Podcast: Former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz

Talking Headways is coming to you this week from Madison, Wisconsin, and the Empty Storefronts Conference. Our guest is former Madison mayor and current Wisconsin Bike Fed Executive Director Dave Cieslewicz.

Guest post: Why can't I find parking?

(Note from Pantograph: This is another guest post from my friend Ed. If you missed his first two posts, check back down the page for more of his work)

Spend any time driving in San Francisco, and you’ll notice that there isn’t a lot of parking. Then, just before you give up and put the car in a garage, it dawns on you that while there aren’t that many spaces, there also aren’t that many parked cars. Instead, driveway after driveway chops up the curb, leaving the street space unusable. Curb cuts are everywhere, of course, but San Francisco buildings seem particularly fond of them.

The obvious impact is that these curb cuts take away parking that could serve many different users of the neighborhood – residents, visitors, and shoppers, and put it into private hands. But there are a lot of other reasons to dislike curb cuts. They increase conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, they set up hazardous situations as cars back out onto busy streets, they encourage sidewalk parking, and they can often leave a street without room for the trees and other amenities that improve the way pedestrians experience the street. Moreover, the garages they lead to take up space that could be used for a variety of things that add to street life, like storefronts or stoops.

The desire for off-street parking in some areas is certainly valid. However, because there isn’t a price attached to installing a curb cut, we see the type of “overfishing” that plagues any unpriced resource, with some buildings sporting rows of 4, 5, and even more garage doors fronting city streets. Fortunately, this is starting to change - the city is soon going to start charging at least $100 per year for installing a cut, and there have also been efforts to slow new installations in North Beach. Hopefully these measures will lead to efficient use of the city’s curbsides.

More Urban Form

In an attempt to go a little deeper into the previous post I went looking for more pictures of Rotterdam and Houston and found even better comparisons and interesting views than the photos I posted before.

It should also be said that I don't mean to discount the devastation of war to people and property. There is a difference between choosing to build parking lots and having your life and possessions destroyed.

First Rotterdam:

This from scientific psychic:


And this from the special collections of the Wageningen Library:


Next Houston:

Clearance of housing to build US59 via TexasFreeway.com, an amazing resource if you want to see how freeways were built in Texas.


Also via TexasFreeway.com, a view of Houston from the same angle as the previous post's shot:



This is from Aerial viewpoint. A historic shot from 1945 compared with today. Notice the freeway intrusion. Also notice the downtown getting taller. Finally, where Union Station used to be is where highway 59 rockets through on the east side of downtown and Minute Maid park now exists with a token train filled with oranges.

Parking Bombs

More! That's the scream of merchants and others who believe that a downtown without an endless sea of parking is not worth going to. But once the whole downtown turns into a parking lot it's not really worth much anymore is it? Yet we still see the discussion of parking dominate without an eye for the destruction that it can cause a downtown if left unfettered.

Before Portland's miraculous return as an urban Mecca, it too was once infested by parking. So was the city of Houston, where parking lots took over most of the downtown at one point.

Via Mike Lydon and Transit Miami (Via the book City Shaped)

Perhaps you can say how different this is from Rotterdam after German bombing...


It's unfortunate that we didn't see what we were doing to our wonderful cities in the name of cars first. Europe had war, yet we dismantled our cities in a similar way in the name of progress. So much parking though, what has that done to the city's value? What has it taken away in terms of tax revenue from land and greater employment agglomerations? A study by Anne Moudon and Dohn Wook Sohn showed that offices that were clustered had greater values than those that weren't in the Seattle region. In addition to the spending on highways that expanded our regions to their current far reaches, how much real estate value did we destoy?

Greater value for downtowns was lost and in the process we saw places like Hartford, as found by Dr. Norm Garrick at UConn lose population, employment, and their character. Not just the loss from parking, but from the gutting of the city by the Interstate System. Here are some slides from Dr. Garrick showing the destruction. When he toggled through the first time, the room I was in audibly gasped for air.

Hartford Pre Interstate


Hartford Post Interstate


So what's the damage? The amount of tax creating employment did not grow and parking spots skyrocketed.


So in aggregate what did this look like? The red shows it all:


Lost revenue, lost agglomeration, lost value. Will these examples teach us a lesson about too much parking? Perhaps

Free Parking Again

Another issue with free parking. Isn't there a market based way to take care of this issue around Mockingbird Station?

Parking Rates & Housing Needs

In Phoenix, Light Rail has pushed more businesses to core areas and pushed parking rates up.

