http://grist.org/cities/wide-open-spaces-how-unused-parking-adds-up/?utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&sub_email=pdrouet@earthlink.net
By Alan Durning, July 29, 2013
My younger son, almost 19, and my daughter, 20, are learning to drive this summer. (
Car-less folks like us are sometimes late to the
car-head rites
of passage.) So I’m temporarily appreciating the wide open spaces of
empty pavement at regional malls and big-box stores. Some of these
parking lots are so big they generate their own mirages, and they’re
vacant enough that my kids can’t do much damage.
Such parking expanses are a modern puzzle: They are so rarely full
that you have to wonder why hard-headed business types ever built them.
The answer is simple. They had no choice. Local laws made them do it.
For more than half a century, cities have mandated oversized quotas of on-site parking at stores, offices,
houses,
apartments, and condominiums, and all other types of new buildings — even
bars.
The result has been millions of parking stalls that stand empty even at
their hour of peak demand. No doubt about it: We have legislated the
waste of land.
In the Old Town area of suburban Beaverton, Ore., for example, barely
half of legally required parking spaces had cars in them when
surveyed in
2007, leaving some 1,500 local slots idle. Many cities demand five
stalls (or about 1,500 square feet of parking) for every 1,000 square
feet of retail space; the big-box hardware-merchandiser Home Depot
surveyed actual parking utilization at 17 of its stores and found only
half that many spots used at peak hours, Donald Shoup writes in
The High Cost of Free Parking.
Such findings, occasionally mentioned in urban planning circles, have
in recent years received empirical validation in the Northwest, where
authorities have undertaken rigorous surveys of parking at multifamily
buildings.
Car prowling
Officials in each of the Northwest’s large metropolitan areas have
sent survey takers out in the still of the night when most people are
cozy in their beds, their cars tucked into their designated slots. The
surveyors’ mission was to prowl through apartment and condominium lots
and garages, record empty and full spaces, and compare their tallies
with the number of apartments.
What they found was surprisingly consistent. In King County, Wash., for example, the
Right Size Parking (RSP) project [PDF]
visited more than 200 buildings and found one parked car per occupied
dwelling, on average. It also found an extra 0.4 empty stalls per
occupied housing unit: almost one-third of parking was idle.
In British Columbia, MetroVancouver
surveyed 80 buildings [PDF]
and reported one parked car and 0.4 empty spaces per occupied unit, on
average. In Portland, Ore., a survey of 15 multifamily buildings tallied
an average of 1.1 parked cars per dwelling, plus 0.4 empty slots [
pg. 13 of PDF]. Everywhere, then, spaces exceeded cars by roughly a third.
These figures are averages, and they conceal other patterns. In
suburban zones, the oversupply was larger, although it remained
approximately proportional. In King County, suburban buildings had 1.2
parked vehicles per unit, plus 0.6 vacant stalls. Buildings in downtown
Seattle, meanwhile, had just 0.6 cars and another 0.2 empty spots per
dwelling.
Similarly, across the region, condo buildings had more spaces and
cars than rentals had, because condo owners are more affluent. In
greater Vancouver, B.C., for example, rental buildings had 0.6 occupied
parking spaces per apartment and 0.4 empties, while condos had one
parked car and 0.3 empties per occupied dwelling [
pg. 44 of
PDF]. In Victoria, B.C., similarly, 33 apartment buildings investigated
in the wee hours by enterprising university students had 0.5 cars
parked per unit and 0.4 vacant slots [
pg. 21 of PDF].
Force feeding
Why do buildings have so much extra parking? Do builders overestimate
demand? No doubt, some do; others undoubtedly underestimate it. But the
real reason for excess parking is that cities require it. Careful
studies in Los Angeles and New York that disaggregated parking decisions
down to the individual parcel level found that developers tend to build
exactly as much parking as local codes require, as Shoup documents in
The High Cost of Free Parking.
Developers would build less, on average, were it not for parking
requirements, but that does not mean they would build none at all. Local
laws do not mandate dishwashers, but most builders install them,
because customers want them. Most customers want parking, too, so
builders install it. Lowering or striking parking requirements lets
builders judge for themselves how much vehicle storage to provide.
Northwestern evidence aligns well with the California and New York studies. The
RSP analysis did
not simply count spaces, it also constructed a detailed model for
predicting actual parking usage based on buildings’ locations and
characteristics. After the model proved robust in its predictive powers,
RSP analysts used it to estimate how much parking would likely be used
on every building lot in King County where zoning allows multifamily
buildings. They concluded that at 45 percent of such lots, the number of
spaces required under local law exceeds the number likely to be used —
that is, the law would force-feed parking, causing builders to install
more than warranted.
When the analysts removed from the calculation all parcels in the
city of Seattle, which recently wrote sweeping exemptions into its
multifamily code, the figure rose to 82 percent: Suburban cities almost
all require more parking than will find takers. In fact, outside of
Seattle, localities’ parking quotas exceed usage by an average of 0.4
spaces per dwelling — approximately the amount by which parking supply
actually exceeds current parking usage.
The waste land
Expressed as stalls per apartment, the waste of space may not seem
egregious: a fraction of a parking space. What’s the big deal? Each
space is expensive, as I’ll detail in a later article, so the cost of
housing rises and the supply shrinks.
Besides, a fraction of a spot per apartment adds up to vast acreage.
British Columbia and the Northwest states of Idaho, Oregon, and
Washington have 2 million apartments, condominiums, and other dwellings
in multifamily buildings, according to data from B.C. Stats and the U.S.
Census Bureau. For each of these dwellings, if the region has an extra
0.4 parking spaces, that’s 800,000 empties. Each space likely occupies
at least 325 square feet of pavement, including access and maneuvering
room. All told, that’s 260 million square feet of superfluous parking:
more than nine square miles of vacancy that, unlike mall lots, isn’t
even useful for driver’s ed. It is, with apologies to T.S. Eliot,
the waste land.
Remember: that’s just the
extra parking spots — the ones idle
around 2 a.m. — and it’s only the excess parking at apartment and condo
buildings. It ignores the far-more numerous ones at single-family homes,
on the street, at offices, factories, churches, schools, park-and-ride
lots — and the malls where my kids have been practicing.
The tally of all those spaces; their mirage-like promise of benefits, which turn on closer inspection to a
handful of dust – these are topics for another day.
