Big Yellow Taxi.

A brilliant rant by Jeff Siegler, which should be read by every single person -- stakeholder or otherwise -- who claims to care about the future of downtown New Albany.

Isn't this what an organization like Develop New Albany is supposed to be doing with its time? Or, conversely, advocating for meaningful measure like THIS?

Click through to read all of it ... and learn something today.

THE REAL PARKING PROBLEM

For anyone that has worked in economic development, community development and especially, downtown revitalization, you have become all too familiar with the parking problem trope. It might be the single biggest frustration in the field, as no matter how much evidence there is to refute this notion, people simply don’t care. Let me sum up the thinking; people believe their downtown cannot be successful unless considerably more parking spaces are added. This sort of thinking is expensive, counterproductive and ignores the real problems the community might be dealing with. Now instead of writing 2000 words on the perceived problem, I am just going to list all the reasons why the perceived parking problem is just a bunch of bullshit and hopefully save you all countless hours of arguing about it.

• Parking is not an attraction. 
• Parking is a utility. 
• Parking does not drive business. 
• People will find a place to park. 
• Parking ruins places.
• People need less parking. 
• Abundant parking sucks. 

We have spent decades complaining about this, I still go into community meetings and have to argue about this. I am not doing it anymore. Nor should anyone in this field have to. If you are going to be willfully ignorant of the facts, we are not obligated to convince you of the truth.

Learning to "despise parking lots like the good-for-nothing, colossal wastes of space they are."

All that empty, unused space.

The Revenge of the Parking Lot, by Neal Freyman (Morning Brew)

Before I wrote for the Brew, I worked in urban planning. And if I learned one thing, it was to despise parking lots like the good-for-nothing, colossal wastes of space they are.

But times are changing. In the Coronavirus Age, parking lots are winning the heart and mind of at least one jaded American for (finally) putting their asphalt to good use.

First, though, we should establish something

Parking lots are indeed good-for-nothing, colossal wastes of space. I take my cue from the parking lot’s #1 enemy, Dr. Donald Shoup, a UCLA professor who’s famous for writing a 741-page tome called The High Cost of Free Parking. In the book, Shoup rails against “parking requirements,” which are laws requiring developers to add a minimum number of off-street parking spaces to new buildings.

99% of you will not read this book, so I’ll just summarize his main points:

• When you park for free at a mall or restaurant, you aren’t really parking for “free.” Parking requirements mandated by the city of Los Angeles increased the cost of building a shopping center by 67%–93%, according to a study cited by Shoup. Those costs are passed down from retailers to you, the consumer.
• The same thing happens in housing. When residential developers are required to add a certain number of parking spots to a new housing complex, they pass those construction costs down to you, the apartment renter.
• Not to mention, parking lots increase traffic congestion, exacerbate climate change, prevent walkability, and...did I mention they’re good-for-nothing, colossal wastes of space? A 2015 study found that 14% of all incorporated land in Los Angeles County is dedicated to parking.

Redemption

One of the ways COVID-19 has turned our world upside down is that park

ing lots, with their uncanny ability to accommodate social distancing, have made themselves useful ...

Gahan's Limitless Ignorance, Volume 392: "Free parking is a bigger equity concern because everyone pays for it, but you must have enough money to own a car in order to qualify for it."

"Essentially, our poorest citizens are subsidizing the wealthiest when it comes to transportation."

Lest this come as a shock to the city's self-described "progressives," almost nothing Slick Jeffie has emphasized during his two terms as Genius of the Flood Plain has had anything remotely to do with assisting our poorest citizens.

Why do you "Democratic" people keep giving him a pass for this? 

---

Why equity-centered advocates should think about parking, by Parking Nerd (Medium)

Most people concerned about equity in reference to parking usually miss the big picture. They worry that raising the cost to park will harm poor people. This is a valid concern, but it is not the real equity dilemma. Free parking is a bigger equity concern because everyone pays for it, but you must have enough money to own a car in order to qualify for it. The money that our communities spend to support the use of private automobiles vastly overshadows the transportation expenditures for those with the fewest resources and the greatest needs. In 2011, Portland’s Mayor Sam Adams said that his team calculated that if they were to build their entire existing bike way network from scratch, it would cost about the same as building just one mile of an urban 4-lane roadway.

