Damien Newton: Los Angeles is changing the way it does parking in its downtown. They’re calling it the ExpressPark system. Let’s start with the basics — what is the program and what are your thoughts?

Donald Shoup: For the first time they’re stating how they’re going to set parking prices. Instead of basing it on council decisions or emotions or people’s feelings, they stated a principal. Parking at a meter will be at the lowest price they can charge and still have one or two open spaces on every block.

If they get that price right, then those spaces will be well used because almost all the spaces will be full. Yet there will be spaces readily available because one or two spaces will be open.

Can it get any better than that as a goal for the parking system?

The key is, can you set the right price without looking at the results even though the results are what’s going to count when setting the price.

DN: This marks a shift in policy for the city that seemed to base parking decisions based on what brings in the most revenue.

DS: It hadn’t been about that even, until quite recently.

You may remember a few years ago they doubled the price of parking everywhere in the city with a minimum price of a dollar an hour. Since most meters were at a quarter an hour, that meant quadrupling the price at most meters. That was the first time meter prices had been changed in eighteen years.

There’s been a lot of neglect of parking meters. Inertia seemed to be the main factor in determining parking prices.

They’re changing that by saying, “Here’s the rule. If half the spaces on a block are empty, we’re going to lower prices. If all the spaces are full we’re going to raise prices.” Since the price change two years ago, I’ve seen entire blocks where there isn’t one car parked. The price is too high.

I think a lot of prices would go down if they extend express park to the whole city. They’re starting in downtown, but I suspect that some prices will go down.

DN: One of the tenets of “The High Cost of Free Parking” is that money collected from meters should be returned to the communities where it was collected. L.A.’s plan returns all metered funds to the general fund. Is that a mistake by the city? Does it give you any misgivings about the plan altogether?

DS: That’s what they’re planning in L.A., they’re not planning on funneling any of the money back to the neighborhood?

That’s a mistake. When you funnel back to the neighborhood you get local buy-in and you get wonderful results.

Pasadena returns all of the metered money back into the neighborhood for decades and they turned the local neighborhood that used to be a commercial skid row into one of the most popular shopping destinations in Southern California. The meters brought in an extra million dollars a year in public services in just that little shopping district. They replaced all the sidewalks, streetlights and street furniture. They cleaned up the allays. They put electric wires underground. This was all paid for by meters.

But that’s a political issue. I think that getting the price right is also very important.

]]> http://la.streetsblog.org/2011/08/24/interview-with-donald-shoup-los-angeles-making-strides-with-expresspark/feed/ 0 http://www.streetfilms.org/mba-the-right-price-for-parking/ http://www.streetfilms.org/mba-the-right-price-for-parking/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:23:24 +0000 Elizabeth Press http://www.streetsblog.org/?p=259572 [...]]]>

You might be shocked at how much traffic consists of drivers who have already arrived at their destination but find themselves cruising the streets, searching for an open parking spot. In some city neighborhoods, cruising makes up as much as 40 percent of all traffic. All this unnecessary traffic slows down buses, endangers cyclists and pedestrians, delays other motorists, and produces harmful emissions. The key to eliminating it is to get the price of parking right.

So what’s the right price for curbside parking? According to UCLA professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, “the right price is the lowest price you can charge and still have one or two spaces available on each block.” Depending on the demand for parking at a given location, the right price could be higher or lower than the static prices you see at traditional meters. You need a dynamic system that adjusts the price based on demand.

The city of San Francisco has been putting Shoup’s ideas into practice on an unprecedented scale with its SFpark program, which will fully launch later this week. In addition to strategically adjusting curbside meter rates, SFpark sets prices in city garages to make them an attractive alternative to on-street spots, and distributes real-time information about parking availability to help drivers find open spaces. It is the most ambitious project in the United States to cut traffic and improve quality of life by getting the price of parking right.

Parking cash out, which lets people choose between receiving free commuter parking or the cash equivalent from their employer, has been shown to reduce vehicle trips to work.

Randal,

Thanks for your message of October 10. The focus of our disagreement seems to have shifted to employer-paid parking. I have criticized employer-paid parking because it increases solo driving to work and thus increases traffic congestion, energy consumption, and air pollution. In contrast, you say, “I don’t see why we, as policy analysts, should be concerned that Cato, or any employer, offers free parking to its employees.”

In defense of this position, you say that Cato voluntarily offers free parking although, as a tax-exempt institution, it is “relatively immune to tax incentives,” and that its decision to offer free parking is its own choice, without any government interference or subsidy. It seems you are saying that whatever Cato does about parking is right if Cato voluntarily chooses to do it. My first response to that line of reasoning is to wonder whether most libertarians place a higher value on liberty than on well-functioning markets. If an institution voluntarily introduces a price distortion, like free parking, should policy analysts not be concerned?

As interesting as that question is, however, it is not germane to our discussion, because you are wrong about Cato’s tax incentives. You should check with Cato’s HR department about taxes, because Cato has the same tax incentives to offer free parking as does any taxable employer.

What are the tax incentives to offer free parking? The Internal Revenue Code encourages all employers to convert taxable wages into nontaxable parking subsidies. With the average 19 percent federal marginal income tax rate and the average 6.5 percent state marginal income tax rate, a commuter faces a 25.5 percent combined marginal income tax rate. Social Security and Medicare add an additional payroll tax rate of 7.65 percent, so a typical commuter’s marginal tax rate on earned income is about 33 percent. The employer (even tax-exempt Cato!) also pays 7.65 percent in payroll taxes. Therefore, the total marginal tax rate on earned income is about 40 percent. Converting $100/month of taxable salary into a tax-exempt parking subsidy of $100/month thus saves the commuter $33 and saves the employer $7.65.

This tax subsidy is a strong incentive for Cato and every other employer to offer free parking at work and thus to subsidize driving to work. It also helps to explain why 95 percent of all automobile commuters in the United States park free at work.

Unwise tax policy distorts the employers’ choices about transportation fringe benefits, and in turn the employers’ misguided fringe benefits distort commuters’ transportation decisions. Chapter 3 in Parking Cash Out explains the tax angles of employer-paid parking.

Employer-paid parking is the most common tax-exempt fringe benefit in the U.S., but it is also an anomaly. Most tax exemptions are intended to promote a public purpose, but the tax exemption for employer-paid parking encourages solo driving to work. As your Cato colleague Julian Sanchez wrote, “heavy automobile use has serious social and environmental externalities, and a socially conscious firm ought not to be subsidizing all that carbon-burning.”

After considering the 40 percent tax subsidy for employer-paid parking, you might rethink your statement that policy analysts should not be concerned if employers offer free parking to their employees. And after studying the tax incentives for employer-paid parking, you may decide to support Congressman Earl Blumenauer’s bill (H.R. 3271) that would encourage many employers to offer parking cash out. H.R. 3271 will not remove the tax exemption for employer-paid parking, but, by requiring employers to offer commuters the option to cash out the parking subsidies as a condition for the tax exemption, the bill will reduce discrimination against non-drivers. So I would very much like to hear your views about how H.R. 3271 will affect the price distortions created by parking subsidies.

Fortunately, we will have the opportunity to debate these issues more formally next Spring, because Jason Kuznicki has commissioned me to write about parking policies in “Cato Unbound.” At that time I do hope to take up the questions I posed earlier, and to learn more about how libertarians view individual freedom in a market where unwise government tax incentives have distorted prices.

Another topic I hope to cover in the article for Cato Unbound could be called parking exceptionalism. It seems to me that most people’s critical and analytic faculties shift to a lower level of intellectual prowess when they think about parking. For example, some people support fair market prices—except for parking. They oppose subsidies—except for parking. They oppose strict planning regulations—except for minimum parking requirements. Unfortunately, when the conversation turns to parking, rational people quickly become emotional, and staunch conservatives become ardent communists.

As you wrote in your earlier message, “Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area.” Employer-paid parking seriously distorts transportation prices in a dense city that has high parking prices, so perhaps I am biased by living in Los Angeles. Similarly, you may be biased by living in Camp Sherman, a hamlet in rural Oregon. You probably never pay anything for parking in Camp Sherman, and therefore you have little daily experience with how a commercial parking market works, or how employer-paid parking affects commuting decisions.

Finally, I have a request. I assume that Cato must have some written policy about how it distributes parking passes among employees. I would appreciate the favor if you would ask the Cato Institute to send me a copy. Thanks.

Donald Shoup
Department of Urban Planning
University of California, Los Angeles

Dear Randal,

In your September 1 post on Cato@Liberty, you mentioned that the Cato Institute offers free parking to its employees.