While they remain among the lowest in the nation, monthly parking rates in Phoenix grew faster this year than in any other major metro area in the country. A new annual report on parking rates from Colliers International says the median unreserved monthly parking rate in Phoenix is $65. That’s up 24 percent from last year’s survey, while the national average declined 1 percent. Two years ago, the average in Phoenix was just $35 a month.

The strange thing is the light rail is causing more people to drive downtown. Perhaps downtown parking fees should be harvested as value capture, since there seems to be some sort of causation according to the article.

“With the light rail’s capability of moving more people in and out of downtown, we are beginning to see entertainment venues and businesses shift from the Camelback Corridor and other metro areas to downtown Phoenix to take advantage of light rail traffic,” Miscio said. “This shift is also driving more auto traffic into downtown, increasing parking garage usage and rates during both the daytime and evening.”

Though businesses moved, development has been slow in Phoenix, for obvious reasons. But while the line connects destinations, according to local developers it's lacking in housing density, which is another likely reason that more people are driving and parking rates are higher. It's times like these that looking at value capture possibilities to pay for more transit and related infrastructure is probably a good idea. Especially since there is likely to be a residential building uptick if there is a lack of options along the line.

In the Dark

I guess there are still city officials who haven't read the High Cost of Free Parking.

Oh Parking

Ryan gives us this treasure trove from an industry that doesn't understand its contribution to many ills that plague good development and sustainability in this country.

Oh Noes! Street Parking Havoc!

So says an article in the Virginian Pilot. I had to chuckle when I saw the head line, "Light-rail work creates street-parking havoc in Norfolk". Havoc they say, pandemonium ensues and all is lost!

Machismo Burrito Bar owner Bill Caton worries it will drive him out of business. Like many businesses in densely developed Freemason, his relies on street parking for his customers.

But then we find out just how many spaces will be lost. A whopping 40. Someone at the city of Norfolk should have taken pedestrian counts before, during, and after the light rail construction. Then I checked the Pilot's website and what were the ads around the article? All for autos. Sure its not a direct correlation, but we know who pays for a lot of advertising budget for the news. Parking story? Big News!!!

A Temple to Automobility

How much did this monstrosity cost?

Related Comedy: Parking

From Seinfeld:

George: Look, I have my system. First I look for the dream spot right in front of the door, then I slowly expand out in concentric circles.

Elaine: Oh come on, George, please put it in a garage. I don't want to spend an hour looking for a space.

George: I can't park in a garage.

Elaine: Why?

George: I don't know, I just can't. Nobody in my family can pay for parking, it's a sickness. My father never paid for parking; my mother, my brother, nobody. We can't do it.

Elaine: I'll pay for it.

George: You don't understand. A garage. I can't even pull in there. It's like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free? (he hears a horn honking) What? What do you want? Go around me, I'm looking for spaces.

And people wonder why there is so much traffic!

Park(ing) Day + Speak Like a Pirate Day

Check out Streetsblog for awesome photos of Park(ing) day. I would have taken some here in SF but I forgot my camera. Arrr. Which reminds me, it's also talk like a pirate day.

Increasing Job Densities an Appropriate TOD Strategy

It might seem like a duh moment, but Prof. Gary Barnes paper discusses in a paper he wrote for the Journal of Public Transportation that it's not just residential density that determines transit usage, but rather where people are going.

Using regression analysis, he showed that in Minneapolis, aside from developing residential densities, transit share can be increased by building up commercial centers. In the regression, he showed that for every 1000 people per square mile that the residential density grew, the increase in transit's share to downtown increased 2.4% versus .6% increase when people went to suburban jobs. The same thing happened for increases in low income users. For every 1% increase in low income population per square mile, increases were noted. The chart that shows the results is below.



He also relates the concentration of regional jobs in major centers directly to how much transit people take. An example from the article is below.


There are a few caveats including the need for quality transit and parking regulations in these centers that encourage transit ridership. But just having a center of commerce isn't good enough. Places that have a lot of jobs like Pleasanton need to be better organized and less suburban office park.

Recently however, many people have been focused really heavily on residential densities, which are important, but I haven't seen many programs that create a regional job placement and growth strategy. This could be part of the key for increasing transit's use for work trips.

I have a feeling as well that pushing for dense commercial centers with mixes of retail and office then connecting them with high capacity transit will go a long way towards increasing transit's ability to cut congestion in the peak hours. It might also be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, creating a cycle of more transit and more office development in the cores of a region.

I know that this is kind of a 'duh' post. But having numbers to quantify the effects of connecting residential areas to large employment centers is really important in moving forward with policies that promote transit ridership. Thanks Prof Barnes for this paper and for your conclusion:

Planners and policymakers hoping to manage urban traffic congestion through increased transit use are limited in the short term by the strong influence that existing land use exerts on mode choice. While this point has been widely acknowledged, most research and policy discussion on this topic has focused on increasing residential densities. However, the conclusion of this article is that the development and expansion of very large, high-density job centers is the best tool available for most cities to achieve substantial increases in transit use.

