Finding the right parking approach

Plan title: Parking Lot Guidelines “Planners cannot significantly improve the design of cities without reforming local parking requirements to emphasize quality over quantity,” Vinit Mukhija and Donald Shoup declare in the Summer 2006 issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association. Mukhija and Shoup, urban planning faculty members at UCLA, write that “most local governments strictly regulate parking quantity but ignore its quality.” They say that if communities were to reduce or eliminate off-street parking requirements, opportunities for good urban design would grow. The authors cite these examples of cities that have taken a better approach: • Portland, Oregon, eliminated off-street parking requirements for sites located less than 500 feet from a street where mass transit service runs at intervals of no more than 20 minutes. • Carmel, California, has prohibited on-site parking its in central commercial land-use district. “This policy reduces the need for curb cuts in sidewalks and the interference with free pedestrian traffic flow,” they report. • “Cities like Palo Alto and Pasadena in California have improved urban design by offering developers the opportunity to pay a fee in lieu of providing all the parking spaces required by zoning. The cities then use the revenue to provide shared public parking spaces to replace those the developers would have provided … The in-lieu option makes it easier to restore historic buildings and rehabilitate historic areas,” among other benefits, Mukhija and Shoup say. • San Diego’s zoning ordinance mandates that in the central business district, “all enclosed ground level parking areas shall be shielded from adjoining public streets, with such parking areas being separated from the public sidewalk by habitable residential or non-residential space, or utility rooms.” Mukhija and Shoup’s article, “Quantity versus Quality in Off-Street Parking Requirements,” says planners can use five strategies to improve urban parking design: • Deregulate or limit the number of parking spaces. • Improve the parking’s location. • Improve the design of surface parking (see figure at right). • Improve the design of parking structures. • Improve the design of residential garages.