All that wasted space

There have been some really good posts recently on Grist about parking requirements and their pernicious effects on the urban environment. We covered how they create really really ugly building typologies a few weeks back while the most recent post examines the level of wasted space that parking minimums create – in other words the amount of parking they force to be provided that probably wouldn’t be provided otherwise.

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.

For more than half a century, cities have mandated oversized quotas of on-site parking at stores, offices, houses, apartments, and condominiums, and all other types of new buildings — even bars. The result has been millions of parking stalls that stand empty even at their hour of peak demand. No doubt about it: We have legislated the waste of land.

Manukau City is a classic local example of this:Recent detailed surveying has found that a huge portion of this mandated parking is actually unused – even at times you’d normally consider close to ‘peak’ demand. For example, residential buildings/dwellings at night:

In King County, Wash., for example, the Right Size Parking (RSP) project [PDF] visited more than 200 buildings and found one parked car per occupied dwelling, on average. It also found an extra 0.4 empty stalls per occupied housing unit: almost one-third of parking was idle.

In British Columbia, MetroVancouver surveyed 80 buildings [PDF] and reported one parked car and 0.4 empty spaces per occupied unit, on average. In Portland, Ore., a survey of 15 multifamily buildings tallied an average of 1.1 parked cars per dwelling, plus 0.4 empty slots [pg. 13 of PDF]. Everywhere, then, spaces exceeded cars by roughly a third.

These figures are averages, and they conceal other patterns. In suburban zones, the oversupply was larger, although it remained approximately proportional. In King County, suburban buildings had 1.2 parked vehicles per unit, plus 0.6 vacant stalls. Buildings in downtown Seattle, meanwhile, had just 0.6 cars and another 0.2 empty spots per dwelling.

The reasons behind why there’s so much excess parking are then explored:

Careful studies in Los Angeles and New York that disaggregated parking decisions down to the individual parcel level found that developers tend to build exactly as much parking as local codes require, as Shoup documents in The High Cost of Free Parking.

Developers would build less, on average, were it not for parking requirements, but that does not mean they would build none at all. Local laws do not mandate dishwashers, but most builders install them, because customers want them. Most customers want parking, too, so builders install it. Lowering or striking parking requirements lets builders judge for themselves how much vehicle storage to provide.

I like the dishwasher analogy. It highlights that removing minimum parking requirements doesn’t stop the provision of parking, but means that in situations where people might want to provide fewer spaces, they’ll be able to. Doing some more analysis highlights that the requirements force a fairly significant amount of parking oversupply:

Northwestern evidence aligns well with the California and New York studies. The RSP analysis did not simply count spaces, it also constructed a detailed model for predicting actual parking usage based on buildings’ locations and characteristics. After the model proved robust in its predictive powers, RSP analysts used it to estimate how much parking would likely be used on every building lot in King County where zoning allows multifamily buildings. They concluded that at 45 percent of such lots, the number of spaces required under local law exceeds the number likely to be used — that is, the law would force-feed parking, causing builders to install more than warranted.

When the analysts removed from the calculation all parcels in the city of Seattle, which recently wrote sweeping exemptions into its multifamily code, the figure rose to 82 percent: Suburban cities almost all require more parking than will find takers. In fact, outside of Seattle, localities’ parking quotas exceed usage by an average of 0.4 spaces per dwelling — approximately the amount by which parking supply actually exceeds current parking usage.

But “so what”, you might say. Who cares if we force more parking than is usually required – at least that’s erring on the safe side of things right? The problem is that all those extra parking spaces are actually using up a lot of land – land that could otherwise be used for something more productive.

…a fraction of a spot per apartment adds up to vast acreage. British Columbia and the Northwest states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington have 2 million apartments, condominiums, and other dwellings in multifamily buildings, according to data from B.C. Stats and the U.S. Census Bureau. For each of these dwellings, if the region has an extra 0.4 parking spaces, that’s 800,000 empties. Each space likely occupies at least 325 square feet of pavement, including access and maneuvering room. All told, that’s 260 million square feet of superfluous parking: more than nine square miles of vacancy that, unlike mall lots, isn’t even useful for driver’s ed. It is, with apologies to T.S. Eliot, the waste land.

Remember: that’s just the extra parking spots — the ones idle around 2 a.m. — and it’s only the excess parking at apartment and condo buildings. It ignores the far-more numerous ones at single-family homes, on the street, at offices, factories, churches, schools, park-and-ride lots — and the malls where my kids have been practicing.

With that in mind, obviously it’s fantastic that the Unitary Plan is proposing to get rid of parking requirements in centres and the Terraced Housing and Apartment Buildings zone, but overall those zones actually only cover a fairly small portion of Auckland – particularly only a small part of the residential area. Do we really want to force everywhere else to provide two spaces per unit?

That’s a lot of wasted space.

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