Reinventing Parking

Avoiding parking monopolies: Adaptive Parking encourages competition and improved options

2012-02-21T18:25:00.000+08:00

Priced parking often prompts worries about monopoly.

Performance pricing for parking managed by the public-sector should help avoid over-pricing in that part of the parking scene (if parking usage drops at any location, then the demand-responsive prices will soon follow suit).

But governments don't (usually) control private sector parking prices. So, unless the Adaptive Parking agenda includes steps against monopoly or market power, it may be vulnerable to cries of 'gouging!', 'exploitation!', 'abuse of monopoly!'.

We can see these concerns in this letter to the editor in Singapore's Today newspaper about parking at the Budget Terminal of Singapore's Changi Airport:

"Monopoly parking should be regulated" Heng Zhao Weng, Feb 14, 2012
The underlying reason for the recent complaints of exorbitant parking at the Budget Terminal ... is straightforward. Parking rates in the city are more or less determined by fair market forces based on supply and demand ... The same cannot be said for the business practices in some remote places. ... The authorities should act. When there is no alternative parking within so many metres of a charging car park, rates fixed by regulation should apply.

This gives me an excuse to introduce the fifth and final Adaptive Parking reform thrust:

Competition and Options: ensure adequate alternatives to driving and/or competition among parking facilities, so that people have options for accessing the area.

CBDs, like Auckland's here, often already have strong competition among parking operators and rich mobility options for reaching the area by various means of transport.

The motivation for including this reform direction in Adaptive Parking is the worry expressed in the letter above. Adaptive Parking points towards a more market-responsive parking system but this would be undermined if there is rampant abuse of monopoly or market power. You should rightly be wary of market pricing and responsive supply unless you get reassurance against monopoly.

Tackling parking monopoly can take two contrasting directions. If direct competition is impossible and if the substitutes are hopeless, then regulation (or public-sector provision) may necessary, as the letter writer above suggests. But in the case of parking, it is probably better to first try to foster more competition and enriched alternatives, rather than resort too hastily to regulation of prices or supply.

So Adaptive Parking suggests that we apply the usual tools of anti-trust or competition policy to parking. This already happens in some areas, especially city centres and airports. Mergers and acquisitions in the parking industry already face scrutiny from competition watchdog agencies. If Adaptive Parking succeeds in spreading a more market-oriented approach to parking, then more locations will need to apply competition policy to their parking systems.

Improving mobility options and alternatives to driving is another way to ease worries about local parking monopolies. After all, market power requires both barriers to entry AND a lack of close substitutes. Enhanced taxi services, public transport, walkability and cycling facilities can all help to reduce the ability of any localised parking monopoly to over-charge or under-deliver.

On a more positive note, enhancing competition and enriching mobility options should give a boost to the market-responsiveness of any neighbourhood parking scene, even if there is no clear-cut monopoly to combat.

P.S. Actually, I am not quite convinced that the controversy over Singapore Budget Terminal parking fees is a good example of monopoly abuse. But never mind. That letter to the editor was a useful lead-in for this post.

Adaptive Parking lets parking supply choices respond to local context

2012-02-14T18:30:00.000+08:00

This post introduces reform direction number four in Adaptive Parking.

It calls for more responsive parking supply choices:

Responsive Supply: Let parking supply choices respond more readily to costs, returns (or the lack of returns) and alternatives.

In other words, it is a good idea to encourage parking supply to adapt to local conditions. By the way, I really mean LOCAL. And by 'conditions' I mean all dimensions of market conditions.

So, this fourth reform direction in Adaptive Parking is actually much more ambitious than just saying we should match parking supply to demand.

It suggests paying attention also to the opportunity costs and the financial returns on parking investments, relative to alternatives. If the costs of building parking are going to be high and/or the returns are going to be low, and there are much better uses of the money, then why supply more parking?

Parking is real estate

Maybe you are thinking that this sounds obvious and that there is no need to labour the point? Well, it may be obvious but that doesn't prevent most jurisdictions around the world having parking policies that ignore such costs and returns and which force real-estate developers to ignore them too.

This reform direction points towards treating parking like any other real estate investment, so that we at least consider its costs, returns and alternatives. Unfortunately, treating parking investments as a real-estate investment decision is in fact NOT the conventional thing to do.

Key examples of policies that limit responsiveness in parking supply include:

the building of taxpayer-subsidised public parking structures in town centers;
minimum parking requirements (especially if these are set at high levels);
policies that make all parking (even parking in excess of the requirements) exempt from counting towards the zoning plan's gross floor area limits for the building (or from counting in the floor area ratio, FAR, also known as plot ratio or floor space index, FSI).

Transit-oriented locations need less parking and the opportunity cost of building it there is high.

So what can we do to make parking supply choices more responsive?

I don't want to go into details today. But here is a short list of examples.

abolish (or just reduce) subsidies for public-sector parking investments
abolish (or just refine or make more flexible or reduce) parking norms
confront parking suppliers with stronger trade-offs (for example, by counting parking, or at least more parking, as part of the floor space allowed under zoning rules).

You may have noticed that this reform principle is a more general version of Donald Shoup's suggestion to abolish minimum parking requirements.

Note that the short list of policies above includes both bold reforms and timid ones. This reform principle points in a direction for reform but does not insist on taking it to its extreme. Some places might be ready for bold steps but many may need baby steps to try. Fortunately, even modest steps along the lines of these suggestions should be helpful in making parking supply choices more responsive to local market conditions.

Uh oh! An example of going in the OPPOSITE direction

Is there really any need to push for more responsiveness in parking supply decisions? How bad could the status quo be? Very bad, I am afraid. See here, here, here, here and here for examples.

Here is some news from Andhra Pradesh in India about a new policy which will make parking supply extremely unresponsive to local conditions. According to the Deccan Chronicle:

Builders constructing malls and multiplexes, even in district headquarters across the state, have to leave a whopping 66 per cent space of the total built-up area for parking. It is mandatory for all municipalities, municipal corporations and urban development authorities in the state to follow this rule while approving building plans for malls and multiplexes. Presently, the space reserved for parking varies in municipalities and corporations.

Oh dear! This ruling doesn't just tie the hands of developers, it ties the hands of all local governments. It imposes a one-size-fits-all norm across the whole state of Andhra Pradesh, forbidding local governments from taking local circumstances into account. If a mall is proposed in Hyderabad near one of the Metro stations now being built, it will have to follow the norm on parking, despite heightened accessibility by public transport. If a developer wants to build a down-market mall in a low-income segment of any Andhra city, sorry, parking must follow the norm.

How much responsiveness in parking supply choices does your city or town allow for?

In case you missed them, here are the links to explanations of Adaptive Parking reform directions Numbers One (Public Parking), Two (Performance Pricing), and Three (Stakeholder Compromise).

Adaptive Parking and the need for stakeholder compromise

2012-02-11T17:47:00.001+08:00

This post introduces the third reform direction in Adaptive Parking.

It is relevant around the world but San Francisco provides a current illustration

San Francisco's parking reforms have met an obstacle. There is stout opposition to proposals to bring parking meters to new areas:

Faced with fierce opposition from newly organized residents and business owners, San Francisco transportation officials are tapping the brakes on a plan to install thousands of new curbside meters on streets where drivers now park for free. The proposal calls for one of the largest expansions of parking meters in city history.

