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Collection: Making Sustainability Legal

How is Parking like a Sandwich?

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Sightline is releasing a new report today—Who Pays for Parking?—documenting the hidden parking subsidies that raise the cost of housing in greater Seattle. In a nutshell, the study finds that “cheap” parking really means expensive rents—which makes parking reform a high priority for housing affordability.  Imagine, just for a moment, that you live in an … Read more

Going Postal 2013

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Thirty-three pounds of junk mail in 2012.

You see that picture? That’s one whole year of my junk mail. Almost 33 pounds of it. A 20 inch stack of expensive, forest-destroying, unwanted trash.

Thirty-three pounds of junk mail in 2012.
Thirty-three pounds of junk mail in 2012.

And that’s nothing! I’m five years into a crusade to defend my little mailbox from paper spam. A typical Seattle household gets three times as much: 100 pounds a year. In 2009, when I last did a 365-day count, my stack was four inches taller and weighed in at 50 pounds. That was after I’d already spent hours beating back the onslaught with the help of Catalog Choice, the de-junking website. I’ve done more of this tedious work since, opting-out online and calling customer service numbers, and I’ve pushed my tally down first to 33 pounds (for calendar year 2012) and, in the most recent six months, to the equivalent of 26 pounds per year.

Progress, yes, but it’s still an obscenity—to have to work so hard to keep other people from putting litter on my property. It’s also a drain on our communities: hauling away junk mail costs US cities and towns about a billion dollars a year.

Conclusion? Unchanged since 2009: we need a Do Not Mail Registry, just like the Do Not Call registry. Changed dramatically since 2009, however, is the overarching trend: US mail volume is in free fall. More on that below.

Frontier Yellow Pages, by Alan Durning
One phone book slipped through in 2013.

The big win in the stack pictured above, which shows my ad-mail from calendar year 2012, was the complete absence of phone books. From 15 pounds and six books, I went to zero. Seattle’s Yellow Pages Opt-Out program worked! Unfortunately, in my 2013 stack (which covers the six months after I spent May aggressively unsubscribing to junk mail), one small phone book appeared, from Frontier Communications. I checked Catalog Choice and saw that I’d already told Frontier to skip me. If Seattle’s Yellow Pages law were still law, Frontier could have been fined for ignoring my request. Unfortunately, the Yellow Pages industry won a court challenge, so the fines are no longer in effect. Aggravating! Naturally, I have torn up the Frontier book and folded its yellow paper into a voodoo doll. I’ve been spending evenings tossing it in the air and catching it on my ice pick.

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To the Victors Go the Sofas

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Film still of activist rally from Toxic Hot Seat documentary film, used with permission.
Film still of activist rally from Toxic Hot Seat documentary film, used with permission.

Beginning in January 2014, non-toxic couches will be widely available for the first time in decades. A tireless campaign waged by firefighters and parents, researchers and scientists, public health and public consumer advocates came to fruition last month when California reversed its outdated, scientifically discredited flammability standard—a standard that places pounds of toxic chemicals in most North American homes.

For 38 years, California has exported to the rest of the continent a flammability standard so feckless, dangerous, and pervasive that it boggles the mind to consider how it was enacted in the first place. Technical Bulletin 117 mandates that all foam furniture sold in the Golden State must withstand an open flame for 12 seconds, a standard furniture manufacturers satisfy by blending flame retardant chemicals into furniture foam. These chemicals are associated with adverse health effects in all living things, particularly in the wee ones.

Bafflingly, TB-117 is 0 percent effective. Fire safety experts know that blending flame retardants into foam doesn’t work. In fact, TB-117 creates deadlier fires, accelerating the progression of flames in real-world fires and making a fire’s smoke more poisonous.

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What Will Ridesharing Be When It Grows Up?

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ridesharing car

The debate over crafting new rules for Seattle’s evolving for-hire industry has lasered in on a interesting question: What will on-demand ridesharing apps like Lyft, Sidecar and uberX look like when they reach a critical mass?

Will they popularize paid ridesharing by connecting people with empty seats in their car with people who need rides? Imagine if someone who happened to be driving from Shoreline to IKEA could open an app and connect with car-free shoppers who need a ride there. Or if someone headed to a meeting in Olympia with an empty car could pick up others headed that way. This could unlock tons of wasted space in our personal cars and create a online marketplace to encourage carpooling on the fly.

Or will these paid ridesharing services simply turn into taxi services with less overhead and fewer regulations? In this scenario, the drivers aren’t really “sharing” rides at all. The drivers are still making it easier for their passengers to live a car-lite or car-free lifestyle, but they’re primarily earning an income by circling around in their personal cars and driving people where they need to go.

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Spot-less?

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Parking reform may finally be coming. Here are eight reasons to hope for change soon:

BP Statistical Review of World Energy - Motion Chart

By flickr photographer shutupyourface, cc.
By flickr photographer shutupyourface, cc.

1. Noah’s (P)ark. UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup, like a modern day Noah, has been carrying a new strategy for parking reform far and wide looking for dry land on which to release it. The three-step plan of action—charging market prices for curb spaces through performance pricing, rebating the proceeds to neighborhoods, and then eliminating off-street quotas—is now working in several cities: Old Pasadena and San Diego, for starters. Parts of it are working in many other places: Austin, Redwood City, Ventura, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and the Northwest’s big cities, too. Each success breeds more, as localities copy good solutions from each other.

