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Tag Donald Shoup

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 16 – 18

This post follows on the earlier discussion of Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. Chapter 16 — Turning Small Change in Big Changes Here Donald Shoup gets to the idea of using Business Improvement Districts to manage street parking as Brandon Smith mentioned in the last post’s comments. When parking revenue goes to municipalities’ general funds, drivers see it as a fee with questionable benefit. Contrarily, when parking revenue stays in the neighborhood, it can provide tangible benefits in the form of neighborhood improvements. This may make drivers more willing to pay for parking. More importantly, it creates an interest group in favor of charging a rate for parking that provides an funding source for neighborhood improvements. Seen from this angle, paid street parking benefits businesses from multiple angles. He uses to Los Angeles neighborhoods to demonstrate the potential benefits of parking revenues. In the 1980’s, Old Pasadena was suffering from a vacant building problem because historic buildings did not include onsite parking. As a result, they could not be repurposed. In 1993 the city introduced parkign emters and gave the revenues to the neighborhood to finance public improvements. Additionally, building owners were given the right to pay a fee for parking in a public garage rather than providing parking onsite, allowing existing buildings to be repurposed. These policy changes have created an environment where drivers can easily find parking and a streetscape that is more inviting for pedestrians. Shoup contrasts Pasadena with Westwood Village which has been in decline since the 1980s. In 1994 a parking study revealed that curb parking was 96 percent occupied, meaning the neighborhood had a significant cruising problem. As a response to the neighborhood’s decline, though, the city decreased hourly parking rates from $1 to 50 cents, worsening the parking shortage. This revenue goes to […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 10-14

This post follows on the earlier discussion of the The High Cost of Free Parking. I realized that I left a couple of important points out of the last post. First, Shoup applies the Hippocratic Oath of “first, do no harm,” to parking requirements. What a great way to think about city planning. If this standard was applied to all policies, we’d be living in libertarian utopia already. Secondly, he gives great treatment to the issue of why politicians sometimes choose regulations over taxation. Regulation imposes costs on everyone, but because these costs are hard to see, their costs are not easily traced to government. It is a less transparent way of manipulating behavior. Chapter 10 – Reduce Demand Rather Than Increase Supply This chapter explores some of the policy alternatives available to cities that could reduce the number of parking spaces needed to satisfy demand. Shoup supports programs that allow employers to provide their employees with unlimited transit passes. In cities where transit operates below capacity, transit agencies may be willing to sell this type of pass to employers at a low cost, knowing that many pass employees won’t use their passes regularly. As of 2002, Dallas, Denver, Salt Lake, and San Jose had adopted this type of program. In two studies, providing these eco passes reduced employees’ demand for parking by 19%, offering employers an opportunity for significant cost savings if they can provide 19% fewer parking spaces as a result. Shoup points out that in some cases this policy can be a win for everyone involved because employees receive an additional benefit, employers can save money, traffic is reduced for the cities’ other commuters, and transit agencies earn some additional revenue at near zero marginal cost, assuming they are operating below capacity. Unfortunately, Shoup finds that in some California cities that […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 5-9

This post follows on the earlier discussion of the first four chapters of The High Cost of Free Parking. Chapter 5- A Great Planning Disaster Shoup sets up parking requirements as a great planning disaster. If an individual developer chose to dedicate more of his land to parking than his customers demanded, he would lose money on the margin. If he is a major property owner and somehow made this mistake repeatedly at many properties, we might consider it a disaster. But a planning disaster occurs when no individual loses a lot of money in this type of error, but rather we all lose some. Shoup explains that parking requirements breed demand for more parking. By subsidizing driving, these rules lead more people to become drivers and encourages sprawling development. This in turn creates an increased demand for free parking and leads to higher parking requirements, since many cities base these requirements on the peak number of people who would like to park at a building for free, leading to the parking disaster we have today. Shoup explains that oftentimes parking requirements are so onerous that they dictate development both in use and in architecture. For example, Los Angeles’ “dingbat” apartments which are apartments built on stilts over driveways were created to fulfill requirements for covered parking. This chapter includes the empirical evidence that I find most persuasive so far, a study of changes in development after Oakland implemented a parking requirement in 1961. For new developments in the two years after the regulation went into effect, residential construction costs increased 18% per unit, housing density decreased by 30%, housing investment decreased by 18%, and land values fell by 33% compared to the four years before the requirement. This is strong evidence that in Oakland, at least, parking requirements, rather than demand […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 1-4

