America's extreme parking requirements

A new parking blog, Graphing Parking, has launched with three amazing posts providing perspective on the minimum parking requirements that apply across numerous US cities. They reveal with stunning clarity the extreme nature of parking minimums in the USA.

With the tagline, 'accessible parking wonkery', it is the work of architect, Seth Goodman.

The new blog has a focus on 'infographics that are expository, accessible  and accurate' and the first three posts certainly live up to that aim.

Here is a striking example: parking requirements for restaurants. The typical American restaurant is required to provide on-site much much more space for parking than actual restaurant space!

Parking requirements for restaurants in USA cities

The other two initial posts show residential and office requirements.

Note that the data are mostly for the municipalities at the cores of US metropolitan areas. Suburban local governments tend to set higher parking requirements than core urban ones.

Don't expect perfection. Comparing parking requirements is surprisingly complicated. So I would not be surprised if a few mistakes emerge. But Seth provides a list of all his sources as a useful resource and for fact-checking.

A huge amount of meticulous detective work has gone into the first three posts. As I said, this is difficult stuff, so Seth says he is open to your input to help him improve the accuracy of the posts.

I am looking forward to more from Graphing Parking. Go check it out.

Parking Reform International

I have set up a Facebook Group: "Parking Reform International".

If you are on Facebook, please go join the group and join in the discussions!

Here is the group description:

Parking Reform International is a group for people interested in WORLDWIDE urban parking policy reform efforts.
It is especially for those looking for alternatives to the conventional approach that fuels oversupply of cheap parking. Unfortunately, this approach dominates parking policy in most parts of the world.
This group should complement The Shoupistas, which has similar aims but has a North American focus.

It should also complement the Reinventing Parking page, which doesn't allow much interaction.

Parking reform does NOT need excellent transit

There is a widespread belief that reform of minimum parking requirements requires excellent public transport. We see this in recent parking reform debates in US cities, such as Portland, Seattle and Washington, DC for example.

But surely this is mistaken.

Abolishing parking minimums can be done in auto-oriented suburbs too

If eliminating parking minimums actually FORCED parking closures and low-parking development, then maybe this link with public transport would make sense.

But reform of parking requirements is NOT about preventing developers from providing parking! It merely ALLOWS them to choose how much parking they supply. In locations where they see the need, they will keep supplying plentiful parking.

If parking reform does not need transit, then what does it need?

Reform of parking minimums DOES require on-street and other public parking to be well managed. This is to ensure developers and their customers know in advance that free-riding on that resource will be limited and/or come at a cost.

The results in terms of parking supply will vary from place to place, and transit will be a factor in that. But parking minimums are unnecessary even far from public transport.

In fact, parking minimums reform does not even require reduced parking demand! Reform of minimum parking requirements can be done anywhere!

So let me repeat: reform of parking minimums simply does not require excellent public transport.

Are you sceptical?

What about all of the spillover problems? What about conflict with existing residents and retailers? Surely there are pre-requisites that need to be in place before eliminating or easing parking minimums? Let's explore the issue.

Certainly, every community needs adequate control over nuisance parking. But that really should be obvious. If your community lacks parking enforcement capacity then no amount of off-street supply will eliminate on-street chaos without on-street enforcement. You will have on-street chaos with or without minimum parking requirements for off-street parking, as the situations in many cities in South Asia and Southeast Asia demonstrate.

Even better than merely enforcing against nuisance parking is to manage on-street and public parking efficiently, with responsive pricing. This should be enough to send the right signals to developers and their potential customers, so everyone knows the parking bottom line.

But we still haven't dealt with the political obstacles confronting reform of parking minimums. Surely, good public transport is essential to overcoming those obstacles? Well no.

Certainly, enforcement and good management are not enough. Yes, more is needed to allay the fears of existing locals over parking reform. But not necessarily better transit service.

