Austin Contrarian: Parking

August 11, 2010

Setting a bad example

The City occasionally gets land-use planning right. Downtown's Great Streets program is a success. The City has reduced minimum parking requirements downtown; the minimum is now below market demand, which is a good thing.

But elsewhere, the City is still getting things wrong. It over-regulates land uses. It sets aside too much land for low-density, single-family housing. It imposes wasteful water-retention and drainage requirements. It mandates too much parking.

The City also sets bad examples when it has the chance to set good examples. The new Twin Oaks library in the Bouldin Creek neighborhood is a case in point.

The library is supposed to epitomize eco-friendly design. I know this because it has solar panels and (obnoxiously) reserves prominent parking spaces for hybrid vehicles.

These are mere flourishes, though, gestures to environmental correctness. In reality, the library epitomizes car-centric, suburban design. It's most prominent feature is not the patch of solar panels, but a giant parking lot:

This parking lot has 51 parking spaces and spans roughly three quarters of the lot's width. That's a whole bunch of parking for a little neighborhood library.

Now, it's a really nice parking lot. It has an attractive central island and sidewalk and planters. These expensive features were only necessary, though, because the parking lot is so big. Had it cut the parking lot in half, the city could have saved money and space.

I don't know how the planners settled on 51 parking spots. I am deeply skeptical that the parking lot will ever be even half full, though. Opposite the library is a small commercial cluster consisting of a barber shop, mini-mart, Thai restaurant, coffee shop, clothing boutique and architect's studio. They have fewer than 3o parking spots combined.

Even if 51 spots were "necessary," though, there was no need to build them all on-site. The library is surrounded by residential streets with plenty of room for on-street parking. Curb parking here:

is just as handy as a striped parking spot, and shaded to boot.

That's the suburban mentality: build on-site parking that will sit mostly empty most of the time; "protect" neighboring residents from the insult of having a strange car parked across the street.

All that extra asphalt causes unnecessary run-off, which is bad for the environment. All that extra asphalt ran up the construction cost. Perhaps most importantly, though, all that extra parking wasted a lot of land. Had the city shrunk the parking lot by half, it could have sold off the other half for redevelopment as a small neighborhood store. Land is expensive in this part of town. The cost of that wasted land was the lot's biggest cost.

Update: I don't have a problem with the design of the building itself. As one commenter noted, the building was placed in the front corner of the lot, which is better than relegating it to the rear. The building's architecture is fine -- it has a modern, Austin flair, and fits the neighborhood. There is a solid iron fence and sort of moat separating the library from the sidewalk on Mary, which is unfortunate. I assume the moat was dictated by topography so I'm giving the city a pass on that.

Posted at 05:32 PM in Austin, Austin development, Parking | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)

February 22, 2010

Parking bombs

The Overhead Wire on the destruction wrought by downtown parking. The Houston photo is stunning.

I don't believe, though, that the interstate highways share equal blame with parking for the destruction of American downtowns.

I suppose I should be careful with my definition here: I mean "Given the construction of a large, nationwide network of interstate highways, the decision to route them through downtowns did not have a material impact on the health of downtowns."

The typical large American downtown before the 1930s or so developed around a rail, harbor or port. Manufacturing clumped together near the transportation hub to save the hefty cost of moving heavy things. Service and government workers -- the only inhabitants of today's downtowns -- located downtown because that's where their customers were.

This model was doomed once the country decided to build a national network of high-speed highways. It was just a matter of time before manufacturing decamped to cheaper, less congested greenfields. It didn't matter whether the highways ran around, through or under downtown -- manufacturers weren't going to pay a premium to be down the street from a rail terminal they no longer used. Downtowns were in for a radical restructuring.

Now downtowns are occupied mainly by service and government workers. More to the point, they are occupied by service and government workers who purport to service the entire metropolitan area. A downtown Houston law firm with a large oil-and-gas practice doesn't market itself just to downtown energy firms; it sells itself to firms in the Energy Corridor, too, even though they are a 10-mile drive down the Katy Freeway. It is easy to run a metropolitan-wide law practice from downtown Houston if it is easy to get to downtown Houston from any point in the metropolis. A rich network of highways (or of light rail or commuter rail lines -- nothing in this argument depends on the mode of trip) makes the central location more attractive, not less.

Note that this has nothing to do with the impact of highways on housing patterns. Highways of course have facilitated sprawl. By lowering the cost (in time) of commuting from land on the periphery of the metropolis, they make that land more attractive for residential development. But this isn't the dynamic that causes businesses to disperse. Service firms like to cluster near similar businesses, near their customers, and near their suppliers. They will do all three if they can. When they can't do all three, they must choose. The trade offs are more acute when a downtown has poor access to the rest of the metropolitan area. In the long run, downtown Austin will suffer for its inaccessibility.

