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*** Ack! Please see the coda at the bottom of this post. *** If I were a sociologist I would examine the deeply irrational beliefs people having about parking. I’m serious. Start talking about meter rates or extending pay hours and you can pretty much throw logic right out the window. Exhibit A is last week’s Seattle Times story on restaurants in the Chinatown/International District. Owners allege that business is down since...

Parking spaces aren’t much to look at. But one day a year they get a makeover worldwide as groups and individuals use them to take the “ing” out of “parking.” Head over to the Park(ing) Day website to find some spots near you. Then, head back here and read up on some policy issues surrounding parking, like how we mandate minimum parking standards for bars.

There’s no better measure of our perverse relationship with cars than the fact that nearly every city and town in North America has laws requiring drinking establishments to provide parking, and yet roadside memorials to victims of drunk driving are mostly illegal. A single year of alcohol-impaired driving kills more Americans than the last decade of war has, but our land use codes practically encourage driving home from taverns. Bar...

The front page of the Seattle Times has a story about a driver convicted of drunk driving 12 times, now going on 13. It’s a tragic and horrifying story. It should also be an opportunity for broadening our analysis of the problem. Serial drunk driving tends be treated as either a failure of the judicial system or as a problem of addiction, both of which are partially right. We might also take a...

As coffers empty out, some local governments have begun eyeing commercial parking taxes. And unsurprisingly, they are not wildly popular in some quarters. In Seattle, for example, a proposed tax rate increase is opposed by heavyweights like the University of Washington and the Downtown Seattle Association. Yet I think there’s a possible compromise available. Broadly speaking, there are two reasons why I tend to favor commercial parking taxes: 1) they reduce the appeal of driving;...

Jonathan Hiskes’ question—“Tell me again why we mandate parking at bars?“—got me wondering about Northwest cities. I did some digging, and here’s what I found. First the good news: we’re not as bad as Long Beach, California, where bars must provide more room for cars than for people. But now the bad news: our codes are not much better in this respect. Seattle and Portland—forward-looking cities when it comes to...

My cries have been answered. In Canada, at least, there is such a thing as a free market think tank with a free market perspective on parking policy. The Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently published a concise little position paper, “How Free Is Your Parking?” by Stuart Donovan. It makes three points, briefly: 1. Parking regulations suppress economicactivity: Parking regulations suppress economic activity in a number of ways. Most importantly parking regulations...

Conservative Northwest think tanks, I am calling you out. I want you guys to talk about parking policy. Yeah, you heard me: parking policy. By my count, there are 5 prominent right-leaning, market-oriented think tanks in the Northwest: Discovery Institute and Washington Policy Center in Seattle; Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Olympia; Cascade Policy Institute in Portland; and Fraser Institute in Vancouver, BC. Each of them prominently features a devotion to free markets...

While putting together an analysis of gasoline consumption, I have been trying to figure out just why Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) in the Northwest has been dropping. Part of the challenge of explaining downward VMT is that it has typically never happened in a sustained way. But, in the last year or so it has been sustained, defying the conventional wisdom of transportation planners. One factor that comes to mind...

Over at Hugeasscity, Dan Bertolet has a fascinating post up. It’s specifically about a big new transit-oriented development at Seattle’s Northgate Mall, but the lessons are universal. It’s about turning 9 acres of asphalt into hundreds of housing units, thousands of square feet of retail, and restoring a buried creek. Dan’s remarks are relevant, I think, to just about any place with shopping malls, parking lots, and a desire to reshape the built environment away...