Austin Contrarian

Using asphalt more efficiently

Most mornings on my way into work, I stop at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on South Lamar, a new coffee shop between Riverside and Barton Springs, one door down from Bridges on the Park.  (The building used to be a soccer store.)

If you are looking for an example of how code mandates too much parking, here you go.

According to Travis County tax records, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf occupies an 8,861 sf building.   City code requires restaurants to have 1 parking spot for every 100 sf for the first 2,500 sf, and 1 spot for every 75 sf over that.   This means that CBTL, had it built on a suburban greenfield, would have needed 30 parking spots to comply with code. 

It has 13.

And -- surprise! -- thirteen is enough most of the time.   Most mornings there is at least one  empty spot to the side of the shop.   Some mornings there is not, but even then I manage to get my coffee.   I park on Lee Barton Drive.  Or I park in the Taco Bell parking lot next door -- which is no big deal since Taco Bell lets CBTL use its parking lot before 10 a.m.  I doubt CBTL loses any business because it is "short" 17 parking spots.

I'm not sure how CBTL got away with fewer than code requires.  Perhaps it got a variance.  It sits on a narrow lot and could not have added another 17 spots without tearing down the building.  Perhaps the number of parking spots were grandfathered.

Regardless, CBTL illustrates how our code requires too much parking.

It illustrates another point, too.  Businesses want their customers to have a place to park.  Sometimes they might prefer to provide another 2,000 sf of asphalt.  Sometimes, though, they might prefer to find space elsewhere that is not being used.  The asphalt on Lee Barton Drive, rather than lying  empty, is now being used productively.  Taco Bell's asphalt, rather than lying empty before lunch time, is now being used more productively.  CBTL avoided pouring a bunch of concrete that would have lain empty 23 out of every 24 hours.   Each square foot of asphalt provides more value now than before.  And that's all because CBTL was allowed to figure out an informal solution to its "shortage" of parking.  

If there, why not everywhere?

No

I agree with Ryan Avent that this WSJ piece makes a bizarre argument against congestion pricing:

By requiring car drivers to pay a fee to drive in a city at peak hours, congestion pricing reduces traffic and raises money that can be used to support public transit—both worthy goals.

Yet congestion pricing has dubious environmental value. Traffic jams, if they're managed well, can actually be good for the environment. They maintain a level of frustration that turns drivers into subway riders or pedestrians.

The author contends that by improving traffic flow, congestion pricing induces more driving, which in turn increases environmental damage:  "If reducing it merely makes life easier for those who drive, then the improved traffic flow can actually increase the environmental damage done by cars, by raising overall traffic volume, encouraging sprawl and long car commutes."

Ryan makes the right arguments.  I think Owen's got the economics flat wrong, which I'll elaborate in another entry.  He's wrong because congestion pricing does not induce more traffic and because congestion pricing encourages more compact cities rather than sprawl.

But Owen's also got the environmental impact wrong.  He ignores that traffic jams impose a cost -- a significant cost -- not imposed by free-flow traffic.  That's health.  Traffic jams concentrate particulate emissions in one location.  High levels of particulate emissions are bad for people.  They cause all kinds of health problems -- asthma and other respiratory illness, obviously -- but also higher risks of infant mortality.

If you need evidence, read this spanking new paper (h/t Matthew Kahn).  It compares infant mortality rates near toll plazas to infant mortality rates after the toll plazas were replaced with an EZ pass system.  They found that the EZ pass system "reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 10.8% and 11.8% respectively."  Because toll plazas are notoriously congested and highways with an EZ pass system are not, this is a good proxy for the health effects of traffic bottlenecks.

Environmentalism is not only about carbon emissions.  The wellspring of the movement was Rachel Carson's crusade against environmental contaminants that (allegedly) made people sick.  Any calculation of environmental cost that omits the costs of making people sick is not just a bad cost-benefit analysis, it's bad environmentalism.

Break

I have been on break the last three weeks because I needed one.  I will post new stuff this weekend.