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News

Parking Reform News

January 18, 2021 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Map with colored pins for locations mentioned in the article.  Chicago is doing well!
The good, the bad, and the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Made with MapCustomizer

A recent city council meeting in Hartford, CT concerning increasing the city’s car parking tax features an illuminating exchange between a city councilor and a car parking operator as well as top-notch testimony by Parking Reform Network advisor, Norman W. Garrick. Joe Cortright at City Observatory makes a strong case that Hartford residents are already bearing an unfair burden to support parking lots and it’s past time for them to pay their own way. The issue will come back to Hartford City Council next week.

This week’s big parking reform news was South Bend, Indiana’s city-wide elimination of minimum parking car requirements. Across the Atlantic, new homes without car parking in Christchurch, England will also be allowed.

Here’s a comprehensive post about the True Cost of Car Ownership. Streetsblog’s Ben Guttman says NYC’s Next Mayor Must End [The] Addiction to ‘Free’ Parking. A similar opinion is shared by a group called People Protected in San Francisco. But not everyone thinks charging for car parking is fair, particularly not Britain’s NHS workers during the pandemic.

Des Moines, IA is bailing out a developer’s “substantially complete” parking garage. Prince George, BC is embroiled in controversy over a parking garage which is over budget. A Minneapolis, MN bus rapid transit project’s price tag is going up by $70 million, to build more parking. One might come to the conclusion that new car parking is too expensive and risky.

Philadelphia, PA is the site of the TV show “Parking Wars,” perhaps because the city’s parking authority collects twice as much revenue in parking tickets than in meter fares, as pointed out in this very interesting post. In Trenton, NJ, the city’s parking authority is suing the city for trying to remove commissioners for corruption.

Bozeman, MT is hoping to move forward on more downtown parking management. Residents of Fargo, ND are worried that there’s not enough student car parking at the high school. The city of Natick, MA has renegotiated a parking lot lease that has lost money in recent years. And the cost to park cars at Muskegon, MI beaches is going up!

A 480 foot tall residential tower, with no new car parking, inches closer to reality in downtown Los Angeles and in the city’s port town of San Pedro, 48 affordable homes are planned with no on-site car parking.

A NYC proposal to pay residents to report parking violations is meeting some resistance on concerns it might cause fights among New Yorkers.

Finally, a tale of two cities bike parking efforts. Chicago, IL has been adding hundreds of new bike parking racks in response to more Chicagoans biking during the pandemic. New York City, on the other hand, has failed to meet its own goals for adding secure bike parking facilities.

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Filed Under: News

Parking Reform News

January 11, 2021 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

There was so much happening this week in political news that it was hard to focus on anything else. We published a list of 10 Podcasts for Parking Reformers the day before the attempted coup. If you’re looking for interviews and policy talk about parking, check it out.

Sightline Institute looked into The Hidden Cost of “Over-Parking” Our Cities, and this opinion piece at Greater Greater Washington concludes that Free parking seems like a great deal, until it isn’t. Another opinion article from Smart Cities Dive warns for this micromobility boom to last, we need to address parking.

A typically comprehensive post from our Advisory Board member Todd Litman will arm you with the arguments, facts, and references to convince anyone that we should pursue a Housing First; Cars Last policy.

Take a break and watch this entertaining philosophical musing on parking and then we’ll get to what’s happening in regional parking policies and news.

A neighborhood in Bend, Oregon is piloting a neighborhood permit program and parking benefit district and some formerly “free” surface parking lots in West Seattle Junction, Washington will begin charging for car parking.

Madison, Wisconsin recently passed rules requiring electric vehicle charging stations in new parking lots, but VW thinks perhaps there’s a better way to add EV infrastructure: autonomous parking lot robots that charge your car while you’re shopping.

Minneapolis, Minnesota will pilot an innovative and promising program to bundle transit passes with monthly car parking permits. The idea is that commuters might take transit to work or use it for other non-commute trips if they’ve already paid for the fare. Also in Minneapolis, a parking lot associated with the late musician Prince has been sold and is likely to be redeveloped.

Expect to hear more about Hartford, Connecticut in coming weeks and their city council considers expanding a parking lot fee to fund transit. Parking lot operators are opposed to the expansion and the Mayor is feeling the heat, the council will vote on January 25th.

Tel Aviv, Israel is planning to repurpose thousands of on-street car parking stalls at the same time as they are reducing minimum parking requirements.

There’s a bill winding its way through the Utah legislative process which would legalize accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and prohibit car parking requirements for them. This follows a trend of states taking action to increase housing supply by limiting local car parking mandates.

Have you been considering investing in parking lots? This Forbes article will provide you with A Primer On The Unique Niche Of Parking Lot Investments.

And finally, Alcosan, the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, is working on complying with a $2 Billion consent decree with the EPA to clean up Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s waterways by building a 5-story 450+ stall parking garage. Alcosan says the garage, which will add almost 300 stalls to the wastewater treatment plant’s supply, is needed to replace stalls lost with a new lab is built and to plan for future expansions. Alcosan also claims there’s not enough space in the garage for 50 bicycles.

You can support a parking reform movement. Join the network or donate today.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: ADUs, Alcosan, Allegheny, Bend, Electric vehicles, EPA, Hartford, Madison, micromobility, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Tel Aviv, Utah, VW

Parking Reform News

January 4, 2021 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Happy New Year! The Parking Reform Network got a flurry of end-of-year new members! We’re now pretty close to 150! Join the Parking Reform Network to support our work (including these posts).

