“Follow the money…”

The National Building Museum‘s newest exhibition is open for business – a brief history of parking structures.  The exhibit has a great collection of archival photos and other items, looking at the evolution of parking structures through time – from elaborate, full-service garages to self-parking decks to LEED certified garages that attempt to make parking a car sustainable in some fashion.  Likewise, the exhibit delves into the social role of the parking structure – with a clip of prominent movie scenes from parking garages (meeting with Deep Throat, getting cool, and getting lost, amongst others) as well as the raw aesthetics of these structures.

What’s missing, however, is any discussion of why parking is necessary.

Philip Kennicott, the Washington Post‘s architecture critic, has a review of the exhibition in this Sunday’s paper.  He notes the fact that the need to park is taken at face value, without question:

The Building Museum’s fascinating and comprehensive “House of Cars” exhibition takes parking for granted, and from that assumption tries to cover the subject dispassionately. It proves that parking structures needn’t be ugly, that they were once more routinely beautiful and integrated into the urban fabric, and that even today they can be architecturally daring if real architects are allowed to explore the poetry of the structure.

The interesting juxtaposition, however, was the exhibit that assumes the need for parking opened just as the story of DC USA’s woefully underutilized parking garage was in the news.

Kennicott also notes another missing piece of the discussion – price.  Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising.  Given that the exhibit starts from the position that demand is there for parking no matter what, a discussion of supply, demand, and price would be a bit much.  The very idea that we might not need that parking after all never crosses the minds of those designing these structures, at least not as they’re presented to a patron walking through the galleries.  Kennicott notes the disconnect:

But the future isn’t all bright for the National Parking Association. Away from the exhibition hall, with its free-flowing red wine and mini-burgers, participants gathered to hear lawyer and lobbyist Vincent Petraro describe how he helped keep at bay a New York proposal to institute “congestion pricing” in the gridlocked south end of Manhattan. This new user fee would charge drivers entering the zone from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Proponents hope it will clear up the streets, clean up the air and generate revenue. Petraro worries that it will hurt business. He cites London, which instituted a similar plan in 2003.

“Yeah it worked, if you want to create a ghost town,” Petraro says of a city that at last check was anything but a ghost town.

Congestion pricing, says Prof. Donald Shoup of UCLA, could hurt the bottom line for parking lot owners. The power of that bottom line was obvious throughout the Parking Show of Shows, where even bright signs — environmentally sustainable lighting and other improvements to design — were predicated on their cost savings. But Shoup, who studies the economics of parking, is interested in a different, more civic-oriented bottom line. He argues that parking is yet one more element of the basic American infrastructure that hasn’t been subjected to the basic rules of the market. Cities all too often under-price their parking meters, which explains why drivers tie up traffic cruising for a cheap space. And for decades cities have required developers to include parking as part of new construction, which hides the real cost — economic and environmental — of parking.

Perhaps there was a more literal message to draw from the Bob Woodward’s meeting with Deep Throat in that parking garage – “follow the money.”

Parking is simply a terminal for auto transportation.  All modes of transport have three basic elements – vehicles (airplanes, trains, cars), rights of way (the sky, tracks, roads), and terminals (airports, train stations, parking spaces).  Even a narrow focus solely on parking spaces can be misleading, to say nothing about simply writing off all other modes of transport.  Transportation, by nature, is multi-modal.  The reality of our urban environments is more complex than a pretty parking garage.

Which brings us to Columbia Heights, and yet another parking boondoggle. But this may also be the future of parking: Less is more. Most of the larger discussion of parking, including the dialogue at the National Parking Association and to a somewhat disturbing extent in the National Building Museum exhibition, is predicated on the idea that parking is a necessity. That it can be improved, but not eliminated. Even the act of studying parking as an evolving architectural form all too often seems to legitimize that form. But the emptiness of that lot in Columbia Heights, and the nightmare images on display at the “House of Cars” show, suggest that we may not be nearly as addicted to parking as we once believed.

Indeed.  However, despite the exhibit’s conceptual shortcomings, it’s definitely worth a visit.  As narrow as the focus may be, it’s still a fascinating subject – and the National Building Museum’s exhibit design, per usual, does not disappoint.

Image from ITDP-Europe

The owner of Cake Love is on the record wanting more parking for businesses on U Street.  Many folks commenting on his blog (myself included) are trying to convince him otherwise.  Warren followed up on his comments on August 3:

I understand and really like the density argument: more people walking will bring success for street level retail shops, these are my core customers, and traffic robs a neighborhood of potential. A lot of the customers that shop in Mid-city are walkers, but not everyone, and this city doesn’t have the density of Manhattan everywhere. Do we really need 1,500 new parking spots, probably not, but couldn’t the Mid-city merchants use more? I appreciate the feedback, but I invite people to ask other businesses if they could drop their driving customers as quickly as the mood suggests in the comments submitted. Drivers matter, too, for a urban environment to thrive.

