Here's a question for you: How many
parking spaces should a convent be
legally required to provide?
If you immediately answered "zero,"
that's probably because you have some
common sense. Parking at a convent shouldn't be a zoning question.
The
Mother Superior should be able to do whatever she wants. When
there's a
problem, the nuns will tell her.
In fact, however, that's not the
way it works in most American
cities. Convents usually have to have a minimum amount of
parking to
stay within the law. So do at least 265 other kinds of enterprises,
including golf courses, zoos, sex shops, slaughterhouses,
maternity
hospitals and taxi stands. All of them are on a list compiled
by
Donald Shoup, an economics professor at UCLA, in a new book
that is
undoubtedly the most comprehensive study of parking ever undertaken
in
this country.
Shoup tells us, among other things,
that the most common requirement for
convents is one space for every 10 nuns in residence. That
may seem a
little arbitrary, but some of the others are worse. Taxi stands,
for
example. I've never met anybody who drove to a taxi stand,
parked, and
then hailed a cab. The average cabbie doesn't need parking
either--he uses
one vehicle, and it's on the road during business hours. And
yet most
cities not only require parking spaces at cab stands but also
require a
fixed number: one space for each employee on the largest shift,
plus one
for each taxi. Some zoning laws demand extra spaces for
"visitors"--whoever they might be.
Where do rules like this come from?
In general, they come from a
document called "Parking Generation," which was
first published
decades ago by the Institute of Transportation Engineers and
has been
updated periodically since then. As Shoup puts it, local zoning
officials
who consult Parking Generation "act like frightened supplicants
bowing
before a powerful totem. ITE's stamp of authority relieves
planners from
the obligation to think for themselves because simple answers
are right
there in the book."
Unfortunately for convents, taxi
stands and countless other
enterprises, the answers in the ITE book make very little
sense. They tend
to be based on a percentage of maximum occupancy--that is,
the largest
number of cars ever likely to use a facility at a given moment.
The manual
recommends enough spaces to ensure that virtually every driver
will be
able to find one virtually all the time. And then cities go
ahead and
require those spaces as a matter of law.
Think how odd that is. If I were building a hotel, and I knew
that I
could fill 200 rooms on the busiest day of the year, but only
50 on an
average day, I wouldn't build 200 and leave three-quarters
of them empty
most nights. I wouldn't open a restaurant so big I couldn't
fill it up
except on Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve. Neither would
you. You'd
just accept it as a fact of life that once in a while, somebody
will have
to be turned away.
It's only when it comes to parking lots that planners and
local
governments insist on invoking a concept as foolish as maximum
capacity. And that's for a rather simple reason: When it comes
to
parking, nobody worries about losing money. Parking, after
all, is
free.
Or, rather, they think it's free. Of course,
it isn't. That's the idea
that Shoup sets forth in abundant detail in his book, which
he calls,
appropriately, "The High Cost of Free Parking."
If I were to tell you a
733-page book about parking is a great read, you probably
wouldn't believe
me. The fact is, however, that Mr. Shoup's opus not only is
lucid and
convincing but also witty, erudite and highly enjoyable. It
quotes Albert
Einstein and Robert Frost, Lewis Carroll and Graham Greene.
It is filled
with quirky little details about the way ordinary people go
about their
lives.
Most of all, however, it is filled with animosity toward free
parking. Shoup hates free parking--especially the off-street
parking
that developers and businesses are required to provide in
order to
operate. He says it degrades urban life in ways that hardly
anybody
bothers to think about. "Because we never see the money
we spend on
parking," he says, "it always seems someone else
is paying for it...
but by prescribing massive overdoses of parking, planners
are
poisoning the city."
How, exactly? Well, for one thing, parking lots eat up a huge
amount of
land that could be used for more productive purposes. Many
shopping malls
devote 60 percent of their surface land to parking spaces
and only 40
percent to the buildings. For the most part, that's not because
developers
insisted on all that parking. It's because zoning law forced
them to
create it. Either way, the result is oceans of asphalt and
an ugly
landscape as far as the eye can see.
