News

Berkeley, CA is poised to approve a major reform of its car parking requirements on Tuesday 1/26/2021. We spoke to Lori Droste – Berkeley City Councilor to find out how and why she’s worked for five years to get to this point. You can watch the hearing live on Zoom at 4pm PST here.

We’ve also been watching the proposal in Hartford, CT to increase parking lot fees. That could be decided today starting at 4pm EST (you can watch here). Parking Today’s John Van Horn thinks the proposal, and our advocacy for similar policy, is terribly misguided.

Sacramento, CA is another city moving to eliminate parking requirements. Los Angeles’ Metro Council is considering required unbundling of car parking and car parking maximums. Honolulu, HI recently passed parking reforms. Atlanta, GA is working on a zoning reform package that could eliminate car parking minimums. And Pittsburgh, PA Mayor Bill Peduto wants to ban curb cuts for new single-unit attached homes. As Michael Andersen points out in this Sightline post, Zoning Reforms Are Popping Up Everywhere.

Nidhi Adlakha’s argues that “free parking is not your right,” and provides some interesting insight into parking reforms happening in Indian cities. Joanna Gubman is the latest San Franciscan to make the case to “stop subsidizing car ownership.” And this interview with the authors of the book Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia covers some interesting ground regarding excess parking and what we can do with it.

Cities continue to build or purchase more parking. Easton, PA is planning to build a 505 stall garage for $12-14 million. Des Moines, IA will pay $40.5-47 million to bail out a floundering car parking garage project. And Chicago suburb, Park Ridge, IL is considering a new parking lot, but they’re claiming it will be “green” due to permeable pavement. Car parking is only getting more expensive, as evidenced by this single space which sold for $123,000 in Toronto, Canada!

If cities are going to build more parking garages, they should at least be convertible to other uses. Watry Design has an interesting post about how garages can be designed for adaptability (but it does add a lot to the construction cost).

Prospects for recouping construction costs for car parks don’t look great, either. Cities from New Haven, CT to Pasadena, CA are seeing deep declines in parking revenue, but authorities are hopeful for a post-COVID recovery.

Revenue from parking tickets has taken a hit due to the pandemic as well. Los Angeles, CA issued almost 700K fewer citations in 2020 than in an average year and La Crosse, WI issued ~$265,000 less in fines in 2020. Of course, issuing tickets isn’t the same as collecting the fines, the state of Hawaii has failed to collect on 20% of tickets over the last five years.

Parking reform is a marathon, not a sprint. Bloomington, IN has been studying options for downtown car parking for a year, but officials want another round of input before making a decision. Palm Beach, FL is considering paid car parking in three business districts. Their third focus group meeting is scheduled for Tuesday before the city can act. Lafayette, LA has raised meter rates and increased hours of enforcement for the first time in 8 years. Hong Kong is updating it’s parking management system with thousands of new pay stations, but the price of car parking remains at 1994 levels and critics say the plan adds 4,000 new parking stalls to the congested city.

Chelmsford, England will start charging for cars at the historic Hylands park, but they also have plans to freeze car park fees. Parking a car at the airport in Manhattan, Kansas will cost $2.50 a day starting in February. It seems the skiing and winter recreation areas in the Pacific Northwest could use better parking management.

Maybe the solution is for citizens to take matters in their own hands and install their own parking meters, like this couple did in Yorkeys Knob, Far North Queensland, Australia.

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.