Here’s the first installation of Market Urbanism Book Club, covering the first four chapters of Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. If you’ve read the book previously or are reading along, please share your thoughts and questions in the comments. Chapter 1: Shoup outlines the unusual view that we take toward parking. Rather than assuming that demand for parking, like any other good, is a function of its price, urban planners typically assume that parking is a zero-price good and require building owners to provide enough parking to meet demand given a zero price. Imagine that this was the way we treated other goods… This Friday afternoon I’m thinking of a municipality that requires bars to provide their customers with as much beer as they’d like at a zero monetary cost. Shoup points out that of course we pay for the cost of all this parking, only drivers do not pay this price in their role as drivers. We pay for it as a tax on housing, retail goods, and in the form of lower wages as workers. Those who pay the highest tax are of course non-drivers. Some drivers are subsidized under this system with the highest subsidy going to drivers who make frequent, short car trips. He explains that off-street parking requirements developed as the demand for zero-price curb parking outpaced supply. This is a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons. Because no one had property rights of street parking, it was overused. Rather than charging for this scarce resource, or allowing building owners to provide their customers with parking at profit-maximizing prices, city governments turned to regulations. Chapter 2: In this chapter, Shoup really gets to the core of the problems that government employees face when they try to provide consumer goods. Some […]

A far-too-long rebuttal of Randal O’Toole on parking

Donald Shoup and Randal O’Toole – they just can’t get enough of each other! Donald Shoup, you may recall, is the granddaddy of free market parking policy, and Randal O’Toole is the self-styled Antiplanner. Though they both claim to be libertarians, they seem to have some pretty fundamental disagreements, which we heterodox libertarians at Market Urbanism can relate to. Shoup has made a career out of pointing out the sprawl-enhancing effects of minimum parking regulations and under-priced on-street parking, whereas O’Toole’s made his on the idea that sprawl is the free market equilibrium and that smart growth, not anti-density NIMBYism, isthe greatest threat to free markets in land. They’ve sparred before in a roundabout way, with Randal O’Toole replying to Tyler Cowen’s very Shoupian NYT column and then Shoup posting a three–part rebuttal to that (which I wasn’t totally onboard with, surprisingly), but I think this Cato Unbound issue is the first time they’re being published head-on. It’ll also also include friend and former Market Urbanism contributer Sandy Ikeda, whose opinion I’m excited to read, along with Clifford Winston of Brookings. Shoup’s contribution was good, though probably familiar to Market Urbanism readers. But it’s O’Toole’s that I want to talk about. There’s a lot about what he wrote that I take issue with, but to keep this post to a manageable length (I could easily make my reply to O’Toole a three-part series), I’ll stick to this paragraph. O’Toole is arguing that in most of America, parking minimums don’t contribute to sprawl since developers would build that much parking anyway: To find out what cities would be like without minimum-parking requirements, we must turn to Texas, where counties aren’t even allowed to zone, much less impose minimum-parking requirements. This means developers are free to build for the market, not for urban planners. […]

Yet another town moves from parking minimums to maximums with no stop in between

Despite its ridiculously biased opening sentence (“Fairfax County residents will have a harder time finding a free parking space in some neighborhoods if transportation planners get their way”), the Washington Post actually has a relatively informative article on potential new parking maximums in Fairfax County, Virginia. Essentially they want to do what a lot of smart growth-enthralled planners want to do: replace their parking minimums with maximums. Under current ordinances, new townhouses must have at least 2.75 parking spaces per dwelling. Under the draft recommendations, parking would be limited to 1.75 spaces per dwelling in a townhouse development less than a quarter-mile from a Metro station or 2.5 spaces per dwelling if the townhouse were located one-fourth of a mile to a half-mile from the station. Parking at commercial developments would be reduced from 2.6 parking spaces per 125,000 square feet of space to 2.1 if less than a quarter-mile from the Metro and to two spaces less than a half-mile away. Ignoring that last sentence, which I’ll get back to in a minute, this is pretty much the standard planner’s bias – move directly from parking minimums to parking maximums, without, oh, I don’t know, maybe just eliminating the centrally-planned parking regulations altogether?? This is one of the reasons that it’s very hard for libertarians and conservatives to get onboard with recent planning trends: the planners go from car-forcing to car-forbidding, skipping over entirely the obvious intermediate step of just letting people choose for themselves how car- or transit-oriented they want their lives to be. There was also this interesting fact: Yet the number of jurisdictions in the United States that impose parking maximums on developers is still perhaps fewer than 50, Rathbone said. For all the anti-smart growth rhetoric we hear about the planners coming to take away our […]

