Regarding DC USA - Yesterday's Washington Post article noted that though the parking does indeed seem unnecessary now, including it was necessary to get the primary retail tenants on board with the development.

In advocating the removal of parking minimums in favor of the market determining the number of spaces built, it seems that the decades of parking requirements have given retailers, developers, and others a skewed perception of how much parking is needed in urban, transit-oriented places like DC USA. This wasn't a case of planners requiring too much parking - all parties in the development wanted it, to some degree. How can we convince tenants that such parking isn't needed, and that there are better policies to solve parking issues?

by Alex B. on Oct 9, 2009 10:33 am  

How do you answer retailers concern that unless there is free / cheap / convenient parking the customers will go elsewhere. These questions come up especially from small service oriented companies where customers spend a short amount of time to transact their business.

by Barbara on Oct 9, 2009 10:36 am  

Dr. Shoup,
What would you say to a transit agency which requires a 1 to 1 replacement of park and ride spaces when TOD is constructed.

Should agencies like WMATA keep the same number of spaces (through structuring parking) even when they're trying to create walkable spaces at station sites?

by Matt Johnson on Oct 9, 2009 10:52 am  

Assume that the federal government will not change any of its policies whatsoever w/r/t free parking for (many) employees (including especially Pentagon employees). Given that assumption, what's the best move that the city can make to encourage said employees to use transit?

by Simon on Oct 9, 2009 11:43 am  

I remember hearing that years ago there was a study of sports complexes in dense urban areas. The results were that older neighborhoods that pushed up against the stadiums actually had more parking within walking distance than the stadiums with oceans of parking around them.

I'm going to the Kennedy Center next weekend, and people tell me to take the metro then take a cab.

How do we get cities to combat large parking lots for civic centers, stadiums, and other large venues before we bring transit to them?

by Dave on Oct 9, 2009 12:01 pm  

@Dave -You don't need to take a cab. The KC provides a shuttle bus (free?) from the Foggy Bottom stop very frequently.

by Bianchi on Oct 9, 2009 12:50 pm  

@Matt Johnson: WMATA no longer requires 1:1 parking replacement, though it's difficult to do in practice. Member jurisdictions can reduce replacement parking & could invest in better access via bus, bike, walk if they choose. DC requested a 45% reduction for Rhode Island Ave. Metro station redevelopment. The city pay for a build a garage for the remaining Metro parking, and the rest of the Metro parking will provided by sharing with the mixed use development. We need to work with other jurisdictions to build on this model.

by Cheryl Cort on Oct 9, 2009 1:20 pm  

I admire your accomplishments very much. Auto traffic is startling, especially here in DC. But don't you think a distinction needs to be made, for a lot of reasons including political, between car ownership and car use? Many inner core residents have to own a car for emergencies or infrequent trips for family, etc. but almost never use them. In every traffic study I've participated in, well over 90% of inner DC traffic is suburban plates.

For residents the double-headed dragon is the dangerous congestion and pollution of suburban-owned vehicles and the impossibility to find what amounts to mainly storage for what vehicles they must own, if seldom use. When performance parking makes no provision for improving storage possibilities for resident's cars, the people who need to support it politically balk.

A side aspect in my neighborhood is that owners of townhouses routinely provide parking now in what were rear yards, cutting down a significant numbers of trees, causing the loss of about 25% of our already marginal tree canopy in the last 15 to 20 years. This is a neighborhood where suburbanites routinely drive three blocks and from Metro stop to Metro stop and expect free curbside parking. And yet there's resistance to Performance Parking because of suspicion that DC will make residents' difficulties even worse.

by Tom Coumaris on Oct 9, 2009 10:37 pm  

I'm going to write down predictions (not here) to a lot of these questions to see if I get them right.

I vote +1 to Alex, Barbara, Simon.

@Tom: are the conditions right for those residents to consider car sharing? You said they need to have access to a car but only infrequently. Maybe the issue has something I missed, but tying up thousands of dollars in capital for occasional use seems like it might be better to rent a car for a day occasionally.

by Michael Perkins on Oct 9, 2009 10:50 pm  

I went without a car for a year as I refuse to turn my yard into parking. I already often rented cars on weekends by Metroing to National Airport and getting weekends rates of about $15 to $20 per day. I also joined ZipCar assuming while expensive it would be good for emergencies.

What I found was without a car I had trouble getting a "non-owner" policy to cover rentals, that the free coverage provided by my credit card was a little complicated and questionable, (and slow to pay evidently), and that rental company insurance was expensive. I also found arranging for a ZipCar was a little tedious in a real fast emergency (and very expensive).