The historical inequities of our transportation system go hand-in-hand with the historical inequities in housing. In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein meticulously catalogs the discriminatory housing policies at the local, state, and federal levels that restricted housing opportunities for African-Americans following their emancipation and whose proliferation spread like wildfire in the 1940s. Our discriminatory housing regulations, often enforced by police, prevented black people from living in desirable neighborhoods and restricted them to other neighborhoods — often places with more industry and pollution. There was more demand than supply and black people ended up paying much more for rental housing than their white counterparts paid in mortgages for nicer homes. They ended up over-crowded and with little savings or investment to pass on to their children.

At the same time as the cost of buying a car was dropping significantly, white Americans were fleeing to the suburbs. Yet the jobs remained in the urban centers that white people were abandoning, and getting people to those jobs became a dilemma that needed major transportation dollars. In 1950, President Eisenhower delivered the Interstate Highway system, to enhance the ability of our nation’s militia to travel the country. This freeway system also enabled people to live further from urban centers and drive in. Given discriminatory housing practices, this new mobility benefit was essentially limited to white people.

So what does this have to do with parking and equity? Well, every transportation system has three components: Rights-of-way, vehicles, and terminal capacity. Automobile travel is unusual in three ways: (1) it requires enormous terminal capacity (several spaces per car), (2) drivers rarely pay for terminal capacity (parking is free for 99% of trips), and (3) the cost of parking has been shifted out of the transportation sector into the prices of everything else (Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking). We even see transit agencies using their limited funding to provide parking for cars at stations without charging drivers the amount that it costs to build and maintain the parking.

So who pays for parking when it’s free? Everyone but the motorist. A shopper pays more for groceries as the funds to provide parking must be covered by the store. Housing is more expensive when parking is included — regardless of whether the renter or home buyer has a car. This has generally been accepted because *most* people drive, and any politician who would conceive of shifting the costs of driving onto drivers would risk being run out of town.

Wealthier people own more vehicles, are more likely to drive large SUVs which cause more damage to roads, and are more likely to pay for fuel-efficient vehicles which means they pay less into the roads through gas taxes. Essentially, our poorest citizens are subsidizing the wealthiest when it comes to transportation.

Roads cost a lot of money to build (and maintain), with estimates around $2 million per lane mile. A typical small urban road, with one lane in either direction and parking on both sides would mean that approximately HALF of the budget to construct the roadway (as much as $4 Million per mile!) is going toward providing parking, which is usually free for the motorist.

The cost to build this roadway includes the parking on either side of the street.
As motor fuel tax revenues have declined, other funds have been shifted to cover the cost of providing and maintaining our roadways. Road subsidies push up tax rates, limit our ability to provide other government services, and encourage people to drive. A growing concern among equity-centered advocates is the shift of poverty from transit-accessible locations to areas that are not well-served by transit, also called the suburbanization of poverty. In this case, lower housing costs may be overshadowed by the costs of vehicular travel. And people living in these areas who cannot afford a car will find themselves stranded. It is important that transportation planners provide safe transportation options to all residents.

What would a more equitable transportation system look like? It would be a transportation system where drivers pay their fair share of the road and what it costs to provide parking, with that payment going toward provision of transportation options and housing subsidies to enable residents to continue to live in transit-accessible, walkable, and bikeable neighborhoods in the face of gentrification.

Some more equitable policy ideas include the following ...

How do minimum parking requirements factor into New Albany's forthcoming updated zoning ordinance?

The argument against minimum parking requirements is not new. Donald Shoup was talking about it in 1999.

Urban planners typically set the minimum parking requirements for every land use to satisfy the peakdemand for free parking. As a result, parking is free for 99% of automobile trips in the United States. Minimum parking requirements increase the supply and reduce the price -- but not the cost -- of parking. They bundle the cost of parking spaces into the cost of development, and thereby increase the prices of all the goods and services sold at the sites that offer free parking. Cars have many external costs, but the external cost of parking in cities may be greater than all the other external costs combined. To prevent spillover, cities could price on-street parking rather than require off-street parking. Compared with minimum parking requirements, market prices can allocate parking spaces fairly and efficiently.