The thing is, drivers do matter.  But urbanism is about playing to your core strengths and advantages, and no matter how you slice it, parking is not going to be the core advantage of an urban area.

Twin Cities Streets for People had a great post linking to a post from the Commercial District Advisor on parking and retail in urban environments, explaining the issues facing urban retail areas.

The other night my colleague and I were convening a merchant roundtable and started by distributing a questionnaire that asked the merchants to describe their typical customer. Things like where they come from, whey they shop in the district, what problems they see with the district…etc. Knowing your customer and responding to their needs and concerns is the foundation of a successful business. Unfortunately, many of the merchants in the room couldn’t answer some of these basic questions. This simple questionnaire pointed to a fundamental problem within the district – merchants cannot pinpoint the reasons why customers are choosing to spend their dollars elsewhere. Without this critical information, there is little that merchants can do to address the problems and improve the shopping experience for their customers.

What I found interesting about that meeting, but not too unusual, was the emphasis that merchants placed on the shortage of parking as the primary reason their businesses are suffering. The mood in the room was tense as merchants lashed out in frustration at the parking situation. Here’s the rub – two follow up roundtables with residents and district employees found that parking was in fact a MINOR concern. Their real concerns were related to the trash, litter, unappealing storefronts and ‘grimy’ interiors of stores…these were the real reasons that many hesitated to shop in the district. The disconnect between what merchants thought was the problem and what the customers actually said was the problem was amazing – and hopefully eye-opening for many of the merchants.

Everyone wants to help small businesses.  The thing is that what the businesses want isn’t exactly what’s best for either them or the city they inhabit.  We could all use a better understanding of exactly how urban transportation and retail markets work, particularly retailers.

Image from Paul Keleher

This month’s edition of the Hill Rag has the usual ‘Numbers’ column from the folks at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.  This month’s subject is the decisions made by the DC Council in order to close DC”s recent budget gap.  The DCFPI folks make the case that the DC Council relied on regressive taxes rather than more progressive measures in order to close the budget gap, and they argue that the poor are being asked to shoulder too much of the burden.

My point here isn’t to judge the actions of the Council.  Nor am I trying to argue the substance of DCFPI’s position that taxation ought to have a more progressive structure.  My issue is with DCFPI’s characterization of what’s progressive and what’s not, and the implications for urbanism of those assumptions.

A PDF of the Hill Rag article is available online here.  In the print version, the article is accompanied by a table showing the ‘regressive’ actions the Council took, compared against ‘progressive’ actions the Council did not take.

Most of the regressive actions are, indeed, regressive taxes.  Sales taxes, for example, are considered regressive because the burden of the tax is greater on those with a lesser ability to pay.   Increasing the sales tax and the gas tax would both be regressive actions, in the strict, abstract sense of the term.

However, DCFPI also characterizes an increase in the sales tax on parking as a progressive action (last line item under the blue column).   In a strict sense, this is simply wrong – any sort of sales tax is regressive.  Amongst the pool of people that are purchasing parking, an increase in the sales tax rate on that parking would be regressive, with the burden falling disproportionately on those with less ability to pay.  Yet they label this as a progressive action.

At the same time, an increase in the gas tax is labeled as regressive.  In a strict sense, this is correct.  However, it’s curious to see the two main transportation items – both regressive taxes – framed in these opposing ways.

If I had to guess as to why DCFPI distorted the academic definitions in this way, I would guess that they see gasoline as a necessity, while off-street parking is a luxury (hence taxing a luxury at a higher rate is progressive).  I can see the logic in this approach, but it’s not a very useful distinction for transportation policy.   At the same time, the logic that determines parking spaces are a luxury for the rich could also conclude that driving (and hence gasoline consumption) are a luxury for the rich, as well – particularly since we’re dealing with a gas tax applied only to an urban jurisdiction with fairly low vehicle ownership rates and good public transit usage.

From a transportation perspective, I’d argue that both taxes are good ideas (again, in the abstract – ignoring the larger decisions of the need to raise revenue) within an urban area.  Parking ought to be priced via a market mechanism, but in general it should be more expensive than it usually is.  Gasoline, on the other hand, is definitely too cheap from my perspective.  Raising the gas tax, both at the local and federal level, should be a no-brainer.

Either way, a more holistic understand of parking and transportation policy would be useful to interject into larger issues of taxation and budgeting.  It’s disappointing to see the DCFPI deal with these concepts on such a basic level, ignoring the larger implications of the taxes at hand – beyond just ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ taxation.