When it comes to parking, which policy does public radio prefer, and which one is favored by the libertarian think tank?

I checked and found that not all employers in Cato’s neighborhood offer free parking. For example, consider National Public Radio, which is on Massachusetts Avenue three blocks from Cato. NPR charges all its employees the market rate for parking in the building. NPR has 125 parking spaces and it uses fair market prices to ration these scarce spaces among its 400 employees.

The different parking practices at NPR and Cato reveal quite different policy preferences. NPR prefers the free market while Cato prefers free parking.

Cato’s free parking severely distorts transportation prices.  The market price of commuter parking in the commercial garage closest to Cato is $255 a month, so Cato’s free parking subsidizes the cost of driving to work by $255 a month. Because employer-paid parking is a tax-exempt fringe benefit, Cato pays the free parkers a tax-exempt subsidy of $3,060 a year ($255 x 12).

If the round-trip commute distance to Cato is 32 miles (the national average), and if commuters drive to work 22 days a month, Cato’s free parking reduces the cost of driving to work by 36¢ a mile ($255/22 days/32 miles). According to the American Automobile Association, the average operating cost of driving a car is about 18¢ a mile. Because the per-mile subsidy for parking is twice the per-mile cost of driving, Cato’s free parking reduces the out-of-pocket cost of driving to work by two-thirds. Free parking therefore grossly distorts market prices in favor of commuting by car.

In your campaign for market policies in transportation, I hope you will try to persuade the Cato Institute to charge market prices for parking, or at least to offer commuters the option to cash out their parking subsidies. Perhaps you might also write a post on Cato@Liberty about Congressman Earl Blumenauer’s bill (H.R. 3271) that would encourage many employers to offer parking cash out. I suspect that might even make the news on All Things Considered.

Donald Shoup
Department of Urban Planning
University of California, Los Angeles

Dear Randal,

UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking

Thanks for your Cato@Liberty post clarifying several points where we agree about parking policies.

You wrote that the Cato Institute offers free parking to its employees. The market price of commuter parking in the commercial garage closest to the Cato Institute is $255 a month (in Colonial Parking at 901 New York Avenue). At this market price, can you calculate the total market value of all the free parking Cato provides to its automobile commuters?

After examining the data, you may find the market value of the Cato Institute’s free parking is surprisingly high. My rough guess is at least $10,000 a month. That is one example of what I mean by the high cost of free parking.

But maybe I am wrong. I hope the Cato Institute will tell you the number of commuters who park free so that you can answer this simple question. What is the fair market value of all the free parking for commuters who drive to the Cato Institute?

My point is not to criticize the Cato Institute for its free parking, because 95 percent of all automobile commuters park free at work in the United States. My point is that you could do a great service to free-market transportation policy by using the Cato Institute as a case study to analyze how employer-paid parking distorts commuter transportation choices.

According to Randal O'Toole, the Cato Institute does provide free parking for employees at its Washington, DC headquarters. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Valued at market prices, free parking at the Cato Institute reduces the cost of driving to work by $255 a month. If commuters drive the national average round-trip distance of 32 miles a day for 22 days a month, free parking thus reduces the cost of driving to work by 36¢ per mile ($255/22 days/32 miles). According to the AAA, the average operating cost of a car is about 18¢ per mile. Because the parking subsidy at work is twice the operating cost of driving to work, free parking at Cato reduces the out-of-pocket costs of driving to work by two-thirds. Free parking is therefore a huge price distortion in favor of commuting by car.

The Internal Revenue Code creates an incentive for this price distortion because free parking at work is exempt from both income and payroll taxes. Parking cash out can eliminate this price distortion. Parking cash out is a market-oriented policy whereby employers who offer free parking at work also offer commuters the option to choose its cash value in lieu a parking space. Parking cash out does not mandate parking charges because commuters who choose to drive can still park free. Parking cash out simply gives the same subsidy to every commuter, regardless of travel mode choice, while free parking gives a subsidy to drivers and nothing to other commuters. Parking cash out expands choice, which I assume is a core value of the Cato Institute.

A bill now in Congress would alter the Internal Revenue Code to reduce the price distortion in favor of free parking. Section 5 of H.R. 3271 (Blumenauer) would include parking cash out as a condition to qualify for the tax exemption for employer-paid parking. That is, the free parking would be a tax-exempt fringe benefit if employers offer commuters the option to cash it out. The bill would allow commuters to make their transportation choices at fair market prices.

Data from the Cato Institute can illustrate how H. R. 3271 would allow market parking prices to influence transportation choices, without eliminating free parking. I hope the Cato Institute will therefore provide the data necessary to estimate the total market value of all the free commuter parking it provides, and how parking cash out would affect the prices for commuting to its building. After all, if the Cato Institute will not make data available to analyze how market prices can improve transportation choices, who will?

Donald Shoup
Department of Urban Planning
University of California, Los Angeles

Sent in response to this post by Randal O’Toole on Cato@Liberty:

Donald Shoup on Free Parking
Posted by Randal O’Toole

Donald Shoup, the author of The High Cost of Free Parking, has posted a response to my first post about Tyler Cowen’s op ed against free parking. Shoup points out that I erroneously attributed proposals to him that are in fact only urged by his followers, such as maximum-parking requirements and requirements that all businesses charge for parking. I apologize for that.

In fact, Shoup’s book argues that cities should eliminate minimum-parking requirements and charge market rates for on-street parking. I favor these things as well. Where we may disagree is about the effects of these policies.

My post pointed out that many municipalities do not have minimum-parking requirements, but businesses still offer plenty of free parking to their employees and customers. Shoup asks for “a list of some of these.” Virtually all counties in Texas, most counties in Nevada, and many counties in Indiana have no minimum-parking requirements, and I am sure I could find counties in many other states as well. Unlike California, where Shoup lives, and Oregon, where I live, these states do not restrict urban development to within city limits or urban-growth boundaries, and developments in unincorporated parts of these counties offer plenty of free parking.

Much of Shoup’s response seems to assume that my posts were defending minimum-parking requirements. “City planners have no training that would enable them to estimate the demand for parking, and no financial stake in the success of a development,” says Shoup. “They know much less than developers do about how many parking spaces to provide for each project.” As I pointed out in my later posting on this issue, I entirely agree. My goal was to defend private provision of free parking.

That said, I think Shoup’s worries about the “high cost” of parking are overblown. As I pointed out in my first post, surface parking is cheap, and even structured parking is not terribly expensive in the long run. Most of Shoup’s analysis is not of the high cost of free parking but the high cost of minimum-parking requirements, and there the cost is only of the spaces that developers are forced to provide that they wouldn’t otherwise provide. Shoup and I seem to agree that businesses who want to free parking should be allowed to do so.

Unfortunately, many urban planners disagree; they want to set maximum-parking limits, and they often cite Shoup in their plans and proposals. The negative effects of such limits are likely to be as bad if not worse than minimum-parking requirements. Planners promote such limits in order to discourage driving, which planners say is bad.

Shoup himself relies on anti-auto rhetoric. “Ubiquitous free parking helps explain why American motor vehicles, by themselves, consume one-eighth of the world’s total oil production,” Shoup says, for example. “America’s extravagant consumption of imported oil to fuel our cars is not sustainable, economically or environmentally, and anything that is not sustainable must eventually stop.” But we can find many alternatives to “extravagant consumption of imported oil” without limiting people’s mobility the way many urban planners want to do.

Planners with Portland’s Metro, for example, have set a goal of allowing congestion on most of the region’s highways to reach level of service F (meaning stop-and-go driving). They also promote “traffic calming” (a euphemism for congestion building), “boulevarding” (a euphemism for taking lanes away from autos in busy thoroughfares), and other anti-auto policies. But their own analyses found that these policies would have very little effect on the amount of driving people do. The biggest effect came from a plan to require that all businesses in the region charge for parking — yet even that effect was small, estimated to reduce per capita driving by about 2 percent. Even though such a plan has not been put into effect, at least a few years ago Metro’s transportation models assumed that it would be put into effect sometime in the next couple of decades.

As I have shown at length, trying to save energy or reduce auto emissions by reducing driving is not cost effective, and the resulting reduction in mobility could have serious negative effects on our economy. Instead, it is much more cost effective to make the cars we drive more energy efficient and/or capable of using alternative fuels, and if oil prices go up that will happen without government coercion anyway.

