Never Pick a Fight When You're Severely Outgunned

If you've read this blog for any period of time, you know that it has some enemies: Brueggman, Wendell Cox, Joel Kotkin, and Randall O'Toole. The bone to pick isn't in the disagreement with their opinions, it is rather with the inconsistencies of logic and rhetoric to the points their making. In my estimation, this is the tell tale sign of corruption, and in this case, that means corruption of thought. They represent other interests while pretending to represent the "common man." Only if that common man happens to be the Koch Brothers, et al. If you are a common man, are you worth multiple billions? Want to know how morons get loud microphones in a supposed meritocracy? Well, there is your answer.

With that said, Randall O'Toole decided to take up the case for free parking in response to a New York Times article entitled "Free Parking Comes at a Price" by Tyler Cowen, since they're such staunch free marketeers and libertarians. Oh wait, their is the first case of logical dissonance.

Then came the response to the response, and this is by the parking guru himself, Professor Donald Shoup, who came out with all guns a'blazin':

Before I examine your misunderstanding of what I have written, I will first summarize the three basic parking reforms I recommend in The High Cost of Free Parking: (1) remove off-street parking requirements, (2) charge market prices for on-street parking to achieve about an 85-percent occupancy rate for curb spaces, and (3) return the resulting revenue to pay for public improvements in the metered neighborhoods.

I will quote ten extracts from your post, and comment on each of them.

1. “Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not.” (ed. note: They do love to quote Los Angeles as the densest urban area don't they? A statistic itself that is meaningless because of where they choose to draw the boundary for where to take that measure. Is it dense at the block level? At the neighborhood level? At the City level? Not really. They go with the metropolitan area. Then they'll turn around and use LA as a model for success when that rhetoric suits their nefarious purpose.

Even Houston, which does not have zoning, has minimum parking requirements, and they resemble the parking requirements in almost every other city in the United States. Houston requires 1.25 parking spaces for each efficiency apartment in an apartment house, for example, and 1.333 parking spaces for each one-bedroom apartment. Here is the link to the minimum parking requirements in Houston’s municipal code: http://tiny.cc/iaj35

Does the Antiplanner, who is “dedicated to the sunset of government planning,” really believe that government planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for every economic activity at every site in every city, no matter how much the required parking spaces may cost and no matter how little drivers may be willing to pay to use them? Does the Antiplanner really support Houston’s minimum parking requirement of 1.333 spaces for each one-bedroom apartment because he believes that Houston’s government planners can accurately predict the “need” for parking at every apartment to one-thousandth of a parking space?

Read the rest of his response here.

PARKING REFORM: Intro

Draft Part 2 of who knows how many...



INTRODUCTION
In ten years, what will the City of Dallas look like? How about in twenty? Fifty? One hundred? The answer in the near-term is far easier to imagine than far into the future. That unpredictability ought to give us some insight into the process of zoning and coding for the City.

The United Nations defined sustainability as taking care of the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs as well. In many ways, our building and zoning codes should represent a similar logic in order to rectify the mistakes of previous generations to be more accommodating for our needs and more adaptable for the future. They must achieve the goals set forth by the City yet be adaptable to prevent the institutionalization of what might have been one generation’s preferences instilling an inertia at the expense of another’s.

In a period of economic and general transition for people and their cities, now is the time to revisit codes cemented in place for so long and mold the underlying “genetic” codes of cities for the functional urban form we desire. Geographer Richard Florida similarly refers to the present version of these periods of varying degree of trauma as the Great Reset.

Urban Genetics, the underlying code and resultant physical form

Howard Bloom, popular science author and neurobiologist, calls these recessionary lulls the growing pains of shedding one form of living, that which is no longer useful for another new way of being, existing, and often, a yet to be determined one. According to Bloom and countless other urban theorists, our cities are the physical manifestation of our economies, meaning our phenotype, which with an understanding of genetics is directly connected to our genotype, or underlying genetic code. To get the cities we want, we must alter the genetic code of cities.

Our current challenge is unpredictability: what if we rewire the City’s code incorrectly? The worst thing to do is the obvious, to stick with the status quo or the comfortable. If Bloom is to be believed, we do not yet know what the future city will be because it is yet to emerge from the competition to replace the failing version of the existing. However, it is equally bad is to code a potentially incorrect prediction. We need to allow for flexibility and the determination of potential new urban phenotypes to battle it out and determine the optimal direction for our City. Lesson: Don't code to specifics.

PARKING REFORM: Executive Summary

(This is a snippet of the overall paper that checks in somewhere around 6,000 words and 11 pages. Putting it out there for crowd-sourced review and another chance to look at it in something other than Word, to give myself fresh eyes, so to speak.)



Part 1
Executive summary

A common solution to parking problems affecting American cities is often to convert to a market-based pricing approach. While this is appropriate in some locations, a strictly market-based approach works when curb parking is underpriced and overcrowded, however when there is plentiful off-street parking, the problem is the very code demanding excessive spaces.

As Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA writes in his paper on cruising, "Cities can therefore eliminate cruising either by charging market prices for curb parking or by requiring enough off-street spaces to reduce the price of off-street parking to zero. The price of curb parking is one of the few policy variables that cities control directly, but almost all American cities have chosen the wrong policy: requiring plentiful off-street parking rather than charge fair market prices for scarce curb parking."

However, rather than only one problem existing in Dallas, it is not that simple. Simply switching all parking to market is not enough. Expecting different results by following past policies or principles is the definition of folly. This paper intends to point out the multitude of negative outcomes for the city produced by the current parking ordinances as well as a suggested road map for guiding revision.

There are two general parking scenarios emerging in Dallas. Using Jan Gehl’s terminology these are the Invaded City or the Abandoned City. An Invaded area is one where demand to be there remains high enough where visitors often search endlessly for free parking and crowd residential neighborhood streets. In Dallas, some of these areas include West Village, Lower Greenville, and Bishop Arts.

Abandoned places are areas where walking and public life has become almost completely nonexistent due to excessive parking. Downtown Dallas was first invaded by automobiles in the 1950s, only to eventually be abandoned due to reactionary measures. Today, much of downtown remains abandoned although Main Street area seems to be on its way back towards invaded. Neither of which is ideal or acceptable.

If thought about thoroughly and amended strategically and creatively, a new parking code will solve both problems. Ultimately, this report suggests the differentiation of regional centers and local centers from the rest of the development code and make special provisions to these overlays for parking and transportation directives associated with the goals and principles of the area as outlined in the Comprehensive Plan.

Parking Debate

Via Houston Tomorrow, I found this article on parking:

First, remember that the traffic patterns flowing to and from every property are unique, thus the exact parking ‘needs’ for each property cannot be accurately established by any ’standard’ ratio. We already stratify properties into 69 different categories - even if we further broke them down into hundreds of categories there would still be more exceptions than properties that were adequately served by the rule. So as we move forward in search of the best solution for parking in the city, we have to keep in mind that the government does not know how much parking any particular property really needs.

But there is someone who knows exactly how much parking each property in the city requires - the owner of each property!

While I agree in principle, I think we need to temper the teabaggin' tempest, to which I respond:

What you're basically advocating is shared-parking as a free-market response because establishing parking minimums creates a "dumb" or non-reactive scenario where supply always greatly exceeds demand for parking, hence parking becomes either unduly cheap or completely free.

This is already getting written into PDDs as a defense against mandated oversupply of parking, but what we must also pay attention to is inertia caused by the transportation system. You can say the property owner or the market always knows the right amount of parking for their use, but that market is created by the government and the type of transportation alotted, ie big, wide roads = need for lots of parking. The "market" may still want big parking lots, because "why not?"

Saying the government doesn't play a role is the wrong way to approach this. As parking requirements are an element of zoning (or at least coding in Houston's case), the City has a role in protecting the asset of neighboring properties. If you put a 500-space parking lot next to me, you drop my property value.

Government can steer the inertia in a positive direction by reducing demand for driving and car use by setting parking maximums (based on proximity to alternative modes of transportation perhaps) allowing increased density and walkability (in that surplusses of parking are public health hazard in a number of ways) and allowing market-based pricing for what parking is available so that if you want to park close, you have to pay for it. If not, residents of Texas cities could use the exercise.

No longer subsidizing parking is necessary for allowing Houston and Dallas to adapt to their new "bones" or transportation frameworks that now includes rail and will increasingly lean on a broader hierarchy of distance appropriate transpo, ie bike, streetcar, etc.

Parking in Dallas

Eye Test: Picture 1, picture 2? Picture 1, picture 2?




Danish Park 'n Ride. All transportation needs its infrastructure. Some are less corrosive than others.

I've written extensively on the general nature of parking (here and here), but rarely have looked at it locally (mostly because the effects are felt the same here as anywhere else) beyond documenting the inordinate amount of both surface parking lots and garages in downtown Dallas.

Over at D, Wick Allison takes on the antiquated parking standards designed to make Downtowns compete with suburbs. Of course, we know you can't do sprawl as well as the suburbs, so instead our downtowns sit punch drunk and confused.

On the other hand, I take issue with the idea that the market can sort it out on its own. While that is true over the long-term, the question is, is it worthwhile to fumble around until the market can find the right answer when cities, neighborhoods, communities, families, taxpayers, and property owners are all suffering from the extraneous effects of too much parking?

The City is looking at a complete revision of its parking codes, but from what I have been told, nobody really knows where or how to begin.

My comments here (edited because I can actually see what I'm writing in my own prompt):

First of all, that 85,000 number is way too low. Dallas has 35,000 surface parking spaces in downtown alone, all of which (or 99% at least) are empty nights and weekends (and too many people falsely think for downtown retail we need more parking - those people don’t know what they’re talking about and are instead spouting conventional wisdom). Furthermore, Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA once calculated there are 4 parking spaces for every car owned in this country. You can quickly see that 85K needs to expand factorially.

