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Tag parking

Your consolation link list

Apologies to everyone for the light posting – over the next few weeks I may be a bit busy with job and internship applications (any suggestions for work or job offers would be very much appreciated!), but hopefully I’ll still be able to put up a few posts a week. But for now, all you get is this mammoth link dump: 1. Vancouver’s laneway housing program (which we discussed earlier) has been off to a brisk start, and though planners are looking to liberalize sewer rules, they’re also considering only allowing one-story houses as-of-right, and limiting the amount of new laneway houses per block. 2. Former Market Urbanism contributer Sandy Ikeda writes about the urban origins of liberty at the Freeman. 3. The Dukakis Center has released a report suggesting that the gentrification caused by new light rail lines might cause driving to increase, defeating the purpose of TOD. Megan McArdle has also been discussing gentrification. Hopefully I’ll write something about this and gentrification more generally soon, but I wanted to post this in case I don’t get around to it. Any thoughts from the commenters on why this is and how it can be avoided? 4. North Korea “declare[s] war” on its version of the jitney, the “servi-cha.” 5. LA is the only big city in America whose fire department mandates that all skyscrapers have flat roofs so as to allow helicopters to land, but this may be changing (Curbed, parts 1 and 2). 6. Disabled riders file a class-action lawsuit against NYC’s MTA “for not spending a federally mandated 20% of [subway] station rehabilitation budgets on improvements like elevators and ramps.” The ADA’s impact on mass transit and urbanism is something that I’d eventually like to discuss more in depth, but I haven’t seen much research or even many […]

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 […]

Matt Yglesias attacks parking maximums, outs himself as a market urbanist

Matt Yglesias has been on a roll lately with the urbanism posts, all of which have a heavy “market urbanist” slant, but it’s this post about parking reform in/around Boston (riffing off of this Boston Globe article) that seals the deal for me: Regulators pushing developers to build less parking than they want is much, much, much better than the near-universal practice of regulators mandating minimum levels of parking. But I do think the message is clearer and the potential political coalition bigger if parking reformers just stick to the idea that this should be left up to the market. Cars are useful, and people who have cars need to park them. So there’s nothing wrong with building parking. But urban space is expensive, and parking spaces take up space, so people should weigh the costs and benefits of building/buying more parking against other possibilities. Getting to market-determined levels of parking construction and parking space pricing would be a huge victory, and it’s not particularly necessary to go beyond that. I guess the only thing I’d have to add is that while I think these sort of parking maximums and general density-forcing rules are of minor import compared to the massively anti-density status quo, they do give rhetorical ammo to people like Randal O’Toole and other self-proclaimed libertarian types who like to claim that what planners really want is to banish cars entirely from cities. The sad truth is that they’re right – New Urbanism/Smart Growth might have some libertarian issues at heart, but at the end of the day, they’re out to put us all on trains/buses/bikes/our own two feet, not to set the market right. Now again, I think that O’Toole & Co. vastly overestimate the influence of density-forcing regulations, but they do have somewhat of a point. […]

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.

Hell freezes over, or: the one in which I agree with Randal O’Toole’s argument over Shoup’s

I never thought the day would come, but I actually find myself taking issue with Donald Shoup’s recent criticism of the Cato Institute (which Randal O’Toole works for) and its own DC headquarters’ employee parking program. While I agree with Shoup’s more general critique of Cato’s stance on transportation and land use issues, and consider him to be the greatest urbanist since Jane Jacobs, his attack on Cato for giving its employees free parking appears to me to be misdirected. The gist of his argument is that since Cato offers free parking to its employees and neighboring NPR (both on Massachusetts Ave. in DC) charges its workers for parking, NPR is taking the “free market” approach and Cato is taking the “free parking” approach. But I don’t see how this comports with Shoup’s broader research, which focuses on parking policies of governments and not private (well, sort of) entities like NPR and Cato. Corporations are allowed to take a command-and-control approach to their operations and still be considered “free market institutions” as long as they are competing in a free market, and in fact some of the most successful ones are (Facebook, for example, is still run as Mark Zuckerberg’s own personal fiefdom). Now of course, Cato is not operating in a free market when it comes to parking. It likely was forced to build some amount of parking by law, and even if it wasn’t, the influence of neighboring areas’ land use policies looms large on a single building like Cato’s. There’s also the issue of employer-provided parking as a fringe benefit not being taxed, which Shoup mentions. He then suggests that Cato offer a parking cash-out program, whereby they pay employees who choose not to park the cash equivalent of the spot, which Cato doesn’t appear to currently […]

New York City links

There are a couple of NYC-related links that I’ve been saving up, so here they are: 1. Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indiannapolis and NYC’s new deputy mayor, appears to be interested in privatizing New York City’s parking meters in order to balance the city’s budget. We’re more interested in the extent to which it will raise parking prices closer to a market rate, but wary of the city locking in parking policy and therefore not being able to experiment with more radical reforms down the road. 2. Bruce Ratner’s new Lower Manhattan apartment building, designed by Frank Gehry, with studios starting at $3,000/mo., is receiving an affordable housing tax abatement. 3. Comptroller John Liu’s task force on “what the city can and should demand from developers of publicly subsidized projects” has collapsed in a series of public resignations and dissensions. Fortunately, it looks like a potentially lethal beast has been slain: In a letter to the task force co-chairs, four dissenters wrote that the task force’s recommendations would create “additional red tape and bureaucracy and ultimately waste taxpayer funds on a new set of city-funded consultants.” “In today’s increasingly competitive environment, a proposal like this would make New York a more difficult place to do business and to build,” the four dissenting task force members wrote in a letter reviewed by the Journal. 4. The Gotham Gazette discusses the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which should ring a bell for anyone interested in NYC real estate. The article claims that it’s the most significant planning entity in New York City, and that its rise has come on the back of inclusionary zoning and public-private initiatives. A lot of this is includes affordable housing mandates (usually about 20%) within otherwise private buildings, which the Gotham Gazette says are included in most […]

