Shoup Shows Cities How to “Just Say No” to Parking

By Josh Stephens

Anyone who has ever eaten the exhaust of a Lamborghini understands the visceral charms of driving. Its appeal lies similarly in the curves of the Big Sur Highway, the preening queues on the Sunset Strip, and the anticipatory thunder of a NASCAR starting line.

The notion of a “love affair with cars” has gone from metaphor to cliché to hardened myth in the course of the past century, and even the dowdiest of America’s engineers, transportation planners and public officials have been seduced into serving the auto’s every need. Meanwhile, parking, which is the obvious, and necessary, corollary to driving, gets only whispered about, like condoms at the back of a drug store. Indeed, the most shocking claim in Professor Don Shoup’s magnum opus The High Cost of Free Parking is not that cities have implemented bad policies -- that happens all the time for all sorts of reasons -- but that almost no one has bothered to study those policies.

As it turns out, every car on the road equates to roughly seven patches of asphalt off the road. Cars get stored at home, at work, at the grocery store, and all about town. They take up valuable real estate, and, even then, any given space is more likely to be empty than not, whether they come in the form of flat expanses of asphalt or towering monoliths of concrete. They amount to the greatest, most pointless failure in American planning and design. Were parking not an aesthetic crime, it would, at the very least, be a sin against efficiency.

Yes, call me biased. But to say that a transportation writer shouldn’t descry parking lots is like saying a crime reporter shouldn’t be opposed to murder.

For all the effort that planners exert to create regulations and, on occasion, envision better cities, their approach to parking has been based on specious assumptions and utter irrationality. Why measure peak annual parking rather than averages? Why give away desirable spaces for free? Who knows what an abattoir is, much less how many parking spaces it needs? Arbitrary minimum parking requirements have not only stretched cities out physically -- so that buildings are enshrouded by surface parking lots and therefore separated from each other -- but also stretched them financially. The costs that parking imposes are in the price of every bag of Cheetos at K-Mart, every minute stuck in suburban traffic, and, indirectly, in lost revenue to cities.

It’s tempting to think that in the postmodern world that we’ve outgrown paradigm shifts, but Professor Shoup has done his best to give us one. He calls for a dramatic reinterpretation of the ills and possibilities of parking, and he’s kind enough to prescribe some compelling solutions: higher street parking rates, communal lots, maximums instead of minimums, parking benefit districts, and the rest. The ball is now in the public officials’ court. My article is but the latest (though perhaps longest) in a series of articles dedicated to Shoup’s studies, so no planner or city engineer has any excuse not to consider his prescriptions.

Shoup himself has taken enthusiastically to the lecture circuit, translating dense, statistics-laden work into a call to action. Refreshingly, he is the opposite of the proverbial bureaucratic planner: He is excited by his own work and believes that it can make the world a better place. And his tools offer cities the chance to rebuild themselves in unconventional, inexpensive ways by centering not on infrastructure or unproven technology, but rather on pricing signals and revision of outdated, inefficient regulations.

Cities that have no money for infrastructure investments, are crushed by byzantine planning codes, or are otherwise skittish about upsetting the status quo now have no excuse not to consider parking reform. What developers would not be happier to have their parking requirements cut in half? What merchant open in the daytime wouldn’t be thrilled to share parking with the dinner theater next door? What big box developer wouldn’t be perfectly content to cut down a few fewer trees -- if only the laws allowed them to?

Studies have shown that abstinence education has largely been a failure. The future for parking abstinence, is, however, far brighter. A city with less parking, less traffic, and more pleasant places to live, work, and stroll hand-in-hand would be sexier indeed.

As for what goes on in the backseat: you kids are on your own.

Josh Stephens is the author of "Putting Parking into Reverse," published in the winter 2009 issue of InTransition. He is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

Long-Range Planning Symposium Multimedia Files Available Online

By Karl Vilacoba

In "the snap of a finger,” energy costs have dramatically changed long-range planning goals and demographic expectations, according to Anne Canby, president of the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership and a member of InTransition’s editorial board.

Canby was among a half-dozen panelists at a June 26 symposium held as part of the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority’s (NJTPA) effort to update its 25-year regional plan. (The NJTPA publishes InTransition in partnership with the New Jersey Institute of Technology.) Canby said the rising cost of energy means that people will decide where to live and work based on the combined cost of housing and transportation, rather than simply assuming transportation will be affordable, as in the past.

“Energy is clearly a front and center issue and has to be incorporated into anything we do with transportation from here on out,” she said.

While a few of the experts addressed specific local issues, others delivered presentations that were highly relevant to anyone in the planning and transportation fields, if not any resident of the country.

One of the most compelling speakers of the day was Daniel Lerch, author of the first major municipal guidebook on peak oil and global warming and a program manager at the Post Carbon Institute, which advises government officials how to end their reliance on fossil fuels. Lerch gave a thought-provoking presentation on how much trouble the country is in with its foreign oil dependence. The gas prices we’re seeing are just the beginning, he warned, and the time is now (if not yesterday) for America to fundamentally change its consumption patterns.

