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Are Parking Authorities Obsolete?

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When I was a graduate student at Rutgers University in New Jersey where I studied city planning, I entered the program with a strong interest in transit-oriented development. I was excited to be going to school in a state with one of the busiest commuter railroads in the U.S. I loved the idea of living in a state where I could access reliable transit for everyday needs and not own a car. But I didn’t expect parking reform to be on the top of my list of my concerns.

My interest in parking started when a particular study caught my attention:  transit-oriented developments across the US were using less than half of the parking spaces they created to meet parking regulations. Instead of building much-needed housing, office buildings or retail on valuable real estate, much of the space just sat empty.

As someone who no longer owned a car, but rode buses, trains and bikes, this was a gut punch. I thought – why should cities invest millions in parking when so many can live comfortably without owning a car? Who gets to decide who pays for, and in effect subsidizes, the cost of driving a car instead of using a train or riding a bicycle?

So in 2018, when I learned that New Brunswick, NJ (home to Rutgers University) had a parking agency that was $390 million dollars in debt, I was shocked. The New Brunswick Parking Authority had been failing to generate sufficient revenue, and the residents of the city (about 35% of whom are under the poverty line) were on the hook if the agency ever failed to pay back their debt.

With some digging, I learned from community organizer and journalist Charlie Kratovil, that New Brunswick is home to the most parking decks of any city in the state! And so began my interest in understanding what exactly are parking authorities, and where they operate. Here’s what I’ve learned..

Parking authorities are quasi-public agencies that usually own significant parking assets (such as parking garages or downtown parking spots) and are charged with the financing, management, planning and operations of on and off-street parking services. They’re found in at least twelve U.S. states (Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia), and densely populated cities such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Chattanooga, Baltimore, Miami and Birmingham.

Parking authorities have a lot of power. Their members are appointed (not elected) by the governing body and Mayor, and have powers that exceed that of a basic public agency or a parking utility or parking department. They operate independently without requiring the direct oversight of the city government, and are not controlled by annual appropriations. They also can act as a city’s major real estate developer, have the power of eminent domain, and have the ability to buy, sell and/or lease property.  As an example, the map below displays all of the land parcels owned by the New Brunswick Parking Authority (NBPA), which owns important real estate in downtown New Brunswick.

map of land parcels owned by New Jersey Parking Authority in New Brunswick, NJ

As an independent agency, parking authorities have been created to expedite construction and management decisions of parking facilities and lots and not be overridden by local officials or elections. For example, a parking authority could make the unpopular (not necessarily incorrect) decision to raise the price of parking on specific streets, or finance a parking garage in a busy neighborhood, to the ire of some residents. Parking authorities can shield elected officials from public backlash, for better or worse.

The creation of parking authorities stems from the state. In New Jersey, the State Legislature recognized parking authorities as a key tool in the economic and social revitalization of cities. Meanwhile the New Jersey Supreme Court backed the legislature stating that “parking authorities were a viable method to address crucial parking issues in downtowns” (1963).

In a nutshell, parking authorities have enormous decision-making power and can be extremely influential when it comes to the urban makeup and transportation system of a city. However, a lot has changed about the U.S. and transportation since the 1960’s. For example, we now have more transportation options, have the option to work from home, or call for a ride with a smartphone.

In some cases, allowing parking authorities to have unchecked power has led to grim consequences including overbuilt parking and cities burdened with debt. In a worst-case scenario, parking authorities can contribute to a city’s bankruptcy. This was the case of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which defaulted on a parking authority bond in 2016 after falling to $300 million in debt. A primary driver for why Scranton (the same city for the hit show “The Office”) went bankrupt was the loss of their main industry (coal mining), while facing an eroding tax base and aging population.

