Parking Reform Network

Equity

Portland equitable mobility plan: Tax parking lots, require equal commute benefits

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  • The Pricing Options for Equitable Mobility (POEM) Task Force recommended a citywide flexible commuter benefit program (parking cash-out), a tax on privately-owned off street parking, and accelerated implementation and expansion of performance-based curb pricing.
  • Fees for urban delivery and transportation network carrier/for-hire (TNC) services recommended to reduce congestion and pollution.
  • The Task Force also recommended a “unified financial assistance system,” potentially in the form of cash payments, to mitigate impacts of pricing strategies on low income households.

After meeting for eighteen months, Portland, Oregon’s Pricing Options for Equitable Mobility (POEM) Task Force issued it’s final recommendations which include: flexible commuter benefits (parking cash-out), increased on-street parking metering and permitting, development of a fee on privately-owned off-street parking lots, and accelerated implementation of the city’s existing performance-based meter pricing policy. The proposal also recommends the city develop a “unified financial assistance system for households living on low incomes that could be applied across pricing programs and transportation services to reduce burdens on these households and administrative complexity.”

The Task Force was asked to consider “if and how new pricing strategies could potentially be used more intentionally to improve mobility, address the climate crisis and advance equity for people historically underserved by the transportation system in Portland, including, but not limited to, low-income Portlanders and communities of color.” The group heard from subject matter experts regarding parking pricing, tolling, congestion pricing, cordons, and many other traffic demand strategies and discussed and debated the merits of each strategy given Portland’s geographic and political particulars and while centering equitable outcomes and transportation justice.

It will take several years to implement the Task Force’s recommendations, assuming they are accepted by Portland’s City Council, but there are many innovative solutions proposed which should be explored in other cities.

A Parking Based Alternative to Congestion Pricing and Cordons

The POEM Task Force did consider road usage charges, highway tolling, and London-style cordons, but Oregon’s Constitution mandates that road, gas, and vehicle registration revenues be used “exclusively for the construction, reconstruction, improvement, repair, maintenance, operation and use of public highways, roads, streets and roadside rest areas in this state.” Furthermore, the city lacks sufficient jurisdiction to toll the highways that run through the city and the bridges that cross the Willamette River. Because of this, the Task Force felt that tolling and cordons would be less likely to manage congestion while advancing the goal of equitable mobility for all Portlanders. Instead, if implemented, the recommendations would seek a similar effect as a cordon by using fees on parking, urban delivery, and TNCs.

  • By accelerating performance-based parking for the central city, drivers would pay the market rate for on-street and publicly-owned off-street parking.
  • A tax on privately-owned parking lots could be implemented as a peak-hour entry/exit surcharge for commuters parking all-day in central city lots and garages.
  • Congestion-based surcharges for urban deliveries and TNCs would discourage peak-hour deliveries and encourage passengers to use other modes, such as transit or e-bike share to enter or exit the central city.
Private garages, like this one in Downtown PDX, would be subject to some form of tax or fees under the recommendations.

Such a system would be more porous than a cordon, but designed properly, could be quite effective with less technological investment and fewer jurisdictional and privacy concerns. In addition, the revenues from parking and TNC/delivery fees are not restricted by the Oregon Constitution and could be spent on transit subsidies and other multi-modal improvements and incentives.

Level The Playing Field For Commuters

The first near-term recommendation from the POEM Task Force isn’t actually a pricing strategy nor a new idea, in fact it’s one of the first ideas Donald Shoup proposed for parking reform: parking cash-out.

A “flexible commuter benefits program” (h/t Cheryl Cort and the Coalition for Smarter Growth) would require employers who pay for or subsidize parking for their commuting employees to provide an equivalent taxable cash benefit to employees who do not drive and park. Many employers provide a transit pass to employees who don’t drive to work, but the cost of a monthly transit pass in Portland is less than 1/2 the cost of a monthly parking space in Downtown and people who commute by bike or on foot may prefer a cash benefit to a transit pass they don’t use often.

Cities should seize upon the opportunity provided by the disruption of the last year to encourage mode shifts for commuters as people return to the office. A citywide (or regional) flexible commuter benefit program is a great way to do that.

