Hyde Park Urbanist

Park(ing) Day, 2009

Today is Park(ing) Day!  All around the world, folks are claiming parking spaces for more humane purposes.  Ah!  If only every day could be park(ing) day.

I'll be curling up later with my Shoup, dreaming about the way things ought to be.

Active Trans on the Parking Meter Lease

Active Transportation Alliance (formerly the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation) has posted this:

The privatization of Chicago’s parking meters puts the region’s future in a precarious position related to transportation, urban planning, congestion and overall quality of life, according to an analysis released today by the Active Transportation Alliance.

The analysis, “Unrealized Assets: How leasing control of parking meters limits the future of active transport and innovative urban planning,“ identifies the overarching impact: when the City gave up control of collecting revenue from parking meters, it also gave up all control of the public right of way on any streets with parking meters. See the full report here.

This limits any potential projects that use streets with metered spaces: bus rapid transit, bicycle lanes, street festivals, sidewalk expansion, streetscaping, pedestrian bulb-outs, loading zones, rush hour parking control, mid-block crossing, and temporary open spaces. The City’s ability to use streets in fresh, people-centric ways is now dictated, controlled and limited by the arrangements and penalties within the parking meters lease.

Take heart, though.  We've lost control for a mere 75 freakin' years.

Privatizing Parket Meters

Q: What would the Hyde Park Urbanist call $6.50/hour metered street parking in the Loop?
A: A good start.

Not that that's the only relevant consideration for the bill privatizing Chicago's parking meters.  My sympathies are with Ald. Preckwinkle and Ald. Hairston, though.  They refused to vote for it because the city council had only 72 hours to read and evaluate the bill.  And is $1.2 billion fair compensation to the city for 75 years of meter collection?

According to the Tribune, the City of Chicago collected a $18.9 million (net) from parking meters in 2007.  That represents less than 2% of the $1.2 billion sale price and if the city simply invested that infusion in a mutual fund (which the city isn't going to do), the return would have easily bested 2% without ever having to touch the principle.  So, my back of the envelope calculation is that this will represent more income for the City.

Of course, that hardly takes into consideration the money the City could have collected had we'd simply set the meters at market rates and collected the windfall ourselves.  On the other hand, the City had no intention of doing that.  So, this represents a backdoor method of pricing street parking about what it should be.  Still, I betcha the rates will end up as the worst possible of all political scenarios-- much higher but not high enough that there will be a vacant spot or two on every block.

Such half-measures would negate Felix Salmon's optimism:

Chicago should get much more than $1.157 billion in benefit from this deal. Underpriced on-street parking is the bane of many large cities' existence: it results in a huge amount of needless congestion as drivers circle around endlessly, looking for a spot to park. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the benefits from lower congestion are larger than the up-front cash that Chicago is receiving.

Like Barbara Kiviat at Time Magazine's Curious Capitalist blog, I don't like how the City is allocating the payout.  Far better IMO to limit the City to annual spending of the sale price/the length of the contract or some such, so this doesn't disadvantage the city's future revenue streams.  Seventy-five years is a long time.  And I would have preferred to see the city's commercial street parking divided up and auctioned off to several companies.  Nothing particularly complicated with splitting it up along the cardinal directions so that one company has the meters on the north side of streets, another on the south, etc.  Then companies then would be competing with each other very directly. 

The District of Columbia's neighborhood zoning concerns must be like ours because Matthew Yglesias writes:

In general, the market price of street parking should be very similar to the market price of garage parking. Since a garage is more secure and protected from the elements, that has certain advantages. But a street spot might be more convenient. So you’d be looking at rough similarity. And in parts of the city where there’s no viable market in garage building, that’s a market signal that parking demand is low and therefore street parking should be very cheap. But where garages are charging a lot, street parking should also be expensive. Among other things, that would reduce the need for new construction to be accompanied by expansive parking garages.

Perhaps more important, it would reduce the tendency for conversations about any new development to become immediately dominated by people’s fear of parking shortages. The whole shortage phenomenon is (as shortages tend to be) a symptom of bad pricing policy. Chicago is a big city with a vibrant downtown and tons of economic activity. Space is limited and expensive. Unless you charge more than a quarter for it, you’ll get shortages.

Not everyone feels this way, of course.  Did you know there was a blog all about parking issues and fighting parking tickets in Chicago?  Let me introduce you to The Expired Meter, where cheap street parking and the resulting shortages is more than just a tradition; it's a right:

But when you take this parking meter deal, and look back at what else the mayor has done to kick drivers in the ribs in 2008, it’s jaw dropping.