2. Jurassic Park? Curb parking has long been an archaic, hunter-gatherer world with spotty enforcement and widespread cheating. But new technologies are dragging public parking out of prehistoric times and into the modern era. Smart parking meters, in-street sensors, parking-enforcement tools such as license-plate scanners, and apps for finding and paying for parking have opened up new possibilities for managing parking on the street. Cities can collect for and enforce parking charges even on quiet streets, and parkers can locate spots efficiently. All of this makes it much easier to charge for curb parking.

Residents selling space on their property for parking near the Puyallup Fair, Washington.
Puyallup Fair Parking, by Flickr photographer Dan O’Leary.

3. Spot Me. The same info-tech tools are making it possible for people to rent out their own parking spaces—a vast, distributed private market for parking spots. Dozens of new apps like Parkatmyhouse and Parkopedia are turning idle spaces into cash, allowing much fuller use of them and inverting their owners’ political motives. Owners of off-street spaces lose out from free on-street spaces and mandatory off-street spaces nearby. As parking space micro-entrepreneurs grow in numbers, and as they find their political voice, they will counteract parking territoriality.

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Parking Break

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This is the season climax, the culmination, the big reveal.

Previously on Parking? Lots!

Cities mandate off-street parking (guided only by junk science and groupthink). They do it in fear of territorial neighbors who want “their” curb spaces left alone. Our communities suffer horribly as a result. Information technology is shaking things up, though, and cities can now charge for curb spaces more easily. They can also share the proceeds with neighborhoods. Doing that breaks the vicious political circle that perpetuates parking quotas.

By flickr photographer Dunwich Type, cc.
By flickr photographer Dunwich Type, cc.

The final step—here’s the reveal—is so simple it’s anti-climactic. (Sorry.) Once they’ve metered the curb and bought off neighborhoods, cities can just ditch parking quotas: scratch them out and turn the page.

There’s never been a good policy reason for minimum parking requirements. Their political rationale—preventing spillover parking—disappears when street parking is no longer free. Then, developers can figure out for themselves how much car storage to provide, just as they decide how many dishwashers, light fixtures, and bay windows to install. The market, a spot market, emerges.

What’s not anti-climactic—and what’s the focus of this episode—is the encouraging degree to which cities are already taking this step. A few are reducing or outright scrapping off-street parking quotas, and many are writing exceptions to them.

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Curb Appeal

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Imagine if you could put a meter in front of your house and charge every driver who parks in “your” space. It’d be like having a cash register at the curb. Free money! How much would you collect? Hundreds of dollars a year? Thousands? How might all that lucre shift your perspective on local parking rules?

The idea of a private meter (already available on eBay)—or a variant of it that is legal and practical—is the crux of this whole series. It’s the deal with the devil that forms the pivotal second step in UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup’s three-point plan to fix parking. Why that’s true is because of politics, and those politics take some explaining. The explanation will bring us back to the buccaneer parking meter, I promise. First, though, I need to show you some other terrain.

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There’s a Place for Us

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There are places in this world the savvy traveler would never drive with any hope of finding street parking: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, for example, or just about anywhere in downtown Los Angeles.

Parking meter in San Francisco.
Parking meter at Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco. Photo by Juli D’aniello.

That’s what you might think, anyway. If you actually drive to Fisherman’s Wharf today, though, you will have no problem finding a curb spot. A space will offer itself on each nearby block, if you’re willing to pay for it. The same goes for downtown LA.

These two cities plus Washington, DC, and a handful of others are experimenting with an approach to parking called “performance pricing.” Rather than dictating a flat meter rate citywide, their councils have set a performance goal: one or two empty spaces per block. They’ve instructed parking functionaries to charge what people are willing to pay, to use information technology to nudge meter rates up or down so that whatever block we citizens drive to, there will always be—with apologies to West Side Story lyricist Stephen Sondheim—a place for us.

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Calling Out Cabs

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Despite seriously questioning the need for a taxi demand study in Seattle (we don’t estimate demand for pizza delivery or dentists before deciding how to regulate them), the fact that the city did one anyway and now has interesting data from it does excite my heart a little. And there are some interesting tidbits in the study, which a council committee commissioned to help wrap its mind around what’s happening in Seattle’s rapidly evolving car-for-hire industry.

This matters because the ability to call a taxi or limo or rideshare service on a moment’s notice, and reasonably expect it to show up, makes it easier for people to give up their cars entirely, or at least leave one at home. When emergencies happen or bus schedules won’t get us where we need to be on time, affordable and reliable car-for-hire services are an important part of a city’s transportation ecosystem.

The good news from Seattle’s taxi study is that there doesn’t appear to be any shortage of vehicles-for-hire out there for people who are savvy and plugged in and wealthy enough to take advantage of all the available options. If you’re trying to call a cab on a busy Saturday night, you may be in for a long wait, since weekend nights are one of the few times that the city’s taxi fleet is completely maxed out.

However, if you know about for-hire vehicles (which look very much like taxis but charge flat rates and are only supposed to pick up fares in Seattle by prearrangement), or flush enough to spring for a limo (which get far better customer service ratings), or comfortable enough to ride with a stranger driving for ridesharing companies like Lyft or Sidecar or UBERx, you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a ride even during those peak times, according to consultants who did the demand study.

The bad news is that taxi service in Seattle—the egalitarian workhorses of the fleet—have far worse response times and serious customer perception problems, according to a survey that asked people about their most recent experience with summoning a cab or other for-hire vehicle.

Taxi response chart
City of Seattle Taxi Demand Study

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