by Russel Norman
This weeks San Francisco Bay Guardian headlines the battle over parking. It is part of the broader national discussion here in the US about the future of freeways, roads, buses, trains, walking and cycling – transportation in short. The politics of mobility.
San Francisco is famous for its freeway revolts, including getting rid of a large freeway that was damaged in the 1989 earthquake. There was a community campaign not to rebuild the freeway and it wasn’t. Instead the area which was once under the shadow of the freeway is now an open space extensively used by pedestrians, cyclists and people in general. Very cool. And a number of other stupid freeway projects were stopped and existing freeways demolished. It adopted a ‘public transport-first’ policy in 1973, has a good network of electric trains, trolley buses, light rail and cable cars, and is a more people friendly city than others (there are some similarities with Wellington) but still half its emissions come from transport and it has congestion issues.
The battle is moving to parking. Rules that say that new apartments must provide parking privilege the car as the means of transportation and dramatically increase the cost of apartments – estimated to cost $50,000 to $100,000 per apartment. It also means the street level of new apartments is more likely to have parking and garage entrances rather than stores and cafes.
Then there is all the on-street parking that is effectively given away cheaply as a subsidy to cars. It is estimated that there are 320,000 on-street parking spaces in the city and given that these have a commercial value of at a conservative $1000 per year, the city is theoretically subsidising parking to the tune of $320m per year (minus the amount that the city collects in parking fees, probably less than 10% of commercial value). This is a controversial idea but does point to an often overlooked subsidy.
[For more see Jason Henderson, “The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco”]
The city won’t be internalising the full cost of parking and cars as it is so high that people would freak out, but it is looking at internalising a part of it.
The city’s Better Neighbourhood Plan says: “Our parking requirements need to be revised to support this [public transport first] policy by limiting parking supply – the single greatest incentive to drive – where transit and other modes are viable alternatives… Without limiting parking, people will continue to choose an auto oriented lifestyle and continue to drive. Traffic will continue to worsen and we will never shift the balance in favour of ways of getting around that are more effective in moving people”. Radical stuff!
The new city parking plan is to begin pilots in seven areas later in summer where the price of parking is increased when parking is scarce in an effort to better reflect the true costs of parking and to increase turnover and hence reduce the amount of traffic cruising the block looking for a park (they are aiming for 85% occupancy). They are also considering congestion charging for downtown (implementation would be three years away).
Parallel to the parking debate, the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency just approved 45 new bike projects. According the Guardian this could add 34 miles of bike lanes, coloured bike lanes, thousands of new bike racks, and ultimately convert up to 2000 on-street parking spaces to accommodate bikes. The projects had been delayed by three years by a legal challenges by those opposed. They are expected to appeal the latest decision too.
But if it goes ahead there will be 880 lane miles built for cars and 79 lane miles for bikes….and leaving 318,000 on-street parks.
It’s time we had the parking debate properly in NZ. We should at least start looking at the rules requiring developers to provide parking in new buildings.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Russel Norman on Mon, July 6th, 2009
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Thank you for raising the parking issue Russel. Minimum parking requirements are probably the stupidest planning rule that we ever invented. It forces residential developments to provide parking at levels above what might actually be needed, therefore incentivising people to use their cars (well they’ve paid for the parking spot so they might as well own the extra car).
Things are even worse for commercial developments. If you take a shopping mall, like Westfield Albany for example, far more space is used by the parking area than by the actual footprint of the mall itself. This is all valuable space – particularly somewhere like Albany – so therefore the space used for parking needs to be paid for one way or another. Inevitably this means the cost is passed on to people who buy stuff at the mall. This means that if I were to bus or walk to the mall (therefore not use the carpark) I would effectively be subsidising those that drove to the mall. So we end up with those using more sustainable transport methods subsidising those using less sustainable transport methods. Talk about a peverse outcome!
The simple first step in fixing up this problem should be doing away with all minimum parking requirements. If a developer wants to sell a townhouse development with only 1 parking space per unit (and the price reflecting that) why the heck should they be forced to provite 2 parking spaces per unit? Let the market decide how much parking is required, not traffic engineers stuck in the 1950s.
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TWO spaces? I’ve never seen a requirement for 2 spaces.
Just wrong. Beyond redemption.
BJ
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Intensification in some areas of Auckland (Ponsonly) now means that people find they cannot have a dinner party at home because there is not enough kerbside parking to accommodate the visitors.
Spillover parking can be a major issue and can lead to knife fights etc as Waitakere found when they developed an underparked housing development.
Yea the malls pass on their costs but still provide the cheapest food and the greatest variety. Minority groups in the US complain that they do NOT have large malls and hence have to pay monopoly prices for their basic food.
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Two spaces is standard practice…..
Then the visitors should catch the bus there, or a taxi. Means they can have a few drinks too!