Public policy expert and Northeastern University (Boston) Professor Joseph Giglio advocated that the government widely reform how our transportation network is funded and administered. He discussed a number of interesting alternative funding strategies that have been tried or are under consideration around the country.

Audio files of the speakers are available online here. In some cases, Powerpoint files corresponding with the presentations were posted.

One Man's Dream Is Another's Nightmare

A CNN.com article headlined, “Is America’s suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?” has proven to be pretty provocative, judging by the volume and tone of comments posted in response.

The author proposes that in the not too far off future, market forces like the mortgage crisis, gas prices and a housing surplus will change homebuying tastes so drastically that the idyllic suburban McMansion may become the new American slum.

According to the article, demand will rise so sharply for walkable, transit-accessible housing in urban areas that the poor could be priced out of today’s ghettos and forced to move to the outlying suburbs. The writer conjures up visions of abandoned cul-de-sac neighborhoods swamped with for sale signs and overgrown grass. These large homes will be split into multi-family dwellings, and neighborhoods will be in danger of street gang infiltration.

Perhaps more fascinating than the glum future outlined in this article was the feedback it generated. I’ve read theories along these lines before on websites geared toward hardcore planners, but not on CNN, one of the most widely trafficked mainstream news sites in the world.

The interactive comments section became an entertaining battleground between those who view the New Urbanist movement with an almost religious seriousness and suburbanites and country folk who view the word “urban” as code for crime, pollution and a hostile way of life. At last check, there were hundreds of comments posted, apparently so many that they shut down the interactive feature.

Has the Time for Action on Climate Change Passed?

By Josh Stephens

For this issue of InTransition I spoke with a wide array of scholars, public officials, businesspeople and activists from around the United States to find out what the field of transportation planning can do to combat climate change. I got a different answer for every interview I conducted. It is only natural that a problem on the order of climate change -- arguably the greatest problem that humanity has faced or ever will face, short of a wayward asteroid -- would elude simple solutions.

The only agreement was that, despite good intentions and a concerted effort to conceive of solutions, America's response to climate change is in its infancy. And there isn't much time for it to grow up.

The question I did not ask in any of my interviews, perhaps because it is too depressing (or because I wanted to save it for another article) is, "What happens if we fail?" Actually, I'm not sure that "if" is at issue. The question should refer to "when." Judging from some of the projections, the matter may already be out of our hands.

Put together, all of the world's climate change mitigation efforts might, if we're lucky, reduce the amount of pollution we put into the atmosphere -- as opposed to merely reducing the rate of increase. Even if clean fuels, innovative engines and compact development can help cut greenhouse gas emissions by one tenth, one quarter or even a half, the atmosphere will continue to heat up from the gases that have already been released. (Never mind China, India, and the other developing countries that are asserting their right to unfettered commerce.) Ocean currents will continue to change. Storm patterns and rainfall will still go haywire. Waves will still lap at the ankles of Miami, Dhaka and Venice. Crops will still fail, and species will go extinct.

In fact, greenhouse gas emissions are not expected to fall to zero for another two centuries. Not because we'll have solved the problem but rather because that's when the earth's crust will finally be exhausted of fossil fuels. In the meantime, demand for those fuels continues apace and the rate of extraction will fall while fuel prices rise.

But there is no telling when pedestrian-friendly suburbs will be built; because zoning laws and the myth known as “the American dream” continue to spawn tract after tract of detached, dispiriting homes. And, having already sent the electric car to a premature death, there is also no telling where all this fiddling with hybrids, hydrogen and Smart Cars will lead. More likely than not, this country, and its transportation planners, will have to figure out how to operate its transportation network when many people can afford to drive -- whether they like it or not.

We have built a world -- of freeways, boulevards, suburbs and office parks -- that was designed and honed for a certain commodity at a certain price. So what do we do about would-be commuters marooned many miles from work by gas prices? How do we get cars off crowded, inefficient urban streets if there's no money to buy buses or build rail lines? How do we fix tens of thousands of crumbling bridges when the costs of steel, concrete, and gas are making billion the new million? What do we do with our ports and airports when the wheels of globalization begin to turn backwards? Where do we put the people driven off their land by rising tides -- and how do they pay for their relocation?

These questions are, perhaps, far more urgent than those about solutions. Solutions are uncertain. But the ravages of climate change are all but assured. In the future, all planning may be disaster planning.

Hyperbolic? I hope so. But the more people are afraid to talk about it, the worse the consequences will be.

I dearly hope that the strategies and solutions outlined in my article come to pass and that they work. I hope that everyone who reads it will take it not as a point of interest but rather as a mandate for action. In fact, I believe that this mandate is already taking hold, and my article is only a tiny part of a growing movement. But we must move quickly indeed.

In my article I compared this challenge to that of Sysiphus. But Sysiphus had one luxury that we do not: his mountain never got higher.

Josh Stephens is the author of the Winter 2008 issue’s cover story, “Transportation Planning Warms Up to Climate Change.”