The prospect of getting priced parking for the first time in an area is always controversial and is often resisted. Having the pricing take the form of demand-responsive SFPark-style pricing (as in this case) adds a further twist.

Initially, the proposed hourly charge would be 25 cents. But under city policy, the price can be increased in 25-cent increments every month or so, based on demand.

Image from SFGate's City Insider blog

By contrast, the districts under the earlier phases of SFPark's performance-pricing trial generally already had on-street parking meters (please correct me if I am wrong on that).

Is the situation hopeless? Is extending parking pricing always political suicide? Maybe not! This bit of the SFGate article suggests room for compromise:

Susette Blackwell, who has lived in and owned a small building in the northeast Mission for more than a decade, now faces the prospect of having new meters planted on her street. "The days of free parking are over. We get it," she said. "We're willing to compromise, but they have to be willing to work with us."

So this sounds like a case for Adaptive Parking reform direction number 3: stakeholder compromise!

Adaptive Parking has five basic reform principles or directions. I have been writing a bit about numbers one and two.

Here is number three again: "compromise with stakeholders when necessary, in ways compatible with the wider reforms".

So what is the thinking behind this reform direction? Regular readers may remember that the central thrust of Adaptive Parking is to expand the role of market responsiveness in local parking arrangements. This includes fostering park-once districts with more parking being made open to the public, pricing parking in more market-responsive ways, and accepting that supply might adjust in ways that produce spillover (which will now be seen as natural and normal).

Obviously, such changes often face resistance.

Local stakeholders care about their local parking. Some get territorial about it. This reform suggestion aims to be realistic that people feel a sense of ownership about public spaces in their neighborhoods, including the parking in the streets. They don't "own" these streets but local governments soon learn that it is foolish to ram through parking reforms that ignore territorial sentiments about parking.

The folks opposed to change also tend to feel more strongly about it than anyone else. So, in social-science-speak, this reform direction is also about defusing the collective action problems associated with parking reform.

So Adaptive Parking reform direction #3 is about giving local stakeholders more reasons to like the reforms and fewer reasons to fear them. It is about accepting that people feel territorial about "their" streets and that we may need to placate those feelings. But it urges us to do so without losing the spirit of the reform. Any compromises should be consistent with the goal of Adaptive Parking to increase the market responsiveness of the local parking system.

Parking Benefit Districts and variations on the theme

Fans of Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking, may have noticed something. A great example of what I am talking about here is Shoup's suggestion to return on-street parking revenue to local ‘parking benefit districts’ to be spent on local public improvements. So you could think of the third Adaptive Parking reform direction as a more generalized take on Shoup's idea.

Parking benefit districts are indeed one way to bring this reform direction to life. They are an institutional form that may resonate for countries that already have similar beasts, such as Business Improvement Districts. Around the world, we will need to find variations on the idea to suit local circumstances.

By the way, Shoup and colleagues have a similar suggestion for overcoming collective action problems standing in the way of congestion pricing.

So what about San Francisco and its current problems?

The opposition to expanding the priced parking areas in San Francisco demonstrates the importance of Stakeholder Compromise as a reform principle in Adaptive Parking.

However, San Francisco has a problem. It's city charter says all parking revenue must go towards public transport service (as pointed out by Pedro Brown in the Shoupistas facebook group). This ties the hands of the SFPark experiment. San Francisco can't use the parking revenue in its local compromises with the immediate stakeholders. So a Shoup-style parking benefit district cannot help I guess.

Of course, spending parking revenue on transit is itself an attempt to make parking pricing more palatable by having it contribute to the improvement of travel choices. But it seems not be enough to mollify locals faced with new parking meters for their area.

Maybe SF will find other ways to win crucial local support for the expansion of priced parking? It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Any suggestions? One obvious line of thinking involves residential parking permits. Can they be made compatible with Adaptive Parking?

Performance pricing is NOT pricing for "traffic restraint"

2012-02-03T17:25:00.000+08:00

Early reactions to proposals for demand-responsive pricing of parking are often plagued by confusion.

When people hear about performance-pricing for the first time, they often confuse it with another (more familiar) parking policy: using high prices to restrict traffic.

If you are a regular Reinventing Parking reader, then you probably won't make that mistake. But be aware of it whenever you try to explain performance pricing to anyone else. Your audience is likely to jump to the conclusion that you simply mean higher parking prices to limit car use.

Comment threads for articles on Donald Shoup's demand-responsive pricing suggestions often have examples of this misunderstanding. For example, this article prompted this comment:

... If, today, you raise the price of parking in most places (Boston included), you reduce mobility. Somehow public transit has to simultaneously be improved while parking is reduced. ...

Even this supportive comment on the same item blurs the distinction between performance pricing (for vacancies) and pricing to deter car use:

... What policies such as congestion pricing, parking pricing, and road diets do is make people switch from driving to not taking the trip or to taking public transit ...

Now I am not against city-center parking restraint and the fact that it leads to high parking prices. It is often a good idea. But it is NOT performance-pricing! It is something else.

For decades, London has been gradually restricting the supply of parking in order to increase parking prices and reduce traffic. It limited its central-area parking as part of its Travel Demand Management (TDM) policies. Sydney too. In fact, many cities in Europe and Australia do this to some extent. According to ITDP:

Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich and Strasbourg limit how much parking is allowed in new developments based on how far it is to walk to a bus, tram or metro stop. Zurich has made significant investments in new tram and bus lines while making parking more expensive and less convenient.

Seoul is one of the few Asian cities to deliberately limit parking supply in its business districts. In the USA, EPA regulations also prompted a few cities to restrict parking supply, producing high prices in their central business districts (CBDs).

Buildings in Seoul's CBDs have tight limits on the parking spaces they can provide.

Such policies are often a great idea, especially for central areas that are well served by mass transit, but they are not performance pricing.

Now, let's try to be clear about distinctions (and connections) between a) performance pricing and b) using parking as TDM:

1. The two policies have different aims.

A key claim for performance pricing is indeed that it would reduce traffic. Uh oh... there is fuel for confusion there. But the key to this is its goal of reducing CRUISING for parking. It does NOT aim to reduce car travel itself (although it should help that agenda indirectly in the longer term). By contrast, parking restriction does aim to deter car-based visits to central areas.

2. The two policies are compatible (this is good but it could also cause confusion)

Parking restrictions nudge off-street parking prices upwards. If such parking restraint were COMBINED with performance-pricing for on-street parking then the on-street parking prices will also be a market outcome and should also rise as supply shrinks. So even though the two policies are not the same thing, they are actually compatible.

In fact, many of the cities that are most urgently in need of on-street parking reform (such as performance pricing or something similar) are those whose CBDs do restrict parking but which still have under-priced on-street parking (think of the business districts of New York City). This produces a toxic combination of very expensive off-street and very cheap on-street parking, causing extreme levels of cruising for parking. This obviously undermines the benefits of the parking restraint.

San Francisco has also been a case of this! And SFPark is being tried as an answer to the problem. So it is no accident that SFPark is being tried in a city which has a "transit-first" transportation policy that includes parking maximums in the central area.