Residents’ parking permit schemes are certainly necessary in some cases.
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These are US average actuals. Would not be much different here.
Centre City Suburbs Rural
% renters 49% 27% 20%
Workers/household 1.3 1.4 1.3
Vehicles 1.5 2.1 2.5
Housing 35.5% 34.1% 28.6%
Transport 16% 17.9% 21.6
Total 51.5% 52.0% 50.1%
The last three lines are the percentage of household income spent on housing, transport and the total of housing and transport.
NOte that the average central city household owns 1.5 vehicles per household.
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Owen; If people need more car-parks for dinner parties in Ponsonby then couldn’t somebody buy some excruitiatingly expensive land, level it and then turn it over to car parking? That this might actually be “too expensive” is very revealing.
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Owen McShane Says:
July 6th, 2009 at 10:54 am
> Intensification in some areas of Auckland (Ponsonly) now means that people find they cannot have a dinner party at home because there is not enough kerbside parking to accommodate the visitors.
some would say that expecting to drive home is evidence that they’re not drinking enough (not that I’m saying that, of course – I’m just putting the statement into other people’s mouths)
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thank you Russel; and isn’t San Francisco a far nicer City to get around than your general car invested smogography? (a la NYC)
A camera is r/q for a SF tour because auto’s don’t own the streets, people do.
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SF does OK. Once you get out of the inner city though it’s just like every other sprawled American metropolis.
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Dare I also mention San Francisco has approved the development of an extensive region wide network of HOT lanes on the highway network, essentially converting existing high occupancy vehicle lanes to also be used by other vehicles paying a toll, and to build new lanes to connect the network so there is a region wide express lane system.
San Francisco congestion charging has faded away and is instead going to be a way for those willing to pay for priority to avoid congestion. This benefits buses (as they will use the lanes), freight and those with time constraints (appointments, flights etc) directly, but all others indirectly as it removes that traffic from the congested lanes.
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jarbury/libertyscott; they have a number of Spanish Mansions on the West and South Sides – destroying these would be a crime – it’s why they’ve opted for freeways – to preserve ‘Old’ San Fransico – Haight Ashbury is still the same – as is the waterfront/downtown area (cable-cars,fairs)
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The story is incorrect, even though I’m a fan of getting people onto public transport in the interest of full disclosure I must point out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarcadero_Freeway
It says after the earthquake a petition of 200,000 people to rebuild the freeway was completed…
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Jezza, there was strong public sentiment both for and against rebuilding the freeway. In the end, common sense prevailed. The area where the freeway used to be is now a lovely public open space.
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this is great oppinions
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The Embarcadero was an eyesore, and should have been put largely underground through the city (and completed), as modern cities now put major urban highways underground through CBDs (Sydney, Oslo, with Seattle now planning). Sydney of course still has the Cahill expressway overhead along the waterfront, but both it and the railway on that structure should be tunnelled if it could be financially viable.
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splutter, gulp, cough, clears troat
jarbury said
That would not be Green party policy would it? The market to decide?
The market has decided it prefers the private transport option. Yet the Greens insist that it is not so.
Oh well.
And are school holidays not an amazing time for traffic densities to lessen remarkably. Just shows how many people drive their johnnies and janes to school.
Lets have a campaign to promote kids going to their local school on foot, bicycle or bus, that will halve traffic congestion, easily. Little or no cost with huge rewards.
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That would not be Green party policy would it? The market to decide?
If the real cost is internalised, we would agree it is part of the solution.
The market has decided it prefers the private transport option. Yet the Greens insist that it is not so.
Yes and no. Certainly its a preference, but people have shown they want public transport and will use it, again when the full costs are factored in and the PT is convenient. There are bus lines you can’t get a seat on in Wellington. The other reason is that people know what effect emissions is having on the planet and want to do what they can. At the moment many people don’t have a real choice and the govt seems wedded to keeping it that way.
Lets have a campaign to promote kids going to their local school on foot, bicycle or bus, that will halve traffic congestion, easily. Little or no cost with huge rewards.
Now you’re sounding like us. But it needs to be made safe too, which will require investment in Auckland particularly.
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The major contributor to reduced commuter congestion during school holidays is that a large number of mothers (and many fathers) chose to take their leave during school holidays and so do not drive the kids to school or drive to work.
It’s the trip to work that reduces congestion – roads around schools are not normally subject to genuine congestion except around the parking areas.
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There is a recent paper by Genter et al on the effects of minimum parking requirements in NZ, and alternative options to move NZ in a more sustainable direction: http://www.nzsses.auckland.ac.nz/Conference/2008/papers/Genter.pdf
The Campaign for Better Transport site has a link to that paper, under the heading “The Cost of Free Parking”.
It’s interesting stuff.
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