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Parking round-up

by Stephen Smith At the risk of beating the parking theme deader than the Ground Zero Mosque, here are some recent parking-related stories published around the world: The NYC DOT’s Park Smart program has been called a success in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, and officials are considering making the program permanent and expanding it to more streets. Donald Shoup is quoted as saying that rates may still be too low, and the DOT has suggested raising the rate even further. The Park Smart program also expanded to Manhattan’s Upper East Side in June, with rates ranging from $2.50 to $3.75/hour. As Streetsblog points out, though, this is still a steal compared to the $22/hour that one private garage charges, indicating that street parking is still massively underpriced. Towns and cities across the UK (“at least 150 councils”) are raising the price of on-street parking and yearly parking passes in order to plug budget deficits. The Telegraph article makes no mention of any Shoupian benefits, and small businesses and “motoring organisations” are, predictably, opposing the moves. The Independent claims that many cities, including Bristol, York, and Leeds, are planning “to charge for parking at workplaces.” Pittsburgh is considering a 50-year concession agreement for its on-street and garage parking assets, which would almost certainly involve raising rates, although “the city would retain the right to revise fees.” City-owned garages currently charge 25% less than private garages. As in the UK, this deal is mostly out of fiscal necessity. Here is an article comparing the proposal to Chicago’s parking concession, which we discussed in 2008. Philadelphia apparently has about 400 illegal parking lots according to local news reports. The city’s Licenses & Inspections office, charged with regulating lots, apparently doesn’t have a single inspector looking for them. This wouldn’t normally bother […]

Why does the Infrastructurist hate libertarians so much?

by Stephen Smith Among urban planners, libertarianism gets a pretty bad rap. Melissa Lafsky at the Infrastructurist goes so far as to call libertarianism “an enemy of infrastructure,” and dismisses entirely the idea that private industry can build infrastructure with a single hyperlink – to a poorly-written article on New Zealand’s economy written over a decade ago that barely says a word about transportation, land use, or infrastructure. She goes on to criticize the Reason Foundation’s transportation writers (something we too have done), and with it, negates entirely libertarianism’s contributions to urbanism. Here at Market Urbanism we’re used to these sorts of attacks from the left, and we work tirelessly to disassociate ourselves (well, mostly) from Reason’s brand of (sub)urbanist libertarianism. Normally I wouldn’t expend so much effort, but the Infrastructurist is a blog that I read daily and we’ve linked to them approvingly over the years, so I figured it merited a rebuttal. To start, I would recommend that Melissa bone up on her history. At least in North America, every great intracity mass transit system was build by private enterprise, almost without exception. From subways to streetcars, private enterprise showed a willingness and eagerness to build and profit from rail-based transit. Sure, the systems weren’t totally private and unregulated (exclusive franchise monopolies were often granted by municipal governments, among other interventions), but the system was far more “private” than the current mostly-suburban road/automobile transportation system that Reason and many other self-identified libertarians champion. While many progressives today like to blame the demise of rail-based transit on GM, Firestone Tire, and Standard Oil (what I like to call the Who Framed Roger Rabbit theory of urbanist history), the truth is that progressives themselves were the ones who really did mass transit in. Through populist measures like the mandatory five-cent fare […]

Shoupistas take Los Angeles

by Stephen Smith Donald Shoup and his arguments about free and underpriced parking have been getting quite a bit of press recently, and it looks like Shoup’s hometown of Los Angeles has surpassed San Francisco (with its SFpark initiative) as the largest city in America to adopt some of his proposals: The yearlong ExpressPark program, slated to begin next summer, will use not only new meters but also a network of wireless pavement sensors to keep track of parked vehicles in real time. The sensors will help transportation officials determine which meters are in use and which have expired. Eventually, roadside signs will guide motorists to empty spaces in municipal parking garages and lots. The program — which involves only city-owned parking in a 4.5-square-mile area — will feature adjustable parking rates, or “dynamic pricing.” In other words, when parking demand increases, meter rates increase; when demand drops, rates drop. “ExpressPark will allow Los Angeles to take the lead in testing new ways to manage curb parking,” said Donald C. Shoup, a UCLA professor of urban planning and a longtime proponent of pricing based on supply and demand. […] “What we’re striving for is pricing such that 85% of meters are occupied and 15% are open,” said Peer Ghent, senior management analyst with the meter operations division of the city’s Department of Transportation, or LADOT. That 85/15 number is straight out of Shoup’s book, so it’s a good sign that they plan to hew relatively closely to his ideas, at least in regards to city-managed spots. One thing that I do wonder is whether this will be paired with an attempt to cut back on LA’s parking minimums, which are surprisingly pervasive in America’s second-largest city. If not (and I don’t see any indication, either in the LA Times article […]