Unfortunately, this also adds to the confusion. Many people seem to think, "hmmm ... if San Francisco is doing demand-responsive pricing for parking then it must be about restricting cars".

3. But the two policies need not go together

Many CBDs around the world that restrain parking don't use performance pricing. As mentioned above, some still underprice their parking. Others manage on-street parking quite well but don't use explicit performance pricing. Most of them manage their on-street parking on a zonal basis in order to achieve on-street prices that are similar to, or higher than, the market-based off-street parking. The outcomes of this are probably similar to a simple version of demand-responsive pricing (since the market-based off-street prices are a benchmark) but vacancies are not the explicit target in setting prices.

And cities could certainly do performance pricing even without restricting parking supply. In fact, this is a key point I am trying to make with this post.

4. Performance-pricing SHOULD be more politically palatable than parking restrictions

Actually, I should say first that even parking restraint CAN be clever politics, at least in city centers and at least compared with some of the other ways to tame traffic. For example, parking restraint is one of the secrets behind Berlin's traffic limitation strategies and was achieved without much political backlash. CBD parking limitation is certainly much more widespread around the world than congestion pricing, for example!

But beyond transit-oriented CBDs, parking restrictions tend to be unpopular. There are many places where it is currently politically impossible to restrict parking supply and to deliberately drive parking prices higher.

This confusion is an obstacle to performance-pricing reform

Now you should be able to see why I have tried so hard to emphasize that performance pricing is NOT the same thing as using parking for travel demand management or traffic restraint.

Performance pricing SHOULD be possible even in places that have no local political appetite for traffic restraint. But not if the two keep getting conflated in people's minds.

An overpricing trap in simple versions of performance pricing for parking?

2012-01-31T18:01:00.000+08:00

In my last post I asked if imperfect versions of performance pricing are better than none at all. My answer: generally yes. Taking small steps towards demand responsive pricing for on-street parking is usually a good idea (for reasons to be explained in future posts).

But I can see at least one mistake to avoid: over-pricing.

In imperfect approximations of demand-responsive parking pricing, it would be easy to over-price parking. This would create too many vacancies and make the whole idea vulnerable to objections that it is killing local businesses.

High-quality performance pricing has an answer to that: if motorists really stop coming, then the prices will drop again until the problem is solved and, in any case, the prices will not rise past the point that gives 15% vacancies.

But rough-and-ready versions of demand-responsive pricing might indeed need to be careful not to over-price at certain places and certain times. This mistake could be tempting for at least two reasons. Today I will talk about one of them.

Simple versions of performance pricing can only vary their prices on a coarse scale.

For example, you might have just three prices (zero, basic and peak) with two pricing zones and two time periods in which to apply these prices.

For example, the American town of Nashua, NH, has just started a basic version of performance pricing. Its downtown area now has three pricing zones: Zone 1 (red): 25 cents per 15 minutes (or $1 an hour), Zone 2 (blue): 25 cents per 20 minutes (or 75 cents an hour), and Zone 3 (green): 25 cents per 30 minutes (or 50 cents an hour).

Now, if you aim for vacancies at the really busy places and times within a large zone and over a long pricing-period, you would end up accidentally overpricing parking for part of the zone and for some of the time. Oops.

We don't yet have many examples to analyze but I think the danger is real.

After all, overpricing can happen even when on-street pricing is NOT demand responsive. For example, Donald Shoup was critical of the City of Los Angeles last year.

Two years ago the city doubled meter rates everywhere, and I’ve since seen entire blocks where there isn’t a single car parked at a meter. The prices should come down on these blocks...
...
Meter rates were based on revenue when the city doubled meter rates everywhere, with a minimum $1 an hour, two years ago. Since most meters had been 25¢ an hour, that meant quadrupling the price at most meters. Rates at most of the city’s meters had not changed at all in the previous 18 years. Inertia had been the city’s policy, not maximum revenue or good management.

The SFPark trial in San Fransciso is also revealing that the previous flat parking prices must have involved overpricing many streets at many times. How do we know? Because many of the price adjustments under SFPark have been price REDUCTIONS due to very low occupancy rates.

These arguments also suggest that performance pricing should be introduced step-by-step and cautiously. And, in fact, even though SFPark is 'gold standard' performance pricing, it is being introduced in small steps, with only small price changes allowed, and only once per month. The discussion above suggests that such caution could be even more important if your pricing is not 'gold standard' and will not be varying much in time or space.

Do you have any examples of cities falling into the trap of over-pricing when adopting simple performance pricing? Or maybe I am wrong to worry about this?

Is performance parking pricing an "all or nothing" thing?

2012-01-28T13:08:00.000+08:00

There is a gold standard for making on-street parking prices responsive to demand. But what if your city can only take baby steps? What if it can only manage a 'silver standard' or 'bronze standard' for performance pricing?

The gold standard is to make sure that on-street parking prices vary across both space and time so that every stretch of street has roughly one of every eight parking spaces open all of the time. San Francisco's SFPark trial is doing this with the help of smart electronic parking meters and parking sensors in the ground. It aims to match the ideal of performance pricing very closely.

[By the way, if this idea is new to you then you may like to read about performance-pricing basics first.]

Making parking prices more demand-responsive is one of the reform ideas in Adaptive Parking. One of the ways in which Adaptive Parking is a little different from Donald Shoup's recommendations on parking policy is that it suggests the modest goal of making parking "more demand responsive" rather than calling for "performance pricing", period.

So Adaptive Parking encourages small steps in the right direction in the hope that performance pricing can be made more attractive to more places, even if the gold-standard version seems way too daunting.

An article in the Vancouver Sun mentioned this issue last week. Neil Podmore, of Vancouver-based PayByPhone, was quoted:

“I think Vancouver has actually been ahead of San Francisco and L.A. for a long time. They realized that on-street parking was a valuable commodity, that it ought to be broadly market-based and they haven’t thrown a lot of money into technology,” he said. “There is a big question in the industry as to whether you need to invest $10,000 per parking space in order to get near-real-time-based parking. Vancouver hasn’t gone that way so they’ve been efficient with the money they spend for the money they get.”

So is a highly-imperfect approximation of performance pricing a step in the right direction?

Saturated parking in Brickfields in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Do even small steps towards responsive parking prices offer benefits? Or are there risks? For example, could some halfway-houses of performance pricing be vulnerable politically? Does doing this in half measures run the risk of being seen as a failure? Could it give the whole idea a bad name?

I will tackle these questions in several posts over the next week or so.

Here is a brief preview of some of the points I will make:

Yes, I believe that small steps towards the ideal are better than none (usually).
But there is some danger. Over-pricing could derail the reforms.
On the other hand, under-pricing certain places and times is less risky for the reform process.
Sending a strong and clear signal that creating vacancies is the primary focus of parking pricing should be a valuable step, even before we change anything else.

Parking reform wins 2012 Sustainable Transport Award

2012-01-26T09:10:00.000+08:00

San Francisco's parking reforms, including SFPark, have made it joint winner (with Medellin, Colombia) of the 8th annual Sustainable Transport Award announced in Washington, D.C. on 24 January.

San Francisco's nomination profile explains:

San Francisco is a 2012 Sustainable Transport Award nominee for its implementation of SFPark, an innovative new parking and traffic demand management system, and its “Pavement to Parks” program that reclaims street and parking spaces for public spaces.