What parking minimums establish is a scenario where supply always vastly exceeds demand. Parking by nature is fluid where that demand creates concerted pressure only at certain times of the day, week, or year. We have yet to arrive at a solution that responds to this nature. The only truly successful one is to reduce demand for parking by building walkable urban places where trips by bike, foot, transit or combo of the above reduce the need for parking. We have to rewrite the urban genotype to have the physical phenotype emerge in a way that is valuable, rewarding, sustainable, cost-efficient, and resilient.

The more important question is, how do we appropriately punish a place that has too much parking?

Large seas of parking are disruptive to the necessary interconnected nature of the urban fabric. It is costly to build parking, sometimes as much as 20% of a project's development cost, but for some businesses that is a drop in the bucket. Furthermore, they trigger the very purpose of zoning in the first place, to prevent the erosion of property values of neighboring properties. In the property rights debate, people seem to conveniently ignore the fact that your property is only as strong as what is around you - the very reason for the emergence of NIMBYism and LULUs.

I have worked with numerous hospitals around the country on their urban plans once they realized their land-banking strategies of buying blocks, clearing houses for surface parking, in the event they need to expand buildings/services has created unsafe (perceived or otherwise matters not) situations and a corrosive effect on neighborhoods. I worked on one project (and won a Daniel Burnham AIA award for it) in Springfield, IL where the hospitals literally destroyed the historic neighborhood and local residents wouldn’t put any $ or effort into maintaining their property knowing they would be bought out and house razed next. The result was downward momentum, an entropic cycle of decay and disinvestment. One look no further than Baylor downtown for a local example.

In a way the “market” is slowly, but surely solving the issue as hospitals realize they are at a competitive disadvantage without walkable, safe, vital urban neighborhoods around them. But, is it worth the market fumbling around and tearing apart the bonds of communities? I recommend the book Root Shock with regard to these effects by Mindy Thompson Fullilove.

Is any place really worth spending time in where parking is cheap and easy? Let’s start w/ that as a precept and work from there.

One simple solution is to set up zones, or overlays as Chris Leinberger suggested, where we set parking max’s rather than min’s. Off the top of my head, I think I recall hearing Professor Shoup say that LA’s parking standards (of which Dallas’s are similar) mandate something like 1000% (might even have been 1000x) more parking than San Francisco’s (numbers could be off, but point remains).

I’ve also recommended to someone involved that we ought to put the otherwise useless Comp Plan to work in establishing zones or at least categorizing a hierarchy of proposed density zones to guide the parking standards.

Prof. Shoup is an advocate of Demand-based parking. I think in the long-term we need to get to something similar, however I am not sure it is the most effective solution for Dallas's current situation. In most places around the City, there is no demand and where/when there is, parking is supplied privately.

Places that do have temporary demand load that effect the neighborhoods and business, such as Greenville and Bishop Arts, suffer because they are essentially neighborhood centers that draw from a City-wide base, suggesting that the majority of our neighborhoods are vastly under-served by walkable, clustered neighborhood centers such as these. Supply of walkable places is far less than demand, and the parking code (and zoning in general) is one of the primary reasons. If we had more of these, serving residents within a certain distance, parking would be far less of a problem.

The other thing to identify is where does city generated parking revenue go? Does it go into the general fund and get lost? These revenues should be directed towards localized public improvements. However, all the revenue is sucked up by private entities. So that solution isn't a short-term fix.

Land is so invaluable currently (yet overpriced), that even in a downtown, it is a market-oriented solution to have surface parking lots, which then further undermine land value. Our roads and transportation system, paid for by taxpayers create that market. That is the deeper issue.

I ask the question, since the market can't/won't push out surface lot owners from downtown, do we have the leadership to drive it out?

Guest Post: Charlotte Parking Wars

Here in Dallas, we have had a similar problem. Not with a greenway, but parking for DART stations taking up spaces in a shopping center and remaining all day, while the car's owner works in downtown.

A friend writes:

This was on our local news last night. I thought you might enjoy it. We built a greenway(+1 for CLT) in a place where it's mainly accessible by car(-1 for CLT) so people began parking overflow in a shopping plaza. The shopping plaza patrons are mad b/c they can't park in the closest spot to WalMart. The solution being proposed is constructing a new parking lot, just for the greenway(-1 for CLT). By my calculations building this new greenway is going to have a net negative effect on Charlotte. Which to me contradicts the original reason for building the greenway?

Here is the link to the news story:

4-Mile Creek Greenway is an outdoor lovers paradise for hikers, bikers, dog walkers, and people who love to run and have fun. But, the problem is parking at the entrance is limited and many find it convenient to park across Bevington Place at the Shops at Piper Glen which is limited itself. "Sometimes it's just like somebody took all the cars and just stirred them up, it's crazy and can be a nightmare, especially on the weekends." said frequent shopper Nancy Brimberry. Brenda Schuler adds, "it's too compact it's too small and and there's so many accidents in here."

Here is where I think it is important to remember the old Donald Shoup study that there are four surface parking spaces built in this country for every car. Furthermore, the Piper Glen area where this parking war is taking place is very suburban. Recall that the quote above says it is for hikers, bikers, dog walkers, joggers, etc. All of these people are DRIVING to the green space.

In a drive-to-everywhere world, this will ALWAYS be a problem.