Strong Towns takes a strong stance on the matter.

End Parking Minimums: Waste of money. Waste of space.

It's time to put an end to parking minimum laws and allow our cities to become productive places again.

What's wrong with parking minimums?
Strong Towns allow new businesses to flourish and treat their land as a valuable resource. Minimum parking requirements hinder the potential of Strong Towns by creating barriers for new local business start ups, and filling our cities with unproductive, empty parking spaces that don’t add value to our places.

Join us each November for our annual #BlackFridayParking event, which takes a bold stand against parking minimums with an interactive, nationwide campaign.

Want to see an end to parking minimums across America? Join the movement that's working to accomplish that.

There's a resource page with links to numerous articles about the usefulness of removing parking minimums. Here's one:

What makes surface parking so destructive is that it consumes a finite resource (land) with virtually no direct financial benefit. Our pre-occupation at Urban Three is local finance. From that perspective, parking — in particular the vast kind that adorns strip malls and box stores — is dead weight. Local governments, be they in cities, towns, or counties, are all constrained by the land they can develop. What they do with that resource is thus, paramount to how well they can pay their bills. Tax revenue is but one of many resources squandered by each acre of land devoted to deactivated cars.

Here's another:

Parking minimums are the strange, out-dated, and totally unscientific law that's probably languishing in your city's zoning code. They sound dull (and they are) but they're incredibly important because they have dramatically shaped our cities in a detrimental manner.

Today, I'm explaining exactly why these laws are harmful and what you can do about them.

1. They rob us of financial productivity and prosperity.
2. They hinder small business owners, homeowners, developers and renters.
3. They fill our cities with empty, useless space.

Now I'm just piling on:

One Line of Your Zoning Code Can Make a World of Difference, by Aaron Qualls

Aaron Qualls is the Director of Planning & Community Development for the city of Sandpoint, Idaho. He shared this essay with us about the benefits Sandpoint has seen in the ten years since it removed all minimum parking requirements in its downtown, and we’re pleased to share it with you.

In 2009, as buildings were being bulldozed for surface parking to meet minimum standards in Historic Downtown Sandpoint, Idaho, city leadership took bold action. Downtown area off-street parking requirements were completely eliminated. The decision was preceded by heated debate and was not unanimous. Now, ten years later, what was the result?

Since that contentious decision by the Sandpoint City Council, millions have been invested downtown—projects that would not have been feasible, but for the elimination of parking requirements. Several jobs, building renovations, and expansions by local businesses were essentially made possible by adding a single line of code.

Arguably, no city ordinance is more underestimated for its long term impacts than off-street parking requirements. Many cities are now starting to recognize the negative effects parking minimums can have on housing affordability, historic preservation, the environment, small businesses, walkability and municipal budgets ...

The city of New Albany's staffers have been working for perhaps two years with an outfit called 11th Street to rewrite our code of ordinances. I took a glance at a draft copy from last year and found this, which comes at the end of 5-10 pages of explanation about newly revised ... minimum parking requirements.

I've written to several appointed and elected officials in New Albany seeking clarification as to why in an era of disappearing minimum parking requirements, we seem to be doubling down -- BUT I'm the first to admit the planning/zoning muck-speak is such that I may be completely misinterpreting this section.

If any of them reply, I'll let you know.

Related:

A rant about the fundamentals of parking space economics.

What's a Parking Benefits District? DNA needs to pay more attention to matters that pertain to merchants.

"Why free parking is bad for everyone."

Windmill dunk by Richard Florida: "America devotes far too many of its precious resources to parking."

Outside, it's New Albany, and in this map prepared a few years back by Jeff Gillenwater, parking areas in downtown are colored red. Granted, not all are public auto-friendly spaces, and perhaps pieces of the wasted acreage have since disappeared for infill, as with Breakwater.

The point remains: the red splotches should be vastly reduced -- and as far as Harvest Homecoming's parking needs for one week each year are concerned, just don't go there.