SFPark is a a demand-pricing based approach to parking management in commercial districts around the city. Over the past year, the city tested its new parking management system at 7,000 of San Francisco’s 28,800 metered spaces and 12,250 spaces in 15 of 20 city-owned parking garages. Despite much initial concern, the program has been well received in its test neighborhoods, helping local businesses and making the streets more pleasant for the huge populations of transit riders and people on foot and bicycle.

The Pavement to Parks program has created new street plazas and many new parklets (sidewalk platforms that replace car parking spaces) by reclaiming street space in partnerships with businesses and other community groups around the city. The parklets program has captured international attention, prompting a host of other cities to begin their own programs, from New York City to Vancouver.

SFPark's website provides details information on the emerging variations in the price of on-street parking.

The Sustainable Transport Award is run by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) and nominees and winners are chosen by a steering committee from various leading organisations working on sustainable transport issues. Previous winners include Guangzhou, Ahmedabad, New York City and Seoul.

Your reactions? Does SF deserve its award?

Tangled up in equity arguments

2012-01-23T17:51:00.000+08:00

The rise of performance pricing for parking is provoking equity-based objections.

As an example, let's take a look at the equity arguments quoted by the Boston Globe article on performance pricing which I mentioned last week. I liked it for mentioning that market pricing can shake up how we think about parking. But I wasn't so impressed by its take on the equity implications:

If Back Bay spots floated up to a market price, lower-income drivers would effectively lose access to parking spaces that they have as much legal right to as anyone else. The result, ultimately, would be a city where the rich have access to whatever spots they want, while everybody else has to settle for what’s affordable.

I care about equity and I agree that parking policy has important equity implications but this paragraph seems deeply muddled to me.

How does having the 'legal right' to park have anything to do with how parking should be priced? I have a 'legal right' to rent an apartment in the most prestigious street in my city. The fact that I, like most people, can't afford to do so has nothing to do with whether apartments should be market-priced. Of course, if significant numbers of people can't afford any decent shelter we must look for solutions. In market economies, those solutions are (usually) targeted and don't abolish market pricing for real estate generally. In any case, surely parking in busy urban streets is much less of a basic need than housing.

This brings me to 'compulsory car' thinking, which is a culprit in many of these equity objections. Many people seem to assume that driving is the only (tolerable) way to move around or that most drivers have little or no choice. They assume that if you can't afford to park in an area, then you can't afford to go there. Many people seem to be thinking of parking and driving as a basic necessity, like water. We do price water of course, but the politics of pricing for basic needs is always tricky. Highly automobile dependent societies, like the USA, are naturally especially prone to compulsory car thinking. However, the places where parking is scarce enough for performance prices to be high also tend to be the kind of dense urban places that are richest in mobility alternatives. Cars are one option among many and are clearly not a basic need in order to reach such places, even when such a place is located within a generally auto-dependent metropolitan area.

It is a pity the Boston Globe journalist didn't dig further into the connection between equity worries and how we frame parking as a good (which was a strong point in the story).

For example, on-street parking is owned by the community as a whole. But is it like space on an uncrowded beach or is it more like city-owned tennis courts in a popular urban park in a dense city? Both are publicly-owned but their pricing stories are different. Pricing the space on an empty beach is unlikely (and in any case, the 'performance price' there would be zero!). But pricing municipal tennis courts seems reasonable (at least in dense places) since tennis involves relatively few people using up a lot of space. Having 'peak pricing' for tennis courts (higher prices for high-demand times like weekends) also seems acceptable (here are some examples from London). And underpricing of tennis courts would cause nothing worse than a waiting list, whereas under-priced on-street parking causes traffic chaos and disruption. So why are some people so suspicious of performance pricing for on-street parking?

Two eminent left-of-center American economists are also quoted in the article:

“My first reaction was that this is going to create a huge issue of equity,” said University of Oregon economist Mark Thoma, who publicly voiced this concern in a 2010 blog post responding to a New York Times op-ed arguing for demand-based pricing.

Robert Reich, former labor secretary and professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, who recently lamented the creep of privatization into public life, points out that the current system has a kind of equity built in: People who make less money, and can’t afford to park in a garage, can instead invest their time in the search for a cheap metered space. “Which is best? It depends in part on how much time you have relative to how much money,” Reich wrote in an e-mail. “Upper-income people have more of the latter, of course, which makes the allocation-by-price system better for them. But it’s far from clear it’s the best system for everyone.”

Now I respect these two economists enormously but I don't think they have thought this parking issue through.

For example, there is a hidden assumption here that the status quo is fair. Why assume that? It seems likely that there are often more low-income people among the victims of cruising for parking (such as bus users) than among the beneficiaries of the under-priced parking.

Here is another way to think about the lack of fairness of the status quo. Imagine a city with a long-standing system of performance pricing for its on-street parking. Would a cap on parking prices really be high on your list of ways to improve equity of access to prime locations in this city? Would such a cap accurately target the people who really need most help? Would the poor really receive a big share of the benefit?

There is much more to be said on equity and performance-pricing but that is enough for one blog post.

What do you think?

Parking protection rackets

2012-01-20T13:53:00.003+08:00

South Africa's informal car guards were featured this week in the New York Times in an article that highlights the stories of the guards as well as the problems with this practice.

It is a phenomenon that happens around the world.

Latin America has them. Mexico City's informal parking attendants have been featured in various media. Last year I saw an informal car guard operating on a Sunday along a restaurant/market street in the beautiful Buenos Aires district of Palermo Viejo.

They are widespread around Asia too. They were familiar when I lived in Malaysia for several years. My father-in-law, a police officer in Singapore in the 1960s, tells me that 'jaga kereta' (Malay for car guard) were also common in Singapore at that time.

Informal parking attendants provoke polarized opinions. Car guards are often feared and loathed. But their existence also reflects serious unemployment and poverty problems, so that a draconian enforcement approach seems harsh and unfair.

My report on Parking Policy in Asian Cities for the ADB makes the point that this phenomenon seems to emerge to fill a vacuum:

If parking in a vicinity is not managed efficiently by governments, informal fee collectors may step in, as seen in Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and some Indian cities. In Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Manila such activities occur whenever and wherever the official fee collection system is absent but where demand remains high.

So the car guard phenomenon is best understood as a sign of our failure to manage on-street parking properly.

These guys are telling us something important. Where parking is saturated for long periods of the day, then motorists will be willing to pay for parking. If cities don't do the pricing, then informal attendants often will.

Harsh action against them is futile (others take their place) and just hurts people who are already poor and marginalised. But the actions of illegal parking guards ARE often problematic. Wouldn't it be better to provide legitimate employment to legal parking attendants by improving and expanding legal parking fee collection systems? This would enhance the level of security and trust on both sides of the transaction.

Indian cities are an interesting case. Most have legal parking attendants, providing employment and managing parking (after a fashion). That is a start. But with weak contractual arrangements and very low prices, the contractors are often tempted to overcharge. The City of Makati in Metro Manila does a better job, with uniformed attendants wielding digital devices.

Arresting illegal parking attendants is not going to solve the problem. Filling the vacuum with legitimate parking management may.

A Makati parking attendant with digital device.