Rethinking Exemptions and Discounts

Higher parking meter rates, delivery fees, and surcharges will have a bigger impact on lower income households even though they are likely to incur fewer charges due to lower overall consumption. One of the tougher challenges faced by any government looking to use pricing to reduce single occupancy trips and congestion is figuring out how to provide protective relief for low income households without making the programs ineffective. Low income drivers, and particularly low income drivers who are BIPOC face institutional hurdles to accessing rebate and discount programs, which often require providing the same documentation to multiple agencies or taking precious time to go to an office or fill out forms. On top of that, the individual needs to know that the program exists in the first place.

The POEM Task Force grappled with this issue at nearly every meeting and came up with some innovative solutions that would provide more flexible and equitable transportation subsidies for low income households and reduce bureaucratic and administrative overhead and complexity.

Foremost, the Task Force urged the city to develop “one set of income-based policy standards” for rebate and exemption programs, to apply to current and future programs. Portland is already piggybacking other programs like the “Golden Transportation Wallet” onto the low income transit pass verification of TriMet, the regional transit agency.

But exemptions and discounts for parking permits and tolls only benefit low income households which own and operate cars. The recommendation acknowledges this by suggesting that “cash rebates or payments” are preferred as they allow individuals to make their own choices about transportation. Furthermore, the Task Force recommends the city explore “a unified financial assistance system for households living on low incomes.” Such a system could operate like a universal basic income (UBI), providing a cash subsidy or perhaps a credit for city services that could be used to pay parking fees, transit, water bills, etc.

A program (statewide or regional would be best) to provide a cash rebate or dividend from climate related tolls, taxes, and fees would be a simple, equitable, redistributive, and effective way to mitigate the regressive impacts of economic strategies to reduce driving and GHG emissions. Such a program would deprive wealthy opponents to pricing of the ability to use low income households as a prop to defend their desire to maintain their own subsidies to drive and park cars cheaply.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well…

Opponents to paid parking and demand-based parking pricing often claim the city is gouging or just seeking revenue through pricing. As a result, many cities set prices too low to impact demand or to even meet the true costs of administering the pricing program. POEM’s report acknowledges that “pricing policy is only effective if it reduces traffic demand and/or raises enough revenue to fund effective demand management or multimodal improvements” and “[s]etting rates or surcharges too low to affect demand or fund improvements is inequitable.“

This is a critical point to make when advocating for paid parking, congestion pricing, or any other similar program. If your city is charging $2 per hour to park in the restaurant district and all the spaces are full, then the fee isn’t solving the problem and the city isn’t providing any value for the cost. If the market clearing price for parking in that area is $5 per hour, then increasing the price to $3-4 dollars IS gouging. The consumer will remain frustrated, the streets will remain congested, businesses will not have supportive turnover, but the city will collect more money just because it can.

A pricing program should deliver value to the community, either in the form of funding effective programs or actually providing a less congested road or curbside. No one wants to pay for parking, but an effective program will likely have much more support.

Now For The Hard Part

This recommendation is a very strong output from a large and diverse group of stakeholders. There were 18 voting members of the Task Force present at the final meeting on July 12th and all of the recommendations passed with at least 16 votes in favor. In the Fall, the recommendations will go to City Council where, hopefully, they will be accepted and adopted as city policy, with direction to the relevant bureaus to get busy developing implementation plans.

The recommendations are necessarily vague on program design. How effective and innovative the city’s flexible commuter benefits program, private parking tax, and low income mitigation policies end up will depend on the leadership of Portland’s elected officials and grassroots advocacy community. But other cities don’t need to wait to review this document and apply the concepts to their own climate action and transportation plans. Hopefully, Portland won’t be alone, or will even be beaten to the punch, in implementing such a comprehensive suite of transportation demand management.

Note: The author of this post was a member of the Pricing Options for Equitable Mobility Task Force.

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Fairness and Equity in Parking Reform- Part 3

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In previous posts, we talked about why adding parking doesn’t solve the “parking problem,” and why we need to use pricing to get turnover and create parking availability to actually solve the “parking problem.” One challenge commonly brought up when meters are proposed is the issue of fairness and equity.

“Won’t new meters hurt poor folks?” It makes sense to keep costs down as much as possible for the most low-income people, especially as they are being pushed out of resource-rich areas. The tricky part is that providing parking costs money; it is a subsidy whose benefits skew toward more wealthy people. And the more you drive, the more you benefit.

