A roomful of people gave two hours of their evening last night to attend a panel sponsored by the Coalition for Smarter Growth at the Downtown BID about parking policy.

Many joked privately beforehand that parking is quite a boring-sounding topic to generate such fascination, including Councilmember Tommy Wells, who spoke at the beginning. He came up with the slogan of “walkable, livable communities” when running for Council, and suddenly discovered the community of people who already cared about walkable, livable communities, with substantial scholarship and their own terminology for the topic.

Wells says he got interested in parking because with the stadium coming and $15-20 billion in development projects just in Ward 6, he “started panicking” (said somewhat tongue in cheek) thinking about all the cars that were coming in, and didn’t want to be remembered in the history books as the guy who did the same old thing that didn’t work. (Of course, most less-imaginative, less smart politicians would absolutely do the same old thing for fear of doing something new, versus Wells who’s more afraid of doing something old.)

When Wells introduced his parking bill, the chair of the relevant committee said to him, “I can’t believe you’re touching this.” And while he has many strong supporters from residents to businesses to clergy, most citizens have no idea what’s going on, but are simply afraid their streets will be turned into paid parking lots.

The main speaker was Jason Schrieber, a principal at transportation consulting firm Nelson Nygaard. He gave a presentation which covered a lot of the topics popularized (within the planning community, anyway) by Donald Shoup.

Schrieber gave the example of Stanford University, which kept wanting to build on its open land, mostly parking lots, but when they would do so, parking would decrease creating pressure for them to build parking garages. They ran the math, and determined that construction of each parking space came out to $18,829 per space in 1995. (Today, cheap garages cost about $24,000 per space for above ground parking; in Seattle, a below-ground garage came out to $70,000 per space.) The $18k cost in 1995 would come out to $124 per month, considering a 40-year lifespan and accounting for interest on whatever financing was used to build the garage. Add $33 per space per month for maintenance, lighting, etc. and the spaces which Stanford gave to faculty for $45 per semester ($8/month) were costing the University $148 per month each.

Meanwhile, people who walk, bike, ride shuttle buses, or carpool are not getting any of the subsidy. Stanford instituted a parking cash-out system where they gave people an equivalent amount of money if they didn’t consume the parking, and parking demand dropped so much that they have been able to avoid building a single new parking space.

A restaurant table, 5’x5’, is worth about $50/sq ft/mo to a restaurant. Office space goes for about $40/sq ft. But a 10’x20’ parking space costs nothing in most areas. Zoning in Hingham, MA requires 10x as much space for parking as for a building for a fast food restaurant; Portland, ME requires 12x as much space for parking around a church than the size of the church itself. Pasadena led the way by reversing this, creating a Parking Benefit District where parking money went directly to the businesses.

In Boulder, CAGID (the Central Area General Improvement District) is generating lots of money, and the businesses (who get that revenue) have decided that it’s cheaper for them to provide free transit shuttles for their employees instead of free parking. Surrounding residential districts have their own parking districts to benefit from parking revenue there, and it’s amazing how quickly people decide they don’t need the on-street parking when their community is getting revenue from shoppers who pay to park there.

In suburban areas where people do drive, develop a “park once” district, where instead of driving to school, then to work, then to a store, then to school again, and each time going from parking lot to arterial to parking lot again, we need districts where people can park once, walk their kids to school, work, and shop without having to get back into the car each time. This requires less than half the parking and generates less than ¼ the vehicle trips. Plus, if there’s a train to the area, people won’t have to walk at all, or if they can live nearby, they don’t even have to commute there in the first place.

Many of the questions revolved around how to adapt these ideas to something other than a downtown business district in a suburban area. If parking is charged, what do employees do? In Boulder and other places, they can park in more outlying parking lots that are underutilized, but in many larger cities that’s not available. And with the exception of New York, where almost everyone has a transit alternative, increasing parking prices, while probably good public policy, would impact employees and would need some program for offsetting the costs. This is one area that the parking management folks don’t seem to have fully figured out, or at least weren’t articulated successfully at the meeting.

One questioner criticized Montgomery County’s parking district, which according to him is generating so much money that is restricted in how it can be spent, that the district is instead a force pushing for more parking. In Downtown Bethesda, parking costs no more than parking at a Metro station, and Metro has the added cost of the fare and the added inconvenience of the extra mode. Schrieber replied that the parking districts must be able to use their money to benefit the surrounding area and to spend on improving everything but parking.

Ironically, the next questioner was a member of Montgomery County’s planning department, who felt that many people who drive to Bethesda come from Potomac or other non-transit areas and have no option. Schreiber pointed out that they could be served with BRT in the meantime, like the Google Shuttle that has its free Wi-Fi. If parking is priced correctly, then there’s enough of an incentive not to use the downtown land for parking that these alternatives become cost-effective.

Update: here’s the presentation thanks to Gwen of Cleveland Park.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.