Zoning's parking regulations

I still haven't decided if I will bother testifying at tonight's Zoning Commission hearing about revising parking regulations.

Greater Greater Washington has been running a series on the issue. See for example, "Parking countdown #2: This is what a neighborhood without minimums looks like," which includes links to earlier entries.

The most important supportive points are that:

1. Neighborhoods within the L'Enfant City, especially designated historic districts such as Capitol Hill, already function along the lines laid out in the revised Draft Parking Recommendations submitted to the Zoning Commission by the Office of Planning.

2. It costs more to build housing with mandated parking.

3. Creating an amenity-rich livable community is not possible with a mobility focus on automobiles.

I have written plenty about this over the years so the story seems old to me.

However, I think that the proposals are likely to fail, at least at this juncture. For one, Chairman Hood lives in an automobile-centric part of Ward 5 and he drives. Automobility is central to his world-view about city livability and how to get around. (See the discussion around removing parking at the Rhode Island Metro Station in favor of a mixed use development on said parking lot in the relevant zoning hearing for confirmation. But I've experienced this over the years with regard to other testimonies, including the H Street Commercial District overlay.)

2. At this time, the car people are far more motivated to get out and testify against than the walker-bicyclist-transit types. Plus neighborhood associations and civic groups tend to be dominated by those of an automobile-centric paradigm.

This is why DDOT proposals to change residential parking regulations to charge more for residential parking permits, for additional permits, and for larger cars, as well as proposals to reign in Sunday church parking failures have always gone down in flames.

3. Plus, it's not like the Zoning Commission is truly focused on enhancing the city's livability and competitive advantage through land use decisions. They don't really focus on it. And so they don't really pay much attention to urban design, transportation demand management, linking land use decisions to transportation questions, etc. Why should they all of a sudden see the light with parking regulations?

4. I think that the Office of Planning made a serious strategic error by choosing to lead the three year process of zoning review mandated by the revision of the Comprehensive Plan with parking, which is the "third rail" of local politics, just as changing Social Security is the "third rail" of national political discourse.

I hope I am wrong... then again, the Zoning Commission can have this action "continued" for further study and bring it back for review later.

Right now, all the regulations favor parking and automobiles. The only exception is for historic districts. Which tend to be the most thriving residential and commercial neighborhoods in the core of the city...

----------------------
Excerpt from a blog entry from 10/2006

The City of San Francisco adopted a "transit first" development policy decades ago. For the most part this means that new development in the downtown core has been built without parking, but with access to efficient transit.

Moving to a "transit first" land use and development paradigm

Most citizens and government agencies are imprinted with an approach to land use that is automobile-centric and oriented towards segregated, relatively undense uses. This is commonly referred to as a suburban-oriented land use and development paradigm. Stakeholders have an unconscious and systematic bias towards "automobility" and improving the transportation system for automobiles, at the expense of transit and pedestrian capacity, and urban design.

The suburban land use approach is particularly inappropriate for center cities generally, and Washington specifically, especially because the city is so well connected by transit, in particular the subway, and relatively efficient bus service throughout most of the city, and because of the importance of leveraging the tremendous public investments that have been made in building and maintaining this system. (Note that the polycentric design of the WMATA subway system is criticized because it promotes sprawl even more than it improves access to and within the center city.)

A "transit-first" policy would establish and emphasize that the basic framework of how the City of Washington should grow is through the linkage-articulation of land use and transit. Intra-city and regional mobility can be improved and congestion reduced by investing in the capacity of our transit system, and by linking land use policies to these investments.

Furthermore, every parking space is an automobile trip generator. We cannot simultaneously expand parking and reduce congestion. The concept of induced demand presented both by parking spaces and roads is well understood throughout the transportation planning profession....

An illustration of how San Francisco's "transit first" development policies work in practice

According to the article "If you build it, will they take the bus? San Francisco builds an epic mall, with no parking," published in the Austin American-Statesman on Sunday, October 22, 2006, San Francisco's downtown growth management policy, adopted in 1985, for the most part, forbids the creation of parking spots when new development is constructed.

The article discusses the Westfield San Francisco Centre, which was just expanded, tripling the square footage to 1.5 million.

According to the article:

San Francisco's Westfield mall doesn't even have a parking lot. The nearest parking is across the street at a city-owned lot that also serves the Moscone convention center and other attractions. It can hold about 2,600 cars. Officials expect about 68,500 people a day on average, or about 25 million a year, will visit the mall. That works out to one parking spot for every 26 mall shoppers....

The mall also is in the middle of one of the biggest hubs for public transportation outside New York City. More than 30 different public transit sources are within a few blocks of the mall, including the Powell Street terminus of the city's famed cable car line, several stops for the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system, and stops for municipal trains and buses.