Don't take any of this as an unqualified endorsement of slashing interstate highways through downtowns. They hurt property values in their immediate vicinity. They wreck the neighborhoods that are plowed under, barricaded or sundered to make room for them. But American downtowns would have experienced wrenching change even if highways hadn't been run right through them. And American downtowns would be more desolate than they are today without the highways.

Parking is another story . . . .

Posted at 11:52 PM in Blogs, Cars, trains and buses, National, Parking, Sprawl | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)

October 22, 2009

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?

Posted at 03:23 PM in Austin, Austin development, Parking, Urbanism, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

September 14, 2009

Parking math

One of the things I enjoyed about The High Cost of Free Parking was the way Shoup explains the practical effects of parking requirements. For example, requiring one parking space per X square feet is equivalent to setting a cap on building coverage.

Take Austin. For most retail, it requires one parking spot per 250 sf. According to Shoup, a parking space requires a minimum of 325 sf (and I've been told by some architects that the minimum is actually higher). Austin's parking requirement is thus equivalent to mandating 1.18 sf of asphalt for every one square foot of building. It ensures that building coverage will always be less than 50% of the lot. Much less when one counts front setbacks and a 25' rear, no-parking setback when single-family homes are close by. Although retail zoning districts theoretically allow a 1.0 floor-to-area ratio, the parking requirement ensures that the floor-to-area ratio will always be much less than that. And so we get buildings relegated to the rear of lots, segregated from sidewalks by a swath of parking.

Most ridiculous are the parking requirements for cocktail lounges. The ordinance requires one space per 100 sf for the first 2,500 sf, one space per 50 sf for the next 7,500, and one per 25 sf for anything over that. Hence, a 5,000 sf bar must be surrounded by nearly 25,000 sf of parking.

Another way of putting the city's parking requirement for cocktail lounges: "Sure, you build a bar, but only if you guarantee each patron that he can drive there for free."

Posted at 02:37 PM in Austin, National, Parking, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

August 24, 2009

The High Cost of Free Parking

I'm reading The Tome. My favorite lines so far:

When planners set minimum parking requirements, they do not define demand and supply the way economists do. For example, economists do not define the demand for food as the peak quantity of food consumed at free buffets where overweight diners eat until the last bite has zero utility. Nor do economists, when asked for policy prescriptions, recommend that restaurants should be required to supply at least this quantity of free food no matter how much it costs. Yet planners do define parking demand as the peak number of spaces occupied at sites with free parking, and cities do require developers to supply at least this number of parking spots, whatever the cost.

Posted at 10:14 AM in Books, Economics, Parking | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

August 11, 2009

Links

1. Frumination works out the highway and parking capacity Manhattan would need to replace its morning rush hour subway capacity:

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.

Of course, at 325 square feet per parking space, all these cars would need over 3.8 square miles of space to park, about 3 times the size of Central Park. At that point, who would want to go to Manhattan anyway?

See the neat map at the bottom of his entry showing how much land Manhattan would have to devote to parking. Commuters of course would abandon Manhattan long before things reached this state. But Manhattan would not be Manhattan in either case.

Pointer from a reader.

(NB: Tyler Cowen thought this was interesting enough for a link . . . to Kottke, who merely quoted a snippet of Frumination's entry. Jerk. (Cowen, not Kottke.))

2. A Detroit neighborhood reverts to prairie (images from DetroitYES):

(H/t the Urbanophile.)

3. Professor Chris Nelson, Director of the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah, projects that the homeownership rate will fall to 63.5% by 2020, sparking intense demand for rban infill and redevelopment. (Via Calculated Risk; no link to paper available.)

I think our homeownership rate is too high, a result of tax subsidies and land-use policies. It ought to drop. But it won't drop by several percent. Richard Green, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (and no conservative), fisks Nelson's study.

Posted at 03:35 PM in Blogs, National, Odds and ends, Parking, Urbanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 09, 2009

The new parking doctrine

For self-declared free-marketeers, we Americans have developed some deeply socialistic tastes. We simply can't abide rationing some things by price. Water. Roads. Parking. Especially roads. But especially parking.

San Francisco's Livable City has put together a nice chart comparing standard American parking doctrine to a more market-oriented, or at least economically rational, doctrine:

Here's a fun exercise. Go through the chart and replace "parking" with "roads." The chart remains just as valid.

Superficially, there is one significant difference between roads and parking: government is the exclusive supplier of roads (except for subdivision streets); private developers supply most parking. The market must be "choosing" the efficient amount of parking. But this difference is an illusion, as everyone understands by now. The government uses its own money to build too many roads or, more commonly, roads with too much capacity. It uses minimum parking requirements to force private developers to build too much parking. In fact, since it costs the government much more to build excess road capacity than to mandate excess parking capacity, we should expect a greater oversupply of parking than of road capacity.

Posted at 04:04 PM in Cars, trains and buses, Economics, National, Parking | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

August 08, 2009

Ban surface parking lots downtown

If I were made parking czar, my first edict would be to ban surface parking lots downtown. We can't get rid of the existing ones, but we can curb the future supply.

