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.

The Observer reported on Wednesday that Walter McCaffrey's Committee to Keep New York City Congestion Tax Free recently solicited UCLA parking policy guru Donald Shoup to do a study of curbside parking policy in New York. Carolyn Konheim, a Brooklyn-based transportation consultant and decades-long congestion pricing advocate, thinks that sounds like a great idea.

As DOT Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller pointed out in his 2007 study, Free Parking, Congested Streets, "free or reimbursed parking is an inducement for the majority of motorists who choose to drive to the Manhattan Central Business District rather than use public transportation or other means of travel." Despite this fact, Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030 has almost nothing to say on reforming parking policy. Konheim suggests that "we need to price both roads and parking." Perhaps this is something that congestion pricing advocates and opponents might actually be able to agree on.

Here is Konheim's commentary:

The Mayor should extend the offer to Shoup. The California- based consultant concluded years ago that pricing parking can be as effective as pricing roads. The high cost of Manhattan off-street parking proves the point. Bruce Schaller's finding that half the auto entries into the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) park for free also proves the point.

London has demonstrated that we need to price both roads and parking. Seeing parking as the low hanging fruit, London started curbside pricing first. At an NYU forum on pricing this spring, London's First Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron, congestion pricing ambassador extraordinaire, whispered away from the microphone: "I hate to be critical, but you've got parking all wrong -- you need to control it first. In London, you can't park for more than 20 minutes without a permit or you'll be clamped. If you can park, it costs 40 quid [~$80]."

Garage rates in central London run $65/day, $1,200 a month. London auto commuters have no local street parking option outside the central pricing zone because all 32 boroughs in the city limit non-resident curbside parking to two hours and deliveries and drop-offs to 20 minutes. In boroughs close to the center, a stay of two hours costs about $8. Spaces are designated in all boroughs for residents who pay a range of $180 to $250 a year for permits for one car and one visitor. Businesses can also get parking permits. Violators' tires are enthusiastically clamped by local wardens who collect fines of $300 or more for their boroughs, which use the revenues for improving roads and traffic calming. The borough of Westminster is developing an automated parking enforcement system. The borough in the center of London nets about $70 million a year in parking revenues.

New York is obviously way behind on parking management. In the core of Manhattan, there are ten times more off-street spaces than in London, and half the drivers into the CBD pay nothing for parking. Many New York neighborhoods are plagued with commuter parking, abuse of agency parking privileges and counterfeit parking permits. Meter feeding is the norm on New York retail streets, which in the boroughs typically adds up to a cost of $8 -- but is not regarded as prohibitive as the proposed $8 congestion fee.

Local civic leaders have expressed fears about the impacts on communities near subway stations that serve the pricing zone, which are not assuaged by Mayoral allusions to -- but no apparent action on -- residential parking permits. Any serious action on resident permits would reveal that they must be just one part of a comprehensive parking program that requires broad public appreciation that street space doesn't come free -- a heavy lift for champions of local parking "rights."

Mayor Bloomberg's bold pricing initiative creates an opportunity to start in Manhattan by properly pricing ALL parking within the pricing zone. The fee would deter free parkers (many on the City payroll). And parking permit fees equal to the $4/day that the Mayor proposes to charge residents for trips within the pricing zone could provide the equity he seeks by charging Manhattan drivers for intra-zone trips. Doing so would eliminate the need for the costly proposed charging network of thousands of charging stations.

As London Deputy Mayor Gavron asked: "Why would you want multiple cordons? We have enough trouble with one." A charging cordon across 60th Street and bridges and tunnels, even simpler than London's, would be far less costly and free up far more congestion revenues for better transit -- the real payoff for all New Yorkers.

While it sounds like a serious study and revision of New York City parking policy is something that pretty much everyone might be able to get behind, Schuerman points out that Walter McCaffrey's lobbying group, "Keep NYC Congestion Tax Free is supported in part by parking garage owners who would logically see underpriced on-street parking as unfair competition." The Observer reports:

The lobbying group opposing congestion pricing is considering ways to reform curbside parking as one alternative to the Mayor's plan to charge drivers $8 to enter core areas of Manhattan.

The group, Keep NYC Congestion Tax Free (which now has a Web site), even approached Donald Shoup, a parking guru at the University of California at Los Angeles who advocates for higher metered rates, to commission a study. But the lobbying group seems to have dropped the idea after Mr. Shoup wrote back with an ambivalent answer.

"They asked me and I wrote back," Mr. Shoup told The Observer via telephone recently. "I told them I'm a great fan of congestion pricing."

Still, Mr. Shoup said raising metered rates makes a good deal of sense, and would be a necessary prerequisite for congestion pricing. His theory is that rates should be raised high enough to discourage idle trips. That would free up one or two spots on every block, creating a so-called "Goldilocks effect" that would reduce the number of cars trolling for spaces.