We added a few podcasts to our link library and we’ll be adding and tagging more parking-related posts there soon. Here’s an interview from September with Don Shoup on ActiveTowns podcast. It covers the basics of parking reform and gives some hints about what he’s working on next. Follow that up with another interview with Shoup you might have missed a few months back on The Parking Podcast.

West Hollywood
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

West Hollywood, California is moving their paper-based guest permit system for residential neighborhoods online. Residents will now be able to pay online and register the license plate of their guests, rather than buying one-time permits from the Sheriff’s Office. This is a good idea and perhaps will open the door for other innovations, like charging AirBnB guests market rates for overnight parking in neighborhoods.

One NYC suburb is hoping to close it’s COVID-19 related budget gap by raising the price of commuter parking permits. Sales were down significantly this year and next year the price will go up from $400 to $700 annually at one station. It’s a bit backwards to charge higher prices when the demand goes down. Municipalities facing a shortfall now should quickly adopt performance-based pricing for all their assets. They should be ready to backfill budgets when demand returns post-pandemic.

Finally, a blurb in this NextCity post covers a textbook published by ORO Editions that came out this year, Increments of Neighborhood. [This is an affiliate link to bookshop.org, a B-Corp. If you buy the book through our link, we get a kickback.] It’s a guidebook for building walkable communities which apparently has quite a bit of parking content. Have you read it? Let us know what you thought in the comments or on Slack.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: budget, Increments of Neighborhood, NextCity, NYC, Patch, permits, Shoup, West Hollywood

Parking Reform News

December 28, 2020 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Honolulu Photo by Keith Champaco on Unsplash

Welcome to another week of Parking Reform News. We published a post last week A Parking Reform Bookshelf which contains a list of all the parking related books we could think of. The list has been updated with suggestions from readers a few times already.

This interview with Donald Shoup may be a few months old, but it’s a good one.

Were you looking for a five minute video covering the real cost of Miami’s parking requirements? How about one with a chill soundtrack to go with it? Your dreams have come true.

Municipal parking garages can be a drain on the city budget. Glen Cove, New Jersey is questioning the value provided by free parking at a 500 stall public garage. Officials in Oswego Park, Illinois are worried that the garage they are building might end up costing more than they expected.

Good news from the Aloha State, Honolulu’s mayor signed a bill which reduces or eliminates parking requirements in the city, requires unbundling, and more.

Two tidbits from the Washington, DC area: Fairfax County is considering redeveloping some of its surface parking lots with affordable housing and this article about Arlington County’s performance pricing pilot is notable for its focus on equity concerns.

There is a lot of innovation, and opportunity, in how we manage our curb space for pickup and drop off. This opinion piece argues that cities can recover lost revenues and make streets work better by modernizing the curb.

And finally, this New York Times article features New Yorkers who’ve got parking spaces, either bundled in their leases, or acquired on the open market. It’s a fun read and an interesting look into the culture of parking in NYC.

Filed Under: News

Parking Reform News

December 21, 2020 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

We’ll start off this week with a viral thread about parking minimums from Parking Reform Network member Luke Klipp, there’s a lot of great discussion, so we encourage you to click through into the replies.

Last week featured a story about Oregon’s statewide parking minimum rules, here’s a supplemental thread from the author (and PRN member) Michael Andersen.

SPUR follows up their “True Cost of Residential Parking” webinar with a deep dive into the legality of charging market rates for residential parking in California, and what California cities could do with the revenue.

“American’s like free parking. They don’t realize it doesn’t exist.” is an exemplary opinion piece, but perhaps change is coming to NYC where most candidates for city council, responding to a StreetsBlog survey, signaled they’d be open to raising prices.

Todd Litman has put together another excellent article breaking down the unequal burden of automobile dependency. Parking tickets and fees are part of that regressive burden and, in some places, can lead to dangerous interactions with police. Burlington, Vermont is taking a step to prevent that by moving parking enforcement out of the purview of law enforcement. St. Louis is also taking steps to reduce the impact of parking tickets by offering a Parking, Towing Assistance program. But not all cites are moving towards greater leniency, Naples, Florida voted to give folks just 10 days to pay a ticket before the price goes up.

A Denver study finds that there’s too much expensive parking being built near transit-oriented development. It’s not just an issue in Denver, there are excess surface lots all over, but surface lots can be repurposed into logistics hubs, food cart pods, and other more productive uses. Another approach is to make it less appealing to run parking lots as a business, Hartford, Connecticut is planning to increase an existing surface lot tax and eventually expand it to garages.

COVID-19 continues to impact city budgets and parking revenue is way down. Portland, Oregon’s parking revenues are down more than 55% and the city is threatening to cut transit benefits, bike share, and safe routes to school. Aspen, Colorado has seen a big drop in parking demand and revenue, which funds bus service, and the city is delaying expansions in residential parking management until demand picks back up. But not all cities are seeing reductions in demand due to the pandemic, Sag Harbor, New York is experiencing an influx in new residents and dealing with their accompanied cars.

Greensboro, North Carolina and Fayetteville, Arkansas are moving forward with plans for new publicly-funded parking garages in their city centers.

We’ll finish up with a few links from across the Atlantic Ocean. Germany has some great examples of model neighborhoods with reduced car-dependency, but it’s only the beginning of what’s needed. Stadium parking in Glasgow could be turned into housing. And here’s an industry report from the British Parking Association on the Public Perceptions of Parking.


We hope you’ve enjoyed this post. Support this work by becoming a member of the Parking Reform Network. Members have access to our complete link library with over 500 articles, posts, and papers tagged by city, parking reform, and more.

Filed Under: News

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