This may sound awfully interventionist for a market-oriented guy, but there is a bona fide market failure here. Our inefficient tax system gives developers an incentive to tear down buildings and replace them with surface parking lots until the developers are ready to build (which could be years). We impose heavy taxes on capital (buildings). This raises the cost of building and lowers the cost of holding vacant land. Revenue generated by surface parking further reduces the cost of holding vacant land. A ban on surface parking would be a second-best response to our inefficient tax system. (The first-best response would be to fix the tax system.)

Banning surface parking lots would accomplish three things. First, it would discourage the premature demolition of buildings by raising the cost of holding vacant land. We are all better off if buildings and tenants are kept around until the redevelopment is ready to begin.

Second, surface lots are intrinsically bad for downtown. They blight the streetscape, making the environment inhospitable for pedestrians. They also radiate heat in summer. Surface parking lots, in other words, deter pedestrians, which reduces demand for nearby ground-floor retail and offices. (If you doubt me, walk south on the west side of Congress starting at Eighth Street. You will find bustling sidewalks until you hit the parking lot at the corner of Congress and Fourth, beyond which lies a pedestrian desert. Perhaps the Austonian will fix that. But that's no sure thing.)

Third, surface parking decreases the demand for garage parking. That may sound like a good idea -- after all, I just got through complaining about Austin's surfeit of downtown parking. But I think one problem with downtown's parking market is the low utilization of existing parking. This is partly due to the reluctance of many garage owners to open their garages to the general public; the returns are simply too low for it to be worth their while to bother with late-night revelers or day-trippers. Raising the returns would lead to better utilization of downtown's parking supply. That, in turn, might provide developers (and lenders) some assurance that there will be a steady supply of market-rate parking in the neighborhood. Surface parking lots provide no such assurance because they could be redeveloped at any time.

Even if a ban on surface parking did lead to more garage parking, we'd still be better off. We can require garages to provide street-level retail or other uses, or even just awnings. There is not much we can do with an asphalt parking lot other than require the owner to rim it with bushes.

Posted at 04:31 PM in Austin, Parking | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Overparked

There are many reasons "too much" parking is bad for a downtown:

Parking raises the cost of new development, which means less of it. This may be no big deal for a city with a built-out downtown, but it is a big deal for Austin, which devotes so many downtown blocks to surface parking or stand-alone garages.

Parking not only raises the cost of new development, but it limits their size and density. An on-site garage can only be so big to be practical. A developer who wants to provide enough on-site parking to cover peak demand must first figure out how much parking he can build; only then will he know how much he can build of whatever it is he wants to build.

Parking garages and surface lots blight the streetscape, triggering a negative feedback loop: the surface lots and garages make streets less attractive to pedestrians, which drives the pedestrians away, which reduces demand for pedesestrian-oriented retail, which makes the streetscape even less attractive for pedestrians, etc.

Subsidized parking -- i.e., parking provided below cost -- distorts the market, encouraging an inefficient mix of driving and transit use.

Plopping ever more parking dowtown increases congestion. The amount of land devoted to streets is fixed. The amount of parking is not. Increasing the number of parking spots but not the amount of street space means more cars per square meter of street, which in turns means more congestion. (This very interesting paper (pdf) by Michael Manville and Donald Shoup explores this argument in depth.)

Parking garages and surface lots are butt-ugly.

There is one and only one counter-argument, but it should be taken seriously: because we are so car-oriented, having too little parking will simply deflect businesses and shops away from downtown. No matter how nice the sidewalks or inviting the buildings, a street is not pedestrian-friendly if it has no pedestrians.

I'm always willing to consider more evidence, but I don't think this argument holds for Austin. There are good reasons to believe Austin's downtown parking market suffers from market failures.

But an even simpler analysis is to compare Austin's dowtown parking supply to other cities'. If other cities get by with less, perhaps Austin could, too.

Continue reading "Overparked" »

Posted at 03:51 PM in Austin, Parking | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

July 12, 2009

Shady Grove needs a parking variance

As I pointed out in one of my entries on the noise ordinance, some restaurants may have trouble switching to the cocktail use to get the higher decibel limit because they will have to bring themselves up to code requirements for a cocktail use. Shady Grove is an example. Here is its application for a variance from the parking requirements for cocktail lounges. Kedron Touvell twitters that the application goes to the Board of Adjustment on Monday.

Obtaining a variance is no mere formality. The applicant is supposed to meet stringent standards -- including unique hardship -- which the Board of Adjustment must enforce to avoid waiver arguments in other cases. The BOA is subject to political pressure like any other institution, though, so my guess is it will grant the waiver.

There is much more on the permitting process and obstacles at the Austin City Permits blog.

Posted at 10:31 AM in Austin development, Law, Parking, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Austin Contrarian

Chris Bradford on Austin, economics and other stuff