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Over the past several days, Sightline’s Parking? Lots! series has gotten some especially capitol attention. That’s right—the other Washington! DC Streetsblog picked up some of Alan’s number-crunching and policy-parsing for its own re-posting (here and here thus far, with more to come). It also distributed the pieces across several of their sister blogs around the country. DC Streetsblog’s most recent article features a Streetsblog original Q&A with Alan. An excerpt...

I explained this already. It took me 1,025 words to detail how cities make up parking quotas from junk science. Maximum parking tallies become minimum parking requirements become landscapes flooded with free parking, which induces more driving, which leads to higher tallies of maximum parking. Repeat. Cascadian artist Don Baker has just explained it in 71 seconds. Behold: Driving in Circles.

Anna Don’t miss (my hero) Naomi Klein on why unions need to join the climate fight. More young people are using birth control. And guess what? Teen births are at a record low. Attention middle school teachers: Check out these free lesson plans on climate science from the Environmental Protection Agency. And, a Center for American Progress study seems to indicate that a healthy middle class actually can help lift all boats. In other words,...

Migee An interesting article on the trend of living alone. Since we’ve been writing so much about housing, it seemed like a good piece to include this week. It will be interesting to see how long this “housing mismatch” continues or alternatively, how living arrangements change. Nicole Two stories on the Tactical Urbanism Facebook page caught my eye. First off, a video about the Detroit Bus Company, started by a...

Editor’s Note 8/19/2015: We are bringing this popular and relevant post back to explain how parking rules raise your rent. Two years later, Sightline’s executive director Alan Durning is still exposing the hidden reason behind skyrocketing housing costs in this recent Stranger article. Read below to learn how ending parking quotas can bring down rent costs. Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then,...

Alan If you want to build a temple in praise of your God, you’re legally obligated to devote much more space to parking than to the sanctuary. Notre-Dame de Paris? Illegal in every American city. The latest from parking-infographic-hero Seth Goodman. My kids watched The O.C., so I only had the most limited exposure to it. But I enjoyed this WaPo dialogue about it being the definitive treatment of the...

Off-street parking quotas are on the books in every city in Cascadia, because they are politically expedient. But the specific quotas—two spaces per apartment or ten per 1,000 square feet of retail floor space, for example—are based on little or nothing. Cities just make them up, then state them with precision, as UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup has documented in The High Cost of Free Parking (see chapter...

Maybe the inventors of Monopoly were onto something when they called their second most expensive property Park Place, because car storage is surprisingly costly. We think of it as cheap, because we so rarely pay for parking at the time when we are using it. More than 90 percent of the time, our cars end their trips in spaces for which there is no charge. But just because we’re not...

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...

On the subject of curb parking, everyone seems to have a story—and what the stories reveal is essential to this entire series. I’ve been asking my friends, and I’ve got an earful. Listen. Soon after advertising executive Necia Dallas moved into a house in Portland, Oregon, she found on her door a detailed, hand-drawn map specifying the curb spots where each resident was permitted to park. The map, left by...