News

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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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.

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.

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