"I think that [New York City] has done everything wrong in terms of getting something done soon," Mr. Shoup said. "It doesn't make sense to introduce this very expensive congestion pricing system and keep curb parking free. It is easy to charge a parked car. It is hard to charge a moving car."

Walter McCaffrey, the lobbyist for the anti-congestion pricing group, could not confirm that his team had reached out to Mr. Shoup, but said that it was looking at parking policy.

"In some places, you could end up having an ability to remove meters to allow for a better flow of traffic depending on the width of the street, or you could temporarily remove the meters on a street where there is construction going on," Mr. McCaffrey said.

Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, Mark Clayton takes stock of the nation's paved parking lots and asks "does America's four-wheeled fleet really need all that extra elbow room?" This article comes on the heels of International Park(ing) Day, a one-day grassroots event in which urban dwellers all around the world transform metered, on-street parking spaces into pocket parks and public plazas as if to suggest that, in a crowded city, there might be better uses for publicly-owned land than storing privately-owned motor vehicles:

Nothing can match America's love affair with the automobile, but a close second might be the parking space. They're everywhere, wrapped around shopping malls, churches, truck stops -- expanses of yellow- and white-striped asphalt as much a part of the American landscape as amber waves of grain or lighted billboards. Now, however, some researchers worry that the United States may have too many parking spaces.

They say it's not worth the sprawl, polluted runoff, and heat generated by these vast lots of concrete and asphalt just to create more automotive resting stations by the Home Depot entrance or the Wal-Mart shopping-cart corral. Anyone who has circled and recircled an airport garage searching for an open spot might beg to differ. But a key problem is that no one really knows how much blacktop real estate is out there.

Enter Bryan Pijanowski, a land-use scientist at Purdue University, who is busy counting the nation's parking spaces. He hasn't gotten very far yet. Using sophisticated software, he and fellow researcher Amalie Davis count 355,000 off-street, nonresidential parking spaces in his home county of Tippecanoe in Indiana. Even that is an estimate based on aerial photos. Now, Dr. Pijanowski wants to expand his survey nationwide.

"This work is unique and important, quantifying something that's not been quantified before," says Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at the University of California at Los Angeles, himself a parking guru widely recognized as one of the nation's top researchers in the field.

If Pijanowski can finish his count, then researchers will finally determine whether the United States is suffering a parking surplus.

For Dr. Shoup, the issue is cost. Free parking, he says, doesn't turn out to be so free. "We all pay for it, not in our role as drivers, but as residents, taxpayers, and customers," says Shoup, who documents the phenomenon in his book "The High Cost of Free Parking." Big parking lots hike building costs and get passed through to the consumer, sometimes through higher rents in their apartment buildings or bigger costs at their grocery stores. "Every place we drive and park free, we really pay for that parking as something other than as a driver," he says.

Photo: denizen8/Flickr

Arnold Diaz confronts some Avis employees on his "Shame Shame Shame" segment for Fox 5 News. He catches them apparently charging motorists $25 to park on a public street. This Avis branch is on the same block as the Beacon Theater, where employees have been taking up street parking during the day and selling the spaces to concert goers at night. The story quotes the Department of Transportation as saying the practice is "totally illegal." Take a look at this outrageous undercover video.

What would Shoup say?

Under the mayor's congestion pricing proposal, drivers will have to pay a toll to go south of 86th Street in Manhattan. At a City Council hearing yesterday, Councilwoman Jessica Lappin drew a bleak picture.

"There will be a crush of cars circling around 86th Street looking for parking spots that don't exist," said Lappin, who feared the downtown-bound bridge-and-tunnel crowd would use her Upper East Side district as a parking lot before catching a train. "I envision idling, and more congestion, and more pollution in the air, because there aren't places for these cars to go." Parking in a garage would be out of the question, she said: "The garages up there are full."

Janette Sadik-Khan, two weeks into her job as the city's transportation commissioner, had a simple solution: a residential parking permit. Such permits would allow only residents to park on the street. Violators would be fined and perhaps towed.

Lappin wasn't buying it: "A residential parking permit is a hunting license." She believed plenty of outsiders would still be looking for a place to land. "Is the city considering municipal garages?" she asked.

"I don't see why people have to pay market rents to live in a neighborhood but the cars should live rent-free. In New York you have expensive housing for people and free parking for cars. You've got your priorities exactly the wrong way around."

Renowned as one of the world's top authorities on parking policy, UCLA Urban Planning Professor Dr. Donald Shoup is the author of The High Cost of Free Parking, a publication so popular among scholars and devotees that he attracts groupies known as Shoup-istas at book signings.

According to Shoup, free parking is the root problem of many of the ills that face our biggest cities. He posits that reforming parking policy will lead to a better pedestrian environment, cleaner streets and air, safer downtown shopping districts, and -- yes -- even fewer headaches for drivers trying to find that ever elusive curb space.

In March 2007, Shoup paid a visit to NYC to enlighten city leaders with his research. Here's part of a taped chat with the Open Planning Project's Mark Gorton.