Do you have any insights or anecdotes on informal parking attendants or car guards?

"A rethinking of what parking is in the first place"

2012-01-16T16:12:00.000+08:00

If your parking policy debates are going in circles, there is a good chance the protagonists are 'framing' parking in totally different ways.

They have different ideas about 'what parking is in the first place', as the Boston Globe's Leon Neyfakh puts in in his short feature, which focuses on the rise of performance pricing for parking in US cities.

I have written before that parking debates often involve different ways to frame the whole idea of parking. So I liked this bit in the article:

At one level, the idea is a novel piece of urban engineering made possible because of new parking technology. But at another, it amounts to a rethinking of what parking is in the first place — not a public resource to be shared by all, but a scarce commodity whose price should fluctuate depending on how badly people want it.

Possible translation into policy-speak: parking is not a public good, it is a private good which can have a market price.

Does that claim shock you?

How could parking in public space (such as in a street) be a private good? Well, you need to understand that when policy wonks use the term 'private good' they do NOT necessarily mean it must be privatized. It just means that it is both rivalrous and excludable.

Now, you CAN try to pretend that parking is a public good if you really want to. This means you would refuse to ration it (or 'exclude' some people some of the time). But, unfortunately, you can't magically stop parking from being rivalrous. If I am parking in a specific spot you can't park there at the same time. So you end up not with a public good but with a common-property resource (or 'commons good'). This means it is non-excludable (or inconvenient to exclude) but it is rivalrous (or 'subtractable'). It also means that you are likely to face a tragedy of the commons situation, such as saturated parking with lots of cruising for parking and much moaning about the parking 'shortage'.

Image from Living Economics

By the way, we have lots of choices on how to manage common-pool resources. Shifting them into the private goods box (eg by pricing it or allocating property rights) is one approach. Others include central planning or local community solutions, such as the common property regimes highlighted by Elinor Ostrum's Nobel winning work on common pool resources).

Further into the article we can see some of these ideas applied to parking and expressed in everyday English:

At the heart of the early resistance to meters was a sense of entitlement to free street parking that has endured in America to this day. We carry a deep-seated belief that people should be free to go where they please on the streets we’ve built, and that a city’s curb space is public — that, like air and water, it belongs to everyone.
To Shoup and his adherents, this is the wrong way to see it: Curbside parking isn’t a shared resource, like Boston Common, but rather a valuable piece of real estate, managed by the city, that should be priced according to what it’s worth. As Shoup put it, “We have a problem with parking exceptionalism in this country. Somehow people think that the normal laws of supply and demand don’t apply.”

So Shoup's thinking on parking, even on-street parking, sees it as a 'private good' (in the policy-wonk sense of the term). This causes dismay to people who are thinking of it as somehow 'public' or 'common'.

This post was about on-street parking. What about off-street parking? That's a whole different story. Conventional parking policy treats off-street parking as like the restrooms we require with each building and we should probably treat parking more like the cooked-food outlets that the market provides and planners usually allow in any walkable district. More on that some other time.

Are parking debates where you live going in circles? Is it because of different ideas about what parking is in the first place?

Demand-responsive parking prices: a key element of Adaptive Parking

2012-01-14T09:25:00.003+08:00

If your town or city wants a parking system that is fair and efficient and which adapts itself easily to changing conditions then you will also need parking prices that adapt to changing conditions.

Pricing parking is controversial but there is no getting away from its importance for improving parking outcomes.

So a shift towards performance pricing for parking is a key part of the Adaptive Parking agenda. The barriers are political, not practical. We have the technology.

SFPark's performance pricing uses smart parking meters like this one.

One key reason to make parking pricing more responsive to demand has been well explained by Donald Shoup. It is to reduce cruising for parking. In districts with saturated on-street parking an alarming percentage of traffic consists of motorists searching for a local parking spot. This is totally unnecessary traffic caused by mismanaged parking!

In the Adaptive Parking agenda I would extend this reason a bit further and take aim at ALL queuing for parking (including queues outside parking lots and even invisible queues, like waiting lists for permits).

Why extend performance pricing to minimizing all queuing for parking? Because a second reason to want responsive parking prices is to better reveal market prices for parking in each neighbourhood.

Even private sector parking prices can be unresponsive. There is an adage in the parking industry that many operators set their prices by simply 'looking across the street'. Many organizations have long waiting lists for employee parking permits. A broader approach to performance pricing might seek ways to reduce such queues and make parking prices more responsive and less sticky so that they more accurately reflect current conditions.

This post is the third in a series explaining the basics of Adaptive Parking. Performance pricing is the second key reform principle in the Adaptive Parking list. The first was to encourage more parking to be open to the public or shared.

Would more responsive parking prices make sense for your community?

India debates proof-of-parking laws

2011-12-01T09:06:00.000+08:00

An issue to watch. Several Indian states are considering 'proof-of-parking' laws and a central government committee has given the idea a boost.

Some background

Since the 1950s, registering a car in Japan has involved proving to local police that you have access to an off-street parking space near your home. The intention in Japan has always been to make sure its narrow streets are not clogged with parked vehicles. The policy was NOT explicitly aimed at restricting car ownership. A key result has been to create a market for priced off-street parking even in residential areas. There is more detail on Japan's experience in my report for the ADB, 'Parking Policy in Asian Cities'.

Korea's island province of Cheju has also been giving it a try in recent years.

In India, the small, far-east state of Mizoram enacted such a policy last year. Sikkim followed suit and Karnataka has expressed strong interest, prompted by Bangalore's parking problems.

Does anyone have updated news on these proof-of-parking initiatives in Korea and India?

India's renewed proof-of-parking debate

India's latest debate on this was sparked in mid-October this year by a central government review, the report of the so-called Sundar Committee on the amendment of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988. Please note that the committee's recommendations have not yet been accepted by the Government of India.

On page 27 of the proposed new version of the Act point 29 (via the Ministry of Road Transport), 'Registration, how to be made' includes this:

(2) The application for registration shall be accompanied by such proof of parking space as may be prescribed by the State Government.

That's it! This seems to leave all of the details, and whether to do anything at all, to the state governments.

Early reactions

Perspectives on the proof-of-parking suggestion in the Sundar report were diverse.

Via a DNA report:

Nitin Dossa of the Western India Automobile Association (WIAA) criticised the Sunder Committee, saying that the recommendations were far from practical. “It is the duty of the government to see to it that enough parking for cars is provided,” Dossa said.

Amardeep Singh Hora of the Responsible Road Users’ Club (RRUC) said, “It is an impractical idea. People will start providing fake proofs of parking. When you don’t even have clear demarcations of parking and no-parking areas on roads, how can such a radical idea be implemented?”

A senior official from the transport department said, “The ratio of vehicle population to the road length in Mumbai is already the lowest in the country. This idea needs to be implemented as it is one of the important ways to control the ballooning vehicle population, which has made commuting on roads such a nightmare.”

Meanwhile, transport analyst Ashok Datar said, “This is a very important initiative. The initiative will help curb the rising number of vehicles on roads. We should not ignore this at all.”

