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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

Parking Reform News

December 14, 2020 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Most sports arenas are surrounded by acres of parking lots. Even in the NYC, the Yankees required thousands of parking spaces to be built along with their new stadium. The problem is, no one wanted to park in them, taxpayers have lost millions of dollars, and the empty garages are holding up the construction of a new soccer stadium.

This Op-Ed in the British Medical Journal makes the case that providing free parking to hospital workers is antithetical to the mission of health care providers.

A pair of notable twitter threads crossed our path this week. This one live tweets a presentation given by our Advisory Board member, Norman Garrick titled “Value Parking and the Land on Which it Stands.” And this thread by UC Davis professor Chris Elmendorf compares California and Oregon’s approaches to statewide parking regulations.

And hot off the presses today, Sightline’s Michael Andersen digs deeper into Oregon’s new statewide parking requirement rules.

What’s happening in various cities around the globe? Paris is on its way to halving on-street parking and wants to know what Parisians think is the best use of the reclaimed space. Arlington County, Virginia is joining a number of other US municipalities in pursuing performance based parking pricing. Olympia, Washington passed a zoning reform package which reduces some parking requirements, including those for new ADUs.

What would the impact on parking be if most of our inner-city travel shifted to on-demand mobility services and transit? This article about a study focused on Singapore provides some scenarios.

Filed Under: News

Parking Reform News

December 7, 2020 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: News

Parking Reform News

November 23, 2020 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: News

Parking Reform News

November 16, 2020 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: News

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