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Collection: Parking? Lots!

Parking Karma

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Parking karma. Mait Jüriado, cc.
Parking karma. Mait Jüriado, cc.

“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.

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Apartment Blockers

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City requirements for off-street parking spaces jack up rents.
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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.

Photo by Alan Durning.
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.

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Park Raving Mad

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A department store in a mixed-use development still requires a large parking lot.

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 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.

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Park Place

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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?

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When Your Parking Grows Up

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In 2007, I saw this in a residential neighborhood near central Copenhagen:

Photo by Alyse Nelson.
Photo by Alyse Nelson.

A rack for 10 bicycles had grown where an on-street car parking space had been. In Copenhagen, where 50 percent of residents commute by bike, on-street bicycle parking was a sensible idea—fit 10 bikes where one car could go, thus freeing up the sidewalk from a cluster of parked cycles.

Fast-forward several years, and Copenhagen parking has grown up to bigger and pinker things:

Photo by Mikael Colville-Anderson, cc.
Photo by Mikael Colville-Anderson, cc.

This car-shaped storage unit provides secure, rainproof space for four cargo bicycles in a space equivalent to 1.5 vehicle parking spots.

As Alan Durning will detail in an upcoming article, on-street parking takes up a lot of space in North American cities: 5 to 8 percent of all urban land, according to UCLA urban planning professor Donald Shoup. If parking reforms—like pricing on-street spaces—reduce the need for curb parking in our cities, what will we do with all that extra space?

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Wide Open Spaces

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Photo by Flickr photographer paulswansen.
Photo by Flickr photographer paulswansen.

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.

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Infographic: Living Space v. Parking Space

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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.

Living Space vs. Parking Space in Cascadia

Click here for the largest version of the infographic (zoom in for full resolution) or here for a landscape version.

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Who Parked in My Spot?!

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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 an anonymous neighbor, indicated that Necia was welcome to park in front of her own house but that it was, “Optional! Because of your driveway. <smiley>” Jon Stahl of Seattle also got a parking map as a house-warming gift (pictured).

To claim the spots in front of their homes, people resort to illegal yellow or red curb paint, earnest oral pleas, or—above all—notes left on the windshield. Lots and lots of notes. “Not here, man. Not here,” said one missive that Seattle architect Rick Mohler’s business partner got on his windshield from a friend and neighbor. A West Seattle resident’s read, “Dear Driver, This is not a park and ride. We the neighbors would appreciate if you would find another spot to park.” Audrey Grossman’s said, “Don’t park your liberal foreign car on the American side of the street.” Brent Bigler of Los Angeles left a response to the note he found on his windshield in May and got an angry rejoinder reading, among other things, “You’ll be towed tomorrow period.”(pictured).

Ugly by Law

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Cars have shaped much of the North American West, including Cascadia, where drive-through restaurants, shopping centers, highway strip malls, and single-family neighborhoods miles from commercial services dominate much of the urban and suburban landscape. Less obvious to the casual observer is the impact that parking regulations have had on architectural forms.

Cities have established parking regulations, often called off-street parking minimums, for each possible land use. When you build a new house or shop, or often when you simply remodel a building or change its use, you must provide a minimum number of off-street parking spaces. These regulations are meant to address demand for parking that cannot be met by nearby on-street spaces, but they have also led to increased development costs, less flexibility for adaptive reuse of existing buildings, and some pretty unattractive architecture.

What’s in Your Garage?

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One car and lots of stuff in a two-car garage.
Alan's single-family home with single-car garage.
Photo by Alan Durning.

I have not owned a car in seven years, but I do own a garage. It’s pictured above. In fact, I am legally required to own an off-street parking space; that’s written in the land-use code for my city, Seattle, as for virtually every city. The driveway that leads to my garage, meanwhile, eliminates almost exactly one parking space from my street. Parking in front of a driveway is illegal, and a regular curb cut is almost exactly the size of a parking space, as illustrated below.

Driveway curb cut blocking street parking space.
Photo by Alan Durning.

The net effect—one mandatory off-street parking space plus one car-less household—is a one-space reduction of parking supply on my block. Repeat: my obligatory driveway and garage deprive the universe of one on-street slot. This is ironic, but it’s only the tip of the irony iceberg where car-storage is concerned.

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