And from another DNA report:

VN More, Maharashtra transport commissioner, said the government wants this clause to be incorporated in the motor vehicles act. More, who was at the meeting in New Delhi, said this would go a long way in solving the city’s parking problem. “Roads are meant for the movement of cars and not for illegally parking cars,” More said. “Cars parked illegally on roads make it difficult for other cars to move freely. In a space-starved city like Mumbai, we should make optimum use of roads.”

What do you think? Is such a policy desirable? Is it feasible? Would it just create new corruption opportunities? Has the debate moved on since October?

From private parking to public parking: part of the Adaptive Parking agenda

2011-11-09T15:40:00.000+08:00

Alvin drives to a shopping district. First he needs some pliers, so he parks his car in the parking lot of the hardware store. Next he needs the bank, some stamps and a haircut. All are available nearby so he leaves the car where it is and heads off on foot. When he returns to the car, the owner of the hardware shop is angry that he parked there for an hour while running other errands.
Who is right?

The hardware shop parking is private and intended for customers. So maybe its owner has a point. But Alvin did buy something and it would have been ridiculous to get in the car to drive 50 metres for fruit, then again for banking, and again for the haircut. It seemed natural, once he was parked, to treat the hardware shop parking lot as public parking.

We have a conflict and a dilemma. The free private parking that is encouraged by conventional parking policy becomes a source of conflict in mixed-use neighbourhoods. By contrast, both parking management and market-oriented approaches to parking (such as Adaptive Parking), encourage public parking which is well-suited to such areas.

Don't be confused by the word 'public' here. I am not talking about government-owned parking. I am talking about parking that is open to the general public. So public parking is often privately owned.

The conventional suburban approach to parking policy assumes that most parking will be associated with just one premises. In fact, it asserts this as the norm by requiring parking with every development. In extremely automobile-oriented locations, such parking is private simply because many parking lots and buildings are isolated.

This Jeff Tumlin graphic illustrates how parking arrangements in car-oriented suburbia inflate both parking demand and traffic.

Destinations like those portrayed above have nowhere else to walk to easily. So they don't worry too much about spillover and they usually don't need signs like this one below.

However, we have a problem when suburban-style parking policy is imposed on places that are even slightly more dense and urban. Ample parking requirements often keep parking prices at zero. But parking once and then walking seems the natural thing to do. The assumption that each parking lot serves its own premises clashes with the reality of walkable neighbourhoods with multiple destinations. So we see disputes like Alvin's with the hardware store owner.

The Oregonian's commuting columnist and blogger, Joseph Rose, grappled with a similar real-life example in April (although in that case, the on-street parking is priced). And here is a follow-up.

Adaptive Parking prefers public parking over private.

In fact, this is one of the five central reform principles for Adaptive Parking, which aims to get more of the benefits of market responsiveness into our parking systems.

Why does Adaptive Parking call for more parking to be open to the public (or at least shared) and for less of it to be private? Primarily because Adaptive Parking seeks market responsiveness in parking. This requires park-once districts. And, for various reasons, park-once districts work best with most of their parking open to the public.

Here is the park-once district alternative in another Jeff Tumlin diagram. By the way, the Atlantic Cities profiled Jeff's parking work recently.

If your community decides that it likes the idea of Adaptive Parking, you will need to promote park-once districts with mostly public parking and discourage the practice of keeping parking private.

But how would that solve the conflict between Alvin and the hardware store owner? Adaptive Parking would encourage all of the businesses in the area to make their parking public and open to each other's customers and clients. If demand is high enough, it would also encourage them to price their parking using performance pricing. This would ensure parking availability in the area and allow retailers to stop worrying about free riders, like Alvin, parking in their lots.

Introducing Adaptive Parking

2011-11-03T13:50:00.001+08:00

I ended a recent talk in Delhi with a few words on 'Adaptive Parking'. Now I want to start explaining it in more detail. I also want your feedback so please leave a comment.

So what is Adaptive Parking?

I suggest the name 'Adaptive Parking' for various parking policy reforms that focus on increasing the market responsiveness of our parking systems.

Parking policy in a city that embraces Adaptive Parking would have a clear focus on this goal of making parking more market responsive or adaptive.

But market-responsiveness does not have to be the ONLY goal. You could still use parking policy as a tool for worthy objectives like traffic restraint or helping local retail businesses. But with Adaptive Parking, you would make sure to pursue such goals in ways that also preserve market responsiveness in the parking system.

Parking arrangements in suburban centres are usually far from adaptive. Supply is heavily regulated to produce oversupply, so that the price is zero, killing most market processes in parking. Most parking is private (customer or employees only) so even occasional localised demand in excess of supply will cause a spillover problem and prompt pleas for even more supply.

Guiding Principles for Adaptive Parking reform

In my Delhi presentation, I introduced some principles for putting Adaptive Parking reforms into practice. I think that any jurisdiction that wants to pursue Adaptive Parking would need to progressively do the following:

encourage more parking to be open to the public or at least shared;
foster more demand-responsive parking pricing;
compromise with stakeholders (when necessary) to integrate their interests into the reforms;
allow parking supply to be more responsive to conditions;
ensure enough alternatives and/or competition among parking facilities, so that people have options.

There is also a prerequisite. Before starting on Adaptive Parking your city will need to get good enough control of on-street parking and parking in public places to deter disruptive nuisance parking.

Maybe you have other suggestions on how best to implement Adaptive Parking? If so, please leave a comment.

Market-oriented yes. Market fundamentalist no.

Adaptive Parking, as defined here, is part of a market-oriented stream in parking policy thinking. This stream also includes most of the work of Donald Shoup. It also includes Gabriel Roth’s contributions in the 1960s (PDF).

Parking reforms would not have to be 'market fundamentalist' to fit my definition of Adaptive Parking. So Adaptive Parking does not require all parking to face a strict market test. Nor would it demand total deregulation. It does not even require the complete elimination of all subsidies or cross-subsidies. If you pursued Adaptive Parking reform vigorously enough, you could end up with strongly market-based parking. But I see Adaptive Parking as anything that nudges a parking system in that general direction, towards greater market responsiveness. It does not necessarily demand that you go all the way to an ideal of 'free market parking'.

For example, a parking reform that increases the ability of parking supply to adjust in light of real demand fits the bill even if it falls far short of deregulating parking supply completely. A reform that makes parking prices a bit more responsive to the balance of demand and supply can be an Adaptive Parking reform, even if it doesn't achieve perfect performance pricing.

How YOU can help

In the months ahead, I plan to post much more about Adaptive Parking. I hope you will help develop this parking reform agenda by offering your feedback, questions, criticisms, objections and suggestions.

I will be arguing that Adaptive Parking reform is promising. I think it offers ways to gradually escape the trap of conventional suburban parking policy, even in automobile dependent suburban areas. It may even offer a chance to do so without being vulnerable to accusations of social engineering.

Parking arrangements in Japanese cities tend to be relatively adaptive. Free parking is the exception not the rule. Most neighbourhoods have market-priced commercial parking with various facilities to choose from. There are minimum parking requirements for large buildings but small buildings are exempted and the requirements are modest. 'Spillover' is normal and expected and not much of a problem, since motorists have come to expect that they will have to look for priced public parking near their destination.

Around the block: parking policy links

2011-10-31T22:38:00.001+08:00

Reinventing Parking has been too quiet lately. Sorry!

