Comments on: Parking datapoints of the day

By: IsabellaBinney

IsabellaBinney — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:14:24 +0000

I live in Baltimore. Significant parts of the downtown have been turned into high-rise parking garages by developers. Where once there were drug stores, local restaurants, dry cleaners, candy shops, etc., there are now brick facades housing cars. The friendliness of the streets has warped into a sense of threat. One can drive down Lombard St and feel they are in a brick corridor. Where people used to shop, walk and converse, there are just cars and brick walls of garages. One of the things that parking lots and garages do to a poorly planned or developer, profit-oriented city is visually destroy it. The quality of visual life, alone, matters. The garages of Baltimore are a clear example of how something needed for city development, rather than promoting it, results in alienation for visitors and citizens alike.

By: realist50

realist50 — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:46:12 +0000

MarThorne – or maybe a company moves to a suburban office park because its employees can’t park at work, or maybe a person shops at a suburban retailer with on-site parking.

I find the comparison of Hartford and New Haven to Cambridge to be an odd one. Both Hartford and New Haven are the central cities of their respective metro areas, a noted contrast with Cambridge. All 3 municipalities are below their peak populations, by the way, and each hit a peak in 1950. I’d also wonder about the focus on Hartford and New Haven proper, which are small cities in both area (18 to 20 square miles) and population (125k to 130k) in the midst of much larger MSA’s (populations of 1.2 million and 570k, respectively). Goes back to the point that rkillings made about daytime population.

By: MarThorne

MarThorne — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 07:57:30 +0000

I don’t know if any one else is seeing my perspective:

If you limit parking in a city, you increase the disincentive to commuting and as a consequence of the cost-benefit analysis that humans use to decide where to live; more people will be inclined to choose to live closer to work (because there’s no cheap parking close to work).

When it takes you more than 15 minutes to find an empty parking spot and that spot is more than a 15 minute walk away from work in weather-exposed environments and once you start realizing you’ve rarely ever found a good parking spot close to work; and that oh look there’s a new condo development being sold and its a 15-minute walk from work; guess what your next move will be.

By: bialecki

bialecki — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 07:40:19 +0000

This is not rocket science – the City has step by step been removing the ugly scars of redevelopment and failures of the past – unlike academics who sit in their office and “discover” some correlation, the practioners on the ground must find ways to actually make things happen…so 360 State Street a 190 million dollar union pension fund investment in the middle of a recession is wildly successful – taking out a “40 year surface parking lot” and replacing it with a leeds platnium TOD development complete with a incredible food coop. The “Coliseum site” is next with Montreal based LiveWorkLearnPlay working on a mixed use development for the 4.5 acre site and several other “surface lots” in play. You do have to facilitate the “market” so these developments happen and given the overall economy New Haven is exploiting every opportunity possible.

By: ctmccahill

ctmccahill — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 22:59:01 +0000

These are thoughtful comments. So, as a co-author of this study, I feel compelled to respond. This has been a slow, laborious study and it’s still ongoing. Some earlier findings have been published based on case studies of just two cities. We are now looking at more than two dozen.
One point I’d like to make clear is that we fully acknowledge the complexity of this issue and we are not suggesting direct causation (as graphs often imply). Instead, we are bringing into question the emphasis that has been placed on parking provision when it comes to urban growth and development.
We suspect that what’s happening in some of these cities is that the fragmenting of the cities by urban renewal and parking have made them less attractive places. It has also made walking, biking, and providing transit more difficult.
In both Hartford and New Haven, much of the parking was the result of failed urban renewal. But since then, both cities have invested heavily in large parking garages in the downtowns. So we are not simply seeing the use of vacant land for parking. Statements by policymakers in both cities verify this.
Although Cambridge is already well-positioned to have a unique transportation system, the policies that the city have instituted go above and beyond (even compared to other cities in the Boston metro). We continue to focus on Cambridge because it offers valuable lessons for any city.
Felix’s summary is fantastic, but it also provides a very narrow view of the work. If anybody is interested in the full studies, I encourage you to contact me directly at christopher.mccahill@engr.uconn.edu

By: NewJerseyMike

NewJerseyMike — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:24:58 +0000

I believe we have another correlation-causation problem here. Parking, especially the kind that can be counted from the air, is what you do with land when you have nothing else to do with land. It’s basically the equivalent of letting agricultural land lay fallow to stop erosion. A parking lot is nominally better than an empty lot as it won’t become trash or weed strewn and someone might occasionally pay you to park there. However if the land had any greater demand, the lot would quickly be converted to meet that demand.

So the problem isn’t that cities build parking and lose people, but that cities on the decline simply try to patch the empty undeveloped lots with parking because it is cheap and still better than nothing.