Even Midtown Manhattan not immune to anti-density NIMBYism

by Stephen Smith In general, I think of Manhattan below Central Park as perhaps the freest place in America in terms of land use restrictions. There are no minimum parking regulations, zoning variances are relatively easy to get, and FAR restrictions are relatively generous. Historical preservation designations sometimes limit redevelopment, but other than that, developers have a relatively free hand to…develop. That is, unless you’re talking about building a tall skyscraper within 17 blocks of the Empire State Building: The owners of the Empire State Building, Anthony E. and Peter L. Malkin, even want a 17-block no-go zone surrounding their 1,250-foot tall tower. This would prevent Vornado Realty Trust, which wants to erect the new building on Seventh Avenue, or any other developer, from putting up a similarly oversize building in the zone. The City Planning Commission has already approved Vornado’s plan for a tower, called 15 Penn Plaza, opposite Pennsylvania Station. It would be 56 percent larger than what would ordinarily be allowed, in keeping with the city’s desire to promote high-density development close to transit hubs. But Community Board 5, whose district includes the area, did not approve. A committee at the board said the developer had not provided a rationale for such a large zoning bonus, especially since it did not have a tenant and might not build for years. While we at Market Urbanism are generally not fans of tying density bonuses to private improvement of public infrastructure, we should note that part of the quid-pro-quo for the government allowing the building is that the developer make improvements to Penn Station “worth more than $100 million,” which would be lost if the project is not approved. (HT: Infrastructurist) Edit: I may have overstated the freeness of Manhattan’s land use situation – see the comments section for […]

Private Buses: Econtalk Takes A Second look at Santiago

Back a couple years ago, I noted an Econtalk podcast with Russell Roberts and Duke University Professor Mike Munger on the private bus system in Santiago, Chile.  This week’s episode starts with Munger’s update on the Santiago transportation system after visiting for three weeks and spending a lot of time traveling the city’s buses and transit.  This discussion comes at a perfect time to follow-up on Stephen Smith’s post on private busing in New York. Munger and Roberts discussed the advantages and problems of the evolution of the system over the years.  In the case of the private system with over 3,000 competing private bus companies, accidents and injuries were common, and pollution was problematic.  However, the regulation and publicization of the buses led to unintended consequences that were probably far worse than the drawbacks of the private system.  Unfortunately, although the administration has apologized for the failures of the system, it would be politically impossible to revert to some of the beneficial aspects of the private system.

New empirical evidence that parking minimums encourage sprawl

by Stephen Smith Although we at Market Urbanism are big fans of Donald Shoup’s work on parking minimums, we have to admit that rigorous econometric evidence that parking minimums mandate more parking than the market would otherwise supply has been a bit lacking. Randal O’Toole at The Antiplanner quite rightly asks to see empirical proof that parking minimums are binding. Tyler Cowen appears to have found this proof, in the form of paper posted online very recently which seeks to determine whether or not non-residential developers in Los Angeles County build more parking than they would in the absence of minimum parking mandates. Here’s the second half of the abstract, emphasis mine: [To] our knowledge the existing literature does not test the effect of parking minimums on the amount of lot space devoted to parking beyond a few case studies. This paper tests the hypothesis that parking space requirements cause an oversupply of parking by examining the implicit marginal value of land allocated to parking spaces. This is an indirect test of the effects of parking requirements that is similar to Glaeser and Gyourko (2003). A simple theoretical model shows that the marginal value of additional parking to the sale price should be equal to the cost of land plus the cost of parking construction. We estimate the marginal values of parking and lot area with spatial methods using a large data set from the Los Angeles area non-residential property sales and find that for most of the property types the marginal value of parking is significantly below that of the parcel area. This evidence supports the contention that minimum parking requirements significantly increase the amount of parcel area devoted to parking. The study ends up finding that at least half of all non-commercial properties have more parking than they […]

Must Read: The Demand Curve for Sprawl Slopes Downward

Sandy Ikeda’s latest article at FEE’s “The Freeman” is a great summary of the libertarian sprawl debate. There has been a lot of Internet chatter lately about what libertarians ought to think about urban sprawl and its causes, including pieces by Kevin Carson, Austin Bramwell, Randal O’Toole, and Matthew Yglesias. The title of Ben Adler’s post basically sums it up: “If You Love the Free Market, You Should Hate Mandated Suburban Sprawl.” Sandy includes a mention of the ongoing minimum parking debate. Sandy concludes that the more the government subsidizes items related to low-density development, the more low-density development we’ll get. But the bottom line is that the law of demand still holds – other things equal, the cheaper you make something the more of it people will want to buy, and that includes low-density development. You’ll get more of that, too, if those direct and indirect subsidies make it cheaper for people to get it. Government intervention has done just that, and it’s hard to understand how you can argue, whether you’re a proponent or (especially) an opponent of Smart Growth, that the free market alone is responsible for the amount of sprawl that we actually have. This doesn’t mean, of course, that Smart Growth regulations are the place to begin. Instead, if you think sprawl is a bad thing, it would seem logical to first remove the vast array of interventions that over the decades have pushed it along. On this, I would have thought all market urbanists could agree. Well said!