Although Shoup teaches in an urban planning school, he is actually an economist, and he and I share many areas of agreement. I won’t even mind if it turns out that I am wrong: if cities get rid of minimum-parking requirements without imposing maximum-parking limits and it leads businesses to charge for parking that are now offering it for free, that’s just the market at work. My only concern is that many planners are using Shoup’s work to promote their own coercive agendas. I hope he responds to them as vigorously as he responded to me.

One more thing: Shoup asks, “Can you tell me if the Cato Institute offers free parking for its employees? If so, does it also offer commuters the option to cash out their parking subsidies?” I do not work in Cato’s Washington, DC, office, but as far as I know it does offer free parking to at least some of its employees and does not provide a cash-out option. Cato is currently expanding its building and I understand it is installing showers for cyclists, as required by DC zoning codes, and is not providing a cash-out option for cyclists (or other employees) who do not plan to use those showers. As a cyclist, I’ll probably use those showers from time to time on my visits to DC. Perhaps someday Dr. Shoup and I will write a paper titled, “The High Cost of Free Showers.”

Randal O’Toole • September 1, 2010 @ 4:30 pm

Dear Randal,

I would like to comment on your August 16 post on the Cato@Liberty blog about “Free Markets for Free Parking.”

Shoup (left) and O'Toole (right). One of these gentlemen has written the definitive volume on parking policy. The other says he has yet to read it.

In commenting on Tyler’s article, you made several mistakes in describing my ideas and proposals. I will explain these mistakes, and if you agree with the explanations I hope you will post corrections on Cato@Liberty.

Before I examine your misunderstanding of what I have written, I will first summarize the three basic parking reforms I recommend in The High Cost of Free Parking: (1) remove off-street parking requirements, (2) charge market prices for on-street parking to achieve about an 85-percent occupancy rate for curb spaces, and (3) return the resulting revenue to pay for public improvements in the metered neighborhoods.

I will quote ten extracts from your post, and comment on each of them.

1.

"Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not."

Does the Antiplanner, who is “dedicated to the sunset of government planning,” really believe that government planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for every economic activity at every site in every city?

Does the Antiplanner, who is “dedicated to the sunset of government planning,” really believe that government planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for every economic activity at every site in every city, no matter how much the required parking spaces may cost and no matter how little drivers may be willing to pay to use them? Does the Antiplanner really support Houston’s minimum parking requirement of 1.333 spaces for each one-bedroom apartment because he believes that Houston’s government planners can accurately predict the “need” for parking at every apartment to one-thousandth of a parking space?

Since you say that many cities do not have minimum parking requirements, can you provide a list of some of these cities?

2.

“Shoup assumes that . . . without such requirements there would be less free parking. This last assumption is extremely unlikely, as entrepreneurs everywhere know that (outside of New York City) 90 percent of all urban travel is by car, and businesses that don’t offer parking are going to lose customers to ones that do.”

Removing a minimum parking requirement means that a city will never force developers to supply more parking spaces than are profitable, but developers would be free to provide as many parking spaces as they like. If developers did always voluntarily supply at least as many parking spaces as cities now require, the minimum parking requirements would be unnecessary. The only research I have seen found that developers usually do not provide more parking spaces than cities require (pp. 78–84 of The High Cost of Free Parking). Recent econometric research also strongly suggests that minimum parking requirements force developers to provide more parking spaces than they would voluntarily provide in a free market [PDF].

3.

“Shoup portrays such free parking as a ‘subsidy’ because not all people drive and so the ones who don’t drive end up subsidizing the ones who do. But any business offers a variety of services to its customers and employees, and no one frets about subsidies just because they don’t take advantage of every single service. How often do you actually swim in the swimming pools or work out in the exercise rooms of the hotels you stay at?”

Every person plays many different roles in life -- tenant, homeowner, worker, consumer, investor, and motorist. With bundled parking, we pay for parking in all these roles except, usually, as motorists.

Every person plays many different roles in life -- tenant, homeowner, worker, consumer, investor, and motorist. With bundled parking, we pay for parking in all these roles except, usually, as motorists. Because we pay for parking indirectly, its cost does not deter us from driving. Because off-street parking requirements force up the supply of parking spaces, they “externalize” the cost of parking by shifting it to everyone but the parker. Only if we pay for parking directly does its cost affect our decisions whether to drive or not.

If cities require an ample supply of parking spaces for every building, this saves everyone the trouble of thinking about parking -- or its cost. Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else. Because we buy and use cars without thinking about the cost of parking, we congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air more than we would if we each paid for our own parking. Everyone parks free at everyone else’s expense.

The issue is not simply whether parking is subsidized. Even without minimum parking requirements some firms would choose to offer free parking, just as some hotels offer swimming pools and some coffee shops offer wi-fi. The real issue is whether the government should mandate the parking supply.

When the US Census Bureau surveyed owners and managers of multifamily rental housing to learn which governmental regulations made their operations most difficult, parking requirements were cited more frequently than any other regulation except property taxes.

Off-street parking requirements collectivize the cost of parking, because they allow everyone to park free at everyone else’s expense. American drivers park free at the end of 99 percent of all their automobile trips. If the cost of parking is hidden in the prices of other goods and services, no one can pay less for parking by using less of it. Off-street parking requirements thus change the way we build our cities, the way we travel, and how much energy we consume. All the required parking spaces spread the city out, and the greater travel distances make driving almost a necessity. Free parking also reduces the price of driving wherever we want to go, so the increased travel distances combined with the reduced price of driving make cars the obvious choice for most trips: 87 percent of all trips in the U.S. are now made in personal motor vehicles. (pp. 621–625 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

Off-street parking requirements produce the free parking that everyone wants, but ubiquitous free parking helps explain why American motor vehicles, by themselves, consume one-eighth of the world’s total oil production. We import two-thirds of this oil and we are paying for it with borrowed money. America’s extravagant consumption of imported oil to fuel our cars is not sustainable, economically or environmentally, and anything that is not sustainable must eventually stop.

4.

“Shoup also supposes (and Cowen accepts) that universal parking fees would greatly reduce the amount of driving people do. ‘Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars,’ Cowen quotes Shoup as saying.”

Please cite any occasion on which I have recommended “universal parking fees.” I am not even sure what you mean by this term. If you mean all parking everywhere must have a substantial price at all times, I most certainly do not recommend that.

Figure 12-1 in The High Cost of Free Parking shows what I mean by the right price for parking, and the right price will often be zero. For example, if half of all the parking spaces at a suburban shopping mall are empty even when parking is free, it would not make sense to charge for parking. On the other hand, if all of the curb parking spaces in a congested business district are occupied and drivers are circling every block in search of a vacant curb space, the price of curb parking is too low. Here is the link to a video that shows how to set the right prices for curb parking.

5.

“Shoup claims that a single parking space costs, on average, 17 percent more than the cost of an average car, and as a result, the cost of parking greatly exceeds the value of all automobiles in the country. This is ridiculous... Even structured parking typically costs only about $10,000 a space.”

Table 7-3 in The High Cost of Free Parking shows that parking spaces built on the UCLA campus have cost, on average, 117 percent of the price of a new car in the years that the parking spaces were built, but I did not rely on this figure to calculate that the cost of parking exceeds the value of all automobiles in the country.

Using data on the capital and operating costs of parking lots and parking structures, I estimated that the subsidy for off-street parking in 2002 was between $127 billion and $374 billion, or between 1.2 percent and 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product. In comparison, in 2002 the federal government spent $231 billion for Medicare and $349 billion for national defense.

There are more parking spaces than vehicles because drivers must be able to park wherever they go, and many parking spaces are vacant much of the time. Cities typically require enough parking spaces to satisfy the peak demand for parking at every land use -- at home, work, school, restaurants, shopping centers, movie theaters, and hundreds of other places -- so that drivers can have convenient access to all addresses at all times. To see the result, think of what happens when almost all vehicles are parked at home in the middle of the night: almost all the spaces necessary to meet the peak demand for free parking at all other land uses are empty.

Cities require a specific number of parking spaces for every land use, but no city collects data on its total parking supply. No one knows the total number of parking spaces in the US, but the eminent land-use planner Victor Gruen estimated that every car has at least one parking space at home and three or four waiting elsewhere to serve the same car. More recently, Davis et al. (2010) used detailed aerial photographs to estimate the number of parking spaces in surface parking lots in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Parking lots were identified as paved surfaces with stripes painted on the surface or where more than three cars were parked in an organized fashion. Although the estimates did not include any on-street parking spaces, or any parking spaces in structures (other than the top floor if the structure has an open roof), or any residential parking spaces that are not in parking lots, the total area occupied by parking lots in the four states would cover about half the state of Rhode Island. In two cities in Indiana for which there were detailed observations, parking lots covered three times more land than parks.