By: boston_bob

boston_bob — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:37:45 +0000

Echoing what others have said (or, piling on, as the case may be), the correlations to each city are tenuous, notwithstanding the Yale and Harvard rivalries. Since contractions occurring in cities are more likely to be in a random and entropic fashion, there is little to control the effect of more sprouting parking lots. Perhaps a tax credit to keep it as a greenfield rather than paving? Short of a monetary incentive, more empty lots will become parking as the cities charge more for on-street parking and increase violation fees.

By: mgjovik

mgjovik — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:26:12 +0000

Parking structures don’t have have to be soul destroying urban scars. For example, Beverly Hills, Ca has done something positive with it’s parking garages. The first floor of the garage is dedicated to retail, with only an entrance and exit drive at street level. The pay booth is recessed deep into the building so pedestrians don’t see it as they walk buy. The facade of the upper floors, where the cars are parked, look like an apartment building with glass windows, faux balconies and flower boxes. The archectural style is usually Mediterranean to fit the whole B.H. vibe. These structures actually add to the beauty of the street. In neighboring West Hollywood, especially on the Sunset Strip, the same concept is used, with first floor retail, only the style is more contemporary and highly graphic billboards adorn the upper floors, which blend in perfectly with the rest of the Strip. Both towns are growing with highly vibrant retail districts. The point is that with a little fore thought, highly functional parking garages can be well integrated into the urban landscape without detracting from it.

By: CampTen

CampTen — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:34:59 +0000

Echoing jomiku, correlation does not equal causation. New Haven and Hartford both notably launched large urban redevelopment programs beginning in the 1950s–New Haven even became (briefly) the national poster child for urban redevelopment. Having not read the paper, I don’t know if the authors controlled for this, or other alternatives, but presented here, the relationship seems spurious–it makes much more theoretical sense that the larger redevelopment programs produced parking lots AND drove down population in both cities rather than that the presence of parking lots alone could drive down the population’s of both cities by 25%. Before we start lobbying local governments to destroy all their parking lots, let’s have realistic expectations as to what degree of positive change this will bring.

By: Developerguy

Developerguy — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:34:20 +0000

Parking lots (as opposed to parking garages) are a sympton of a declining city, not a causation. As a building becomes physically and or economically obsolesent, and is demolished, there is either an economic demand to build a new building in its place, or the owner of the property “land banks” the site until there is an economic demand to build a replacement building. usually the cheapest way to “land bank” the site is to pave it over cheaply and operate a parking lot.

By: rkillings

rkillings — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:53:01 +0000

Coming so soon after your post on the limits of statistics, Felix, I’d have expected a more nuanced treatment.

What happened to the *daytime* population of New Haven over the past 30 years? (What would have happened to it without the expansion of parking space?) What happened to total population, employment and income of the entire area within commuting radius of the New Haven-Hamden-West Haven urban agglomeration? What should have been done with vacant lots downtown, and who should have done it?

By: upstater

upstater — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:39:58 +0000

I once read that San Diego has something like 70% of its area paved with asphalt or concrete, the vast majority of which is dedicated to the automobile.

I believe the existence of freeways and parking and lack of ATTRACTIVE public transit is quite intentional. Regional planning commissions are usually packed with pro-development hacks that view land as a resource to be consumed, not conserved.

The are more quick bucks to be made by facilitating suburban and exurban development on raw land that trying to do the same in the inner cities.

Latent or soft-core racism is also big factor here, especially for the Cambridge versus Connecticut example.

By: neil21

neil21 — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:09:36 +0000

Nice of you to highlight this, but “of the day” in your headline rather suggests this is a new paper.

Published back in January I believe: http://trb.metapress.com/content/v3m386q 536331u12/

By: jomiku

jomiku — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:41:00 +0000

1. Cambridge was put under a court order that limited parking. That’s why the number plateaus. Clean air act. The result has been good for the city and the city has embraced it.

2. Correlation is not causation. Urban decline caused parking lots; empty buildings were torn down and nothing replaced them. Downtown New Haven lost most of its retail, including large department stores. Downtown Hartford is worse. One can argue the parking lots make things worse but it’s tough to draw a causal line because there was no interest in investing in these places at a scale which would have reduced the number of empty lots. While New Haven has come back somewhat, there was a tremendous amount of loss.

By: OneOfTheSheep

OneOfTheSheep — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:48:14 +0000

Growth occurs predictably with easiest access.

Build mass transit, growth occurs along the route outward from stops. Build freeways, and growth occurs along the route outward from on/offramps.

Parking lots are necessary, but to be attractive as a “piece of the puzzle of economic strength and growth” they must be easily accessible and inexpensive.

Access is the key to growth, presuming demand and reasonable cost. California has shown you CAN build freeways into the desert and, given sufficient water, the desert will bloom along it.