*Lowered the Denver boot threshold from three to a paltry two unpaid tickets.
*An additional 22% premium tacked onto unpaid parking tickets to cover the alleged cost of collections.
*Installing over 50 red light cameras in 2008, with at least another 50 for 2009, 2010 and 2011 reaching a goal of having red light cameras at a minimum of 10% of all city intersections.
*Initiating a plan to install cameras on all city street sweepers to nail drivers parked in violation of street cleaning bans.
*General increases to the cost of parking ticket fines.
*Increased parking enforcement and the planned hiring of 50 new parking enforcement aides.
*Increase in parking garage taxes.
*Converting all 4000 park district parking spaces into metered spaces.
*Adding 1,250 new metered parking spaces to the near west side.

When you look at all these policy changes implemented by Mayor Daley over the past 12 months, you can see that Chicago is the most anti-driver city in the entire U.S.

Well, when you put it that way, it almost makes it seem like Richard M. Daley is angling for the much-coveted Hyde Park Urbanist endorsement for king or dictator or something really powerful like Mayor of Chicago for life.

Hyde Park Urbanist Sexiest Man Competition

Not counting Donald Shoup, of course, it might well be Gordon Price.  I'll let Jude Galligan at Downtown Austin present the relevant argument:

In October I was fortunate to be included in a delegation of Austinites sent to Vancouver in order to learn about how they’ve managed rapid growth and become one of the most admired cities in the world. One of their council members, Gordon Price, delivered one of the most impassioned orations about smart urban planning.  He made one particular comment that struck me…

“Show me your parking ordinance, and I’ll show you what your city looks like!”

Jezebel bases their sexiest men list on a somewhat different set of standards-- a set I find it difficult to argue with, actually.

Matthew Yglesias: A Shoupista PowerVoice

(Update: Irene Sherr sent me this link to an article concerning a street parking plan that San Francisco will be trying out.  Note the Donald Shoup quote at the end.)

Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias gulps down the most delicious Kool-Aid ever and joins up with the Shoupistas:

...(T)o my way of thinking an enormous amount of good could be done if conservatives were more interested in applying really basic free market principles to transportation policy. For example, why not allow developers to build as much or as little parking as they want to build when they launch a new development? Why not charge market rates for curbside parking on public streets? How about fewer restrictions on the permitted density of development? Why not reduce congestion on the most-trafficked roads through market pricing of access? It happens to be the case that most of the people who are interested in these issues have liberal views on unrelated political issues, but the specific set of views at hand don’t draw on any deep ideological principles, it’s just application of basic economic thinking to the issues and, as such, is something that should be completely accessible to conservative politicians looking to show that conservative ideas can be relevant to the concerns (environmental concerns, quality of life concerns, economic growth concerns) of a set of people who are disinclined to think of themselves as conservatives.

Exactly.  I can come up with plenty of reasons to argue that the government should subsidize public transportation or education or health care, but parking?

Parking & Affordable Housing

More from Donald Shoup in The High Cost of Free Parking (p. 90):

In my own experience as a member of a Design Review Board for the Los Angeles City Planning Department, I reviewed the plans for all developments in Westwood between 1994 and 2003. I saw many projects where the parking requirements limited the floor space of a building, prevented changing its use, or disfigured its design...  (An example): a 19-unit building with 58 parking spaces (2.5 spaces per unit), exactly the number required by the zoning code. Because of the small site, two levels of underground parking were needed to satisfy the parking requirement. The small, two-level underground parking garage was very inefficient, with 520 square feet of garage floor area per parking space because the ramps, aisles, columns, stairs, and elevators occupied a high proportion of the area. The garage's construction cost was $80 per square foot, so the cost per space was $41,600 ($80 x 520), and the required parking added $104,000 to the cost of each apartment (2.5 x $41,600).  With an average apartment size 1969 square feet, the required parking added $53 per square foot to the apartment's construction cost ($104,000 divided by 1969). The project provided 54 square feet of parking for every 100 square feet of housing.

(Emphasis mine.)  Ok, that's an extreme case and there are other reasonable methods of allocating the costs, but I bet that few parking spaces in garages built these days cost less than $20K each.  The cost of city-required parking for new developments either is added on to the price of the abode or else the housing simply doesn't get built.  And the latter is deadly for affordable housing because more housing means more affordable housing-- from a simple supply and demand perspective. 

