Over the course of the last year, New York City's transportation policy community has spent tremendous time, energy and money pursuing the idea of congestion pricing. For good reason: London showed that congestion pricing works. It reduces traffic while raising money for transit, bike and pedestrian improvements. And it unites a full spectrum of political interests, from lefty environmentalists to rightish business types.

Despite all it has going for it, congestion pricing won't be easy to make happen. New York City likely does not have the ability to impose congestion pricing without approval from the state legislature. And outer borough politicians insist that they will do everything in their power to prevent it from ever being enacted. In public Mayor Michael Bloomberg has expressed no interest in the idea and many in city government believe that the political cost of congestion pricing is too high -- even though polls show that New Yorkers are relatively receptive to the idea.

As the pricing debate simmers on a back burner, transportation policy experts have begun looking more closely at other tools for managing and reducing the choking traffic congestion that one study estimates is costing New York City $13 billion per year. Increasingly, they are turning their attention to the quintessential, neurotic New York obsession -- parking. Parking policy, it seems, may be a key to reducing the city's crushing traffic congestion. 

City Hall can change parking policy without interference from the state legislature. And many of these changes can be made without expensive, time-consuming street redesigns and capital projects. Likewise, changes in parking policy don't require billions of federal dollars like the Second Avenue Subway.

"It's something we can control," said Matthew Roth of Transportation Alternatives.

Some things the city could do are simple, like cracking down on government workers who park illegally, or metering parking for city workers, which would raise $46 million annually, according to a study by Bruce Schaller of Schaller Consulting. But there are an increasing number of ambitious programs that could serve as models for New York.

In California, state law requires that certain employers who provide free parking to employees offer them the choice of a cash allowance equal to the market rate of that parking. Copenhagen spent 35 years reducing its total supply of parking by two to three percent annually. Many of the vibrant, thriving public spaces that you see today in Copenhagen were once, simply, parking lots. And many American cities are tinkering wit the idea that the price of parking on the street should be set by the market.

Jeff Zupan of the Regional Plan Association wants to rewrite city zoning restrictions that would put caps on the amount of parking developers can build. The new parking requirements would be based on the availability of mass transit, rather than the somewhat arbitrary minimum levels they are required to meet now. UCLA urban planning professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, adds that the city should allow parking prices to rise to market rates, rather than requiring developers to build enough parking to keep prices low, which he says "collectivizes the cost of parking because they allow everyone to park free at everyone else's expense." This, Shoup says, takes away the incentive for individual drivers to save money by driving less. Over the long term, Zupan and Shoup both believe such changes would compel a shift from automobiles to mass transit, helping the city achieve its PLANYC 2030 goals.

Schaller agrees that new parking policies should be explored, but warns against doing so without also investing in mass transit and experimenting with other ways to shift travelers out of their cars. Transportation policy has a lot of moving parts, Schaller says, and putting too much focus on one aspect "overstresses the tool." If you're not careful you may end up "doing various things to clog up traffic and not accomplish your purpose."

All of this talk is a bit premature for some advocates, who are pressuring city officials to first come up with a detailed, comprehensive inventory of all the parking in the city -- something that, remarkably, does not exist today, and is not on the agenda of any city agency. Any aggressive action on parking must be preceded by an effort to understand the specifics of the current situation, said Jon Orcutt of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

As it is right now, "the whole issue of dealing with parking is groping in the dark," he said.

Photo: Zarin/Flickr

In recent years, urban planners have come to accept a somewhat counter-intuitive theory called "induced demand." The theory posits that when you build a new road or widen an existing one to try to ease traffic congestion, the roadway almost always fills to its maximum capacity and traffic congestion grows even worse than it was before. In the mid-1990's British researchers discovered that the opposite of "induced demand" is also true. When roads are narrowed or altogether eliminated, or when it is less convenient or more expensive to drive, traffic doesn't just pile up elsewhere. Rather, traffic disappears.

Traffic jams, it turns out, are the result of tens of thousands of individual human decisions. When it is no longer convenient to drive, especially in a big city with lots of other travel options, a number of commuters will decide to take a different mode of transportation, travel at a different time of day, car-pool, make fewer, more efficient trips, or simply stay at home. The corollary to "induced demand" is often called the theory of "disappearing traffic."  

Thanks to the work of UCLA urban planning professor Donald Shoup, city planners now have a significant body of evidence to show that the theories of induced demand and disappearing traffic also apply to parking. In his book, The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup showed that the more cheap, abundant parking that cities build, the more traffic congestion and automobile dependence cities get.

Shoup's findings, however, do not yet appear to be influencing New York City's official approach to land use and transportation planning, particularly in the booming outer boroughs. While city regulations hamper the construction of new parking in Manhattan below 96th Street and Long Island City, the Department of City Planning still attaches off-street parking requirements to new construction projects in much of the rest of the city, even in areas as transit-rich as Downtown Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens. Remarkably, the Hudson Yards rezoning on the west side of Manhattan also included minimum parking requirements despite the fact that billions are being spent to extend the number 7 subway line to reach it.

In other parts of the city, including all of Staten Island, officials have established "low density growth management areas," that maintain a more suburban character (including all of Staten Island). Part of the mayor's plan to quell over-development includes strict limits on how dense development can be and higher levels of required parking attached to residential buildings. According to the city's zoning handbook, the city's goal is to "accommodate high auto ownership in these outlying areas distant from mass transit."

