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 … Read more
Game day near the University of Washington’s stadium, photo by Judy Dailey.
In Peggy Clifford’s neighborhood, out back of the State Capitol in Olympia, Washington, a black market thrives. Early each year during the state’s legislative session, lobbyists go there—just a hop, skip, and a jump from the capitol dome—to buy what they crave: parking spaces. Peggy says, “This is a neighborhood, not a parking lot.”
Tell that to regular Capitol visitors. The neighborhood may be nationally registered as historic and staunchly defended by Peggy and other concerned citizens, but it also has driveways and backyards, and to some residents, the offer of hard currency for use of that real estate is persuasive. They park their cars at the curb, protected by their resident-only permits, and rent out their private spaces to professional Capitol-goers. A lot of money changes hands.
“My sister has great food karma. She finds great food, and she never pays.” If you heard someone say that, you’d just scratch your head. What could that mean? Does she dumpster dive?
If you substitute the “parking” for “food,” though, it makes sense. Indeed, a friend said those exact words to me recently, so I started asking others about their parking karma. Everyone I asked knew exactly what I was talking about: no confused expressions or blank stares.
Greg W. said, “I have always had spectacularly good parking karma….It’s a Zen thing: I am water flowing downhill into the perfect parking place.”
“Just ride with me and you’ll always get a parking spot right in front!” said Cynthia S.
What’s not surprising is that people claim good parking karma. An overwhelming majority of people sincerely believe that they’re luckier than average, as economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook reported in their 1996 book Winner-Take-All Society, so a pervasive belief in good parking fortune fits.
What’s more surprising, or perhaps more revealing, is that we apply the notion of karma to parking at all, and with only a hint of irony. The naturalness of this expression, “parking karma,” suggests that parking is one of those spheres of life where we regard ourselves as at the mercy of cosmic forces or blind chance.
And this fact is an indication of what a strange commodity parking is. It is among the strangest in the economic universe. It’s god-awful expensive, but the “market” for it is triply weird. It is a domain of hidden prices, huge spillover costs, and bizarre cross currents.
City requirements for off-street parking spaces jack up rents.
Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then, when the digging is finally done, construction rockets upward in no time. For the past few months, I’ve been watching a crew excavate the site of a new condo tower on Seattle’s First Hill. It’s on a route I walk three times a week, so I’ve had a ring-side seat. And here’s the thing that finally dawned on me, after years of not really thinking about these holes in the urban ground: what’s all the excavation for? It’s for parking. Underground parking. In most cities and in most soil conditions, the giant holes are only there to satisfy off-street parking rules, and to do that, you need a deep, deep hole. A hole like this one.
At Eighth Ave. and Seneca St. in Seattle. Photo by Alan Durning.
Digging these holes is astronomically expensive. They’re real-life money holes. The crew I’ve been watching has been laboring away for weeks, deploying enormous machinery and keeping a fleet of dump trucks in constant motion. They’ve undoubtedly spent millions of dollars removing rock and dirt. One Portland developer told me that each successive layer of excavation—each floor down in the garage—costs two to three times as much as the previous one.
Such costs are one reason housing is so expensive nowadays. A one-bedroom apartment in the city of Seattle rents for upwards of $1,300 on average. In Portland, rents are approaching $1,000 and, in Vancouver, BC, $1,400.
For starters, I’m fortunate enough to have the option of owning an iPhone, which gives me the choice to use services like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar. Those new companies use smartphone apps as their dispatch systems, which put their services out of reach for certain consumers. There are plenty of people who need rides but can’t afford expensive data plans or who are intimidated by new technology.
Off-street parking quotas are onthebooks 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 2).
Here’s how it works. Territorial constituents push city leaders to defend free neighborhood curb parking from newcomers, so the leaders instruct city planners to recommend parking quotas sufficient to prevent spillover from new buildings. No visitor to any new development should ever park on the street, leaders tell planners.
Let’s say you’re a planner in a city department. What are you to do? Like all planners, you were trained in a discipline in which the main curricula and classic text books say nothing at all about parking requirements. You have exactly zero training in how to set a parking requirement.
[prettyquote]“What I tell you three times is true.”
–Lewis Carroll[/prettyquote]
If you’re typical, what you do is call your peers in nearby jurisdictions and copy their mandates number for number: two off-street spaces per apartment; five per 1,000 square feet of office building; and so on. “It’s magical the way these numbers spread,” parking researcher Richard Willson told LA Magazine. Groupthink fills the void where analysis is lacking. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, would have readily understood how cities set parking requirements.
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 paying as drivers does not mean we are not paying in other ways—as residents, employees, and shoppers, for example. The costs of parking are concealed in higher rent and housing prices, lower profits and wages, and higher prices. We rarely think about the costs of parking, because parking itself is so ubiquitous. Because of city off-street parking mandates in land-use codes, it’s so commonplace we hardly notice it. Yet it’s a defining feature of modern cities: it’s one of the principal uses of urban and suburban land, as the image below of several blocks close to downtown Seattle illustrates. Consequently, it’s one of the principal uses of real-estate dollars.
This article quantifies just how expansive and expensive parking is. How much do we have? How much does it cost?
My experience with Lyft was radically better (more on that below), but not in the ways that its marketing strategy emphasizes. I wasn’t looking for my driver to be my best friend, or to feel like I was a part of a community, or to have scintillating conversations about politics before 9 a.m. I’m a mom with a poky kid, trying to get to work as quickly as possible, and I did that 34 minutes faster with Lyft.
That simple fact says a lot about the upstart—and, for now in Seattle, wholly unregulated—services that allow a customer to summon and pay for a ride from a fleet of drivers roaming the streets in their personal cars using a smartphone app. You can see on the map how far away your driver is, and that he or she is really coming. It’s much less stressful than calling a grumpy dispatcher and waiting on the side of the road, wondering if your cab will ever show up.
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 parking expanses are a modern puzzle: they are so rarely full that you have to wonder why hard-headed business types ever built them. The answer is simple. They had no choice. Local laws made them do it.
Your bedroom is smaller than your car’s—that and other surprising facts stand out in a new infographic we’ve assembled with architect and designer Seth Goodman of Graphing Parking.
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