#car-centric development

This is the kind of thing that brings me life-sustaining joy. On Twitter, an ultra conservative author at Forbes links to her awful article warning the U.S. to not adopt good urban designs from Europe that de-center cars and benefit pedestrians/cyclists. Diana Furchtgott-Roth served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. DOT under Trump.

The first commenter on the tweet writes a wonderful smack down of the article, and uses an image I made years ago for this Tumblr blog to illustrate it. I don’t know this person; they live in California apparently. But they’ve brought me happiness by using my stuff to shame a Trump-administration conservative who apparently loves car-oriented cities. 

That image, BTW, shows the exact same section of Atlanta before and after the freeways were built, and the neighborhoods that were destroyed. (I-75/85 and I-20 interchange.)

absolutely no one:

me, enraged: HOW IS THERE NO DIRECT TRAIN SERVICE BETWEEN THESE TWO MAJOR EAST COAST CITIES????!!!?!!? YOU’RE TELLING ME I HAVE TO GO TO AN ENTIRE SEPARATE CITY IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION THEN SPEND HOURS ON A SECOND SMALLER TRAIN GOING ALL THE WAY BACK?????

me, thoughtful: well, i suppose there is a major mountain range between those two cities

no one:

Modern cities suffer from a parking problem that’s hidden in plain sight: There’s simply too much of it.

When we think of the issues cars present, we tend to look at automobiles in motion. But an often overlooked issue is how cities handle cars at rest. Since the invention of the automobile, parking – or, sometimes, progressive, forward-thinking restrictions on parking – has powerfully shaped the design, environment and economies of urban areas.

The sheer amount of asphalt should make it clear how cars at rest consume our cities: some analysts say Western Europe contains 300 million spots, while estimates suggest the US boasts two billion. Often, that real estate is centrally located and very valuable. Just a single standard parking space, which measures a little more than 6x3m, takes up about as much space as a small Parisian studio apartment, a low-income housing unit in India or three office cubicles.

These spaces line the streets of urban neighbourhoods, stack floor upon floor in parking garages and sprawl out in seas of asphalt around offices and shopping centres. The largest parking lot in the world, at the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, boasts 20,000 parking spaces, covering enough space for a neighbourhood of 500 homes.

Even more troubling, though, is that parking spaces aren’t actually used that much. A study by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a sustainable-development non-profit in Chicago, found that a quarter to a third of parking spaces around apartment buildings in many US cities sat empty. Considering that the average car moves just 5% of the time, there’s a strong case for cities to rightsize the space they allocate for vehicles at rest.

(...) Cities face immense challenges from climate change and rising heat, increased urbanisation and housing affordability. All of those are made worse by our addiction to asphalt.

Few aspects of zoning, the building code or development exert such a strong influence on the built environment. The deeper you dig into parking policy, the clearer it becomes that parking isn’t something offered to motorists as much as it is mandated by the government – and the more it can seem like a key that unlocks a greater understanding of urban land use.

(...) Mandatory parking minimums have ripple effects that extend well beyond individual developments. That’s in no small part because parking incentivises driving. A Norwegian study found that parking availability triples the likelihood of owning a car. It also creates congestion and reduces the real estate available for more important purposes, such as housing, transit, parks and public space. Parking also contributes to urban sprawl by increasing the distance between each building. At scale, this makes neighbourhoods and cities less walkable, increasing the need to use cars to move around, which, of course, spurs the need for more parking.Traditionally, when people mention the problem with parking, they’re referring to a lack of space for cars in a particular place. In reality, the parking problem is an issue of overall transport policy. Failures in parking management lead to a greater dependence on the private automobile and more competition for available parking space.

Anyone who pays for it is sure to have the same thought at some point: why is parking so expensive? But consider what that six-by-three-metre space costs in some of the priciest urban areas of the world. In London, some neighbourhoods have what’s called residents’ parking zones, where locals pay between £90 and £242 a year for the right to park in areas that typically charge substantial hourly rates up to £5.20. In wealthy neighbourhoods such as Kensington and Chelsea, it’s ostensibly a giveaway to the upper crust.

This amounts to a subsidy for motorists that is paid for by non-drivers. The European Parking Association found that the subsidies for on-street parking across Europe added up to roughly €300 per taxpayer per year. In countries like India, where most people walk or take transit, parking requires public expenditure benefitting a very well-off sliver of the total population.

And even where parking is abundant and free, it comes at a cost.

The perceived need for parking adds many expenses to homes and businesses. A small part of the price of every item in a store reflects the cost of providing parking, and business owners often fastidiously defend parking and street space for cars as necessities for business (often at the expense of adding or improving bike and pedestrian infrastructure).

This affects every business, but it’s particularly hard on smaller ones; the added cost of carving out space for cars means larger, well-financed chains have an advantage. It can even shape what kinds of businesses take hold. When bars are required to have a minimum number of parking spaces (yes, this happens) it’s more challenging to have a small, walkable neighbourhood pub.

And just like parking at apartment buildings, these spaces often remain unused due to overzealous requirements – a US social media campaign even highlights the empty spaces near retail on Black Friday, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Donald Shoup, a professor and patron saint of the anti-parking crusade, studied the cost of parking spaces built on the campus of the school where he teaches, UCLA. He determined that they accounted for 39% of the total cost of constructing a new office building.

