Auto-oriented, neutral, and transit-oriented parking policy
Editor's note: This article is a sidebar to the "Parking reform gathers speed, especially in the West" article.
Most municipalities have codes with minimum off-street parking requirements. Many of these are also interested in sustainability and transit-oriented development — but they don’t know how to achieve these goals through their parking policies, according to transportation planner Patrick Siegman of Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates in San Francisco, California.
The technique Siegman has used is to present three alternative approaches, he told New Urban News:
1. Auto-oriented planning: Minimum parking requirements are employed to make the city more auto-oriented than it would be if the matter was left up to the free market.
2. Neutral (a.k.a. laissez-faire) codes: Neither minimum nor maximum parking requirements are instituted.
3. Transit-oriented planning: No minimum parking requirements are used, but planners may use maximum parking requirements to help increase the market price of parking (reducing vehicle trips), and curb parking is carefully managed — using pricing and neighborhood parking benefit districts — to prevent curb parking shortages. Transit-oriented codes also frequently require the unbundling of parking costs from the cost of other goods and services, require the provision of free transit passes to building occupants, and include various other transportation demand management requirements.
We usually analyze how each approach will affect the community’s progress towards its own stated goals. Most cities list aspirations in their General Plan: more affordable housing, less pollution, less traffic congestion, and so on. It’s usually not hard to see that auto-oriented planning undermines progress toward those goals. As a result, quite a few of our clients have embraced plans that completely remove minimum parking requirements. It’s happening even in some pretty suburban places, like the City of Hayward, California. Even if a community doesn’t want to fully remove minimum parking requirements, laying out these alternatives always seems to make the discussion easier. Once clients understand how to run a city without minimum parking requirements, it’s easy for them to see how they could reduce their existing parking requirements by half.
A compromise that frequently works is to adopt a set of interim parking requirements that are much lower than the old ones and that will sunset in a few years, so that the city has time to set up its curb parking management system. This is the approach we wound up using in Ventura, California. This change coincided with a new system of parking meters and residential parking permits. Now that those are in place, it really is possible to remove minimum parking requirements without generating any spillover problems.
Siegman also has some clients in cities like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Washington, DC, who are “pretty steadily removing minimum parking requirements from their codes, and often replacing them with maximum parking requirements.”
He objects to many form-based codes that still have minimum parking requirements. The SmartCode, for example, requires 2 spaces per 1,000 square feet of office in the center and core zones of a city, and 3 per 1,000 square feet elsewhere. The SmartCode also includes a shared parking formula, reductions for transit-oriented development, and allows on-street parking to count towards the requirements — so it promotes the reduction of minimum parking requirements. The Neighborhood Conservation Code, a version of the SmartCode for infill sites, includes no minimum parking requirements.
But Siegman thinks the SmartCode could be rewritten to make it (1) more progressive and (2) politically astute, by including the three alternative approaches described above. “Once you put all three approaches in the recipe book, and clearly explain how each one works and what its consequences are, you wind up with a code that has far broader appeal and far greater applicability.”