Would you rather generate income 51 weeks each year, or only one?

The article at CityLab is Parking Has Eaten American Cities, and Richard Florida's conclusion is the place to start.

America devotes far too many of its precious resources to parking. This is especially troubling given that driving is in decline. For example, the share of Seattle households with a car has fallen for the first time in at least 40 years, and the percentage of U.S. high school seniors with a driver’s license is at “a record low”—down from 85.3 percent in 1996 to 71.5 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, ride-sharing is up, and cities and real estate developers are striving to reduce parking requirements.

Joni Mitchell famously sang: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” It’s time we reclaim our cities from car storage and use the space for what we need more of, from housing and bike lanes to sidewalk cafes and parks.

As always, Florida offers statistical evidence.

Parking eats up an incredible amount of space and costs America’s cities an extraordinary amount of money. That’s the main takeaway of a new study that looks in detail at parking in five U.S. cities: New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming.

The study, by Eric Scharnhorst of the Research Institute for Housing America (which is affiliated with the Mortgage Bankers of America), uses data from satellite images, the U.S. Census, property tax assessment offices, city departments of transportation, parking authorities, and geospatial maps like Google Maps to generate inventories of parking for these five cities. (The inventories include on-street parking spaces, off-street surface parking lots, and off-street parking structures.)

Friday evening is going to be an interesting test case. There'll be two food and drink openings downtown, and maybe a third, and also Schmitt Furniture's birthday concert is at the amphitheater. Friday's always the busiest night of the week for eating out, anyway.

If all this comes down on Friday and the top two levels of the (free) parking garage are still mostly empty ...

In letter to newspaper, downtown shop owner disagrees with a parking policy that doesn't exist.

The letter's author appeared in these pages in the spring of 2015, when her shop was blocked without warning by the farmers market.

Mulberry House Antiques and "an encroaching Farmers Market."

Then, she had a solid point about non-communication. Now, she does again, although I'm not sure she realizes it.

Certainly Betty knows that the two-hour parking signs to which she refers were replacements for previous signs that read precisely the same -- and which have not been enforced for six or seven years, since some time during the reign of King England III.

The current "improvements" aren't the cause of the problem, if any.

Rather, it's non-communication once again, and the inability or unwillingness of downtown stakeholders to study and address parking the future of parking.

When dysfunction is the issue, enhanced function is the best solution. It would require lots more communication than presently is occurring, which is the best reason to doubt it will happen.

But a boy can dream.

Timed street parking ill-advised

I have a shop in downtown New Albany. Today I had a customer ask me a very good question: "How does making all the streets two-way help businesses?"

I told her I guess since more people will be stuck in traffic jams on Spring Street they will decide they may as well stop and shop or go to a local restaurant. Oh, wait, they can't park for over two hours, according to new signs, which should be plenty long enough if you can grab some fast food while running through the streets looking in the shop windows.

Apparently the "Powers that be" want to make New Albany look like a big city, but most of our customers are from the big cities who want to enjoy the leisure of eating, shopping, walking and even parking without worrying about tickets or being towed.

This policy also shows a total lack of concern for those people who work in shops and restaurants that have no parking lots (which is most of the small businesses) and already have parking problems made worse by these "improvements."

— Betty Rinker, New Albany

Parking the car when it's not moving, "which, these days, is about 95% of the time."

A long, leisurely Saturday morning read.

Parkageddon: How not to create traffic jams, pollution and urban sprawl (The Economist)

Don’t let people park for free

EVEN if the new headquarters that Apple is creating in California does not prove to be “the best office building in the world”, as Steve Jobs boasted shortly before his death in 2011, it will be an astounding sight. The main building resembles a flying saucer with a hole in the middle. Through its large, gently curving windows, workers will eventually look out on a wood containing some 7,000 carefully chosen trees. It is as though a race of high-tech beings has landed on a pristine planet.