Using this limited category of parking spaces (only the spaces in off-street surface parking lots), Davis et al. estimated that the parking supply ranged between 2.5 spaces per car in Indiana to 3 spaces per car in Michigan. Presumably, most cars also have one parking space at home, and many more parking spaces are on the streets and in structures.

To be extremely conservative, suppose there is one parking space at home for every car and only two additional parking spaces elsewhere (at work, school, supermarkets, and so on), for a total of three parking spaces per car. Let us also take your back-of-the-envelope estimate of $2,200 for the land and construction cost of a surface parking space, an extremely low value. The cost of the parking spaces available per car would be $6,600 (3 spaces per car x $2,200 per space). In this case, the per-car cost of parking exceeds the average value of a car ($5,507). If so, the total cost of the parking supply exceeds the total value of all cars. And this estimate does not include the cost of any parking spaces on the streets or in structures.

Please cite the source of your statement that “Even structured parking typically costs only about $10,000 a space.” The national average construction cost for an above-ground parking structure in 2010, according to Carl Walker Associates, is just over $16,000 per space (excluding land value). Underground parking structures are even more expensive. The most recent underground parking structure built at UCLA, for example, cost $31,500 per space (Table 6-1 in The High Cost of Free Parking). Yale is about to spend $20 million to build a 200-space underground parking structure for its new School of Management, which is a cost of $100,000 per space. Your rough estimates of $2,200 per space for surface parking and $10,000 per space for structured parking are probably far too low for parking lots and structures in many cities.

If the total cost of all parking spaces in the US exceeds the total value of all the cars parked in them, and if drivers park free for 99 percent of all their trips, the total subsidy for parking (the total cost of parking not paid for by drivers in their role as parkers) is huge. Using data on the capital and operating costs of parking lots and parking structures, I estimated that the subsidy for off-street parking in 2002 was between $127 billion and $374 billion, or between 1.2 percent and 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product. In comparison, in 2002 the federal government spent $231 billion for Medicare and $349 billion for national defense. (Chapter 7 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

Free curb parking may be the most costly subsidy that American cities provide for most of their citizens.

6.

“Strangely, one of the examples Cowen uses in his article is Manhattan, where (he claims) ‘streets are full of cars cruising around, looking for cheaper on-street parking, rather than pulling into a lot.’ Give me a break! I defy Cowen to find any free parking anywhere in Manhattan, where ownership of a single parking space can cost more than a median home in other parts of the country.”

I see that you retracted this no-free-parking-in-Manhattan claim in a later post.

Unfortunately, this retraction includes several new errors of fact.

7.

“Many streets in Manhattan offer free parking, albeit often with the caveat that you have to move your car from one side of the street to the other every night.”

New York does not require owners who park on the street to move their cars every night. It requires owners to move their cars twice a week so the city can sweep the streets under them. Most of the curb parking spaces in Manhattan are free, on some of the most valuable land on earth. As you say, a parking space in Manhattan can cost more than a house in other parts of the country, so these free curb spaces must provide an awesome subsidy for cars. And the competition for this awesome subsidy requires cruising to find a rare vacant space. This cruising for free parking wastes time and fuel, congests traffic, and pollutes the air.

A study of cruising in one 15-block business district in Los Angeles found that, over the course of a year, the search for underpriced curb parking created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel—equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gasoline and produces 730 tons of carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in throughout the United States. (Chapter 14 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

8.

“But this doesn’t change my main point, which is that it is one thing for Cowen to argue that cities should not price parking below market rates where there is a market for parking. I have no problem with this. But it is quite another thing to argue, as many urban planners following the Shoup model do, that private businesses should be required to charge for parking (or be limited in how much parking they are allowed to provide) in areas where the market rate for parking is zero.”

Please cite the source of a Shoup model that would require businesses to charge for parking. Opposing minimum parking requirements is very different from proposing minimum pricing requirements.

I have supported the policy of “parking cash out” whereby employers who offer commuters free parking at work also offer commuters the option to choose the cash value of a parking space if they do not take a free parking space at work. This policy does not mandate parking charges because commuters who choose to drive can still park free. Parking cash out gives the same subsidy to every commuter, regardless of travel mode choice, while free parking gives a subsidy to drivers and nothing to other commuters.

Case studies of employers who offer parking cash out in Southern California show that it reduced vehicle travel to work by 12 percent -- equivalent to removing one of every eight cars from the road during peak commute hours. Parking cash out cost the employers only $2 a month per employee because they saved almost as much on parking subsidies as they paid in cash to commuters. Federal and state income tax revenues increased by $65 a year per employee because many commuters voluntarily traded their tax-exempt parking subsidies for taxable cash. Employers said that parking cash out is simple and fair, and that it helps recruit and retain workers. Parking cash out thus produces benefits for commuters, employers, taxpayers, cities, and the environment. It accomplishes all these goals simply by letting commuters choose how to spend their own money.

Can you tell me if the Cato Institute offers free parking for its employees? If so, does it also offer commuters the option to cash out their parking subsidies?

9.

"Cowen’s complaint about Manhattan is not about free parking but that the government is pricing on-street parking below the market. If that were the extent of Shoup’s argument, I would have no problem, as I noted in my blog last week. But Shoup’s goal isn’t market pricing of public parking; it is to create artificial shortages of private parking. He doesn’t want to simply eliminate the minimum-parking requirements that are found in many zoning codes; he wants to replace them with maximum-parking limits so that places like WalMart will not be allowed to provide their customers with as much parking as they like."

You have misunderstood what I recommend. Here are four quotes about parking requirements in The High Cost of Free Parking:

“Most markets depend on prices to allocate resources -- so much so that it’s hard to imagine they could operate in any other way. Nevertheless, cities have tried to manage parking almost entirely without prices. . . cities have without a second thought imposed planning requirements to ensure affordable parking. Rather than charge fair market prices for on-street parking, cities require ample off-street parking for every land use.” (page eight)

Why do you say that planners are annoyed when developers voluntarily provide more parking than zoning codes demand? Most off-street parking requirements are a minimum with no maximum. Minimum parking requirements imply that planners care only about having enough parking spaces, and that there can never be too many.

“Despite their ambivalence on whether to require or restrict parking, planners always regulate it. This behavior recalls a Soviet maxim: 'What is not required must be prohibited.'” (p. 121)

“Although market prices can allocate parking spaces fairly and efficiently, cities now require off-street parking everywhere -- imposing enormous costs on the economy and the environment. Cities can and should regulate off-street parking to improve its quality, but they should deregulate its quantity and instead charge market prices for curb parking. If cities deregulate off-street parking and charge the right price for curb parking, market forces will improve transportation, land use, the environment, and urban life. You will not pay for my parking, and I will not pay for yours. Instead of planning without prices, we can let prices do the planning.” (p. 499)

I did not mention WalMart anywhere in The High Cost of Free Parking.

10.

“The empirical question is: do shopping malls, office parks, and companies like WalMart provide parking for their customers and employees because of zoning mandates, as Shoup claims? Or would they and do they provide parking just because it is good for their businesses? Texas counties are not allowed to zone, yet shopping centers and office parks in unincorporated Texas still provide plenty of parking. Much to planners’ annoyance, many developers elsewhere routinely provide more parking than zoning codes demand. This suggests that free parking is a free-market choice, and Cowen, who generally supports free markets, should have no objection to it.”

Your “empirical question” attacks a straw planner. I have never said that developers provide parking only because of zoning. I have said that zoning often forces developers to provide more parking than they would voluntarily choose to provide in a free market, where they take into account both the cost of providing the parking spaces and the revenue the spaces will generate. So please cite the evidence for your statement that many developers routinely provide more parking than zoning codes demand.

Why do you say that planners are annoyed when developers voluntarily provide more parking than zoning codes demand? Most off-street parking requirements are a minimum with no maximum. Minimum parking requirements imply that planners care only about having enough parking spaces, and that there can never be too many. Furthermore, the planning approvals for specific projects often require developers to provide more parking spaces than the zoning code requires. Few planners are annoyed when developers provide more parking than the code requires; they are annoyed when developers try to provide less parking than the code requires.

