand in the evening and use some of the money to help the homeless? Similarly, cities can operate their meters during times of high demand on Sundays. If cities carry the argument for demand-based pricing to its logical conclusion, they can extend the hours of meter operation for as long as needed to manage demand, and thus provide large benefits where meters already exist. If cities continue to put their meters to sleep at 6 p.m. and on Sunday, they have learned little about demand-based prices for curb parking.

Parking was for many years the most stagnant industry outside North Korea. Now, however, nothing in parking is the last word for long. The parking industry is taking advantage of everything Silicon Valley has to offer, and the humble parking meter has improved rapidly in recent years. Meters now accept payment by credit cards and cell phones. They can charge different prices by time of day or day of the week, depending on demand. Parking officials can remotely reconfigure the price schedule in any neighborhood, and the new rates are sent wirelessly to all the meters in the neighborhood. They can be multilingual and guide the users through transactions, displaying messages such as “Please insert your card other side up.”

Parking occupancy sensors have also evolved rapidly. The first generation of sensors used in San Francisco and Los Angeles were embedded in the pavement and had to be dug up or abandoned when the batteries needed replacement, but new forms of occupancy sensing have developed. Some single space meters have occupancy sensors embedded in the meter heads, which lower the power requirements and simplify the battery replacement. Parking enforcement vehicles equipped with cameras to record license plate numbers can also count the number of parked cars. Fixed-mount cameras can also analyze parking occupancy.

The technology of metering and occupancy sensing is becoming cheaper and better so fast that programs like SFpark and LA Express Park will be much easier for other cities to adopt. We may soon consider coin-in-the-slot parking meters as primitive as the Wright brothers’ first airplane at Kitty Hawk.

MPS: Do you know any city that redirects part of the parking revenues to transit, public services, etc.? And do you know how much parking fees can be expected to contribute to pay the costs of those services?

DS: Most cities use their parking revenues to fund public services. San Francisco uses all of its meter revenue to fund public transit.  To create local support for user-paid parking in commercial areas, some cities have created Parking Benefit Districts that spend the meter revenue for public services in the metered areas. These cities offer each district a package that includes both priced parking and better public services. Everyone who lives, works, visits, or owns property in a Parking Benefit District can see their meter money at work, and the package is much more popular than the meters alone. Localizing the parking revenue will generate local support for the parking meters. Here is the link to a short article that explains the benefits of spending the parking meter revenue to finance neighborhood public services on the metered blocks.

MPS: Some experts agree that a good public parking policy might replace or be as good as congestion charging. What is your opinion on this?

DS: The average car is parked 95 percent of the time, so if most parking remains free, most drivers will pay congestion tolls only during the brief time they are traveling between two free parking spaces.  Parking charges complement congestion tolls, and one study showed that parking fees and congestion tolls combined will make transportation more efficient than either one alone can (The High Cost of Free Parking, Chapter 7). When parking fees and congestion tolls are introduced together, both the optimal parking fee and the optimal congestion toll are lower than when either one is introduced alone.  But the study also found that parking fees alone produced 96 percent of the benefit that parking fees and congestion tolls together would produce, while congestion tolls alone produced only 72 percent of this benefit.  If a city had to choose either parking fees or congestion tolls, parking fees can produce higher benefits.

Here is the link to a series of short articles that explain all the parking reforms I recommend: http://www.shoupdogg.com/reforms/

MPS: How will autonomous cars impact public and private parking?

DS: Autonomous cars will be most valuable where parking is expensive.  All of parking reforms I recommend will shift the cost of parking to drivers and they will therefore accelerate the adoption of autonomous cars. So, if cities want to encourage autonomous cars, they should adopt the parking reforms that shift the cost of parking to drivers, where it rightly belongs.

The post Interview with Parking Guru Donald Shoup appeared first on Market Urbanism.

In new research on parking policy in the Journal of Economic Geography, Jan Brueckner and Sofia Franco argue that residential developers should be required to provide more off-street parking in places where street parking contributes to traffic congestion. They argue that because traffic congestion is a negative externality, off-street parking requirements improve urban living. But street parking only contributes to traffic congestion when policymakers underprice it. Rather than addressing the externality of a government-created problem with new regulations, cities should price their street parking appropriately.

Brueckner and Franco’s argument relies on the assumption that off-street parking will be under-provided without government intervention. They argue that because drivers circle their destination looking for free or cheap street parking, minimum parking requirements make people better off. The authors are correct in arguing that street parking contributes to the problem of traffic congestions. Parking guru Donald Shoup estimates that drivers who are circling around looking for parking spots make up 30 percent of downtown traffic. Cruising for parking imposes an external cost on others by causing everyone to waste time in slow traffic.

While, Brueckner and Franco actually cite Shoup’s work on street parking and traffic congestion, they ignore his insight that when parking is priced appropriately, cities can eliminate this externality. The incentive to cruise for parking originates with public policy when city officials provide street parking at below-market prices. When parking prices are high enough, drivers will leave some parking availability on each block, eliminating the cruising problem without the need for minimum parking requirements.

San Francisco’s SFPark program provides an example of successful implementation of variable pricing based on demand. SFPark has the goal of maintaining one to two available spots on each block so that drivers don’t contribute to traffic congestion while they’re looking for parking.

When street parking is priced high enough that drivers don’t drive around looking for it, developers have the incentive to provide the amount of parking that their customers are willing to pay for. They are in the best position to determine if land values make it worthwhile to charge for this pricing, or if they would make more money by including free parking as an amenity for their customers.

Developers are not responsible for creating a traffic congestion externality. Rather, city policymakers create this externality when they provide free or underpriced street parking. They cause drivers to waste time and gas sitting in traffic. Parking is not a public good that needs to be publicly-provided; it’s both rivalrous and excludable.

In their efforts to propose policies that reduce traffic externalities, Brueckner and Franco ignore that off-street parking that cities require comes with its own negative externalities. Nothing does more to hurt the pedestrian experience of a neighborhood than vast swaths of parking lots, and lots contribute to urban heat islands and flooding. Shoup shows that in many cases minimum parking requirements exacerbate these problems by requiring more parking than developers would choose to provide. They lead to wasted land dedicated to parking that could be put to more efficient use as building space if that were legal. When policymakers price street parking appropriately, developers have appropriate incentives to provide the amount of parking that their customers are willing to pay for, rather than more or less as regulations require.

Rather than addressing the government failure of underpriced street parking with new distortionary regulations, city policymakers should fix the problem they have created by pricing street parking appropriately. Policymakers could decide to stop causing an externality of traffic congestion by using demand-based pricing. When they attempt to fix government-created problems with regulation, policymakers instead create new inefficiencies.

The post Government-Created Parking Externalities appeared first on Market Urbanism.