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Tag parking

Link list

1. Development blogger Roving Bandit criticizes UN-Habitat executive director Joan Clos for saying that Africa is “confronted with […] the challenge of preventing the formation of new slums.” I wonder if Clos thinks that the Lower East Side was born with yoga studios and Starbucks. 2. A kidney dialysis center in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia wants to open in an abandoned industrial site, and when the City Council moved to overrule the local residents’ objections to the clinic staying open nine extra hours a week, they sued and called it an attack on democracy. The residents claim to want “peace and quiet,” which I guess you can’t get when you have people whose kidneys are failing all around you. Edit: Commenter Terry Nicol pointed me in the direction of this story earlier this year about a locally-owned Chestnut Hill grocery store that was threatened by a local resident for selling prepared food. 3. Yonah Freemark writes about Dallas’ new and extensive, but underperforming light rail network. Apparently the new lines were built along automobile corridors and bypass the densest parts of town entirely, and so the system functions more as a glorified park-and-ride rather than as an engine for infill growth. 4. Topher Matthews lays out his proposal for “performance parking” (i.e., charging market rates for street parking) in Georgetown. This is desperately needed in this very trendy and congested area – I remember one hairdresser on Wisconsin Ave. telling me about the convoluted game of hide-and-seek she played in order to park for free on the residential streets. Unfortunately, one DC Commissioner apparently believes that, even in one of DC’s most walkable neighborhoods, parking minimums are necessary: “This is an office building. There’s no Metro, people are going to drive.” 5. Apparently satellite photos show that the […]

NYC & DC links

New York City 1. A while ago I wrote about how Manhattanville’s blight, and therefore Columbia’s ability to use eminent domain, was the fault of bad zoning. The nearby neighborhood of West Harlem looks like it’s learned that lesson, and is seeking to protect itself against encroachment from Columbia by upzoning itself. Unfortunately it’s not a pure upzoning – there’re also affordable housing mandates, regulations against “sliver buildings,” and some unspecified protections for existing structures. The massive 100-block rezoning is the first in half a century. 2. A handful of buildings in Downtown Brooklyn may get historic district’d. 3. A massive parking garage in Jamaica, Queens is receiving huge tax breaks, ostensibly for reducing congestion. Why am I not surprised to see that it’s owned by an organization with “development corporation” in its name? 4. Janette Sadik-Khan wants to expand the “pop-up cafe” program that essentially lets businesses use parking spaces as seating areas. I personally think that anyone who’s willing to pay more than the current metered parking rates should be allowed to do whatever they want with the space. Washington, DC 1. Security expert Bruce Schneier suggests closing the Washington Monument “as a monument to our fears,” and Matt Yglesias wants terrorists to blow it up – something I’ve suggested before. Maybe if that boring obelisk were gone, people would give up on DC’s height restriction and consider turning the Mall into a place that’s actually pleasant to be. 2. Unsuck DC Metro on why the Metro’s escalators suck – it’s the unions!

Seattle’s land use liberalization

It’s not often that I find a plan that I can wholeheartedly agree with, but this one from Seattle sounds damn near perfect, at least in terms of marginal change (my emphasis…apologies to Publicola for stealing their content!): 1. Instead of the current generic land-use standards, the new regulations include five different allowed housing types: Cottage housing (collections of small single-family-style houses), row houses (rows of units attached by a single wall), townhouses (attached units that occupy space from ground to roof), autocourt townhouses (townhouses that each have a private garage), and apartments. 2. The maximum allowable height would be increased from 25 to 30 feet (basically, from three to a potential four stories)—a change that prompted commenters like Eastlake gadfly Chris Leman to accuse the council of supporting “larger and taller condos… that are bulkier and …. really worse than the worst townhouses” because they would block views, make it impossible to plant trees, and displace low-income housing. 3. The size of new developments would be determined by floor-area ratio (the ratio of a building’s floor area to the lot on which it is built) rather than simple building footprint, allowing more flexibility in building size. 4. Row houses would not be subject to the same density limits as auto-oriented townhouses, allowing them to cover more of a lot. 5. The law also includes new design standards to improve the appearance of new low-rise buildings and make them fit better into neighborhoods; 6. The changes would reduce the setbacks required between housing and the street (and between low-rise townhouses or row houses and each other), allowing more development on a lot; 7. Require developers to provide space for garbage, recycling, and food waste bins for smaller buildings, making it easier for residents of small town houses and apartment buildings […]

A question and a link list

Hey guys, before I start this link list, I wanted to ask: Has anybody had trouble posting comments here with Disqus lately? Either you can’t post them, or once you do they disappear? I’ve gotten two complaints in the last few days, so if you’ve been experiencing any problems please don’t hesitate to let me know so I can try to get to the bottom of it. If you can’t post a comment, email me at smithsj[at]gmail[dot]com. 1. DC gets upzoned. Why the Washington City Paper chose to bury that behind items about “neighborhood branding” and “supporting the enactment of pending federal legislation to ensure that insurance reserves are held and invested in the U.S.” is beyond me. 2. DC has, unfortunately, also started to cap the number of cabs in the city. American politicians just can’t get enough of screwing over Somalis, I guess. 3. Jamaica, Queens gets downzoned. The Post tells us joyfully that the city is implementing the “innovative and critically important” FRESH initiative to deal with the area’s lack of supermarkets – which will be sorely needed now that the city is guaranteeing that there will be no new demand for food. 4. “Vertical parking lot” in Chicago, circa 1930. 5. Communism in America: Roosevelt Island. 6. Matt Yglesias and Megan McArdle discuss bars and clustering, but Ryan Advent has the best post in my opinion. 7. Chicago’s Metra boosts home values (duh). 8. India fails at urbanism. 9. One Tea Partier thinks that only property owners (read: homeowners) should be allowed to vote. “If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners.”

