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In
Virginia's transportation debate, the role of
parking comes as an afterthought. Let me rephrase
that. The role of parking doesn't even come up.
While politicians, pundits and lobbyists bray for
billions more in spending for new roads and mass
transit facilities, the number of speeches,
editorials and position papers dedicated to the
relationship between parking, automobility and other
forms of transportation has been just about zero.
It
goes without saying that if you want to drive
somewhere, you need more than roads -- you need a
place to park your car when you get there. But
Virginians are clueless about the massive investment
they collectively make in creating and maintaining
millions of parking spaces, and the impact of that
investment upon their transportation choices.
Fortunately,
a UCLA urban planning professor by the
name of Donald Shoup has dedicated his career to
studying the economics of parking. In his 752-page
tome, "The High Cost of Free Parking," he
argues that the capital value of all the parking
spaces in the United States in 1997 roughly equaled
that of all the automobiles plus all the
roads in the country.
No,
that's not a typo. In 1997, the capital value of
motor vehicles in the United States amounted to
$1.144 trillion. The capital value of all the roads
was $1.359 trillion. Assuming an average value of
$4,000 per parking space, and assuming a ratio of
three parking spaces for each of the nation's 200
million automobiles, Shoup argued, the capital value of parking
spaces was roughly $2.5 trillion. If you don't like
Shoup's assumptions -- I personally think they're a
tad high -- plug in your own. Whatever numbers you
use, you'll still come up with a number in the
hundreds of billions of dollars.
Shifting
gears to annual spending, Shoup estimates that
parking cost Americans between $127 billion and
$374 billion in 2002. That would have translated
into $3 billion to $10 billion a year in Virginia,
and it compares to the
Commonwealth's $4.9 billion budget this year for all
transportation spending
We
don't realize that we spend so much on parking
because we pay only a tiny fraction of that amount
directly, maybe one to four percent, in cash outlays
to parking lots and parking meters. The rest of the
parking comes "free" -- free in the sense
that motorists didn't open up their wallets for it,
but not free in an economic sense. Builders and
developers pass on the cost of parking lots in the
form of higher charges for housing, shopping space
and office space. Municipalities pass on the cost of
on-street parking in the form of higher taxes.
How,
precisely, does Shoup's insight bear upon Virginia's
transportation debate? Shoup argues that
"free" parking amounts to a massive
subsidy of automobility. People may pay a lot of
money when they purchase their car, and even more
when they fork over tolls and gasoline taxes to
cover the cost building and maintaining roads. But
they rarely pay the direct cost of parking their
cars. As a consequence, people drive cars more often
— and avail themselves of mass transit less —
than they would if they shelled out a few shekels
every time they parked.
The
distortions of "free" parking ripple
through the economy in other ways. City and county
zoning codes mandate minimum parking requirements
for houses, apartments, restaurants, strip malls and
office buildings. Clusters of buildings with peak
parking demands at different times of the day --
apartments (peak loads at night), office buildings
(during the day) and stores/ restaurants/nightclubs
(in the evening) -- get no break from the rules. As
a consequence, far more space is dedicated to
parking than required, and buildings are separated
by greater distances than they need be.
That
spatial separation limits pedestrian
accessibility and undermines the economics of mass
transit. Bus lines and metro stops typically draw
passengers from within a quarter-mile walking
radius. The mandated excess of parking lots
diminishes the number of buildings -- and, hence,
the number of people -- located within walking
distance. Fewer people means fewer prospective
passengers.
In
sum, ubiquitous "free" parking subsidizes
the phenomenon of single-occupancy vehicles,
discourages the use of carpooling, buses, rail and
other forms of shared-vehicle transportation, and
feeds the insatiable demand for more roads and
higher taxes to pay for them.
So,
what's to be done about it?
I'm
still thinking through the implications of
"free" parking, so I don't pretend to have
all the answers. I certainly do not -- repeat, do
not, not, not -- advocate artificially
restricting the amount of parking in order to
discourage automobile use. Rather, I think public
policy in Virginia should be to let the marketplace
decide how much parking is needed, to create a level
playing field between transportation modes and to
respect the resulting consumer choices.
There
are three areas that require examination.
Reform
zoning codes. First, we need to revisit zoning
codes in every city, county and town in Virginia
with the goal of deleting minimum parking
requirements. Eliminating zoning mandates wouldn't mean an
end to "free" parking, of course -- a free
market would continue to provide it with some
abundance. As a merchandising strategy, Wal Mart
undoubtedly would continue to bundle
"free" parking with its stores to induce
customers to visit. But a free market would provide
less "free" parking than the regulated
marketplace does now.
Real
estate developers would have the freedom, for
instance, to combine complementary land uses, as
architect Burrell Saunders has done with condos,
offices and retail in Virginia Beach Town Center
(see "Extreme
Makeover," August 28, 2006). Likewise, we
might see more creative use of shared space, as in
an arrangement I suggested in "Parking
Madness" (June 6, 2006) whereby a church
(Sunday peak loads), a synagogue (Saturday), and an
elementary school (weekdays) could jointly maintain
a parking lot.