All the evidence I have seen suggests that developers often request planning variances to provide fewer parking spaces than the zoning codes require, because these requirements can seriously overestimate the peak demand for free parking. Developers must commission expensive transportation studies to justify a planning variance. Consider the results in a study commissioned by Home Depot for of the peak parking occupancy at its stores in the Southwest United States. The Parsons Transportation Group observed the parking occupancy at hourly intervals at 17 Home Depot stores on a Saturday, the busiest day of the week, and found “no correlation between the square footage of a store and its resultant peak parking demand.” Parsons used the sales data at each store to predict its peak parking occupancy on the 5th-busiest day of the year, which was selected as the “design day” for the parking supply. As Parsons explained, “Choosing the 5th-busiest day as the design day would mean that some customers may not be able to find a parking space immediately during the peak hour of the busiest four or five days of the year; however, they should have no problem finding a parking space in the lot at any other time.”

Parsons then compared these estimates of peak parking occupancy with the number of spaces that cities typically require at the rate of 5 spaces per 1,000 square feet of floor area. The average municipal parking requirement based on floor area was more than double the estimated peak parking occupancy on the 5th-busiest day at a Home Depot store. That is, the study commissioned by Home Depot found that cities required twice the number of parking spaces needed to meet the peak demand for free parking at Home Depot stores at the busiest time of the year. (pp. 35–37 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

City planners have no training that would enable them to estimate the demand for parking, and no financial stake in the success of a development. They know much less than developers do about how many parking spaces to provide for each project. Planners may, at best, know a little about the peak demand for free parking at a few land uses, but they know nothing about the marginal cost of parking spaces at any site, or about how to estimate the demand for parking as a function of its price. Markets will quickly reveal the demand for parking if cities cease requiring off-street spaces. Developers, landlords, and residents will all be able to make their own independent decisions about the right number of parking spaces. Market-priced parking will allow cities to evolve naturally in response to developers’ costs and citizens’ preferences, while minimum parking requirements force evolution toward car dependency and sprawl. In planning for an uncertain future, flexible prices are far better than rigid requirements. Could things be any worse if there were no planning for parking at all?

The vision behind most planning for parking is a drive-in utopia, and cities legislate this vision into reality for every new building, regardless of the cost. Off-street parking requirements that satisfy the peak demand for free parking are, in reality, free parking requirements. Planners may believe in the immaculate conception of parking demand, and economists may believe that market choices reveal consumer preferences for travel by car. But the demand for parking was not immaculately conceived, and it does not result from consumer preferences revealed in a free market. Free parking is not always a free-market choice. Instead, governments and the market coupled long ago to produce today’s swollen demand for cars and parking.

After he has studied the evidence and reconsidered the issues, I hope the Antiplanner at the Cato Institute may decide to condemn rather than condone a complex web of wasteful and harmful minimum parking requirements that severely restrict the use of private property.

Well, that’s about it for pointing out mistakes in your blog post. Because you have said that you did not read The High Cost of Free Parking, I can understand why you have some misconceptions of what is in it. If you had read the book, you would probably have found much with which you agree. I do not expect that you will want to read a 733-page book on parking, however, so here are the links to a few sites that will give you a quick view of what’s in the book.

• A video of how San Francisco sets market prices for curb parking
  
• A video of a presentation on parking at Yale
  
• A proposal for pricing curb parking [PDF]
• An op-ed piece in the New York Times
• The first chapter of The High Cost of Free Parking [PDF]
  
• Book reviews of The High Cost of Free Parking [PDF]
  
• Roughly right or precisely wrong in ACCESS [PDF]
  
• People, parking, and cities in ACCESS [PDF]
  
• Turning small change into big changes in ACCESS [PDF]
  
• Cruising for parking in ACCESS [PDF]
  
• Playing with parking fees and matchbox cars
  
• Parking cash out in ACCESS [PDF]
  
• A video about parking cash out
  
• My website
  

I did not spend all this time simply to send you a personal message about your blog post. If you take responsibility for the accuracy of the facts you have confidently stated on Cato@Liberty, and if the Cato Institute stands behind the accuracy of what its staff members post on its blog, I hope you will use the information in this message to correct all the errors in your original post. If your post is so careless with the facts and so filled with errors, and it is not corrected or retracted, what should one assume about all the other posts on Cato@Liberty?

Donald Shoup
Department of Urban Planning
University of California, Los Angeles

Original post by Randal O’Toole on CATO@LIBERTY:

Free Markets for Free Parking
Posted by Randal O'Toole
August 16, 2010 @ 7:49 am

I am disappointed that the distinguished George Mason University economist, Tyler Cowen, has fallen for the “high-cost-of-free-parking” arguments of UCLA urban planner Donald Shoup. Shoup is an excellent scholar, but like many scholars, he has the parochial view that the city that he lives in is a representative example of what is happening everywhere else.

Should free parking be a thing of the past?

Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not, and that without such requirements there would be less free parking. This last assumption is extremely unlikely, as entrepreneurs everywhere know that (outside of New York City) 90 percent of all urban travel is by car, and businesses that don’t offer parking are going to lose customers to ones that do.

Shoup portrays such free parking as a “subsidy” because not all people drive and so the ones who don’t drive end up subsidizing the ones who do. But any business offers a variety of services to its customers and employees, and no one frets about subsidies just because they don’t take advantage of every single service. How often do you actually swim in the swimming pools or work out in the exercise rooms of the hotels you stay at?

Shoup also supposes (and Cowen accepts) that universal parking fees would greatly reduce the amount of driving people do. “Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars,” Cowen quotes Shoup as saying. Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, submitted this question to its transportation model and concluded that requiring all offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to charge for parking would reduce driving by about 2 percent. The model showed that charging for parking has a greater effect on driving than spending billions on light rail, building scores of transit-oriented developments, or increasing the urban area’s population density by 20 percent. But 2 percent still isn’t going to do much to relieve congestion or solve any of the other problems Cowen associates with driving. Plus he never really explains why he thinks reducing mobility is a good idea in the first place.

Shoup claims that a single parking space costs, on average, 17 percent more than the cost of an average car, and as a result, the cost of parking greatly exceeds the value of all automobiles in the country. This is ridiculous. Most free parking is surface parking, which costs about $2,000 a space plus the cost of land. In areas that have not used urban-growth boundaries and similar tools to create artificial land shortages, vacant suburban land with urban services typically costs about $20,000 an acre. Since each acre can hold about 100 parking spaces, the total cost is about $2,200 per space. From the point of view of a business owner, this cost can be amortized over 30 years at 6 percent, for an annual cost of about $160. If that parking space is used by just two customers a day, the cost is about 22 cents per customer. That’s pretty trivial, and the costs of collecting fees for such parking would probably be greater than the parking itself. Even structured parking typically costs only about $10,000 a space (or, using the above assumptions, $1 per customer), but structured parking is rarely provided for free.

Strangely, one of the examples Cowen uses in his article is Manhattan, where (he claims) “streets are full of cars cruising around, looking for cheaper on-street parking, rather than pulling into a lot.” Give me a break! I defy Cowen to find any free parking anywhere in Manhattan, where ownership of a single parking space can cost more than a median home in other parts of the country.

Cowen’s complaint about Manhattan is not about free parking but that the government is pricing on-street parking below the market. If that were the extent of Shoup’s argument, I would have no problem, as I noted in my blog last week. But Shoup’s goal isn’t market pricing of public parking; it is to create artificial shortages of private parking. He doesn’t want to simply eliminate the minimum-parking requirements that are found in many zoning codes; he wants to replace them with maximum-parking limits so that places like WalMart will not be allowed to provide their customers with as much parking as they like.

The empirical question is: do shopping malls, office parks, and companies like WalMart provide parking for their customers and employees because of zoning mandates, as Shoup claims? Or would they and do they provide parking just because it is good for their businesses? Texas counties are not allowed to zone, yet shopping centers and office parks in unincorporated Texas still provide plenty of parking. Much to planners’ annoyance, many developers elsewhere routinely provide more parking than zoning codes demand. This suggests that free parking is a free-market choice, and Cowen, who generally supports free markets, should have no objection to it.

Randal O'Toole • August 16, 2010 @ 7:49 am
Filed under: Energy and Environment

UCLA professor and parking policy superstar Donald Shoup.

This Tuesday, the San Francisco MTA released a long-awaited parking meter study, which calls for increasing meter hours in commercial districts where parking occupancy rises above 85 percent and businesses are open late on weekdays and Sundays. Afterward, Streetsblog called UCLA Professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking and arguably the world's foremost parking expert, and asked for his thoughts on the study.

Professor Shoup had read the document and called it "pathbreaking," lauding the MTA for being thorough and data-driven, and for embracing occupancy targets to manage parking supply.