Matthew Roth of Transportation Alternatives finds all this exasperating. City officials "fail to acknowledge what their colleagues in the field have long recognized as indisputable truth: the demand for driving is elastic, dependent upon the amount of driving and parking space that is made available."

If City Hall is hedging its bets, the anti-parking argument is often a hard sell at community board meetings and local negotiations where new development projects are being discussed. It is virtually a rule: When a large new development is proposed, locals push for the construction of more parking.

Martha Bitterman, the district manager of Queens Community Board Seven, which includes downtown Flushing, said that she had heard the argument that more parking will lead to more traffic. But she believes that an outer-borough "mentality" means that people will drive at all costs. "You can't say there's not ample public transportation to get in and out of Flushing. But no matter what rules or regulations, or if you jack up the prices, people will still drive," she said.

The recurring debate is particularly strange because both sides appear to have the same goal -- less traffic congestion. Yet, one side argues that building more parking space will achieve that goal. The other side says building less parking space -- or, at least, charging more money for it -- is the way to convince people to get out of their cars.

Unfortunately, debates about big new development projects are not marked by their capacity to digest such nuanced thinking, says Gale Brewer. She has spent decades attending such meetings as a community board member and now as a member of the City Council (Brewer recently introduced a congestion relief bill, which does not directly address parking).

Brewer says that parking comes up at virtually every community meeting she attends, inevitably inspiring such vitriol that she regularly excuses herself "to go to the bathroom" when the issue arises.

"People almost get into fistfights over this," she says.

Photo: photogirl58/Flickr

Last December, in announcing the goals of his Long-Term Planning and Sustainability initiative, Mayor Michael Bloomberg raised the terrifying specter of New York City commuters in the year 2030 stuck in an eight-hour "rush hour." This all-day traffic jam would become a reality, the mayor said, if New York City failed to plan for growth.

Just a short bus ride away from the Queens Museum of Art, where the mayor delivered his speech, is Downtown Flushing. There, the ideal of the mayor's Long-Term Planning and Sustainability project is running up against the reality of New York City's current-day development boom.

Though Downtown Flushing is accessible by more than twenty bus lines and the number 7 train, two major new development projects, Flushing Commons and Flushing Town Center, have been planned with the assumption that people will come by car. Flushing Commons, a $500 million project which will include a hotel, retail, and community center, is being built on city-owned property. Flushing Town Center is a combination residential and retail complex whose $600 million cost is being helped along by a variety of state tax breaks. Together, the projects will create a net gain of 3,500 hundred parking spaces in Downtown Flushing, an amount more suitable for a suburban mega-mall than the most transit-friendly neighborhood in all of Queens.

New York has a reputation as a walking and public transportation city, and cutting commute times is one of the goals of the PLANYC 2030 project. Yet the city's recent development boom has included the planning and construction of tens of thousands of new parking spaces, many of which are being paid for by public money. New York City and State are, in essence, subsidizing a parking boom that, some experts say, may ensure decades of automobile dependence and traffic congestion no matter what Mayor Bloomberg's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability has to say about it.

No one seems to know exactly how many new parking spaces are being built across New York City, but Matthew Roth of Transportation Alternatives says he can think of 18,000 spots off the top of his head. The new Yankee Stadium includes 10,000 slots for vehicles, more than doubling the amount of parking per fan at the old stadium. The Bronx Terminal market will offer room for 2,800 cars. And vast, accessible parking lots are a basic element of plans for Atlantic Yards, Ikea, Fairway, Whole Foods, Lowe's and many other developments in Brooklyn. In April 2005, Brian Ketcham and Carolyn Conheim of Community Consulting Services tallied up over 20,000 new parking spaces planned, under construction or already built in and around Downtown Brooklyn (Download their PDF).

While many outer borough Community Boards view new parking spaces as a traffic mitigation, experts say otherwise. "Those new parking spaces result in encouraging more people to drive while at the same time you're trying to eliminate traffic by other means," said Jeff Zupan, a transportation analyst with the Regional Plan Association. "You're working at cross purposes, no doubt about it."

All of this new parking space is necessary, city officials say, because outer borough New Yorkers are more likely to drive where public transportation is not as developed. Even in Flushing, with its wealth of transit, Councilmember John Liu (chair of the council's transportation committee), has fought to keep the cost for parking at Flushing Commons below market rate and to keep the number of new spaces as high as possible, despite studies that show they aren't all needed.

The City Planning Department has long tried to restrict driving in Manhattan's Central Business District by not requiring developers to include parking, putting caps on the amount of parking that can be built, and taxing parking lots. A recent, notable exception is the rezoning of the enormous Hudson Yards area on Manhattan's West Side. City dollars are being spent on extending the 7 train to the area. Still, developers will also be required to build a certain amount of parking based on the size of the buildings they are constructing. These are the first such parking requirements in Manhattan since 1982.

City officials argue that they are simply providing people with a choice by accommodating both public and private transportation. But UCLA Professor Donald Shoup, whose book The High Cost of Free Parking is the most thorough examination of parking ever written, argues that simply offering a choice won't cut congestion.

"Off-street parking requirements encourage everyone to drive wherever they go," he writes, "because they know that can usually park free when they get there." Inexpensive and abundant parking, in other words, creates more traffic congestion. So, how does Mayor Bloomberg square his administration's laudable long-term sustainability goals with the boom in parking that his administration has, in many cases, promoted and subsidized?

Photo: wakejunkie/Flickr