News

Let’s start out with a pair of excellent new resources on parking reform. Streetsmart has published a beta version of their website and it has a section on Parking Availability and Pricing. And Todd Litman has published a comprehensive post with advice on Responding to Criticisms of Road Tolls and Parking Fees.

Berkeley, CA City Council was scheduled to hear a parking reform measure last week, but it has been delayed until the December 15th meeting. As Patrick Siegman argues in this Op-Ed, the policy is long overdue.

Sacramento, CA was supposed to vote on their 2040 plan the same night, which would have eliminated parking requirements, but that was also delayed to January.

We have another great thread covering Dallas, TX Zoning Committee parking meetings from Nathaniel Barrett and the future looks very promising for some parking requirement reductions there.

Traverse City, MI is considering a plan to exempt smaller buildings from parking requirements. Similarly, Panama City, FL is moving forward on reduced commercial parking requirements.

Up north, several Canadian cities are implementing parking reforms and down under in Australia there’s a conversation happening about free parking in a post-COVID world. Also out of Australia comes an innovative proposal to let developers turn parking decks into public amenities in exchange for bonuses on nearby projects.

It’s not dynamic pricing, but Laguna Beach, CA is raising rates with the aim of achieving 85% occupancy at their meters.

This letter to the editor from a student at the University of Utah makes a convincing connection between excess parking and public health, it’s excellent. In Philadelphia, a parking reformer writes in to defend the city’s parking tax. And this post makes the argument that San Francisco should use parking revenue to close transit budget shortfalls.

On the lighter side of things, Don Shoup might be joking when he suggests Monopoly should remove Free Parking from the game, it’s certainly on brand. And officials have decided to close off most of a $4.5 million dollar garage in Butte, MT to stop local teens from using it for fun. The garage has been mostly empty since COVID struck.

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

Happy Thanksgiving (to those viewing from the USA)! We hope you’re staying in town and reading about parking reform safely from your own home.

StrongTowns has carried on a tradition of calling out excess commercial parking lots in their #BlackFridayParking annual event. This year they’re doing something a little different. Take a picture of your “favorite” parking crater and post it with #iWishThisParkingWas

If you missed last week’s news and didn’t sign up for SPUR’s seminar the True Cost of Residential Street Parking (featuring Don Shoup and others), you can view it here. It was a great session and well worth your time.

The latest issue of Transfers Magazine came out last week and features an article on a research paper investigating How Developers Respond To Parking Reform. You might also check out Commuter Benefits and Driving: Direct and Spillover Effects.

A long process to reform parking minimums in Berkeley, CA is coming to an end. There is a hearing on December 1st and, if you’re a resident, you might want to weigh in. Councilmember Lori Droste gives the details in this thread.

Parking Reform Network member Nathaniel Barrett has been live tweeting Dallas zoning committee parking meetings and the threads are epic and informative. His latest thread from last Thursday can be enjoyed here.

A partnership in Munich generated some headlines last week for pairing buzzwords AI and cryptocurrency with parking management. But don’t worry, you don’t really need fancy tech to manage parking and incentivize commuters to drive less.

StrongTowns continues it’s robust coverage of Edmonton’s recent parking reforms with a 90 minute webinar on How to Get Rid of Parking Minimums.

Another Canadian victory, this time in Vancouver, BC, where City Council approved a Climate Emergency Action Plan that calls for eliminating parking minimums and more on-street parking management.

Santa Barbara, CA figures that it has to spend money to make money and has approved a $700,000 expenditure to replace parking attendants at downtown lots with license plate reader (LPR) technology.

NYC, on the other hand, might be heading in a different direction with enforcement. Curbed covers a proposal to crowdsource parking enforcement by incentivizing New Yorkers to report parking violations by sharing the proceeds with the reporters.

That’s it for this week! If you have some news we missed, tweet it at us!

Parking Panel Webcast Tonight at 5PM PST hear an expert panel, featuring PRN Advisory Board member Donald Shoup, discuss the True Cost of Residential Street Parking. This is a free event, but you need to register before 4PM for the link.

More Parking Podcasts Transportation Lawyer Greg Shill has a podcast called Densely Speaking and this week’s episode will feature Devin Bunten to discuss her recent white paper “People or Parking?“

Chalking tires ruled legal again. You might remember earlier this year when a court ruled chalking tires to be an unconstitutional search? Looks like the ruling didn’t stand.

More cities reforming parking minimums. Wilmington, NC will be considering reducing parking requirements after a study showed the city had three times as much parking as park space.

In June, Edmonton, Alberta took the plunge and eliminated it’s parking requirements. Strongtowns posted a write-up about how that came about.

Parking over people. San Francisco doesn’t require residential parking, but there’s still plenty of opportunities for cars to displace people. Here’s a story about a small basement apartment that was removed because the city made the property owner choose between the apartment or a curb cut.

Do You Suck At Parking? Find out via this new parking related video game which features some pretty extreme parking maneuvers!

The first installment of Parking News on this site was March 3rd, 2020 and how the world has changed in a month. Here’s a roundup of links to stories about parking and transportation as they relate to the current crisis and where we go from here.

Some cities, like Spokane, WA, Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, WA, and Brisbane, AUS have stopped charging for on-street parking entirely. Other cities, including: Berkeley, CA, Salt Lake City, UT, Portland, OR, San Diego, CA, and Boulder, CO are keeping the meters on, but reducing enforcement, time stays, and generally calling for leniency and understanding during these times.

At my Parking Minute blog, I argue that cities should lower parking rates, but only as part of a performance pricing strategy that will bring them up as we return to a new normalcy.

Traditional transportation demand management is difficult to justify right now, especially for healthcare workers and some healthcare systems are looking to reduce rates and find more parking supply for their employees.

Hospital parking, however, might be harder to find in general if parking garages are turned into emergency wards for COVID-19 patients.

In Las Vegas, a city with what seems like a million shuttered hotel rooms, houseless people are sleeping in a surface lot because the shelter was too crowded for social distancing.

The parking industry is heading into rough waters. Demand is down, even if monthly contracts might be still providing revenue, and some parking operations have laid off staff.

No one knows how this will all shake out. Will we see permanent shifts in commuting habits? It’s unlikely we’ll end up exactly back where we started, Walker Consultants has some ideas for how cities can manage parking during COVID-19 and our own blog here at the Parking Reform Network features some thoughts about what parking policy looks like post-coronavirus.

All these links came out of our full link library (which is available to members of the Parking Reform Network). You can preview some of our database here, or just go ahead and join us already!