Donald Shoup says parking minimums can be scrapped if we can ALSO
a) price on-street parking rationally, AND
b) make the process attractive to locals via Parking Benefit Districts.
We have to not only neutralise spillover as a problem but also work to make the new pricing welcomed by locals.

Adaptive Parking is similar. It suggests that it is easier to "relax" about parking supply if we ALSO make other complementary reforms:
- Share! (make most parking open to the public),
- Price! (to avoid parking queues and searching),
- Sweeten! (sweeten the deal for relevant existing local stakeholders),
- Relax! (easier now to not worry about parking supply),
- Choice! (make the parking market work better by enhancing choices and choice making).

Notice that none of these require excellent public transport.

But something else is hidden in the Shoupista and Adaptive Parking points above. They both imply (indirectly) that WALKABILITY is important for parking minimums reform.

It is much easier to relax about off-street parking supply in "park-once districts" where any end-destination is served by a range of parking options within walking distance, not just by on-site parking. This is the point of Adaptive Parking's preference for public not private parking. And we need walkability to make it easy to walk between parking options and destinations. A park-once district requires walkability.

But don't forget that even walkability and park-once districts are not really essential. They are helpful and they ease the politics. They make it less crucial for developers to be accurate in guessing how much parking each site needs.

But even without walkability and public parking, there is still no real need for parking minimums.

Bottom line: there is no real need for parking minimums. Anywhere.

"Cars are parked 95% of the time". Let's check!

"Most people in transportation focus on the five percent of the time that cars are moving. But the average car is parked 95 percent of the time. I think there's a lot to learn from that 95 percent." Donald Shoup when asked why he studies parking.

Photo by Clive Perrin

If you have an interest in parking policy, you may have come across that figure of 95% before. But where does it come from? How accurate is it? Does it only apply to the United States? Is the number similar in your country, state or city?

This post offers some answers and gives you tools to find out more. 

Basically, to calculate the percent of time that cars are parked we need to estimate the number of hours that the average car is in motion. After that the time spent parking is simple.

Give it a try for a place you care about! And when you are done, please share your results (and your assumptions) in the comments!

Here are three different approaches to the calculation. There are probably others, which you may be forced to try depending on the data available.

Option #1: based on the number of cars, the number of car trips and the average time duration of car trips: 

A UK report on parking put out last year by the RAC Foundation (and well worth a read by the way!) uses this method based on data from the UK National Travel Survey (NTS) (see p.23):

"... there are about 25 billion car trips per year, and with some 27 million cars, this suggests an average of just under 18 trips per car every week. Since the duration of the average car trip is about 20 minutes, the typical car is only on the move for 6 hours in the week: for the remaining 162 hours it is stationary – parked."

Since there are 168 hours in a week, the typical UK car is parked 96.5% of the time -  even higher than Shoup's US estimate!

With this method, be careful to use car trips and not just trips by car. In other words, you want trips by car as driver so that you don't count trips as a car passenger. If you only have a total for both drivers and passengers then you will need to find an estimate of overall average car occupancy and divide by that to get the vehicle trips (driver trips) number.  

Option #2: Based on time drivers spend driving (from transportation surveys) and assuming one car per driver. 

If your local travel survey spits out a number for time spent driving then you can use that directly for a rough estimate.

This is how Shoup gets his 95% number. See Appendix B (p.624) of his epic tome "The High Cost of Free Parking". He cites the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportaton Survey (NPTS) of the US Department of Transportation as finding that the average time drivers spent driving was 73 minutes (1.2 hours). Assuming one car per driver (which is roughly OK probably for the US context), this gives 5% as the time each car is in motion.

Option #3:  Using car kilometres per car and overall average speeds

Transportation studies for metropolitan areas often provide data on the average yearly distance driven per car and the overall (24 hour, 7 days) traffic speed. If so, you can use this easy method (although note that those 24/7 speed numbers may not be the most solid of transport statistics I suspect). If you don't have car km per car you may be able to get it by dividing total car km by the number of cars, being careful that the two numbers are for the same study area.