And then, unfortunately, there’s the car park. For 14,000 workers, Apple is building almost 11,000 parking spaces. Many cars will be tucked under the main building, but most will cram into two enormous garages to the south. Tot up all the parking spaces and the lanes and ramps that will allow cars to reach them, and it is clear that Apple is allocating a vast area to stationary vehicles. In all, the new headquarters will contain 318,000 square metres of offices and laboratories. The car parks will occupy 325,000 square metres.

Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it.

"Parking meters and opportunity costs."

It might be funny if not for the hair-tearing frustration of it. The same person who'll happily drive ten miles to walk back and forth across the Big Four Bridge will bitterly complain when "forced" to park two blocks from his favorite downtown restaurant.

Perhaps this is because the restaurant walk isn't as pleasing as the bridge walk, although it might be more pleasing if we weren't compelled to maintain downtown streets almost exclusively for cars, for the needs of cars as opposed to those of walkers, so as to ease our diner's transit from suburbia to the parking space just outside the front door of his destination -- you know, the one currently occupied by the business owner's personal car.

Obliquely, my favorite recent comment on this weird phenomenon comes from food writer Steve Coomes in a piece about the newly opened HopCat on Bardstown Road in Louisville. Is there enough parking?

HopCat will battle the same limited parking problem all its neighbors face. With just 23 spots on the lot, it’s expected diners will do as they do everywhere else: find a spot, any spot, park and walk to the restaurant.

I seem to have forgotten the point ... wait, yes; until New Albany's downtown parking garage is filled with cars every night, then the only parking problem we have is the inability of business owners and employees to park right there, in the parking garage. It's either cheap or free most of the time, and if the streets night are not sufficiently well lit or not pleasurable for walking, then by all means, please join me in making this point to City Hall.

But maybe if these parking spaces had value?

The opener ...

Parking meters and opportunity costs, by Daniel Hertz (City Observatory)

What if we could make parking spaces in high-demand areas more widely available, while also making better use of under-used parking spaces elsewhere?

Think of it as Uber’s “surge pricing,” but for parking. (Though it elicits some grumbles from a consumer perspective, we think surge pricing can make lots of sense: it encourages more efficient choices by riders, and brings out more drivers when they’re most in demand).

... and the closer.

But that’s not all that’s missing here. Proponents of “smart parking” say that one of their goals is to increase the usage of “underutilized” parking spaces. Often, that may mean increasing the total amount of driving. But, of course, driving incurs all sorts of extra social costs: pollution, wear and tear on public roads, injuries and deaths from crashes. When calibrating the appropriate price of parking on public space, should cities take those costs into account?

"Ideas worth stealing: Parking benefit districts."

Or, we could institute sidewalk double parking.

Each month downtown merchants gather, and parking is always a topic of conversation. The odd part is that we haven't much of a parking problem, apart from business owners and their employees monopolizing curbside spaces that should turn over according to demand from all users.

Consequently, it comes down to one of three potential "solutions."

• Merchants police themselves.
• The city policies the spaces by enforcing its own code.
• We use parking meters to regulate turnover.

Yet again, there seem to be any number of opinions, but little will to examine underlying realities as a means of understanding the issue.

I'd encourage all downtown stakeholders to at least familiarize themselves with the potential usefulness of a parking benefit district, as described here (and on numerous previous occasions).

The most important thing to remember is that this or any other City Hall will take no action unless "encouraged" to do so. Political entities prefer the status quo, and the votes they know. Unity and collective will can influence this situation.

Ideas worth stealing: Parking benefit districts, by Jon Geeting (Keystone Crossroads)

As UCLA professor Donald Shoup explained in his cult parking economics tome "The High Cost of Free Parking," some cities and downtown business associations have discovered that it's much easier, politically speaking, to introduce new parking meters or permits when the impacted areas are allowed to keep some of the revenue generated within the neighborhood to pay for extra public improvements and services.

The prospect of a dedicated, ongoing local revenue stream for neighborhood projects becomes enticing enough to residents and businesses, and they become a countervailing force in support of parking meters.

Those public improvements in turn attract even more visitors, which generates more parking revenue in a virtuous cycle of redevelopment.

In different cities, Parking Benefit Districts (PBDs) come in different shapes and sizes, but what they all have in common is that they fund visible local public improvements in the places where the revenue is raised.