Bottom
line: Planners should back off, let private property
owners decide how many parking spaces they need to
serve their customers and encourage landowners to
cluster complementary uses.
Make
parking reflect its environmental costs.
According to Shoup, if you combined all the parking
spaces in the United States, they would take up an
area roughly the size of the state of Connecticut.
That's a lot of space -- and a lot of run-off.
Run-off
from the impervious surface of roads and parking
lots allows storm water to reach streams faster and
in greater quantities than it otherwise would.
Instead of seeping into the soil and recharging the
groundwater, rain falling on parking lots scours out
stream beds, accelerates erosion and deposits
sediment and chemicals into Virginia's rivers,
streams and waterways.
A
common-sense system would gauge the cost of
ameliorating the damage from run-off and assign that
cost to roads and parking lots. Each parking space
would be charged a pro rata share. Whether an
appropriate number would be $1, $10 or $100 per
parking space, I don't know but it should reflect
the core principle that any human activity that
damages the environment should be charged a fee to
help offset that damage.
Establish
a pricing mechanism for parking. One reason that
so much parking comes "free" is that the
transaction costs associated with collecting parking
fees are so high that it's not worth the trouble
except in areas where space is at a premium. But
advances in GPS tracking technology promise
unprecedented convenience and flexibility in parking
policies.
Bern
Grush, founder and CEO of Toronto-based Skymeter
Corporation is close to commercializing technology
that he hopes will revolutionize how parking is paid
for. His satellite-based technology can track the
exact location of any car equipped with a
transponder and how long it resides in a parking
space. The concept isn't new, but Grush claims to
have solved the supposedly insolvable problem of the
"urban canyon effect," in which buildings
block the ability of satellites to get a fix on a
car's movements in a city, and he has developed
systems to produce irrefutable documentary evidence
of a car's whereabouts, necessary to settle any
possible billing disputes.
I
had a chance to talk to Grush last week. I had read
about him in a feature article in Business 2.0
magazine, "The
Disruptors -- 11 important technologies."
Around the same time, he had stumbled across my
musings about congestion pricing in Bacon's
Rebellion. We exchanged e-mails, and the next
thing I knew, Grush was introducing me to Donald
Shoup's writings and explaining the wondrous
benefits of applying pricing mechanisms to
transportation and parking.
The
major obstacles to implementing Grush's ideas are
institutional -- the willingness of municipal
bureaucracies to change the way they do things. He
thinks he can win over local authorities by enabling
them to fine-tune parking with far greater dexterity
than they can now.
With
Skymeter, pricing schemes can be extremely flexible,
Grush says. To encourage turnover in a retail
shopping district, for instance, a city could offer
the first 20 minutes of parking for free, then start
charging three cents per minute for an hour, and
then escalate the charge to 20 cents a minute
thereafter. Try doing that with parking signs and
a meter maid!
Skymeter
could solve the hassles of living in my old
neighborhood in the Fan, where local residents buy
decals to enjoy parking preference over the Virginia
Commonwealth University students who park there and
walk to class. The system could be jiggered to allow
residents free parking within 500 feet of their
house or to charge students a fee for
parking in the neighborhood.
Another
example: Instead of selling monthly passes for
parking lots, which result in empty parking spaces
on days subscribers don't show up, municipalities
could sell parking passes in various configurations,
throw in loyalty bonuses -- "park 10 times, get
one day free" -- or utilize other techniques to
maximize parking space utilization.
This
graphic, taken from a Grush-authored publication
contrasts how current parking practices (the signs
in the upper row) could be modified with Skymeter
(lower row).
Grush
sees a multi-step process in implementing Skymeter
in a city:
1.
Develop a pricing map. Proceeding neighborhood by
neighborhood, district by district, ascertain what
your goals are and what kind of pricing strategy
would best accomplish those goals.
2.
Print and install new signs.
3.
Set up network of automobile repair shops or other
retail locations where motorists can sign up for the
service and equip their cars with transponders.
4.
Devise a marketing/communications plan to explain
the new system to the public.
5.
Set up a data center/call center to handle billing
and resolve disputes.
(If
there's anyone in Virginia who would like to discuss
the process in more detail, Grush says, he would be
happy to talk to them.)
Grush
envisions using Skymeter technology to solve other
transportation-related problems -- congestion
pricing on highways foremost among them -- but
parking, he believes, offers Skymeter the easiest
entry into the marketplace. People have an
entitlement mentality when it comes to driving on
roads, and they resent paying taxes and tolls. By
contrast, they're accustomed to paying for parking,
in urban locations at least. Skymeter would provide
drivers far more flexibility and convenience while
eliminating the aggravation of parking tickets.
But
fine tuning parking policies is not an end unto
itself, Grush says. It's a tool to address the much
larger problem of traffic congestion. "Anything
that hides the cost of parking, like getting free
parking as a perk with your job, encourages you to
drive," he says. "The single largest
unexamined cause of congestion is our blindness to
the linkage between parking and roads. If you want
to solve the road problem, you've got to solve the
parking problem."
--
December 4, 2006
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