A lack of accountability, transparency and mounting debt within parking authorities has caused residents of some cities to take control.  In some New Jersey cities (such as Jersey City, Montclair and Bloomington), residents decided to abolish their parking authorities as local studies demonstrated that residents would save significant sums of money. For example, Jersey City is currently saving about $850,000 a year in management / healthcare costs after merging their authority with the existing Public Safety department. The Board of Commissioners in West New York, the second-most densely populated municipality in the U.S. with a population greater than 50,000, voted to dissolve its parking authority in 2019 and transform it to a parking utility (which would have more government oversight) after a local study found it would save $429,000 in operations costs a year. In New Brunswick, long-time resident Charlie Kratovil ran for mayor in 2018 on a campaign platform which included abolishing its parking authority and replacing it with a local Department of Transportation.  And in what may be a first for a mayoral race, Kratovil announced his platform from a parking lot where he announced “parking relief is coming to New Brunswick”. In his campaign, Kratovil vowed to get the parking authority out of the real estate business, as the NBPA has failed to generate revenue from its real estate assets, including a major grocery store which shuttered its doors.

Another agency, the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA), gained national attention in the reality TV show “Parking Wars.” In recent years, the PPA has faced local and FBI scrutiny for corruption and siphoning of funds from the City and School District of Philadelphia.  Local outrage sparked a change.org petition in 2014, calling for the PPA to be fully controlled by the city of Philadelphia. In 2017, the state auditor general found that the PPA lost nearly $80 million in revenue for the underfunded Philadelphia School District. Following this audit, Governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, called for the State Legislature to abolish state control of the PPA.

In May 2019, Philadelphia Councilman and Republican David Oh, tried to pass legislation to hand control of on-street parking and other functions to the city. However, the city’s lawyers informed him that if the resolution passed, the state would sue the city. So are Philadelphia’s parking policies at the mercy of state legislators, and not Philadelphia’s own residents?

In December 2020, Philadelphia City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart released an audit of the PPA which found that management salaries exceed that of parking agencies at all other major cities. In addition, the audit showed that political patronage is a problem, as a sample of PPA employees showed that 23% were politically connected. Her audit has heightened calls for transparency and accountability for the PPA’s budget. Rebecca Rhynhart shared her findings in this interview on WURD Radio.

If we are to be serious about parking reform, we need greater awareness of all of the political forces and institutions behind it, such as parking authorities. The public needs to understand who controls the levers of power not only at the local level, but on the state and regional level too. We need to know how parking policies can affect city budgets for education, transportation and other social services.

Do you know who controls parking policy in your community or region? Is it controlled by a parking authority or other entity?

If you’d like to support more articles like this and other resources for parking reformers, join the Parking Reform Network at parkingreform.org/join.

Fairness and Equity in Parking Reform- Part 3

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In previous posts, we talked about why adding parking doesn’t solve the “parking problem,” and why we need to use pricing to get turnover and create parking availability to actually solve the “parking problem.” One challenge commonly brought up when meters are proposed is the issue of fairness and equity.

“Won’t new meters hurt poor folks?” It makes sense to keep costs down as much as possible for the most low-income people, especially as they are being pushed out of resource-rich areas. The tricky part is that providing parking costs money; it is a subsidy whose benefits skew toward more wealthy people. And the more you drive, the more you benefit.

If we leave the current situation as is, that is a decision to continue today’s inequitable conditions. We put enormous public resources into roads and parking, even though many people do not or cannot drive. You must be wealthy enough to own a car in order to benefit from the vast amounts of free parking.

When it comes to our denser cities, the geometry of our roadways is limited. Our roads can move more people and work better by allocating road space to more efficient travel modes. We can’t all get around by car and still expect our cities to thrive. Yet, to the degree that our communities have been organized around the use of a private automobile, it has led to fewer opportunities for zero vehicle households, and having a car is often a requirement to escape poverty.

Prioritizing driving shifts the costs onto everyone, so that the poorest citizens are essentially subsidizing the wealthiest who are more likely to drive large SUVs and fuel-efficient or electric models that cause major damage to roads but contribute less to their maintenance with the gas tax. The inequities in transportation go back further, as I wrote in a piece on Medium:

The historical inequities of our transportation system go hand-in-hand with the historical inequities in housing. In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein meticulously catalogs the discriminatory housing policies at the local, state, and federal levels that restricted housing opportunities for African-Americans following their emancipation and whose proliferation spread like wildfire in the 1940s. Our discriminatory housing regulations [and White violence], often enforced by police, prevented Black people from living in desirable neighborhoods and restricted them to other neighborhoods — often places with more industry and pollution. There was more demand than supply and Black people ended up paying much more for rental housing than their White counterparts paid in mortgages for nicer homes. They ended up over-crowded and with little savings or investment to pass on to their children, while White folks were building their “nest egg.”