If we leave the current situation as is, that is a decision to continue today’s inequitable conditions. We put enormous public resources into roads and parking, even though many people do not or cannot drive. You must be wealthy enough to own a car in order to benefit from the vast amounts of free parking.

When it comes to our denser cities, the geometry of our roadways is limited. Our roads can move more people and work better by allocating road space to more efficient travel modes. We can’t all get around by car and still expect our cities to thrive. Yet, to the degree that our communities have been organized around the use of a private automobile, it has led to fewer opportunities for zero vehicle households, and having a car is often a requirement to escape poverty.

Prioritizing driving shifts the costs onto everyone, so that the poorest citizens are essentially subsidizing the wealthiest who are more likely to drive large SUVs and fuel-efficient or electric models that cause major damage to roads but contribute less to their maintenance with the gas tax. The inequities in transportation go back further, as I wrote in a piece on Medium:

The historical inequities of our transportation system go hand-in-hand with the historical inequities in housing. In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein meticulously catalogs the discriminatory housing policies at the local, state, and federal levels that restricted housing opportunities for African-Americans following their emancipation and whose proliferation spread like wildfire in the 1940s. Our discriminatory housing regulations [and White violence], often enforced by police, prevented Black people from living in desirable neighborhoods and restricted them to other neighborhoods — often places with more industry and pollution. There was more demand than supply and Black people ended up paying much more for rental housing than their White counterparts paid in mortgages for nicer homes. They ended up over-crowded and with little savings or investment to pass on to their children, while White folks were building their “nest egg.”

At the same time as the cost of buying a car was dropping significantly, White Americans were fleeing to the suburbs. Yet the jobs remained in the urban centers that White people were abandoning, and getting people to those jobs became a dilemma that needed major transportation dollars. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower delivered the Interstate Highway system, to enhance the ability of our nation’s militia to travel the country. This freeway system also enabled people to live further from urban centers and drive in. Given discriminatory housing practices, this new mobility benefit was essentially limited to White people–and often plowed right through Black neighborhoods, destroying their wealth.

So how do we improve equity for transportation? We focus on providing better access to opportunities and resources in disinvested areas and shift the costs of driving to drivers, rather than the population at large. This includes priced parking, or meters. Priced parking should not be a source of revenue, but a process to better manage access to high demand spaces. However, since certain neighborhoods in cities have experienced growth and pushed long-time residents out, we’re now seeing more people of color living in car-dependent suburban locations. So we must consider equity impacts of every policy enacted, and the fines and fees associated with driving. With the wealth extraction that has destroyed Black neighborhoods for the benefit of White neighborhoods, some form of reparations is needed.

If you work in or with communities that have been marginalized, be sure that you listen to community members who have been advocating on behalf of the community, validate their concerns, and empower them to have decision-making authority. This is often the hardest part within the constraints of many of our bureaucratic systems, but one that we need to work to change. As King, Smart, and Manville write in The Poverty of the Carless, in many places, a combination of better access to cars along with regulation of their use is important to address inequities.

Other policy ideas (many from my piece on Medium) to address equity include the following:

  • Unbundled parking. Buildings would not be required to provide parking, but would be required to “unbundle” parking so that only drivers pay for parking spaces. Parking would not be included as part of rent or sale prices.
  • Parking cashout. Employers would offer their employees the option of having subsidized parking, subsidized transit, or the cash equivalent of what it costs them to provide parking. This policy is called Parking Cash Out and has been implemented for certain industries in California, Rhode Island, and the City of Santa Monica. Washington, DC has also passed a parking cash out law.
  • Non-driving validation. Parking validation programs would also offer the equivalent cash benefits to people who arrive by transit, biking or walking so that those people receive the same discounts as driving customers. Transit operators could design a card reader that gives transit credit/ reimbursement and provide those readers to hospitals, malls, and other places where parking is the only transportation discount offered.
  • Manage residential permits. Residential permit parking areas would price permits by the length of the vehicle and by the demand for parking in the area. So if all the spaces are usually full, permit prices go up. If street parking is never congested, prices remain stable or free. This would prevent the problems like Danielle Steel’s 26 parking permits, or at least raise more city revenue. That revenue could go toward a rebate for car-free households or discounts for low-income residents.
  • Share street space. Residential streets would have space reserved for car share vehicles, delivery vehicles, pick-up and drop-off, or secure bike parking for residents who don’t own cars.
  • Strategic revenue investment. High-demand areas with expensive parking would retain parking revenue locally and use it to provide locally-appropriate amenities. These amenities could include free public WiFi, increased transit service, improved walking and biking infrastructure, public art and lighting, and affordable housing subsidies so that people can continue to live in the neighborhood while it increases in popularity.
  • VMT charges. Vehicles would pay to use roads by the mile (a VMT tax), based on their weight (which impacts how much damage they may cause to roads). These fees also would extend to trucks and delivery vehicles.
  • Refunds and credits. Cities could provide a tax refund to carless households and/or credits for e-bikes.
  • Redirect transportation investments. Our transportation investments at the regional and state level would dedicate more money to areas that have more people and higher needs. This would mean fewer suburban highway projects and more urban transit, regular roadway maintenance, and bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure – and possibly more highway removal.
  • Equitable fines and fees. Ticket fines would be proportional to a person’s income and the seriousness of the crime, as is done in Finland. This would ensure that tickets are a deterrent to bad behavior for all, without causing financial ruin for low-income drivers.
  • Safety before revenue. Fines, fees, and fares would be examined through an equity lens to ensure that there is incentive to prevent people from breaking the law without leading to personal bankruptcy.

Our current inequitable transportation system favors those that are wealthy enough to own and maintain cars, at the expense of those who do not own cars or cannot drive. Lack of access to a vehicle in a car-dependent society exacerbates inequities.

Have you heard of cities implementing more equitable parking policies? What other approaches would improve equity?

Parking Requirements Gave Me a Haircut

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Neighborhood-friendly developments are often made infeasible due to overly high parking requirements.

By Neil Heller with Cary Westerbeck

Neil is an urban planner at Neighborhood Workshop in Portland, Oregon and faculty of the Incremental Development Alliance. Currently sporting an 80-day shelter-in-place mullet.

Cary is an architect and small-scale developer at Westerbeck Architecture in Bothell, Washington currently taking development haircuts.

Image via Google Maps: Different development types in one image, each with different financial metrics but the same off-street parking requirements. Cary’s 4-unit small scale project at left. A large scale 80-unit project in background.

A Parking Conversation With Cary Westerbeck

I caught up with Inc Dev alum and fellow founding member of the Parking Reform Network, Cary Westerbeck, who recently completed a mixed-use 4-plex in Downtown Bothell, WA.

Having such similar interests with him, it’s fun to talk shop and learn from his lived experience.

Cary:

Small Developers are needed in cities. We play a critical role. We are the ones who can utilize a small lot, an infill lot, a weird shaped lot, and all the lots that the large developers could never build on feasibly. We can build neighborhood-friendly sized apartments and businesses on these small sites. However, the minute we must provide required, on-site minimum parking for these sites they do not pencil out, they become physically and financially infeasible.

For example, I have a 2,500 square foot lot on which I just completed a mixed-use 4-plex. The entitlements allow me to build up to five stories in this downtown zone. I could have feasibly built 14-15 dwellings and a small retail space on this site had I not been required to use most of the site for parking. As a result of the onerous parking requirements, we squeezed in the five required parking spots for the four units.

We were prevented from using the site’s “highest and best use” in both height and number of units. As I told the Development Director at my city, I could have provided an additional 12 desperately needed small apartments at my site if minimum parking requirements had not held me back. Because I could have put 16 units on the site rather than 4, the price of the land per unit would be spread over 16 units, not just four.

I have a barber on the ground floor of my building, but it was the mandated parking minimums that forced me to take a 75% haircut!

Why would a city allow development entitlements that are functionally unobtainable?

Today, “form follows parking” for small developers. Feasibility for a project must start with required on-site parking minimums, then we can see how much site is left over for productive uses. It’s crazy, but true. As an architect and small developer, the first thing we do after reviewing zoning codes is figure out how many cars we’ll have to park for our intended building’s uses and how they will fit. Invariably – always – we can’t build nearly as much productive building due to the constraints of required parking. It’s the tail that wags the dog. It seems like something is broken when building design starts with cars, rather than people, but indeed it does.

Let’s pause for a moment.

For context, Bothell is in a downtown construction boom. Giving the place credit, it is good to see so much downtown investment and willingness to accept higher densities for being an outer suburb. Not to mention, the downtown zoning standards look quite permissible.