Zoning blighted Manhattanville before Columbia did

Something that always annoyed me about discussions of the state of Manhattanville and Columbia’s blight study is the fact that they usually leave out restrictive zoning as the original sin. We’re certainly no fans of eminent domain or Columbia’s plans for the West Harlem neighborhood, and while people are right to point out that Columbia’s neighborhood acquisitions and plans are key drivers of the further decline of the neighborhood, it would be stretching the truth to say that the neighborhood’s blight is entirely Columbia’s fault. The fact is that even before Columbia descended upon the neighborhood, its zoning classification just wouldn’t allow it to be a nice place. What else would you expect from an area that’s zoned mostly for industrial and manufacturing uses and is inhabited mostly by storage companies and auto repair shops? And the neighborhood organizations themselves weren’t doing the best job selling the alternatives. While their plan included some upzonings, it also would have hobbled the area with the onerous restrictions that are all too common throughout the city. There was an emphasis on preservation of the status quo, with some light industry retained. Inclusionary zoning and community benefits agreements would have driven up the cost of development further. They also took the stance that parking in the area was “insufficient” and “inadequate,” and called for “affordable municipal parking.” Clearly not being familiar with the work of Donald Shoup, they argued that “limited parking cause[s] drivers to circle blocks looking for on-street parking.” Again, while we’re no fans of eminent domain or Columbia’s heavy-handed tactics, it’s important to remember how difficult it is to do things “the right way,” and how much time and money is necessary to get plots of land rezoned. NYU, which doesn’t have the blight excuse for its Lower Manhattan acquisitions, is […]

Enforced price ceilings on private parking lots

by Stephen Smith I wrote last week about a tendency in developing Asian countries to emulate the most anti-market Western planning policies, but I didn’t realize it was this bad. Paul Barter writes: Would it surprise you to know that some cities control the price of parking even for private-sector off-street parking operations? Beijing, Guangzhou, Hanoi and Jakarta do control parking prices, so I assume the practice is common throughout China, Indonesia and Vietnam. Obviously, the “controlling” is a price cap, not a price minimum, and Barter makes a convincing case that the rates are indeed below the market price. I don’t recall ever hearing about price controls on private parking in the West, but it looks like the urge to come up with new ways to cater to car owners is universal. I should add that Paul Barter’s new blog Reinventing Parking is a must-read for anyone interested in parking policy. He’s based in Singapore and writes a lot about Southeast Asia and China, and has another more general blog called Reinventing Urban Transport.

Food deserts and zoning

by Stephen Smith The other day I put up a post detailing the restrictions that small-scale restaurants and food carts face, but I should mention that grocery stores and supermarkets also face similar restrictions.  Like restrictions on restaurants, they end hitting poor, urban, black neighborhoods the hardest, creating the phenomenon known as “food deserts.”  Aside from traditional Euclidean zoning that forbids building commercial structures like corner grocers in residential neighborhoods, developers also face a raft of minimum parking regulations and mandatory reviews.  NYC’s FRESH initiative has been trying to overturn some of these restrictions (although it also offers developers a bunch of subsidies and tax breaks), but the restrictions they describe are still applicable in much of the city and in cities around the US: Other regulations can drive up the cost of developing grocery stores. The Zoning Resolution currently applies a higher parking requirement for food stores over other types of neighborhood retail and service uses. The current regulations also restrict grocery stores to 10,000 square feet in M1 Districts. These regulations have cost implications and reflect outdated assumptions about the impacts of new food stores.  New grocery stores may be required to purchase more land to accommodate parking than would be justified by the demand, in commercial districts where prevailing market rents are high and larger tracts of land are scarce. In M1 Districts where development costs are lower than commercial districts and larger tracts of land are more available, full-line grocery stores are subject to a time-consuming and costly public review process at a very low size threshold. These M1 Districts encompass light manufacturing areas in Mixed Use Districts where residential uses are permitted and light manufacturing areas directly adjacent to underserved residential districts. Supermarkets are difficult to build even in more suburban areas – zoning approval […]

Toronto’s new zoning code

by Stephen Smith Matt Yglesias points to an article about Toronto’s new zoning code. The story is short on details, although the lowering of parking minimums near transit and overall simplification of the code seem like appealing features to Market Urbanists. I did, however, find a blog post from last year about the proposed changes, which has a lot more details. Keep in mind that this is from last year and so it might not still be relevant, but if anyone’s interested in digging a little deeper into the new code, there’s a good place to start. This part, though, is not very encouraging: The new zoning also takes a more coherent approach to minimum parking provisions, requiring a lot less parking for condos/apartments or office buildings that are in the downtown core or on heavy transit lines. Many new projects don’t need the amount of parking required by zoning, and developers would be glad not to pay the extra cost to provide it. But the overall reduction in minimum parking requirements is disappointingly limited — the planner in charge of the project, Joe D’Abramo, estimated it at about 10% less compared to previous requirements. There also seems to be a lot of New Urbanist-style regulation – for example, making it more difficult to build drive-thrus and driveways – that we don’t necessarily support. When you look at the revisions as a whole I doubt that there’s more urban-forcing than urban-allowing, but I do wish that they’d work harder on repealing things like parking minimums and density restrictions before trying mandate density. Even if the mandatory New Urbanist regulations are minor, they give ammo to people like Randal O’Toole and the Cato/Reason bunch to claim that urbanism is being forced down people’s throats rather than simply being allowed. New Urbanist […]

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