Last week Seattle’s new Mayor, Michael McGinn reversed a city policy that prohibited commercial parking near rail transit stations and sparked a controversy. In some ways, it’s a hyper-local, even neighborhood-level, controversy but it also makes an interesting case study for parking policies in cities and towns all over Cascadia. Parking issues can be a third rail in local politics and leaders across the region often confront a similar problems in virtually every urbanized neighborhood in the Northwest: how to meet parking needs without undermining policies intended to reduce reliance on driving.
Development has slowed in Seattle and many other cities, so why not allow pay parking on surface lots (like a particular one in front of a Safeway) until demand for housing and building increases? Some worry that once parking is allowed, it will be very difficult to take it away. Also, more parking could mean more driving.
But what shouldn’t be lost in this local debate—or in the hundreds like it across the region—is that the problem is really more about land use, pricing and taxation than it is about where people store their cars. To understand why, we need to get into the weeds just a little bit.
Here’s Sara Nikolic—a supporter of the parking prohibition that the mayor overturned—explaining the details:
The vision for these station areas…is the conversion of an auto-dominated area of the city into pedestrian friendly, mixed-use neighborhood centers where people can easily access light rail by foot, bike or bus. Allowing park and ride facilities is not only a flagrant disregard for that vision, but would also make it more difficult to achieve.
A commenter added, even more succinctly.
The problem is that you’re looking at how to make driving in easier. The easier and faster you can drive into a city, the more sprawl you create since you can now live further away (with more land, for cheaper).
In other words, while allowing parking near transit centers may seems like a good thing—a way to boost rail ridership—it may actually be counterproductive to the larger goal of creating compact walkable communities. It’s not the first time that our parking policies have run afoul of other public policy objectives.
In fact, Eric de Place has blogged about how our parking policy is fundamentally in conflict with itself. On the one hand, cities want to encourage people to get out of their cars; and on the other hand, cities provide large amounts of free or very cheap storage for cars on public land along city streets.
So while McGinn’s move may seem like an act of deregulation, it should be understood in the larger context of city parking policy, which continues to operate a fixed-price monopoly of sub-market-rate parking on public land. And allowing artificially cheap private parking adds to the problem.
The other big problem here is zoning. Cities can be timid and incremental in creating the kind of building capacity that would allow for the development of true transit oriented communities (TOC), compact, busy and walkable neighborhoods centered around transit hubs. The political problems created by neighbors frightened by change too often have trumped what we know makes transit work: land use that creates compact development (You can find anything you ever wanted to know about why TOC matters for our region in Futurewise’s TOC Blueprint.) If policymakers genuinely want walkable transit-oriented neighborhoods, we’ll have to encourage denser development through local zoning ordinances.
Density is not a popular term, but it is a pretty straightforward concept. For transit to work there has to be a demand for it, and study after study has shown that higher density neighborhoods create a sustainable demand for transit (not to mention reduced car ownership, energy consumption, carbon emissions and vehicle miles traveled). Adding ‘park and ride’ lots has been shown to undermine, the benefits of density around transit stations. One look at this problem by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute found that “extensive Park & Ride facilities around transit stations tend to contradict efforts to create Transit Oriented Development. In some circumstances, Park & Ride facilities may encourage urban sprawl by reducing the cost of long distance commutes.”
Taken together, the two policies—removing the prohibition on parking and failing to create bold land use policy that promotes TOC—Seattle is running the risk of turning light rail into yet another subsidy for an auto-dependent lifestyle. Allowing parking near transit might seem like “making it easier to use light rail” when in fact there’s good evidence that it’s just making it easier (and cheaper) to drive.
What are the solutions cities can look to when considering allowing parking in exchange for riding transit? Here are a few important principles:
- Adopt a coherent and comprehensive strategy on land use that will create vibrant compact communities that support transit. Allow more housing in transit areas (even if some neighbors complain). Use form-based or performance zoning around stations to more sustainably meet economic and neighborhood needs.
- Explore policies like land value taxation that make operating parking lots less economically viable than developing housing. Proponents of land value taxation argue that it would tend to make developing housing more financially feasible than running a parking lot.