Here is a quick 'links' post to help me get going with blogging again. By the way, most of these links are drawn from my Twitter feed (where I tweet about parking as well as some wider urban transport themes). I haven't been in the habit of re-posting them here. But I think I should.

Macau is proposing to vary its parking fees by area and time - making it costlier to park in peak hours and in the busiest areas. It looks like they are thinking of this in terms of traffic restraint rather than making parking occupancy the focus of pricing decisions.

John Van Horn at Parking Today blog picked up on my coining of the term "Adaptive Parking" in my last post here. Encouraging. Thanks John!

A Westfield shopping centre in Brisbane just started charging for parking (the first three hrs are free) in order to deter 'free-riders' using it as a park-and-ride lot. Seems reasonable to me, but local reactions seem to range from shock to horror.

Streets Blog has a series of posts on parking reforms brewing in New York City. There are some promising signs and some rather worrying ones.

Park-and-ride Metro-North parking lots in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City have multi-year waits for passes and some screwed up pricing policies. Felix Salmon had some brief and pertinent comments (but a misleading headline).

Parking reform in California that would have prevented local governments from having excessively high parking minimums near transit stops (among other reforms) has been killed by lobbying.

Creative parking policy reforms in Montgomery County, Maryland. Nelson/Nygaard helped the county navigate a minefield to achieve pro-urban parking policy settings in its urban districts. But abolishing parking minimums was a step too far.

The unfairness of Delhi's extremely low parking prices: The Hindu.

UK's coalition government has announced parking policy changes. Not good. Thoughtful commentary here and here.

Fascinating first hand insights on how residential parking works in urban Japan.

Promising Parking Policies Worldwide: Lessons for India?

2011-10-11T19:43:00.001+08:00

I have mentioned before that India's cities have dire parking problems and much heated debate over what to do about them.

I have strong views on the subject, informed in part by my study of parking policy in Asian cities. So I was happy to be invited to a 17 August conference in Delhi entitled 'International Conference on Parking Reforms for a Liveable City. It was organised by the environmental NGO, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), which is prominent in India's parking policy debates. It was a fascinating day, shared with parking folks from all over India and a few from other parts of the world. It was good to catch up with some old friends.

My presentation is embedded below. If you can't see it, here is a link to the pdf.

My key point was to ask where in the world India's cities might find useful and relevant models for parking policy. Unfortunately, Indian cities now seem to be following the least appropriate model, the USA's and Australia's suburban parking policy approach.

My talk also includes the first public airing of an approach to parking policy reform that I am calling Adaptive Parking. It brings together many of the ideas that I have been raising in this blog.

The Adaptive Parking reform agenda is based on Donald Shoup's approach but tries to extend it. It aims to make Shoup's market-oriented parking reform agenda general enough to be relevant to places very different from North America. It also offers guidance on how to move in that direction with baby steps even if your city is not ready to take on the whole package of Shoupista reforms.

I will be saying more about Adaptive Parking in the coming months. In the meantime, feedback on this presentation would be very welcome!

Promising Parking Policies Worldwide: Lessons for India?

View more presentations from Paul Barter

Other presentations at the conference included the following, all of which can be downloaded from the conference page:

Parking policy: Getting the principles right
By Anumita Roy Chowdhury
Europe’s Parking U-Turn
By Michael Kodransky
Parking Pricing as TDM Tool
By Dr. Errampalli Madhu
Parking Reforms for a Liveable City
By Sanjiv N. Sahai
Parking Demand Management Study for Central Delhi
By Piyush Kansal
Parking Reforms for a Liveable City
By Abhijit Lokre

Is $125,000 for a residential parking space too much?

2011-08-09T15:27:00.001+08:00

The China Daily reported last week on alarm in Chinese cities over high selling prices for parking spaces in residential complexes. The highest reported price was 800,000 yuan (or $125,000) recently for a parking space in an upmarket complex in Beijing.

Before you get too agitated, let's try to get some perspective. [And you can play too! Scroll down for a homework exercise.]

The info-graphic is actually a little misleading. Housing prices are quoted per square metre but parking prices are totals. It would be better to compare housing per square metre with parking per square metre.

To convert, we need to know the total space per parking slot. This can range from about 20 to 38 square metres depending on the layout and the form of the parking. These make a big difference to how much aisle space and space-consuming ramps are needed.

If we need 20 to 38 sq.m per parking spot, maybe it is really NOT so shocking that:

... the average price of a parking space in Xi'an, 170,000 yuan, is 31 times greater than the average square-meter price for residences, by far the biggest differential of seven cities surveyed.

This '31 times' actually means that Xi'an housing and parking are similar in price per square metre. And in the other cities, parking is usually cheaper than housing. For example, if we assume 30 sq.m per parking slot on average, then Nanjing parking is priced at about 4,000 yuan per square metre on average compared with 12,000 per sq.m for housing.

Here is a homework exercise (please share answers in the comments). Next time you see a breathless news report about a sky-high sales price for a parking space, divide by thirty and compare with the price per square metre for real-estate floor space in the area (or divide by 300 and compare with the price per square foot if you must).

You may ask, why compare the parking prices with the housing prices at all? After all, underground parking can't usually be converted to housing. True. But if the price per square metre of parking rises above that of housing you would expect developers to start building more parking anyway as a profitable venture. So it is worth comparing. And by the way, if the data are reliable, then it looks like Xi'an may already be close to that point.

Another perspective is based on the cost of construction. From the article:

Zhang, the property market supervisor, said the average construction cost of a regular underground parking space is about 3,000 yuan per square meter. An individual parking space takes up about 38 square meters, accounting for supporting facilities such as ramps and aisles. So the average cost of each parking spot is about 114,000 yuan.

So Zhang seems to be saying that 114,000 yuan would be a reasonable price to charge for a parking slot. But wait a minute. Property prices are a market phenomenon. And parking is being treated more or less like real estate in this situation. So we shouldn't really expect its price to just reflect costs.

Of course, housing and parking prices in China's cities might BOTH be in a bubble! But that is another issue.

Will the price of residential parking just keep rising in Chinese cities? I think not. One reason is that newly increased parking minimums can be expected to gradually increase supply (at least in areas with a lot of new development) and send prices lower if it gets ahead of demand. One source in the article thinks this likely:

According to national standards, three parking spaces were required to accommodate 10 households in a residential development before 2006. Now, six to eight spaces must be available for every 10 households.

Yu thinks that shortages of parking spaces in residential areas will gradually ease in the future and prices will go down. "Let the market do the adjusting," Yu said.

But even without this government-imposed increase in supply, market forces would also put a lid on prices at some point. At some point, investors would notice if parking is a profitable thing to build. Maybe they already are? If so, expect to see automated parking structures appearing in established neighbourhoods with pricy parking.

On the other hand, this market response will not happen if price controls kick in. China's cities have price controls on other kinds of parking, so they might easily be tempted to impose them here too. Indeed, the article quotes calls for regulation to prevent price escalation.

"It's about time the sale of parking spaces was regulated," said Zhang Jigang, director of property market supervision in Northwest China's Shaanxi province. "Some developers have been making excessive profits and this has affected social stability."
The Shaanxi Housing and Urban-Rural Development Department issued the country's first directive on the sale of parking spaces on June 10. The regulations allow market forces to set prices, but ban overpricing. They also say that the annual increase in prices must be below that for housing.