While there are many ways to improve transit use, achieving the substantial increases necessary to impact congestion levels will probably ultimately require greatly improved service frequency or higher costs of driving, such as parking charges. Higher parking charges will be politically infeasible in the absence of adequate transit service as an alternative; however, improved transit service is hard to justify in the absence of a sufficiently large market.

Creating a large market appears to reduce to two options: the well-known solution of increasing residential density and the less-considered option of focusing on the work end of the trip. While both of these tactics appear to be effective in principle as well as practice, it is, for a variety of reasons discussed in this article, very difficult to have impacts on residential density that are large enough to have regional significance.

The constraints that limit the use of residential density increases as a tool are not in force to nearly the same extent for commercial development. A gradual transition of a relatively small amount of office space from isolated or low-density settings into a few large dense centers could lead to sizable increases in regional transit use in a relatively short time.

The Twin Cities area illustrates the possibilities of this approach. There are two downtowns, but Minneapolis is much larger and is geographically in the center of the developed area. Downtown St. Paul is relatively small and close to the edge by comparison, yet still attracts a substantial transit share. This hints at the possibility that even suburban locations, if they are developed to a sufficient size and density, can become major transit attractors.

Increased densities at the work end of the trip, by making improved transit service frequency more viable, could also help to increase nonauto access to retail and other nonwork opportunities. While higher density residential development can also have an impact, the effect is much larger when the increased density occurs in or around high-density commercial areas, both because more trips will be made to these high-transit attractors and because these areas support relatively good transit service going out as well as coming in. Increased commercial densities, especially in the suburbs, may be the only tool available for inducing significant transit use from the vast suburban areas of most cities that are already developed at low densities, and which will probably stay that way forever.

West Corridor Could Be in Trouble

I wrote a post previously about the takings issue in Denver. It looks like things are getting a bit heated and the line could be in trouble if it loses its ability to build parking garages. These folks think that parking garages aren't part of building the line, but the FTA thinks otherwise and without them, the ridership models drop and the Cost-Effectiveness measure kicks the Full Funding Grant Agreement out.

House Bill 1278 would allow RTD to acquire property by eminent domain only for "public transit purposes." Under the bill, RTD could not take land for park-n-Rides or retail or residential development near train stations. Rep. Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, a House sponsor of the bill, said legislators introduced it because "of significant concerns about the misuse" of eminent domain by RTD.

An RTD plan to acquire properties at Wadsworth Boulevard and West 14th Avenue in Lakewood has galvanized landowner opposition to the agency's power of eminent domain. If RTD can't acquire land for parking, FasTracks cannot proceed, said RTD general manager Cal Marsella.

Hopefully this gets worked out, but the way things have been going recently I'm cautiously optimistic.

Giving Employees a Bonus by Charging for Parking

On the other side of the coin from the suburban subsidization is the money that can be saved by transit, whether its rail or an express bus. Richard Layman has a post over on his blog about when companies decide to charge for parking and give an allowance for transit. The original article was in the New York Times.

Tailgating & Transit Don't Mix

Why is this not a surprise? Tailgating apparently is ranked by the amount of parking available which of course is limited in transit oriented cities. Even in the most transit oriented city, a recent uproar has been caused in the Bronx over the cost of parking for the new Yankee Stadium. Makes sense, but when it causes a city to lose a bid for my favorite sports event every 4 years it gets personal. I know this is old news, but when I saw the post at Transit Miami, it kind of poured some salt in an old wound.

San Francisco will abandon its bid to bring the 2016 Olympics here in the wake of the 49ers' announcement that the team no longer plans to build a new stadium in the city, the group leading the Olympic effort announced today.

Scott Givens, managing director of San Francisco's bid, said last week's surprise announcement regarding the stadium -- until then a central part of the group's San Francisco Olympic bid -- irreparably damaged the city's reputation with the U.S. Olympic Committee.

The reason for the drop? The cost of a light rail extension from the T line and the lack of tailgating!

The team's largest objection to the San Francisco site, they said, was the high cost of bringing transit and parking infrastructure to the Point. York also cited the loss of traditional parking lots, saying tailgating would not be an option for fans if the stadium was located in San Francisco.

I sometimes wonder if San Francisco is really transit first, if one of its most beloved institutions, the 49ers are so beholden to the car. At least you'll be able to get to AT&T park on a PCC at some point in the future. But I won't be going to watch the 5k.

