Posts about Shared Parking

The former Babe's sits on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Brandywine Street, near the top of a hill with downward slopes to the south and west, and Douglas's proposal promises to utilize this topography creatively.

Douglas Development's proposal would allow for a potential sit-down restaurant to have an outdoor seating area along Brandywine Street and for the sought-after retail tenants (no dry cleaners, fast-food restaurants, or banks) to have tall, airy ceilings as high as 16-18 feet.

Renderings by Douglas Development Corp.

Although the retail mix in Tenleytown is improving, this stretch of Wisconsin Avenue has long been associated with mattress stores, cheap fast food, dry cleaners and lots of banks (okay, maybe not the banks) that belies the affluence of upper Northwest and the proximity to the student population at American University.

A ground-floor restaurant would be an ideal tenant for the space and provide significant value to the community, but if the ANC or Zoning Commission requires parking, that won't be possible due to the topography.

Foregoing on-site parking will also help make the upstairs housing units more affordable. This is appropriate, as the cost of underground parking can cost as much as $40,000 per unit, a significant barrier to working-class people seeking to move to the Wisconsin Avenue corridor.

The site is also just a few hundred feet from the Metro station, is well-served by several bus routes, and is within walking distance of two grocery stores and other amenities.

Despite the fact that people who are willing to pay a premium to live directly next to a Metro station have fundamentally different travel patterns, with much lower car ownership and transit usage rates than the surrounding neighbors, Douglas Development is planning ahead for the few people who may own a car. The company proposes to aggressively pursue shared parking agreements with neighboring businesses with spaces that go unused every day.

Douglas could also help reduce driving demand further by providing amenities like car sharing spaces and dedicated bicycle parking. Supportive neighbors have recommended making both a part of the community benefits package.

While the predictable opponents of any change have opposed the Babe's development, city officials in Santa Monica, California, recently approved a very similar 56-unit mixed-use development without any off-street parking. This despite the fact that it will be at least a half decade until the light-rail Expo Line is extended to Santa Monica. The Babe's site already has Metro nearly at its doorstep.

If a mixed-use development can be built in car-centric Southern California without any off-street parking, years before a light rail connection will be provided to the neighborhood, DC's elected leaders and planning officials should have the courage to support a similar development in a walkable community, already well-served by transit.

I urge smart growth advocates to attend the ANC 3E meeting. The Babe's issue might not come up until later in the meeting (perhaps around 9:30pm), but if you come earlier, you can hear from the folks at Safeway who are planning to rebuild the store at 42nd and Ellicott Streets NW, along Wisconsin Avenue.

There are sure to be the usual opponents of any Wisconsin Avenue development in attendance, so the more proponents of a mixed-use development of the Babe's site in attendance, the better.

Parking Panda was co-founded by Baltimore residents Adam Zilberbaum and Nick Miller. They won a local business development competition to develop the app, and have been building its technology and user base ever since.

The impetus behind the app was a simple idea. Co-founder Nick Miller says in a phone interview, "at some point and time we all have needed a parking spot and couldn't find one."

Parking Panda hopes to solve that problem by making private parking spaces available to public users, in exchange for a fee set by the owner of each space. Parking Panda takes up to a 20% cut on the cost of the space for providing the service.

If a homeowner will be out of town for a few days, they can rent out their alley parking space rather than have it go to waste. Owners can even rent out spaces on an hourly basis during the day, while they are at work. Once a user reserves a space, the owner gets an email notification.

Many condo and apartment building garages don't allow owners to rent out their parking spaces because access to the garage is limited by keycards or an access code. In cases like this, Parking Panda would require the owner to find a way to grant the renter access.

Miller says Parking Panda needs at least 30 spaces registered before they come to the District. "We have to have spaces before we have customers," he added. They will start their service in DC as soon as they get to 30 spaces.

Parking Panda unveiled its service in Baltimore during the Grand Prix race, and managed to offer parking for over 150 cars. Since then the numbers have increased, and eventually they hope to make a dent in Baltimore's and ultimately the District's parking challenges.

Parking Panda is currently only available for iPhone. They do plan to roll the service out to Android users, but have no time frame for that yet.

If Parking Panda or another market succeeds and has a meaningful impact on the parking market, how might it change cities? The region already devotes a large portion of its land to parking cars. Every car used for commuting requires at least 2 spaces: 1 at home and 1 at work or a transit station.

Most of the time, 1 of those spaces is empty at all times. Office spaces are empty at night, and suburban residential spaces during the day. Parking Panda makes it easier to share these spaces. If someone works near some residential rowhouses, he or she can park in those spaces while the homeowners' cars are parked at offices.

This strengthens the argument for reducing parking minimums, in particular. Traditional minimum parking requirements assume that each building's parking will only serve that building, during the hours it's in use, and be empty otherwise. DC's zoning rewrite will allow some shared parking, but only with formal agreements between 2 establishments that can demonstrate that they use parking at different times.

Tools like Parking Panda could show how a city's parking can function effectively even without these assumptions, and reduce the need to build more parking in the future.