The average time each car is in motion is the car km per year divided by the average speed.

I took a look at the 1995 UITP Millennium Cities Database numbers using this method.  The average percentage of time that cars were parked for the 84 cities in that study was 95.8%. They were typically in motion for 1.02 hours per day. 

For example, for Singapore in 1995, we have a 24/7 speed of 35.2 km/hr and 18,486 car km per car. This gives 525 annual hours of operation per car and, since there are 8,760 hours in a year, we get 94% as the percent of time a 1995 Singapore car was spent parked.

The lowest figures (88.4% and 89.4%) were two Chinese cities with suspicious looking speed numbers (nice round 18 km/h for both, which looks like a rough estimate and on the slow side). The next lowest figure was 92.3% in Seoul with 16,013 car km per car and 23.8 km/h in 1995.

So what?

First, I have confirmed that Shoup's estimate of 95% does seem widely applicable. Across the world cars seem to be parked at least 92% of the time and typically about 96% of the time, according to the 1995 data mentioned above. I doubt more up to date or accurate data sets would change this number much.

But why should we care?

One reason to talk about this is to highlight the importance of parking. It is what cars do the vast majority of the time.

It highlights a crucial inefficiency of mass private car ownership. It points towards huge parking space savings (an enormous land bank) that shifts away from mass car ownership might open up, if only we could massively improve the alternatives including making car-sharing and other 'metered access to shared cars' (MASC) more of a mass market phenomenon.

The numbers on parking time also tend to surprise people, which makes them worth mentioning.

But of course, once you think about it, we shouldn't really be surprised. It WOULD be surprising if privately owned household cars were typically in motion for any more than 1 hour 40 minutes which means parking would be less than 93% of the time.

What if you exclude sleeping time, say the 8 hours from 10.30pm to 6.30am? Even then in-motion time is only 1.02/16 hrs = 6.4%.  So cars are typically parked for 93.6% of even WAKING hours!

It is also striking that the percentage of time that cars spend parked varies so little across the globe.  Again, we shouldn't really be surprised since annual hours in operation would need to vary enormously to make much impact on the percent of time parked.

So once again, give it a try with numbers on the places you care about.

Easing parking minimums is NOT war on cars

Almost every day I see even the mildest of parking reforms being portrayed as anti-car or as somehow radical. Such claims are wrong headed.

It is the status quo that is extreme (especially in most of the USA).

A recent example is in Santa Monica in the Los Angeles metropolitan region, where Jeffrey Tumlin of Nelson/Nygaard has been working with the City on some modest adjustments to parking requirements.

Reactions include: "We are not poised to sell our cars and rely on transit in Santa Monica, and we won’t be for some time"

Google Street View of a commercial section of Montana Ave, Santa Monica

Portraying modest reductions in parking requirements as a radical effort to get people out of cars is like labelling the earliest requests for voting rights for women as "anti-men". It involves ignoring a huge edifice of policies that are actually skewed in the other direction.

Slightly easing a policy that FORCES excessive parking into the landscape is a far cry from actually restraining car use or ownership.

Please get this straight. Today's conventional parking policies are not mode neutral. 

They are not agnostic about people's mobility choices. They are not a natural expression of individuals' preferences about our transport systems or our towns and cities.

In fact, the American-style conventional parking policies that have spread around the world are just about as far from mode neutral as they could possibly be. These policies don't just acquiesce to people's car preferences. They shape those preferences. They effectively pull people into cars and reshape the landscape to keep them there.

The process of setting parking requirements makes arbitrary but self-fulfilling prophecies about how many people will own and use cars in every single building far into the future The process often even aims to make enough room for the busiest time of the busiest day of the year. The procedure generally assumes that all this parking will be free-of-charge to the motorists.

This prompts parking to be bundled with all other real estate, effectively forcing private actors (including you and me) to cross-subsidise car ownership and car use. So most new developments being built around the world continue to include much more parking than we need or than the actual users would willingly pay for.