(The photo is of a random underground parking garage, not the example cited in the Shoup story.)

Parking Minimums

(Via Marketurbanism) Yahoo has a fine Donald Shoup-quoting article on urban parking minimums-- the number of parking spaces that cities require new houses to have.

Milwaukee, one of a small group of cities that has eased minimum parking requirements, did so because they were impeding redevelopment of struggling neighborhoods, said John Norquist, the city's mayor from 1988 to 2004.

Norquist, who today heads the Chicago-based Congress for the New Urbanism, described a lot that sat vacant for decades after a historic building burned down. The required parking made it unfeasible to build anything new there, he said. After officials relaxed the parking requirement, a thriving restaurant sprang up.

Some cities have switched directions altogether, replacing the minimum requirement with a cap on the maximum allowable number of parking spaces. London and San Francisco began making the shift decades ago.

Well, I'm not sure if we want Chicago to be like those hellholes London and San Francisco.

Viva las Shoupistas

My special order copy of Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking finally arrived.  So far I've only read a tiny bit of it, but already I feel angry.

According to Shoup, a majority of U.S. cities began to adopt regulations for off-street parking in the five years after World War II (p.22).  Since then, most city planners have either copied other cities' parking regulations or based their city's regulations on the standards suggested by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE).  The ITE publishes suggestions for parking lot size for a variety of commercial uses based on surveys they've done.  Thing is, Shoup maintains that the surveys for some of these land-use categories are based on incredibly small sample sizes, sometimes just a couple parking lots. (Pic-right used under Creative Commons from here.)

And it will be no surprise to regular readers of this blog that ITE requirements call for much wasted asphalt.  In a study of 17 Home Depot stores, the Parsons Transportation Group found that ITE's recommendation of 5 spaces per thousand square feet of floor space was about twice what was used on the 5th busiest day of the year at Home Depot (p.32-36). 

Urban sprawl is poleodomogenic.  That is, this catastrophe has been generated by urban planners (poleodomos in Greek).

My new tag line for this blog: "In the beginning the earth was without parking" is the first sentence of Shoup's second chapter.  This tag line replaces "an enemy of creeping suburbanization since 2007", which I'd come to view as inaccurate.  As I've learned more about the history of Hyde Park, I've come to the conclusion that suburbanization didn't creep into our neighborhood at all.  Rather, urban renewal literally bulldozed the old commercial strips along 55th Street and Lake Park Avenue.  Within a matter of a few years, a vibrant (yet high-crime) neighborhood became much greener & sterile.  Suburbia came to central Hyde Park all of a sudden. (Pic-right is 55th St looking west from Lake Park before urban renewal.  The photograph is courtesy of HPKCC.)

Herald Letters: (Part One) Parking

A couple of letters to the editor in this week's Herald have gotten me to the point of being self-righteous.  Let's start with parking.

Howard Niden with the East Hyde Park Action Committee is upset with street parking opportunities in his neighborhood.  He believes the authorities should recognize "that residents of East Hyde Park have a legitimate right to expect to be able to find parking close to their homes".  Oh, really?  What part of the constitution is that from?  In an ideal world, should this even be a right?  Maybe health care should be a right, but parking? 

The EHPAC suggests that perhaps all of East Hyde Park should be metered.  Hey, I can go along with that.  Of course, he wants residents to get a sticker so they won't have to pay.  Why?  The streets of Chicago belong to all the people of Chicago.  Why should anyone get special privileges?  Why should those of us without cars subsidize people with cars?  I could give you plenty of reasons why the government should subsidize other means of transportation, but why subsidize cars?

I'll tell you what I'd be happy to do as a compromise.  What if we metered all of the city with market-based pricing and current residents were grandfathered in as free parkers?  I just want there to be some end-point for this free parking expectation.

The City Subsidizes This

1) The City of Chicago owns the residential streets.
2) Therefore, it owns the parking spaces on those streets.
3) The city would be within its rights to charge for residential street parking (instead of raising property taxes 15%).
4) Without really thinking about it, the city has generally decided not to charge for street parking, but rather to give it away first-come, first-serve.
5) When the government gives away finite resources, we shouldn't be surprised if this creates a shortage.

If these were metered spaces, the eyesore would be gone, there'd be an empty space for someone else to use and the city would have a source of revenue besides taxation.