Shoup also reiterated the importance of Community Benefit Districts (CBDs) as a tool for selling parking reform to the public. In CBDs, a portion of the new meter revenue collected in commercial districts is returned to that district for sidewalk repair, street trees, enhanced street cleaning, etc., so that businesses can see firsthand how parking revenue improves their streets.

Professor Shoup also pointed to Redwood City, Ventura, and Old Pasadena for best practice examples of occupancy-based parking policy changes that have revitalized neighborhoods and facilitated business. Here is an edited transcript of our interview. [For a longer version, head over to Streetsblog San Francisco.]

Matthew Roth: What are your impressions of the MTA's new parking meter study?

Donald Shoup: It's pathbreaking. There's never been anything like it anywhere before. I think they've done the right thing to say, 'we're aiming for an occupancy rate.'  You want the spaces to be well used, but readily available. Well used means almost full, but readily available means not quite full. You have to be very careful to make sure you get that right. They're willing to adjust it if they get it wrong. I think the right price for parking is sort of like the Supreme Court's definition for pornography: I know it when I see it. There's no way to say the price is right except by looking at the result and San Francisco is committed to change the price wherever they get it wrong.

I think they did it with a very careful goal in mind and that is: set the lowest possible price they could charge and still have spaces available on every block. So that's different prices at different times of the day and at different locations, but I think if they aim for this policy, if they've chosen the lowest price they can charge and still have available spaces, it means if they go any lower, all the spaces will be filled and people will say there's no place to park. And if they go higher than that, there will be a lot of vacant spaces. Some of the supply will be mismanaged. 

MR: How important are Community Benefit Districts for selling parking reform to the public?

DS: Well, I think it is the key to getting political support. As you probably know, Redwood City has this policy and Ventura in Southern California, they just started it. From the merchants' point of view, they think that the revenue return is the most important part of the entire policy. They realize that it's going to cut down on cruising and maybe greenhouse gas emissions, but the important thing to them is seeing improvements right in front of their businesses. Without that it seems to be hard to support the idea.

It's also true in Washington, D.C. They installed it around a new ballpark and they returned 75 percent of the revenue to the metered districts. And this can be for transportation improvements. I think that something visible and sharing with the community is very important. If they don't do that it's hard to show and prove and have pictures of the benefits.  

I think it's important for getting people to understand the workings of the program. I don't think the community benefit district will change anything about the right price for parking. I do, however, think they will make the policies seem much more reasonable to everybody. If they use the money to make sidewalk improvements, one of the most important transportation pieces of infrastructure in San Francisco. I think the sidewalks are almost as important as the bus system. If they said we'll use some of the money to improve the sidewalks and the streetscapes on the metered streets, everybody would see that the city is giving back something and not just taking. I think if you give back something that's very visible and very valuable, the metered communities will see the benefits right in front of their eyes. Everybody wants better bus service and more frequent bus service, but that's hard to see, especially if you're a struggling merchant. I think that it's easy to see very clean sidewalks, very well-policed sidewalks in front of your restaurant, rapid responses to any cracks in your sidewalks, maybe much more frequent cleaning.

MR: Some businesses complain that extending meter hours or raising rates will drive customers away, that they'll go to suburban malls where parking is plentiful and free. How do you contend with that assertion?

DS: You have to emphasize that the pricing is to keep the spaces almost entirely, but not quite, full. So you can't say the people are being chased away if almost all the spaces are full almost all of the time. You just wonder, where are they being chased? For the businesses, the important thing is that people are being chased away because the spaces will be occupied, but they will be occupied by people who will be willing to pay for parking if they can easily find a space.

If I were a waiter working in a restaurant, who do you think would leave a bigger tip, someone who will come only if they can find a free parking space after they have driven around long enough to find it, or someone that who is willing to pay for parking if they can easily find a space? I think the person that is willing to pay for parking is more willing to leave a bigger tip or pay more at a store or bring more business to the area than somebody who wants to be a freeloader and just won't come to your neighborhood unless they can get free parking. When you think about it, the kind of customers you're going to get is probably a little bit more free-spending if they can easily find a space and they're willing to pay for parking.  

In terms of the economics of it, Old Pasadena simply took off economically the year they installed meters. The sales-tax revenue is about six times higher than it was when they put in the meters in 1992. That is because, at least in Old Pasadena, the meter money has greatly improved the public infrastructure of that neighborhood. In San Francisco, they're talking about using most of the money for public transit, so there won't be the physical improvements. You're probably attracting a more free-spending group of customers and maybe more carpools, because they'll be splitting the cost of the curb parking. Maybe two dollars an hour won't seem like such a punitive payment if there are four people in the car and they're staying in an area for four hours. The solo driver will object to paying for parking. But if I were a business person, I'd rather see the cars arriving with four people in them rather than one.

MR: What should San Francisco, or any city trying to reform parking policy, do about time limits?

DS: The other thing I think that San Francisco is doing and that Redwood City did and that Ventura has done is eliminate any time limits on the meters. They removed the time limits and they rely on pricing to create turnover and vacancies and this has been the most popular part of the policy in Redwood City. People now don't have to worry -- a driver and three friends want to go for dinner some place and they park -- they don't have to worry that they have to get back to their meter in an hour or two hours. Whatever they're doing, they don't feel like they're pushed around so much by the city.  It still creates a lot of turnover because the price is higher, but the user is more in control of their life than when somebody who manages meters says you can only stay here for an hour or two hours.

The advantage of using prices to manage parking is that you don't need to have these arbitrary time limits. I think when people say they're going to run meters in the evening, it seems ridiculous because people want to park once and walk around for the evening. Turnover is not important for that, but pricing is important to make sure that some of the spaces remain available. So I would say that whenever you talk about running the meters in the evening, you have to say there's no time limit on them. You can put enough money in to stay for the entire evening, park once and go to dinner, a movie, a bar, and then walk around for as long as you want. You have to break this automatic assumption that a meter means that you have to leave in an hour or two hours.

MR: In the MTA study, during metered hours, Columbus Avenue had 71-81 percent occupancy.  Does that mean the meter prices are too high?

DS: Yes, I think it's quite common for meter prices to be too high, especially in the morning. Definitely on some days and at some hours the prices will definitely come down. 

MR: Is 85 percent occupancy target a firm benchmark? Are there situations where you want more or less occupancy?

DS: Well, it's short-hand. It just means you shouldn't have too much of an hour that is totally full. You shouldn't have much of an hour that is less than 70 percent, but somewhere around 85 percent. Sometimes it's going to be higher and sometimes its going to be absolutely full. What you'll see is variation around 85 percent, but I think what you mainly want is to make sure it isn't full more than 10 or 15 minutes out of any hour.

Streets designed for safe, accessible, and equitable use. That is the vision of the "Blueprint for the Upper West Side: A Roadmap for Truly Livable Streets," to be unveiled tonight by the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance Campaign. The product of one year of community-driven planning, in consultation with urbanist legends Jan Gehl and Donald Shoup, the 51-page Blueprint [PDF] is an expansive neighborhood-wide plan that would employ many livable streets concepts already in use by NYC DOT. 

Proposals include:

• Separated bike lanes and bike boxes on Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus
  
• Bollard-protected pedestrian bulb-outs
  
• Leading Pedestrian Intervals
• Curb extensions to slow auto traffic and allow for garbage pick-up
• Bus bulbs with bike parking 
• Chicanes with reverse-angle parking on cross streets

The Blueprint was composed from input gathered via neighborhood surveys and citizen workshops in a community where drivers account for 10 percent of commutes but absorb 228 times more street space per capita, and where over 5,000 pedestrians and cyclists were injured or killed between 1995 and 2005.

Gehl will be on hand for tonight's reveal, as he was at the project's inception last November. The event is free and open to the public.

Where: P.S. 87, 160 W. 78th St. between Amsterdam and Columbus

When: 6:30 p.m.

RSVP here

The trade pub recently ran a debate between parking planner Don Norte and performance parking guru Donald Shoup. Norte contends that cities shouldn't adopt reforms like off-street parking maximums until they have reached a certain level of density and transit service:

Once a city or region has achieved transportation efficiency by accommodating the number of trips generated by the appropriate mode of travel, then the option of reducing minimum parking requirements across the board can truly become a positive and cost-effective solution for our policymakers.

But holding off on parking reform will only interfere with cities' attempts to become more walkable and transit-oriented, responds Shoup:

Every developer knows that cities' minimum parking requirements are often the real limit to urban density. Minimum parking requirements often force developers to provide more parking than they would voluntarily provide, or smaller buildings than the zoning allows. Off-street parking requirements do not promote a walkable and sustainable city. Instead, off-street parking requirements promote a drivable and unsustainable city.