Premium link list

Recently I’ve been delaying posting a few things because I wanted to wait till I had more time to cover them, but I’m realizing that I’ll probably have new things to write about on the 15th (which is when regular posting will hopefully resume), so have at it – your first ever premium link list: 1. The Bowles-Simpson Plan is out (but apparently it’s not the final plan that will be presented to Obama), and it looks like a great deal for market urbanism.  Their “Zero Plan” is a broad base, low rate approach that eliminates all tax deductions and credits, including not only the mortgage-interest rate deduction that we’ve discussed earlier, but also the tax break that businesses get for providing employees with parking that Shoup criticized a few weeks ago.  (By the way, that first linked TPM article is by far the most comprehensive and concise outline of the plan that I’ve seen in the media so far.) 2. Cap’n Transit gives an overview of his local community group’s proposal for eliminating parking minimums in a politically-palatable way. Spoiler: it involves everybody’s favorite transit maps – frequency maps! People involved in DC’s recent moves towards parking reform should especially take note, since the success of their plan depends on the definition of “good transit service.” 3. Reinventing Parking has a post on illegal parking extortion in developing countries.  In India and Bangladesh, which Paul Barter discusses, the problem is parking contractors illegally raising prices.  In Bucharest, though, where I used to live, the “extortionists” were much less organized, usually gypsy street kids, who didn’t do much to stop you from parking, don’t actually provide protection for the car, and probably aren’t going to do anything to your car but guilt trip you if you don’t pay them.  In either […]

Matt Yglesias’ proposal for reforming DC’s ANC’s

At the risk of turning Market Urbanism into Reblogging Matt Yglesias, here’s another interesting post from the blogosphere’s most famous market urbanist about reforming DC’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) system. After discussing a recent decision by an ANC incumbent to deny Five Guys permission to open up a sidewalk cafe in an otherwise barren area until they pay up for “other community initiatives,” he claims that the problem isn’t necessarily shortsightedness vis-à-vis development, but rather “an error of institutional design”: Advisory Neighborhood Commissions don’t have very much power or very much responsibility. But they do have a lot of power over liquor licenses, sidewalk cafes, and zoning variances. ANC members, however, have views on things other than liquor licenses, sidewalk cafes, and zoning variances. So the most reasonable way for them to achieve a diverse set of policy goals is to adopt a very stringent attitude toward liquor licenses and sidewalk cafes, and to support very restrictive zoning rules that increase the value of variances, and then to trade permission to do business for other kinds of favors. If a fixed portion of retail sales taxes raised in a given ANC were put into a neighborhood fund controlled by the commissioners, then I bet commissioners would suddenly be less interested in swaps of these sorts and more interested in attracting businesses to their area. But instead we’ve set up ANCs in a way that encourages them to be systematically biased against just saying “yes” to local retailers. Practical politics are not my forte, but this sounds like it could be a good idea. If it would work, I like the idea of essentially standardizing the community bribe and having it be paid in fungible money rather than less efficient in-kind donations (more parking, inclusionary zoning, etc.).  I would suppose that […]

Midnight parking round-up

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.

Midnight links

1. Cap’n Transit weighs in on the ARC debate, and shows that Chris Christie is more interested in shifting resources to his suburban constituents than to cutting spending. Here’s the best part: Editorial board member: What’s the difference between a gas tax hike and a fare hike, besides who it lands on? Christie: That’s the difference. 2. The Los Angeles Times profiles Donald Shoup. I liked this part: Shoup depends on his bicycle for much of his mobility. He freely confesses, however, that when behind the wheel of his silver 1994 Infiniti J30, he often circles the block looking for a free parking space. “I don’t like paying for parking,” he says with a shrug. 3. Matt Yglesias notes DC’s second-only-to-NYC office rents, and blames them on the city’s absurd height restriction.  I’m happy that Yglesias is interested in urbanism, but it doesn’t really appear like he reads/interacts with the wider planning blogosphere (I stand corrected).

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