All the land that's paved over and reserved for cars is land
that
can't be used for housing--affordable or any other kind. Because
parking requirements have taken so much land out of development,
they
force up the cost of building on whatever land remains. Rents
are higher
than they would otherwise need to be. What's more, the parking
requirements written into zoning law make smaller, moderately
priced
apartments difficult to produce anywhere.
Some cities in Southern California require residential developers
to
provide as many as 3.25 spaces per apartment. That often leaves
as
practical only two kinds of projects: a massive, sprawling
condo complex
that meets the requirement by paving over additional acres
of land, or a
boutique development that makes money by selling or renting
luxury units
at luxury prices. A densely built project filled with compact
two- and
three-bedroom apartments just doesn't cost out.
Meanwhile, in the central business districts of older cities,
the
amount of parking keeps increasing and the number of buildings
keeps
declining. Buffalo and Albuquerque devote more central-city
land to
parking lots than to all other uses combined. For anyone who
wants to come
downtown, a member of the Buffalo City Council lamented a
couple of years
ago, "there will be lots of places to park. There just
won't be a whole
lot to do here."
That's one of the simple ironies of this whole depressing
subject.
But there's an even bigger irony: The central city districts
that have
done really well in recent years aren't the ones that have
provided the
most parking; they're the ones that have provided the least.
Portland,
Oregon, instead of expanding its downtown parking capacity,
has spent the
past 30 years restricting it. There was less parking per capita
in
downtown Portland in the 1990s than there was in the 1970s.
And Portland,
as any visitor notices at once, has one of the most successful
downtowns
in America.
Los Angeles and San Francisco both opened new concert halls
in the
1990s. Los Angeles included a six-level garage for 2,188 cars,
built
at a cost of $110 million. San Francisco, on the other hand,
put in no
garage--for a total cost of nothing. After each concert in
L.A., the
patrons head straight for their cars, leaving the area around
the building
deserted. After concerts in San Francisco, people spill out
onto the local
streets, spending money in local bars, restaurants and bookstores.
Some of
them have to walk several blocks to their cars parked along
the curb, but
every block they walk adds extra life to the neighborhood.
How smart do cities have to be to learn the
lessons of all this?
Smarter than most of them have been so far, apparently. But
as cynical as
Shoup can sometimes sound, he has a few modest proposals for
dealing with
the disasters of parking policy.
First, he suggests, instead of making developers build off-street
parking, allow them to pay a fee in lieu of each space provided.
If
you make the fee less than the cost of building the space,
most of
them will accept that deal. Some 25 American cities are actually
doing
this. Most of them are small towns in California, or wealthy
suburbs in
the east, but there are some surprises. Orlando, Florida,
allows subsidies
in lieu of parking. So does Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The
developers
get to spend more money on the actual project. And the fees
go for public
improvement in the area.
Then, since the amount of parking will be reduced, allow commuters
to
take the value of a free parking space in the office lot and
trade it in
for cash. They can use it on public transportation, and if
they don't
spend it all, they can keep what's left over. Different versions
of this
experiment have been tried in Denver, Dallas, Salt Lake City
and San Jose.
Ultimately, though, as Shoup himself concedes, there's a more
basic
answer: Local governments have to rethink the whole idea of
parking.
Even here, there's something to report. Minneapolis and Chicago
are
now exempting the first 4,000 square feet of retail space
in a new
development from any parking requirements at all. That's a
tiny step, but
it's a step.
The asphalt jungle we have created will not disappear anytime
soon.
As Shoup says, "automobile dependency resembles addiction
to smoking, and
free parking is like free cigarettes...it will take decades
for cities to
recover from the damage." That's a sobering thought.
On the other hand, as
the Chinese would probably understand, sometimes even a journey
of a
thousand miles has to start with a single parking space.Ironically,
the
central city districts that have thrived in recent years aren't
the ones
that have provided the most parking; they are the ones that
have provided
the least.
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