At the same time as the cost of buying a car was dropping significantly, White Americans were fleeing to the suburbs. Yet the jobs remained in the urban centers that White people were abandoning, and getting people to those jobs became a dilemma that needed major transportation dollars. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower delivered the Interstate Highway system, to enhance the ability of our nation’s militia to travel the country. This freeway system also enabled people to live further from urban centers and drive in. Given discriminatory housing practices, this new mobility benefit was essentially limited to White people–and often plowed right through Black neighborhoods, destroying their wealth.

So how do we improve equity for transportation? We focus on providing better access to opportunities and resources in disinvested areas and shift the costs of driving to drivers, rather than the population at large. This includes priced parking, or meters. Priced parking should not be a source of revenue, but a process to better manage access to high demand spaces. However, since certain neighborhoods in cities have experienced growth and pushed long-time residents out, we’re now seeing more people of color living in car-dependent suburban locations. So we must consider equity impacts of every policy enacted, and the fines and fees associated with driving. With the wealth extraction that has destroyed Black neighborhoods for the benefit of White neighborhoods, some form of reparations is needed.

If you work in or with communities that have been marginalized, be sure that you listen to community members who have been advocating on behalf of the community, validate their concerns, and empower them to have decision-making authority. This is often the hardest part within the constraints of many of our bureaucratic systems, but one that we need to work to change. As King, Smart, and Manville write in The Poverty of the Carless, in many places, a combination of better access to cars along with regulation of their use is important to address inequities.

Other policy ideas (many from my piece on Medium) to address equity include the following:

  • Unbundled parking. Buildings would not be required to provide parking, but would be required to “unbundle” parking so that only drivers pay for parking spaces. Parking would not be included as part of rent or sale prices.
  • Parking cashout. Employers would offer their employees the option of having subsidized parking, subsidized transit, or the cash equivalent of what it costs them to provide parking. This policy is called Parking Cash Out and has been implemented for certain industries in California, Rhode Island, and the City of Santa Monica. Washington, DC has also passed a parking cash out law.
  • Non-driving validation. Parking validation programs would also offer the equivalent cash benefits to people who arrive by transit, biking or walking so that those people receive the same discounts as driving customers. Transit operators could design a card reader that gives transit credit/ reimbursement and provide those readers to hospitals, malls, and other places where parking is the only transportation discount offered.
  • Manage residential permits. Residential permit parking areas would price permits by the length of the vehicle and by the demand for parking in the area. So if all the spaces are usually full, permit prices go up. If street parking is never congested, prices remain stable or free. This would prevent the problems like Danielle Steel’s 26 parking permits, or at least raise more city revenue. That revenue could go toward a rebate for car-free households or discounts for low-income residents.
  • Share street space. Residential streets would have space reserved for car share vehicles, delivery vehicles, pick-up and drop-off, or secure bike parking for residents who don’t own cars.
  • Strategic revenue investment. High-demand areas with expensive parking would retain parking revenue locally and use it to provide locally-appropriate amenities. These amenities could include free public WiFi, increased transit service, improved walking and biking infrastructure, public art and lighting, and affordable housing subsidies so that people can continue to live in the neighborhood while it increases in popularity.
  • VMT charges. Vehicles would pay to use roads by the mile (a VMT tax), based on their weight (which impacts how much damage they may cause to roads). These fees also would extend to trucks and delivery vehicles.
  • Refunds and credits. Cities could provide a tax refund to carless households and/or credits for e-bikes.
  • Redirect transportation investments. Our transportation investments at the regional and state level would dedicate more money to areas that have more people and higher needs. This would mean fewer suburban highway projects and more urban transit, regular roadway maintenance, and bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure – and possibly more highway removal.
  • Equitable fines and fees. Ticket fines would be proportional to a person’s income and the seriousness of the crime, as is done in Finland. This would ensure that tickets are a deterrent to bad behavior for all, without causing financial ruin for low-income drivers.
  • Safety before revenue. Fines, fees, and fares would be examined through an equity lens to ensure that there is incentive to prevent people from breaking the law without leading to personal bankruptcy.