Private buses make a comeback in NYC

by Stephen Smith Transit activists have been bemoaning recent cuts in the MTA’s bus routes throughout New York City, but the cuts may have a silver lining, in particular for market urbanists: they may usher in the return of private buses to the streets of New York City. Private buses (and subways, and streetcars) were once the only transit options available to New Yorkers, but since the early 20th century, and especially after World War II, virtually all intracity routes have been subsumed by various levels of government, and the network has barely grown at all since nationalization (not withstanding the Second Avenue Subway, conceived eighty years ago by a private company). Now that’s not to say that private operators haven’t tried to compete – the outer boroughs’ immigrant communities have had robust networks of informal private vans (known in NYC as “dollar vans”), which operate illegally but have been hard to prosecute, likely due to the fact that they are used mostly by linguistically-distinct immigrant communities. The recent cuts even propelled the bootleg bus phenomenon out of its immigrant ghetto, when a brave bus operator named Joel Azumah made headlines by operating a bootleg bus route along routes cut in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. This experiment was quickly quashed by an unrelenting bureaucracy, but at least it demonstrated the mutual desire on the part of riders and entrepreneurs for private service. The city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission appears to have headed that call, and under the direction of chairman David Yassky is trying to replace at least some of the old bus routes with private buses. Unlike the city’s much-abused private van service, where operators are technically not allowed to pick up riders off the street who haven’t called ahead of time, the buses would operate with many of […]

NYC’s lingering obsession with parking minimums may come to an end

by Stephen Smith Back in February Streetsblog had a good three–part series on planning changes in New York City since the beginning of Michael Bloomberg’s term, and while they had a lot of praise for upzonings that have occurred throughout much of the four urban boroughs, they highlighted minimum parking regulations as the biggest impediment to walkable, transit-oriented development. The series ran a few months ago, but I was reminded of it because of Tyler Cowen’s article in the New York Times a few days ago, in which he made the same general Donald Shoup-esque arguments about parking that readers of Market Urbanism are familiar with. But back to the Streetsblog series – the second part is mostly about parking minimums in NYC, which haven’t been lowered despite the upzonings and other policies that emphasize mass transit over cars. The article has a great map which shows that, outside of areas south of Central Park, parking minimums are barely relaxed at all in areas of all five boroughs with the best transit access, and this paragraph sums up the paradox of New York’s planning regulations pretty well: Perversely, because you can build more densely near transit, parking minimums per square foot of land are actually higher where transit options are most robust. So even as the planning department tries to concentrate growth near transit lines, it is simultaneously filling that valuable real estate with unnecessary parking. As one commenter points out, the Department of City Planning probably isn’t intentionally sabotaging its walkability goals – many current residents own cars and want to continue to use them, and a development’s car-less residents from the hypothetical future don’t get a say in local politics. Fast-forward a few months, though, and it looks as though the City Planning Department may be reconsidering its […]

HSR crowding out local transportation projects

by Stephen Smith Yet another way in which Obama’s high-speed rail plans are derailing actual progress in getting Americans out of their cars: BUENA PARK, Calif. — Mayor Art Brown spent years pushing for a commuter train station combined with nearby housing in his community. But as townhouses are being finished around the $14 million Metrolink station, he’s facing the prospect that California’s high-speed rail line may plow right through his beloved project. “The only option they presented to us was either losing the condo units or losing our train station,” Brown said of an engineering presentation to city leaders last year. That a successful effort to get car-dependent Californians to embrace mass transit could be derailed by another transportation project may strike some as ironic. But it’s also one of the hidden costs — and a potential harbinger of delay — in the ambitious plan that would enable passengers to speed the 430 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 2 1/2 hours. By the way, the projected cost of a one-way ticket on the high-speed rail line from LA to SF has risen from $55 to $105. Despite the fact that intraurban trips account for the vast majority of transportation use in America, the Obama administration and other politicians prefer to focus on expensive boondoggles like high-speed rail, often at the expense of more mundane, but much more important local projects like the Buena Park Metrolink station. Originally posted on my blog.

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