If West Hollywood or any other city waits until there is excellent public transit before it reduces its off-street parking requirements, most people will continue to drive everywhere, even if Santa Claus miraculously builds the transit system.

If planners insist that cities must have good public transit before they can reduce their off-street parking requirements for every land use, cities will never get good public transit. The smartest step cities can take is to convert all their minimum parking requirements into maximum parking limits, without changing any of the numbers.

More from Shoup, including plenty of observations that apply to parking reform in New York, after the jump.

City planners have no professional expertise or training to set parking requirements. They don't know how much parking spaces cost at any site, and they don't know how the parking requirements affect development or the transportation system. City planners also know little about the effects of parking requirements, but they are expected to know exactly how many parking spaces are required for every land use.

In trying to foretell the demand for parking, urban planners resemble the Wizard of Oz, deceived by his own tricks. No one should blame planners for dispensing the elixir of ample free parking, however, because everyone wants to park free. Nevertheless, planners can be faulted for their pretension to special skills in dealing with parking. Planners cannot predict parking demand any better than the Wizard of Oz could give the Scarecrow brains or send Dorothy back to Kansas.

The inaugural entry is the bio-in-progress on UCLA professor Donald Shoup (right). Earlier this week, Zane Selvans (member of the Livable Streets Network since June 16) helped flesh out some details about how Shoup's theories on parking policy have been applied in California: 

Prof. Shoup helped draft California's "Parking Cash Out" Law, requiring employers who provide free parking to their employees to offer comparable transportation subsidies to employees who do not drive. He also worked with the City of Pasadena, California to develop the dynamic market based parking pricing scheme used in Old Pasadena and other business districts, to pay for infrastructure improvements and maintain a constant supply of on-street parking spaces.

Shoup is known especially for his criticism of free parking, and the consequences that it has on transportation decisions, as detailed in his book The High Cost of Free Parking.

With New York City DOT about to test out Shoup's ideas in two pilot areas, and Transportation Alternatives calling for further reform of parking management -- following the lead of Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington DC -- this StreetsWiki entry is ripe for expansion.

If Shoup's not up your alley, to start a new entry, sign up and drop some knowledge.

The Toronto Star gave parking policy maven Donald Shoup some major play earlier this week, running a profile of the UCLA professor excerpted from journalist Tim Falconer's new book, "Drive." In the piece, we learn why Shoup believes planners are apt to make bad judgments when it comes to the optimum supply of off-street parking:

...planning departments always insist that developers include a minimum number of parking spots. Shoup doesn't have much respect for the ability of urban planners to determine how many spots are necessary. Since planners don't learn anything about parking in school, they learn it on the job, but because parking is so political -- NIMBY neighbours constantly squawk at the thought of anyone parking on their street -- what they really learn is the politics of parking.

Hardly surprising, perhaps, but certainly applicable to New York, where parking minimums have facilitated pedestrian-hostile development, as on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue. It also raises the question: Even if the city were to muster the political will to adopt Shoupian pricing for on-street parking (following the lead of San Francisco and Washington), would it have the fortitude to address another big part of the equation by reforming zoning regs that require parking in certain residential buildings?

A story in today's Times about the suspension of alternate-side parking rules in Park Slope shows the warped sense of entitlement such measures would run up against:

“Parking is such a joke in this neighborhood that no matter what they do, it won’t make a difference,” said Buddy Ferriola, from the deli Pollio on Fifth Avenue. “You got 20,000 cars and 2,000 parking spaces.”

In a first for a big east coast city, Washington, DC, is putting the ideas of celebrated parking reformer Don Shoup to work. Spurred by concerns over game day traffic surges caused by the opening of a new baseball stadium, the city council recently created two performance parking pilot project zones. The most important provision of the legislation is that 75 percent of the meter revenue, after initial expenses and maintenance, "Shall be used solely for the purpose of non-automobile transportation improvements in that pilot zone." This includes a menu of transit, bicycling and pedestrian improvements including sidewalk widenings, traffic calming, separated bikeways and real-time information signs for buses and trains.

The project is especially exciting, because once parking money from the pilot zones begins to translate into actual neighborhood improvements, DC voters will want more parking reform and parking revenue return in their neighborhoods.

The force behind the legislation was Council Member Tommy Wells, whose campaign slogan, "For a Livable and Walkable Community," is prominently featured on his web site. Wells says he held "over a dozen community meetings and town halls" to build a consensus around the plan. His work seems to have paid off. The new zones and especially the revenue return provision have been cheered by the press and local livable streets advocates, including those at Greater Greater Washington.org.

Along with using "revenue return" to create a constituency for parking reform, the basic idea behind Shoup's work, and DC's performance parking zones, is simple: underpriced curbside parking meters result in completely full curbs and low turnover, which in turn causes parking shortages and cruising and double parking. The problem is solved by raising and lowering meter rates to achieve vacancy targets.

Other highlights of Washington's new performance parking zones:

• Curbside vacancy targets of 10 percent to 20 percent
  
• Gradual meter rate increases capped at $0.50 a month
  
• Authority to the DC DOT to "adjust parking fines as needed"
  

It's unclear if the DC DOT will vary prices during peak and off-peak periods to achieve the vacancy targets.

Alas, Shoupian doctrine didn't escape the legislative meat grinder unscathed. The DC law undercuts itself by turning off meters on holidays, freezing meter rates in some areas and, worst of all, exempting Residential Parking Permit holders from meters in other areas. However, on balance, DC's new parking experiment is an exciting step forward and should serve to inspire the New York City Council to get smart about solving New York's parking dysfunction.

Photo: pickles_pics/Flickr

Yesterday, Theodore "Ted" Kheel's traffic plan was officially unveiled with a 52-page report (pdf) outlining his proposal to make transit free via a round-the-clock $16 congestion charge for cars ($32 for trucks) entering Manhattan below 60th Street. The report says Kheel's "Bolder Plan" would cut CBD traffic by 25 percent, and traffic citywide by nearly 10 percent, all while increasing mass transit funding and decreasing the number of overcrowded trains and buses.

Skeptical? So was lead author Charles Komanoff, he says, until he delved into the data. Not only do the numbers add up, Komanoff writes, the Kheel plan offers an irresistible political hook:

Don Shoup wrote recently that the dilemma confronting congestion pricing is not that opposition is too high, but that support is too low. Free transit resolves this dilemma by offering as tangible a benefit as one can imagine. As I said last week to a legislator from Central Brooklyn who has lined up against the mayor's congestion pricing plan, "Are you really going to tell your constituents that you walked away from a plan that would let them ride the trains and buses for free?" I wish you'd seen his double-take, followed by: "Um, okay, what's this Kheel Plan again, and how exactly is it going to work?"

A highlight of the Kheel plan is the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, an interactive spreadsheet that lets users compare the different congestion pricing proposals (download it here). "Unlike the opaque 'black box' models used throughout the Transportation-Industrial Complex," writes Komanoff, "the BTA reveals its hundreds of underlying assumptions and their interrelationships. It is a true citizen's tool."

Whether this is all too much, too late, considering the Congestion Mitigation Commission's January 31 deadline, and whether or not it's conceivable that the city and all affected bureaucracies would tolerate such a tectonic shift regardless of potential upsides, by leading with the carrot of free transit and following with the stick of congestion pricing, the Kheel planners have shown how Mayor Bloomberg's proposal could have been promoted from day one. On the other hand, it also makes one wonder what might have been if they had brought that approach to the mayor's plan, and pushed along with everyone else.

During his recent visit to New York, Donald Shoup, professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, sat down with Open Planning Project's Mark Gorton to discuss parking policy and play with Matchbox cars on a miniature New York City street grid.

Shoup argues that charging higher fees for curbside parking would free up more parking space, reduce congestion-causing cruising and generate funds for local street improvement projects. And unlike congestion pricing, City Hall doesn't need permission from Albany to make it happen.

Check out the animation by StreetFilms' Elizabeth Press. Not bad, eh? And, as always, here is the Shoup theme song:

• Related StreetFilm: Dr. Shoup: Parking Guru

Spencer Wilking reports:

There's nothing more blessed to the New York City driver than finding an open parking spot. Donald Shoup, professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, would like New Yorkers to reconsider that ideal. The parking policy cult hero addressed a crowd at Fordham's Pope Auditorium Monday evening. His mission: Eliminate free parking.

"Some people think that charging for curb parking is un-American. I think it is very American to ask people to pay for what they use," Shoup said. "We're not a nation of freeloaders."

