CC image from Joe Shlabotnik

A few items on parking, and zoning requirements to provide it.

A case study of absurd and pernicious parking rules – from Grist (as part of a series)

Alan Durning documents many of the absurdities of zoning code requirements for off-street parking, focusing his own experience in Seattle. Durning does not own a car and wanted to renovate his existing attached garage into extra space in his house, but such alterations would not comply with the zoning code. Worse, the curb cut for his one-car garage meant one less on-street space.

A parking minimum of two (or more) is even worse public policy. Like a one-space minimum, a two-car minimum sometimes yields no net spaces: Many builders planning two-car garages install double-wide driveways, which block two on-street spaces. Worse, as I’ll argue in subsequent articles, off-street mandates tend to glut the market for parking spaces and trigger a chain of cause and effect that ensures massive subsidies to driving. Whatever the number, furthermore, required off-street spaces dramatically push up the minimum cost of building a house. Curb cuts, driveways, and parking spaces cost thousands of dollars. The requirements also result in more pavement getting poured, armoring our watersheds and increasing the quantity of polluted runoff reaching our streams.

In demonstrating the opportunity costs of parking, Durning compiles a laundry list of potential uses for his garage, other than automobile storage.

Ugly by law – from the Sightline Institute (also part of a series)

In the second installment of the series, Alyse Nelson documents the visual impacts of parking and parking requirements. The series also includes several examples of buildings erected prior to on-site parking requirements and those built after, demonstrating the impact of such demanding requirements.

Before parking minimums, buildings in Cascadia could be built to the property line because parking wasn’t a constraint. Now, developers must contend with building heights, setbacks for buildings, and parking regulations—all of which make it harder to develop affordable housing projects. This is especially true at medium densities and lower building heights because it’s harder to make parking garages or underground parking pencil for these smaller projects.

The economic argument is important. The space required to meet the requirements is both expensive to build and requires space to be used for parking, rather than the demanded use. Both of these factors serve to drive up the cost of urban development, but also make infill development difficult and more expensive. Meeting parking requirements in a greenfield site is not the greatest challenge, but meeting suburban-style requirements on an infill development site surrounded by existing buildings on all sides is difficult.

The parking garage, in practice – from Old Urbanist (also part of a series)

Charlie Gardner highlights several examples of garage parking used in practice around the world, providing a set of case studies for how developers deal with the spatial challenges of providing parking.

Outside of Toronto, a residential development features a fairly dense cluster of townhouses built atop of a common-use underground parking garage. Another typology is the ‘Texas Doughnut,’ featuring multi-family development wrapped around a shared-use above-ground parking garage:

This is of course the notorious “Texas Doughnut,” a mid-rise residential liner wrapped around interior structured parking.  The product of on-site parking requirements and building codes which permit cheaper wood framing for lower-rise buildings, these structures have proliferated throughout the Sunbelt, though they can be found, with less frequency, outside that geographic range. To the extent these cities are experiencing urbanization near their centers (hello, Dallas), this is the form that urbanism frequently takes, for better or worse.

Despite the prominence of the parking facilities and the transportation mode choices that suggests, note that many residents are required to walk non-trivial distances to reach their vehicles. In some cases, the walk may actually exceed three minutes for some residents.

In debates about parking in urban areas, pricing and availability tend to garner the majority of the attention, with proximity only a secondary concern (although many complaints about these first two issues implicitly involve proximity). Similarly, attempts to reduce reliance on the car through parking reform have tended to focus on eliminating or reducing parking maximums or establishing a market pricing mechanism for parking spaces, rather than considering the location of the vehicle itself.

It should be common sense, though, that in an otherwise reasonably walkable area with some transit options, the further the car is from one’s residence, the less use that car is likely to receive, since transportation is above all a matter of immediate convenience.

Washington Street itself offers only 22 spaces, in comparison to the over 1,000 public garage spaces in close proximity, plus many hundreds more in public and private surface lots. Although these spaces only supply a tiny fraction of the total, by their conspicuousness they play an outsized role, inducing many motorists to circle the block several times in hopes of winning the parking lottery, rather than simply proceeding to one of the garages.