Feeling the Pain of Parking

I posted a few weeks ago about what I felt like was a natural disaster when it came to parking in San Francisco. People are feeling the pain, and are trying to make those who have adjusted pay for their pain. A post on Metro Rider in LA, discusses how LA just hasn't felt the pain because they don't pay the true cost of parking. It's just paid for through back channel ways. If the free market was really able to work, those spaces would cost an awful lot. But they would be provided by the market. Perhaps they would cost as much as the one's in New York City, which according to a New York Times article are going for about $225,000. Wow

For developers in New York, parking is the highest and best use for below-grade space and fetches about the same price per square foot as actual living space, which costs much more to develop. According to Miller Samuel, the average parking space costs $165,019, or $1,100 per square foot, close to the average apartment price of $1,107 per square foot. Those are averages, of course. A $200,000 parking space is about $1,333 per square foot.

The Myth of Houston's No Zoning Part 1

There is a pervasive myth in the world of anti-planning and anti-transit fanatics that should be debunked. Specifically Randall O'Toole believes that Houston is the bastion of the free market. That would be nice and rosy if it were true, but it of course is not.

Parking Requirements

What is a good libertarian argument without a discussion about their preferred mode of transportation. If there was no such thing as zoning in Houston, then there would also not be any requirements on property. But instead we find that a one bedroom apartment has a 1.33 space parking requirement which of course lead to larger parking lots or garages costing developers lots of money. If it were a true free market issue, parking space construction would be left up to the market, yet its not. A report done by the EPA found that parking requirements were a big reason why TOD in Midtown has failed to take off. Another reason seems to stem from the fact that land owners think their land is worth much more than it really is and have been unwilling to part with it feeling like a high rise is their eventual destiny.

Muni Gets an F

I love transit, but this weekend when trying to get from the Mission to North Beach I had an awful time on what should be a rapid transit corridor. Aside from my subway under Geary, I'm going to say that Van Ness needs one too. This is the 101 corridor from LA to Oregon and it's always packed. Muni wants to turn it into a BRT corridor but once again that will just make people mad. Making a 6 Lane Urban thoroughfare into 4 lanes is a good idea most of the time. And people don't go fast on this street because there are too many stoplights.

But in this instance, taking away a lane for buses is A. A bad idea and B. A bad idea. Why? Because making a major road like this go to 4 lanes is like a snowstorm blocking planes at the airport in Denver. No one will get anywhere. If there was a subway, it would have taken me 35 minutes instead of an hour to get where i was going. 25 minutes is a HUGE time savings and worth it to the folks who want to get to the north side of town out of bus traffic. So instead of planning this long term, it should be done now, with the Geary Subway.

But we have no money says MUNI. There is tons of money out there. As referenced in the article above, Don Shoup (king of parking), states that parking in downtown San Francisco is too cheap. I have never driven downtown at any time other than 11pm or Sunday afternoon but the reason is I don't want to have to worry about parking. It's so much easier and faster to just take the train in the subway. But apparently if I did find a space downtown on the street it would be cheap cheap cheap.

While San Francisco has taken steps to make transit friendly and parking harder to come by it comes as no surprise that they still cater to the automobile. It is so entrenched in our society that even the most dense metropolis' can't get away from it. So if we can't get away from it, lets make it as expensive as possible. Another funding source that is being discussed is closing off downtown from anything but Taxi's, buses and rail. This is a great idea and it would raise money for transit, specifically the subways that are in planning but need funding.

Possible Capital Funding Sources #1

As a part of this blog, I'd like to toss out possible transit funding sources. These ideas are meant to spur ideas and thoughts about how to pay for the transit infrastructure that cities desperately need. Included in this discussion will be ways that the Feds can better fund and operate the New Starts program to support these other funding sources.

So today i'd like to throw out the first idea. A developer parking in lieu fee. Along major urban corridors in the United States, developers are facing a harsh reality. Parking spaces are required at suburban ratios along corridors that should be served by urban transit. There should be an exchange where parking spaces can be traded for transit money. So what would happen is a parking space costs a developer a certain amount of money, say 20,000 dollars in a very urban area. Usually a certain amount of spaces are required. So what if half of the spaces were required could be traded away for a half price solution. So if 50 spaces are required, then 25 of them could be traded for 50% of the cost meaning the developer builds 25 spaces but then pays $10,000 for each space he doesn't build into a capital fund for transit expansion. This single project would raise $250,000 for transit projects in the city and allow the developer to use the savings to build more housing or make the housing available more affordable. This solution has never been used to my knowledge in this fashion but its about time cities start looking at better ways to fund capital projects that will propel the transit space race forward.