The High Cost of Free Parking

It might not be paradise, but it's "free." Yesterday's USA Today has an article about the new book by Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA, entitled The High Cost of Free Parking, and published by the American Planning Association.

According to the article, "Cities and taxpayers are wasting billions of dollars subsidizing parking on valuable land that could be used for housing or parks...The book challenges traditional thinking that cheap and plentiful parking is smart public policy. It comes at a time when cities and companies are studying how much parking to provide workers and how to encourage wider use of mass transit."

"For anyone who has spent hours circling for a parking space, the conclusions are surprising:

• Curbside parking in many cities is too cheap. Low rates on parking meters encourage people to cruise the streets to avoid costlier parking lots and garages
• Cities and suburbs require too many parking spaces around malls, apartments and office buildings. That wastes land that could be put to better use, and for much of the year, hundreds of spaces sit vacant.
• Shoup says cities mismanage parking supplies and pricing in an attempt to provide free or cheap parking to a car-obsessed nation. When developers are forced to build extra parking, their costs soar — and get passed on to consumers. "

'It raises the cost of housing and, really, everything we buy[.] The cost of parking ... is just hidden from us. You pay for it in the cost of dinner (at a restaurant) even if you didn't drive', says Shoup.

Getting the most out of parking is a priority for communities that are struggling with dwindling revenue, worsening traffic gridlock and soaring prices for land and housing:
• Boston froze the number of off-street parking spaces.
• In Washington state, Oregon and Maryland, communities let office and retail developers build fewer parking spaces if they offer cash incentives or transit passes to employees to discourage driving.
• San Francisco realized that its parking requirements didn't match its vision for affordable housing and traffic control, says Amit Ghosh*, the city's chief of comprehensive planning. 'We still had minimum parking requirements for residential parking of one parking space for one unit,' he says.

In San Francisco, the city first eliminated minimum requirements for downtown commercial buildings. Now it's proposing scrapping them for residences downtown and surrounding neighborhoods, especially near mass transit stops. If approved, the new parking guidelines would set a maximum of one-half or three-quarters of a parking space per housing unit.

These residential parking spots are subsidized way below what the market would actually bear for them," Ghosh says. "Almost 16% of city land holdings are street parking spaces."
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Parking for new development in Washington is still a big burning issue, particularly in the neighborhoods that ring Capitol Hill and Union Station. In the northwest quadrant, it is not uncommon for apartment buildings to have as many as 80% of residents not owning cars. But the idea of a car-limited lifestyle is still a stretch for people whose predominate planning and development paradigm is car-centric and suburban (this is a key downside about the city's residential resurgence, which is attracting new residents who "don't know how to live in cities").

(* I heard Amit Ghosh speak at the APA meeting last year on retaining "production-distribution-repair" light industrial businesses in San Francisco. The session was amazing--two other presenters as well--and I regret not being able to go to the APA meeting this week, to attend great sessions, learn best practices, and to tour that district... )