NYC to raise on-street parking rates, local news freaks out

New York City has some of the most underpriced parking in the nation, and while there have been a few pilot programs (in the UES, the West Village, and Park Slope) to raise rates during peak hours, it looks like Bloomberg is finally pushing to implement Park Smart citywide.  Residential metered hourly rates throughout the city will be bumped up to $1 (they were 50¢ just six months ago) and commercial rates will rise to $3 (they were $2 six months ago). Beyond this, peak on-street parking in the busiest commercial zones will cost even more. The Post loads its article with driver outrage (headline: “Feed it and weep!  Meter$ jacked up”; opening line: “Park your wallet right here, drivers.”), but at least towards the end they suggest a benefit of the program: “More than half of the business owners and drivers in the area said parking became easier once the more expensive pilot program went into effect.” The CBS affiliate starts off interviewing a guy who lives on the Upper West Side who thinks that Bloomberg “should pay for [parking] himself.  Dip into his pocket […] and put it to the city.”  The interviewer then asks, “And pay for your parking?” and he answers, completely unashamed, “Right!”  The next guy complains about how tough it is to survive in the city, while he commuters by car from Rockville Centre in Nassau County (median household income: $99,299). He’s joined in this opinion by a fellow Long Island resident from Melville (median household income: $92,527). After a city representative notes that it’s a steal compared to off-street garages and an UES physician agrees, the presenter finishes by announcing plans to charge “sky high rates” on busy commercial streets during peak hours – so they’ll be higher than the $3.75/hour that they are now. […]

Sobyanin’s horrific plan for Moscow

It’s been a few months since longtime Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov was fired, so I figured it would be a good time to check in on the city. In spite of Moscow’s infamous traffic and “perversely-sloped” population density gradient, the former mayor’s plan to build 100 km of new metro tracks and over 350 km of new railroad tracks was rejected just a few weeks before his ouster as too expensive. So now that the new mayor, Segrey Sobyanin, has announced his plan to untangle Moscow’s Gordian knot of traffic, how does it measure up? Well, put quite simply, it’s probably the worst urban plan I’ve seen since Paul Rudolph’s plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Increasing the amount of parking by building large lots on the outskirts of town seems to be the most prominent proposal. Like the author of this Bloomberg article which claims that parking spaces in the city “meet 30 percent of needed capacity,” Muscovites don’t seem to recognize that all cars obviously already have places to park, and that increasing the amount of parking is only going to increase the ease of owning a car, and hence the amount of people who choose to do so. Russian urban planners seem to be stuck in the 1950s, too – here is the president of the national planners’ guild claiming that Moscow needs to more than double the surface area it dedicates to roads. The plan also seems to operate under the assumption that public transportation is the problem – their promises to expand mass transit ring hollow when they’re also contemplating banning trolleybuses from the city center and banning the private fleets of jitneys, known as marshrutki, which provide higher quality and more expensive service than the city’s decrepit buses. Some of the elements of the […]

Ann Arbor’s biggest problem with medical marijuana? Parking

Of course it would be the only thing standing in the way of Ann Arbor, the famously liberal college town that almost legalized weed in the ’60s and ’70s, and medical marijuana: Even for some Ann Arbor residents, the city’s tacit acceptance started to give way to unease. As more and more dispensaries opened up, some residents started calling council members to complain about congested parking and busy traffic near pot shops. So there you have it. I guess the only issue more controversial than pot is parking.

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 […]

Links, links, links!

1. An bill that would replace New Jersey’s court-mandated patchwork of inclusionary zoning programs with a more uniform 10% affordable housing mandate has left advanced through its Assembly committee after passing the NJ Senate, though Chris Christie promised to veto it. 2. Last month I reported that Obama’s deficit commission may recommend paring back the mortgage-interest tax deduction. Well, the official plan is now out, and – good news! – it looks like completely doing away with the deduction is on the table. 3. The New Yorker reports on a Cooper Union exhibit that models what the area around the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway connecting the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg Bridge would have looked like if Jane Jacobs had lost and Robert Moses had won. 4. Even with $100 million in cash and hundreds of millions in tax-exempt bonds, Bronx Parking, which operates Yankee Stadium’s perennially under-used parking garage, still can’t turn a profit.

DC parking minimums to “disappear in most cases”

Last month, Eric Fidler of Greater Greater Washington left a tantalizing comment suggesting that DC was going to do away with its minimum parking requirements soon. Obviously this would be very big news and a welcome change for market urbanists, and it looks like it might indeed pan out. On Monday the Zoning Commission is taking comments, but the DC Office of Planning’s draft is apparently very promising. The documents themselves are, like all planning documents, quite long and bury all the dirt within a morass of bullet-points. While I read over the first dozen or so pages, my eyes soon glazed over and so I’ll be relying on GGW’s summary. So, to start out with, here’s the good news: Parking minimums would disappear in most cases. In neighborhood commercial corridors or low-density residential areas without good transit, commercial, institutional, or multi-family residential buildings would still need to provide some parking. But any area with good transit service, or high-density areas, would have no requirements. Beyond that, however, the plan falls short of the market urbanist ideal. To misquote the internet meme, “planners gonna plan” – not content to simply dismantle the previous density-forbidden regimes, the planners are trying to stay relevant by instituting a few density-forcing rules. Parking maximums would come into effect (total lot size, for example, would be capped at 500 or 1000 spaces), and new parking lots wouldn’t be allowed adjacent to sidewalks, a reversal of the traditional setback requirements which encourage the parking-in-front designs so common in America. And while I’m sure in many of these cases the maximums will be set higher than people want to build anyway, GGW points out at least a few proposed projects that would have too much parking under the guidelines. One thing the plan doesn’t seem to mention […]

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