1. Donald Shoup makes up for last week with an interesting piece on how America’s tax structure biases employers towards providing parking for their employees, similar to how untaxed employer-provided healthcare shapes that industry.
2. Back in August Randal O’Toole asked for proof that minimum parking requirements force Walmart to build more parking than they otherwise would. I think this is a bit of a red herring, since obviously parking reform would have more of an impact in areas that are more urban than where Walmart typically locates, but lo and behold, here’s the proof, at least in the case of one store in Northeastern Connecticut. In this case it looks like the parking minimums are going to be reduced, but I question whether smaller companies without Wal-Mart’s clout and money could have demanded such changes.
3. A survey of urban planners, supposedly biased towards big cities, found that 60% feel that the free market would not provide an adequate amount of parking if developers were not given parking minimums, with only 1 in 10 believing that the market would provide too much parking. The author of the paper, called “Are suburban TODs over-parked?” (.pdf), and published in the Journal of Public Transportation, found that suburban TOD projects in the East Bay and Portland supplied too much parking for the amount of cars that were actually parked. The authors unfortunately don’t do a great job of linking the parking surplus directly to parking minimums, but they do provide some interesting empirical evidence for what Matt Yglesias called “parking feedback loops” and what the study’s authors term a “virtuous cycle” – the idea that parking itself is a barrier to walkability, and thus removing spaces will lessen the demand for parking, even if nobody was using the spots that were removed.
I work in Oakland. I have to walk three blocks, one of which is a mostly empty parking lot, to buy a turkey sandwich.
I can sympathize. One of the things I’ve noticed about the suburbs and too many cities is that you can walk pretty much anywhere just through parking lots, and usually it’s actually the fastest route.
Not surprising. Not all urban planners are followers of urbanism/new urbanism/facilitating the market. Many planners were educated (or not) with the idea that the main goal of “planning” is to prevent undue impacts (be it parking, traffic, loss of views, movement of “those people”) from impacting existing neighborhoods. In this narrative, the developer needs to be browbeaten into delivering a good project thru numerous discretionary reviews. (I.e. “city reacting” rather than “city planning”)
Others believe we are to be “note takers” who simply deliver what the community says they want. The community often says it wants low density and plenty of parking, then they complain about the results …
Additionally, planners are people and have many of the biases of the American public (can you really live of less than 6,000 sq ft? In a townhome? Don’t developers just want to “pack people in” to make money? Isn’t urban crime caused by “density”?)
In my experience, the idea of pro-actively planning and offering predictability in order to facilitate the market to create vibrant communities with balanced housing, transportation and employment seems to have emerged as a philosophy only in the 1990s, driven in part by New Urbanism.