Our current inequitable transportation system favors those that are wealthy enough to own and maintain cars, at the expense of those who do not own cars or cannot drive. Lack of access to a vehicle in a car-dependent society exacerbates inequities.

Have you heard of cities implementing more equitable parking policies? What other approaches would improve equity?

When pricing is needed – Part 2

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As discussed in Part 1, increasing the supply of parking doesn’t address the fundamental challenge of congested parking areas. When drivers can’t find convenient parking during busy hours, the challenge must be addressed with pricing. No one wants to pay for something that they’re used to getting for free. But many are tired of driving in circles and are willing to pay so that they don’t have to keep wasting their time looking for parking.

When working with a community to understand their supply and demand challenges, a parking consultant will often undertake a parking turnover survey to understand how long cars stay parked in certain areas. Below is a graphic from a turnover study on Division Street in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.

Bar chart depicting length of time cars were parked at free spaces, metered spaces, and loading spaces. (Source: CMAP, 2013)

Metered parking is shown in red, loading zones are orange, and free spaces are shown in green – and the length of the bar is how long cars were parked. I spoke with a business owner on the west end of the metered section. He thought it was *great* because he would park in the free space just west of his business and leave his car all day and his customers could easily find a metered spot.

And this is the problem with free parking. You don’t get turnover.

If you have businesses whose customers want to park, a free space that they can’t use is worthless. We typically find that many cars remain parked for the entire duration of our 7-hour surveys. Maybe they are employees, maybe they are residents who only use their car on the weekend. It doesn’t matter. All those businesses in the green area have no available parking. The alderman saw this chart and quietly put meters in the easternmost block. No one complained, because it makes sense to have meters there. You want turnover.

Part 3 dives into the equity considerations of metering parking.

Parking problems – Part 1

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In the “before times” pre-COVID19, when beginning a parking study in an area that has a “parking problem,” I would start by interviewing people and asking them about the problem. I’d talk to business owners, residents, elected officials, principals at local schools, and anyone else who wants to talk to me. Can you guess the #1 complaint I would hear (prior to lockdowns)?

“There’s not enough parking!”

If you’ve found this site, you probably already understand that parking is more complex than that. But I thought I would share how I generally work with people to help shift their perspective – slowly.  Rather than immediately reject the idea that more parking is needed, I start a conversation around the cost of parking. For at least $30,000 per space for new garages, I can ask who they think should pay for it. Will drivers be willing to pay for that? Should the local taxpayers cover it? Should the businesses have added taxes to pay for it? Will it be worth it? Will each new car bring in the sales tax revenue to cover that? What about people who don’t drive; should their taxes be higher so that others can park free? Should they pay more to dine out so that others can park for free?

When it settles in that their small town or neighborhood isn’t going to get a new free parking garage, I start to talk about ECON 101. Parking and driving are unique in our society because they don’t fit into the standard laws of supply and demand, because we typically don’t price much that has to do with driving. When it comes to other goods (housing, food, cell phone, etc.), the right price makes it so that suppliers can continue to produce and make a profit and demand can be satisfied. The point where the supply curve and the demand curve cross, determined by price, is called the equilibrium. (Credit to Jeffrey Tumlin for graphics and inspiration for this post and others yet to come)

When you don’t price driving and parking, you force people to wait for desirable spaces or sit in congested roadways, and TIME – rather than price – regulates how much demand there is. How much time are you willing to spend looking for parking or on your daily commute? And congestion, or full parking, becomes the equilibrium. While parking problems are very different than they were in February, that is because the demand is lower. The same principles of supply and demand still apply.

As San Francisco MTA’s Executive Director, Jeffrey Tumlin, says: congestion is what happens when the demand for mobility equals supply. It is the constant. Building more parking or more roads won’t fix the problem. So we need to understand what the problem is. Usually, the problem is better stated as “I can’t find convenient parking when I need it.” Solving for that problem requires more than just additional parking.

Part 2 of this series looks at how pricing and parking meters impact driver behavior. Part 3 dives into the equity considerations of metering parking.