I tried, but returned to having a small basic car with my own insurance that covers rentals as replacements which I rent for longer trips with passengers to rural areas about once a month. I still pay $50 a year for ZipCar as I believe in car sharing in principal. I often have to park at a suburban Metro if I have to come home after 6pm on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday (neighborhood church of suburbanites) retrieve my car in the morning, and return home to pick up the beer bottles tossed from the suburban SUV's the night before (I'm on major bus routes and 2 blocks from Metro. It's easy to see why residents feel parking policy is either forcing them to concrete their yards if they have one or giving up a car altogether which is a major inconvenience for many, so that suburbanites can drive in instead of taking Metro.

Car ownership and irresponsible car use that causes congestion and pollution are not the same. The second should be discouraged as strongly as possible. And I'd love to be in a situation where car ownership isn't necessary at all. Until then in DC, attacking residents first who out of necessity must own a car even if they only drive seldom is counterproductive.

by Tom Coumaris on Oct 9, 2009 11:59 pm  

What can be done about (non-big-city) situations where people say that they refuse to park in parking garages? This summer, I was at a community meeting in a small university city, where the university was needs to relocate their performing arts complex (currently surrounded by 1,000 surface parking spaces) out of the flood plain. One option was moving it from the edge of campus to downtown, where it would have used the already-existing nearby city-owned parking garages that are mostly vacant in the evenings. But the patrons of the performing arts complex all stood up and vehemently declared their opposition on grounds that they would not park in a parking garage, even if it was free.

by Miriam on Oct 10, 2009 8:50 am  

In my neighborhood, we have three different parking dramas going on:

1) Our Residential Parking Program allows free parking for residents who live on streets that have been zoned "RPP". For many years, two institutions (school and senior living center) located in a residential area benefited from their neighbors not requesting their streets be zoned. These institutions could have their employees park on the unzoned streets for free. Unfortunately, this unzoned area became a magnet for all non-RPP permitted vehicles and the neighbors eventually had to request a zoning change.

We have tried to develop a program for a day-time RPP parking pass that employers could purchase that would allow employees to park away from the commercial areas of the neighborhood for a cost that would be slightly less than commuting by transit.

2) The Latino Association of Mt. Pleasant has complained repeatedly that they are being harrassed with parking enforcement. They agree that enforcement should follow the law, but they say that when a ticket writer lays in wait to predatorily write a ticket, that it is harrassment.

3) Our local businesses feel that one of the reasons that they have trouble competing against the nearby DCUSA complex is that they do not have enough parking in the neighborhood.

What are the primary principles that we should use as a framework within our community to address these problems?

by Phil Lepanto on Oct 10, 2009 1:05 pm  

I'd like to get your opinion on a chicken-and-egg scenario, that might only be slightly parking related.

Zipcar is a great service here in DC, and its cars tend to be concentrated in neighborhoods that have good transit service right now (like Dupont, U Street, Adams Morgan). Places like Trinidad, much of Brookland, Woodridge, Langdon, and other places that are far from Metro stations don't have such easy access to car sharing.

My question is this—it seems like the places that could actually use car sharing more would be the neighborhoods that don't have easy access to transit. Yet, those neighborhoods don't have a lot of car sharing cars available, so people end up owning private automobiles there. It seems that, if more car sharing cars were available in those neighborhoods, some people might be willing to give up their private autos.

What can be done to help jump start an increase in Zipcar density in the neighborhoods where they are sparse? I'm sure their business model says to put them in dense places because there would be more usage, but I feel like they're ignoring a potential market. Thoughts?

by IMGoph on Oct 11, 2009 6:52 pm  

Question to Dr. Shoup:

You were the originator of the brilliant idea of mandatory parking cash out, but I haven't heard you talk about it recently. (For unfamiliar readers, mandatory cash out would require employers that offer subsidized parking, which is tax free, to also offer an equivalent-value benefit--in the form of a tax free transit or bicycling benefit, taxable cash, or a combination of the two--or the parking would become taxable.) It seems that there are two avenues to advance this that I'd like you to comment on. First would be a Federal law, as you originally proposed, but with one important caveat--that cash out only needs to be offered beginning at the time that paid parking can be shed by an employer, such as upon lease renewal. Second (assuming no or delayed Federal action), since many U.S. cities are aggressively striving to reduce carbon emissions, what if anything, might preclude cities from simply requiring cash out, perhaps with large fines to employers that do not comply? New York City, for example, was quite willing to impose congestion charges, before blocked at the state level, but would there be any reason that you are aware of that it could not require parking cash out instead?

by Allen Greenberg on Oct 11, 2009 10:08 pm  

+1 Alex Barbara

by Steve O on Oct 11, 2009 11:41 pm  

+1 for Simon

by Dave Murphy on Oct 12, 2009 12:11 am