Of course, reinforcing automobile dependence is not the stated aim of parking requirements.  

Parking minimums are enacted in the name of preventing the dreaded menace of "parking spillover". But, as I have argued before, spillover is a fake menace.

Or spillover SHOULD be a fake menace. It is real in places that fail to manage on-street parking properly, which unfortunately is almost everywhere for now, Santa Monica included. So residents' fears of spillover are not irrational.

Still, isn't it strange that most communities allow the fear of something that is manageable - a little spillover - to be the excuse for policies that inadvertently fuel traffic growth, over-use of cars, pollution, and sprawl on a monumental scale.

Maybe this approach to parking was rational decades ago. Once upon a time we didn't yet have the tools, technologies and enforcement experience to give us confidence that we could contain and manage on-street spillover. [Or maybe even then the spillover bogey was just an excuse.]

Today, we know how to deal with spillover. 

Yes, it takes a little guts to be willing to price on-street parking efficiently. Yes, it requires effort and will to enforce against nuisance parking. We need to be creative to design an approach that pleases local stakeholders. But such exertions are tiny compared with the costs of minimum parking requirements.

Yet we continue to allow a phantom to spook us (or to fool us) into stupid parking policies.

So let me say it again. The conventional parking policy approach with its excessive parking requirements is not mode neutral. Moderating its excesses just a little is not anti car.

Proposals like those in Santa Monica are a small (even timid) effort to very slightly ease away from extreme policies that protect car-based transport systems from market forces and that keep metro areas locked into car dependence.

For a more mode-neutral approach to parking policy, try Adaptive Parking.

Injustice in Parking: the example of Delhi

In a previous post, I discussed awful injustice in parking.

That post lamented the resources wasted on parking subsidies and under-pricing, when so many cities have other urgent priorities.

Today, let's consider the example of Delhi in India.

Delhi has a rapidly growing vehicle fleet and a sense of parking crisis. It also has very cheap parking and motorists with a hefty sense of entitlement. They are convinced that expensive parking would be unfair, even though car ownership in Delhi is restricted to the upper middle class and the rich.

10 hours of parking outside a metro station in a busy
commercial centre for 10 Rupees (about 25 US cents)

So there is a concerted push to build more parking for private vehicles across the city.

Will motorists cover the costs of these parking facilities? No! Parking prices are way too low and Delhi real estate is very expensive. By any estimate, Delhi's new parking structures will require large injections of precious municipal funds, even if PPP schemes are used.

If the complaints of motorists about a lack of parking are any indication, then performance prices for much of Delhi's parking would be much higher than today's prices. This implies that existing parking is much under-priced and that valuable revenue is going begging that could ease the city's service deficits.

The automated parking structure at parking facility in
Sarojini Nagar under construction in 2010. 

And Delhi has huge deficits in its basic services. This is a city with nasty air pollution and a severe water supply shortfall. Much of its sewage flows untreated into the Yamuna River. Many streets and footways are in poor condition. The road death rate is reducing but remains appalling, with pedestrians accounting for almost half of  the victims.

Proper parking pricing and an end to parking subsidies would not solve all these problems of course.

But with so many more worthy uses of government funds, why do we even think of wasting taxpayer's money on parking largesse for the well-to-do?

As usual, the bogey fear of 'parking spillover' is at work. But parking chaos in the streets would be best addressed directly, with effective parking management not subsidized off-street supply.

Is Delhi unusual? Unfortunately not. This illustration could have taken aim at any of hundreds of cities across Asia, Africa, Latin America or eastern Europe.

In fact, a similar story plays out even in many rich, motorised societies too, even if higher rates of car ownership make the unfairness of parking subsidies and cross-subsidies slightly less stark.

It is a strange world in which the rich can successfully call for subsidized mansions for their cars, while the poor literally live in shacks without sanitation or running water.