Shoup contends that much of the congestion on New York City streets is due to drivers circling the block, hunting for that elusive free parking spot. Shoup's bold plan is to charge more for curbside parking, which he believes would free up more parking space for people who need it, reduce congestion-causing cruising and generate funds for local street improvement projects. He also said that his ideas on parking would be easier to implement than Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan.

Armed with a Powerpoint presentation, Shoup displayed Al Gorian flare, weaving humor, amusing visuals and staggering facts to keep his audience both entertained and informed.

Shoup's lively lecture and the fact that he may very well be the only academic in America to focus solely on parking policy has earned him cult hero status in the world of urban planning. In his introduction, Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives joked that Shoup is a rock star who "prefers loose tweed to leather." With his characteristic droll delivery, Shoup replied, "Maybe I should change my name to Shoup Dogg."

The professor began his lecture by illustrating the ills of American parking policy, first citing the staggering amount of real estate Americans allocate for cars. He believes faulty public policy has created a culture that expects free parking everywhere. "The planning process has gone wrong and it costs a lot of money," said Shoup. "Because we so deviate from normal business practice with curb parking we get these very inferior results."

In New York City, this is compounded by the cost differential between curbside parking and private lot parking. Shoup says the low, often free, cost of curbside parking versus the high cost of off-the-street parking has created a perverse situation in which drivers are more inclined to cruise around hoping to be rewarded with a free parking spot.

Shoup quoted Seinfeld's George Costanza to sum up the essential New Yorker attitude when it comes to curbside parking: "It's like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?"

Calling Manhattan "the capital of cruising," Shoup cited several recent studies on cruising to demonstrate its contribution to gridlock. Bruce Schaller, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Transportation found that 28 percent of drivers in SoHo were looking for curb parking. A similar study conducted by Transportation Alternatives in Park Slope concluded that 45 percent of drivers were cruising.

To limit the amount of cruising and balance the supply and demand of parking, Shoup suggests the city should allow the price of curbside parking to float upwards until each block reaches 85 percent occupancy, or about one free parking spot per block.
Shoup calls this the Goldilocks principle: "Parking prices shouldn't be too high, or too low. They should be just right."

Shoup says that the price of curbside parking should vary according to time and location, much like the pricing of hotel rooms. "If you turned parking supply over to the hospitality industry they would figure out how to do it," said Shoup.

To ease store owners' fears of losing customers to increased parking costs, Shoup suggests that merchants get a cut of the parking revenue. A large portion of the cash created by new parking costs would go local Business Improvement Districts that would use the money to improve the streetscape, making commercial corridors more pleasurable for pedestrians.

Shoup offered three California cities where this type of parking policy has been implemented successfully. Pasadena, Redwood City and Glendale were able to revitalize their downtown shopping districts by increasing the cost of parking and funneling those funds into public space improvement projects.

The issue of congestion pricing was conspicuously missing from Shoup's talk. The only mention of congestion pricing came in Paul Steely White's introduction saying that Shoup's ideas on parking were "not an alternative to congestion pricing, but a complement." However, talking to Dr. Shoup after the lecture he suggested that his reforms would be more feasible than the Mayor's plan due to the controlled pace of implementation. "The city can do the parking first because it can be done in small increments,"
he said.

Shoup did have some skeptics. Hilary Kitasei, of the Lower East Side, voiced concern over the increased movement of cars that parking reform seeks to create from parking turnover. "New Yorkers wouldn't dare drive for fear that they'll lose their space. Once you create this wonderful environment where it's possible to drive to other neighborhoods, why would I stay home at night? It seems like this city could be unleashing a much worse nightmare than what we have now," she said.

Shoup also had some ideas about the influx of city parking permits -- a long abused system that lacks accountability. He says New York City employees are three times more likely to drive to work. Shoup believes that the city could offer employees cash to get these permits off the street. "If you told these permit holders we'll give you $500 a month to surrender your permit I bet a lot of them would give up that permit," he said.

Over 100 people filled Fordham's Pope Auditorium to hear Dr. Shoup speak. He's in New York to further his "no free parking" campaign, meet with BID leaders, city agency officials and the press. Shoup's theories are detailed in his 700-page opus, "The High Cost of Free Parking" (Chicago:
Planners Press, 2005).

Reported by Spencer Wilking for Streetsblog.
Photo: Stan Paul, UCLA School of Public Affairs.

He'll also be speaking tonight at 6pm:

Fordham University - Pope Auditorium
113 W. 60th St. (at Columbus Av.)
Manhattan

By the way, check out our new Donald Shoup theme song: 

 
Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, will be in New York next week, with a number of events on Monday culminating in an evening appearance at Fordham University. Here's a rundown.

Press Walk-Thru of One of NYC’s Worst Streets to Park
Monday, December 10, 12 noon
SE Corner of 6th Avenue and West 29th Street
Hosted by Transportation Alternatives

Discussion: "The High Cost of Free Parking"
Monday, December 10, 6 pm  
Fordham University - Pope Auditorium
113 W. 60th St. (at Columbus Av.), Manhattan
FREE (RSVP requested)
Hosted by New York City Streets Renaissance and Transportation Alternatives

Streetsblog also has word that Shoup will be meeting with local officials about city parking policy. Maybe he'll swap war stories with the Sheriff of Chinatown.

It may not have been Mayor Bloomberg's intention when he proposed congestion pricing, but he has put reforming curbside parking policies front and center. Desperate for "alternatives" to pricing, opponents have borrowed proposals to hike curbside parking rates, and price free curb spaces. These parking reforms which would significantly reduce double-parking and traffic snarling cruising, are championed by Transportation Alternatives, and its former consultant Bruce Schaller, who is now a Deputy Commissioner at the city DOT.

Regardless of whether congestion pricing meets legislative approval in March, it has laid the groundwork for significant changes in city parking policy. The first hint came this week in a DOT press release announcing community parking workshops in neighborhoods on the edge of the congestion pricing zone. Says DOT:

The study areas, which display a range of parking-related conditions, were selected based on their representative characteristics and their ability to inform parking strategies that can be applied citywide…DOT (is working) to develop a toolbox of potential parking solutions that can be applied to neighborhoods citywide.

Traffic is a hot issue because of the mayor. But on-street parking reform has been percolating for a number of years thanks to Transportation Alternatives. The advocates at T.A. commissioned key studies by Schaller which revealed that 28 percent of Soho traffic and 45 percent of Park Slope traffic is made up entirely of motorists cruising for parking space.

T.A. also brought UCLA parking guru Don Shoup to New York City to meet with business leaders, police and DOT officials. Shoup's message that curbside parking prices should be based on occupancy targets -- typically 85 percent of curb spots filled -- was very well received. Despite being posed by some as an "alternative" to congestion pricing, ideally on-street parking reforms would work in concert with pricing, as they do in London, to reduce traffic and create more space for pedestrians, cyclists and buses. However, with or without road pricing, much needed changes in curbside parking are coming to New York City.

In the first of many shorts we will present over consecutive days, The Open Planning Project's Executive Director Mark Gorton tours the streets of the Upper West Side with neighbor Lisa Sladkus pointing out problems in advance of the November 6 Streets Renaissance Workshop with Jan Gehl. Today's topic is: Double Parking.

Parking policy is one of the biggest challenges that faces New York City and the rest of the U.S. In this related StreetFilm, Donald Shoup explains how responsible pricing can solve the woes of double parking and pollution, while raising revenues that can be re-invested in communities.

Here is what USDOT/FHWA says.

There are four main types of pricing strategies

Variably priced lanes, involving variable tolls on separated lanes within a highway, such as Express Toll Lanes or HOT Lanes, i.e. High Occupancy Toll lanes

Variable tolls on entire roadways - both on toll roads and bridges, as well as on existing toll-free facilities during rush hours

Cordon charges - either variable or fixed charges to drive within or into a congested area within a city

Area-wide charges - per-mile charges on all roads within an area that may vary by level of congestion

The U.S. DOT's Congestion Relief Initiative, of which the Urban Partnership agreement is part, is aimed at promoting congestion pricing and specifically refers to tolling rather than parking. It further focuses the above tolling programs toward the overall goal of relieving congestion.

All of the five cities selected for the congestion initiative are centered around road pricing, though New York's is by far the most ambitious. Miami and Minneapolis propose building tolled HOT lanes on area highways and San Francisco proposes a new toll cordon on Doyle Drive or variable pricing on the Golden Gate Bridge. San Francisco also includes a value parking program in addition to new tolls.