- Avoid intervening in the parking market to ‘solve parking problems.’ Let the market do that by establishing a price for parking based on supply and demand, including on any public land that is set aside for car storage. Resist urges to create more parking supply since less supply means higher prices.
These aren’t politically easy things to do. But if they are pursued broadly and consistently they can result in better outcomes in the long run
Sara Nikolic
Thanks for this thoughtful post, Roger. Especially for bringing up the land value taxation issue. It’s not something that we can do properly in Washington State due to constitutional limitations, but warrants lots more thought and discussion.On form-based codes, I’d like to plug a brown bag we are having on that topic this Wednesday January 20th at GGLO (1301 First Avenue) at noon. We’ve had a couple pilot projects in the Seattle region, and the potential to expand to other cities is great. Could help solve some of the particular challenges in station areas.
Darcy McGee
The ANNUAL cost for a parking pass for a resident of Vancouver, BC’s very compact downtown is $60.I’ve long argued that it should more accurately reflect the cost of the land, the city’s cost of operation (patrolling) and commercial rates. I don’t understand why the city feels an obligation to provided public land for the benefit of private residents *at such a massive discount.*
Dave
No argument with the points you raise – makes sense to me. I’m wondering though, how do I articulate this to a coworker who parks and rides in a scenario similar to what’s described above? This person cannot afford to live in a dense urban core (single parent, two kids) and values the education that the two kids are getting at an arguably better suburban school. My coworker, by parking and riding, believes they are doing a good thing by not driving as far and not contributing to increased congestion and pollution. What’s a well intentioned citizen to do?
Matt the Engineer
[Dave] I think it’s a really delicate argument, since we’re talking about how to shape our city, not individual choices. Your coworker is free to make the choice that’s right for him. But we need to build a region where it’s cheaper to live densely than to sprawl. We’ve actually done that to some extent, but most people don’t recognize how expensive it is to drive*.How do we make compromise, and shape growth at the same time we don’t make your coworker drive? I say we set high and increasing prices for parking. This won’t bankrupt your friend, but it will make him reconsider moving to the city (especially if he thinks about the real cost of driving). We want him in the city: more families = better schools, more density = less environment-killing sprawl, less commute = more time with his family.* For example, Google says it’s $13.63 each way to drive to Seattle from Federal Way, then add $10 parking downtown, multiply that by 250 workdays a year and then by a 30 year mortgage = he could have spent an extra $279k on a house in the city.
Roger Valdez
Great answer Matt. And it highlights the most important parts of the affordability discussion. Yes, it might be more expensive to live in the city. But at the end of the day, it might be about the same or less and will ultimately have less impact on the environment. That’s why it is important to redefine our definition of housing affordability as I have suggested before: http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2009/09/10/toward-a-new-measure-of-housing-affordability
Buster G.
Will someone please tell this naive reader why parking on the street anywhere, any time in the city should be free.
Chris Bradshaw
A rapid transit station bumps up the land value for the surrounding lands, setting in place the densification process. During the time between the station’s construction and the construction of the dense projects, the land should be used for parking, but only if it is charged for at a significant rate, such as for street parking in other dense areas. If someone wants to park for less, let them park further away from the station and walk.The City might do itself a favour by buying the land closest to the station before the latter is built, and thereby control it. That would also open up a better land-tax option than the land-value taxation, which is annual, rather than a one-time capture of increase in value caused by the public works. Also, the stations should include a mini-commercial area to serve the users of the station and the early occupants on the first developments.With free parking, rapid transit, indeed, is simply a subsidy of and encouragement for exurban development. In fact, one has to ask how many of the votes for spending for RT comes from those current and future exurbanites who want to use it without having to use the connector bus service that is slower, less comfortable, and less frequent.Chris, Ottawa, Canada
Jon Morgan
The problem we had in considering a land value capture in DC is that if you’re taxing the additional real estate value created by transit stations, you also discourage just the kind of dense, tall development you want around them. It seems to me the policy that might be better is a split-rate property tax. In a revenue-neutral way, raise the property tax rate on land and reduce it on buildings in order to discourage wasteful, inefficient land uses like surface parking lots while incentivizing dense, tall development.