Interestingly, there are a variety of parcel sizes in downtown Bothell that correspond to the sizes of the buildings being developed. Despite all this variety, one thing remains constant — the size of parking stalls does not adjust based on the size of the lot.

Cary built in the Downtown Neighborhood Zone (DN) so let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a small developer and explore how this plays out.

  • The median lot size found in the DN zone is 7,500 square feet (see chart below).
  • A single 9×18 foot parking stall is 234 square feet when including the drive aisle.
  • This means that the median lot size in this zone can mathematically fit 32 surface parking spaces, but we want to house people, not just cars. Plus, in comparison to parking, housing is better for the municipal tax base and it is the humans who support the local businesses that in turn strengthen the local economy.

Also, the maximum height allowed in this DN zone is 5-stories. This means that the median lot size has the development potential for (32) 1,000 sf units. Great, 32 new homes! But let’s say we want a portion of our ground floor as commercial space. This results in three less units but, hey, local business easily accessible by residents!

Chart: DN zone parcel size analysis. The rules in a city should respond to the realities on the ground

But what about the parking?

  • Each of our prospective units are 1,000 square feet (2-bedrooms).
  • Each residential unit requires 1.5 spaces per unit (234 square feet each, remember).
  • Our commercial unit requires 2.5 per 1,000 square feet. (234 square feet each, remember).

So, let’s add this up:

29 residential units x 1.5 (43.5 subtotal)
+ 9 for our commercial space
= 53 parking spaces totaling 12,285 square feet.

But wait, we only have 7,500 square feet of lot area, so what gives?

It is often assumed that zoning is about buildings. It is not. Zoning assures neighbors that parking, setbacks, and landscaping requirements will be met and then whatever is left over is where a developer can build a building.

The starry-eyed planner might suggest putting all of our required parking underground so that we get all of our units and have good urban form, but, with a price tag of $1.5M this option forces rents to be an additional $500 more dollars per month, potentially out of reach for the local market. Even with the State of Washington’s progressive minimum wage of $13.50/hour, that’s an extra 37 hours of work.

The larger-scale developments may be able to absorb the additional cost of underground parking due to the larger number of units to share in that cost. So, while the total cost of underground parking will be more in comparison, the net cost to the renter will likely be less, therefore maintaining market feasibility. Smaller-scale projects are much more sensitive to price shocks due to the limited number of units to absorb additional development costs.

The thrifty developer might want to reduce the building size and surface park everything since that’s the least expensive, but then more than 60% of the lot is paved over, also resulting in significantly less housing in the downtown area and municipal revenue for the city.

The purpose of this example was to run through the onerous and expensive outcomes that mandated parking requirements create, particularly for the small, local developer who is likely to be working on one of the 72% of lots that are below 20,000 square feet within this downtown zone.

A more sane and rational approach is to not require but allow parking in order to provide flexibility to a development project so that a workable solution can be found, allowing developers to obtain more of the parcel’s legal development entitlements, otherwise known as ‘highest and best use’. Recent studies have shown that most times, developers do build parking and averages around 0.5 spaces per unit. They do this because there is still market demand for parking spaces. This could change in the near future so having the flexibility to determine what is appropriate for the site and for the intended end-user is key to a reasonable and feasible development. The final example we can call, “the reasonable and feasible” is only made possible by applying this 0.5 spaces per unit amount. This does not mean that 0.5 is the magic number, just that having the flexibility to suit our needs creates an option that works for everyone.

Additionally, one option to make sure that those who do not want parking are not subsidizing their neighbor is to decouple any provided parking from the rents just like a building might for extra storage or laundry facilities. Just because coffee is on the ground floor of the building does not mean that everyone’s rent should be higher in order to provide free coffee to the coffee drinkers.

In closing, I felt like Cary cast a vision that is likely to resonate with what most of us want out of our downtowns and neighborhood centers. Does your city have reasonable and feasible parking policies? I’d love to hear of good examples.

Cary:

With less of each site devoted to the automobile, more of each site can be focused on humans and their needs. This will allow more homes and businesses to be accommodated within the same amount of space, increasing the feasibility of potential developments, and potentially lowering the price point of each home while supporting our increasingly important local economies.

Cary’s completed fourplex with barbershop on the ground floor.