In many ways, it’s worse for residential projects. Research on parking minimums in the United States shows they add significant cost to projects. Adding one parking space per unit increases the cost of affordable-housing development by 12.5%, and UCLA researchers found that garage parking typically adds $142 a month to a household’s rent. The inverse occurs when parking minimums get cut. In 2015, Minneapolis slashed parking minimums for housing. Developers responded by dropping rent costs for new apartments, with $1,200 units becoming $1,000 units.

This requirement becomes more striking with taller building projects, which might be forced to include pricey subterranean car storage or dedicate several lower floors to parking that could otherwise be used for street-level retail, offices or homes. Enough new towers in a recent wave of development in downtown Los Angeles featured parking podiums that a magazine had the material to do a best- and worst-designed list.

How to fix the parking problem

The insatiable hunger for more parking comes from the belief that parking is a right, not a land use that’s subject to market forces. So it’s no shock that reformers who want better ways to manage the parking problem – and to eliminate the glut of spaces – look to the power of the market.

The researcher Paul Barter identifies three ways for cities to manage parking. There’s the supply-focused approach, on display in the US, which relies on parking minimums. There’s parking management, which contains a mix of restrictions and rules to balance competing land use goals. And there are market-based strategies that blend supply deregulation and efficient pricing: Tokyo, for instance, requires car buyers to prove they own a spot before buying a car. (This, along with having no explicit parking requirements for builders, has kept Tokyo’s parking supply bounded and small).

Parking management is by far the most common way to rein in parking chaos. In Mexico City, a study of the city’s parking inventory, “Less Parking, More City,” found that parking spaces accounted for 40% of everything being built in the city. That meant parking covered even more area than housing. Between 2009 and 2013, 250,000 parking spaces were built, researchers found, costing about $10,000 per space.

That money could have funded 18 lines of bus rapid transit, a system capable of moving 3 million people a day. The city responded by turning parking minimums into parking maximums, making sure new projects didn’t add to the excess supply. São Paulo, Brazil, has adopted similar ideas, and a campaign to do the same in Auckland, New Zealand, (“Bin the Parking Mins”) also repealed the old standard.

Some cities have turned to technology to tame parking problems. In 2011, San Francisco set up a pilot to test dynamic pricing for parking spaces, meaning the cost of parking changes based on demand. Market forces work: research demonstrated that the trial increased parking availability, lowered the time spent searching for a spot and even sped up transit routes. Increasing the price of parking by 10% cut demand between 3% and 10%. Some researchers are also pushing an idea called walkable parking, which reorients development around shared park-and-walk areas between scores of big developments, concentrating parking in certain areas, eliminating excess capacity and, ultimately, creating denser (and more walkable) neighbourhoods.

A curious priority guides urban transportation: the less the efficiency of a mode of travel in moving people, the greater the space cities devote to it. Cars rank lowest in efficiency, and therefore get the most public space.

City policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve equity and increase road safety would all benefit from fewer cars. But community groups that fight for an extra sliver of the road — for wider sidewalks, bike lanes and busways — face a number of hurdles, beginning with an apparent obligation to justify their demands against potential adverse impacts on motorists.

Throwing Good Money After Bad Car Infrastructure - Wonderland Road

“10 percent of the preventable deaths in the United States are related to lack of physical activity. Communities that lack safe places to walk are a part of this problem. What if we labeled unwalkable neighborhoods like we do cigarettes?”

-- What if we labeled unwalkable neighborhoods like we do cigarettes? | t4america.org

I agree basically with this concept, though a big difference between cigarettes and housing styles is that smoking is a personal behavior. Whereas the construction of car-centric places that exclude pedestrian mobility -- that’s a behavior that takes place on a systemic level. And it’s a system that results in car-dependency (and thus pedestrian-challenged places) being supported by all levels of government, from local zoning to state transportation spending to federal mortgage deductions.

In other words: don’t presume that consumer behavior is the main factor that needs to be altered in the continued delivery of this type of “product.”

People who don’t know the facts will argue that our sprawling, unwalkable places are simply the result of consumer choice. But when government subsidizes sprawl on so many levels, consumers end up without a choice. There is no series of Prospect Park-type walkable utopias in Metro Atlanta that sit empty because home buyers are not choosing them. They simply don’t exist.

On a regional level, we’ve ended up with little to choose from in the format of our built environments due to our development practices, and that’s the behavior that primarily needs changing.

It’s important to address the lack of physical activity that is the result of our unwalkable places. But the subject is complex. What about suburban poverty, for instance? Metro Atlanta has seen a big jump in the number of poor households in the sprawling suburbs. Those families have little choice but to accept affordable housing wherever it can be found. A warning label won’t help them.

To be fair, the goal of T4America here is probably more about the construction and maintenance of sidewalks within the existing built environment; I don’t mean to diminish that effort -- it’s one that could certainly be beneficial to that growing number of suburban poor households I mentioned. But I think it’s important to address that infrastructure while at the same time considering the way we build new developments.