One final comment. What we are seeing here is unbundled parking. It is actually a very good thing.

Why so little progress on eliminating parking minimums?

2011-08-02T23:13:00.000+08:00

One of Donald Shoup's two big suggestions, performance parking pricing, is slowly but surely taking off. But his other major policy thrust, eliminating minimum parking requirements, is being widely ignored.

Here is Don Shoup in an interview with John Van Horn of the Parking Today magazine (It is quite a good read. Take a look!):

... I wanted to show that minimum parking requirements damage cities, the economy and the environment. The first 272 pages of the book are essentially an attack on minimum parking requirements, and no one has risen to defend them. Nevertheless, most city planners continue to set minimum parking requirements as though nothing had happened.

... Although the planning profession’s lack of interest in reforming off-street parking requirements has been disappointing, I was surprised and delighted by the interest in charging market prices for curb parking.

So, despite widespread attacks on parking minimums there are very few takers for eliminating them (or even reducing them!).

There seems to be next to no interest in such reform in auto-oriented suburbs where the parking minimums are at their most extreme. Even worse, various rapidly motorising countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America are keener than ever on minimum parking requirements, despite all the warnings about them from people like ITDP and GIZ's SUTP programme.

What are we doing wrong? Why is it so hard to shift this bad policy?

Without getting too much into the public policy theories on why some policy proposals take off and some don't, here (below the fold) are a few possibilities.

The idea of minimum parking requirements is very simple: just require every site to have enough parking. People get it. They don't care (or know) that in actual practice there is enormous complexity. They are not aware of the foolishness of parking minimums that are determined with great precision but little accuracy. It is tough to shake people's faith in the simple mantra that development sites must be made responsible for their own parking demand.

The problems caused by parking minimums are 'chronic' (long-term and relatively intangible) not 'acute' (painful here and now... 'ouch'). They are not very salient to most people and they are hard to explain. The resulting inefficiencies don't stand up and wave big signs saying 'parking minimums caused me!' It takes some analysis and explaining to see them. How many people know that parking minimums make the rejuvenation and re-use of inner city buildings very difficult? How many people know that parking minimums make housing less affordable?

So if your idea of a parking problem is when you can't easily find a free space, you may be happy with parking in car-oriented suburbs. And no-one blames parking minimums for their parking search frustrations in inner cities.

Wait a minute! The oceans of parking in automobile dependent landscapes are not invisible! But for people who have lived all their lives in such places, all that parking just seems normal. It doesn't register as a problem, except when it is full. I certainly didn't question it as I grew up in the Australian suburbs.

Even worse, eliminating parking minimums provokes fears of spillover. I think spillover is a bogey monster, which would cease to be a problem if we did parking policy right. But it is a bogey that most people find much easier to visualise than the problems caused by the minimums. And without smarter parking policies, I guess they have reason to worry.

Shoupistas are obviously having a hard time persuading people that performance pricing means never having to worry about spillover. The connection is not obvious enough perhaps.

And the prospect of new pricing then gets portrayed as a problem in itself. It seems to provoke horror for many suburbanites who are used to free parking everywhere they go.

Pricing shouldn't be so frightening in inner cities of course. But I guess it doesn't help that many of the new trials of performance pricing are not also implementing the sweetener policy that Shoup says should always go with it: returning on-street parking revenue to the area that generates it via parking benefit districts.

Do YOU have a good explanation for the surprising resilience of parking minimums in the face of all the attacks on them? How could parking reformers do better on this one?

Photo by Flickr user Zach Bonnell

Parking Policy in Asian Cities: final report now available from the Asian Development Bank

2011-07-15T07:40:00.000+08:00

The final book form of my study of "Parking Policy in Asian Cities" is now available for purchase or free download via the website of the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

Even if you have already seen the earlier 'consultants report' version, you will find this final version valuable for its professional editing and layout and as the definitive version to use as a reference.

I hope this will help participants in parking policy debates around the region think more clearly about key parking policy choices.

Description

Most Asian cities are facing an acute parking crisis as a result of rapid urbanization and motorization, and high urban densities. Parking policy is an important component of a holistic approach to sustainable urban transport across the region. The report provides an international comparative perspective on parking policy in Asian cities, while highlighting the nature of the policy choices available. It is a step in building a knowledge base to address the knowledge gap on parking and the lack of adequate guidance for parking policy in Asia.

Contents

Executive Summary
Introduction
Approaches to Parking Supply Policy
Minimum Parking Requirements and Parking Built with Buildings
Parking Policy in Streets and Lanes
Government Resources Devoted to Off-Street Parking Supply
Policy toward Public Parking as a Business
Parking as a Mobility Management Tool
Car Parking Outcomes in Asian Cities
Motorcycle Parking
Parking Policy Trajectories?
Policy Lessons and Conclusions
References
Appendixes

Many thanks again to everyone who helped along the way!

SFPark's first price review: some hikes, some decreases

2011-07-12T22:00:00.001+08:00

Many eyes are on San Francisco's trial of performance pricing for parking. The SFMTA has just announced its first price revisions under the SFPark trial.

Donald Shoup tweeted the link, calling it 'the world’s first parking price adjustments in response to parking occupancy rates'.

The announcement links to various details and data, including an easy-to-understand map (PDF).

In case you missed the earlier news about SFPark, the idea is to trial Donald Shoup's proposal for parking prices that target 15% vacancy rate at all times by making prices vary from place to place and time to time. The aim is to get enough vacancies to eliminate 'cruising for parking'. By the way, the Spring 2011 Access magazine has a concise update and summary of Shoup's parking policy suggestions and their uptake in various places.

So, in this SFPark price review, places and times with high parking occupancy rates see price rises, while blocks and times with low occupancy rates see price decreases. The small changes (never more than 50 cents at a time) that were just announced are the result of automatic monitoring over the last two months or so. Here is one of the maps.

These maps are fascinating. Suspicious souls have tended to assume that SFPark will all be about price increases. The maps show otherwise. Many blocks will have price decreases at various times. Some places that are close together see their prices moving in opposite directions.

These maps should demolish the simplistic idea that we can talk about a whole district having a parking shortage. Whenever you hear such a claim you should ask: Which section of which street do you mean? And at what specific times?

I am not too surprised by the patterns we see in the maps. But the details are still full of interest. And it remains to be seen how the prices evolve over time and at what rates they might settle down to.

But a much more important question is how this will go over in public perceptions and in the local political scene. THAT is what SFPark is really testing, I think. And it is the politics that will determine whether it truly becomes a model for others to emulate.

Who's afraid of the spillover bogey?

2011-07-04T22:56:00.001+08:00

No spillover please.

Is most parking policy based on fear of a phantom?

Spillover parking is nuisance parking that takes place outside a motorist's actual destination. And fear of Spillover Parking is central to all conventional parking policy.

But wait a minute. Is parking outside your destination automatically a nuisance or a problem?

Conventional parking policy assumes that spillover almost always IS a nuisance. But are we sure about that?

Someone must be pretty certain. After all, local governments all over the world enact costly regulations (minimum parking requirements) to make sure all premises have enough parking in the hope that no neighbouring business or resident need ever fear that horror-of-horrors, spillover parking.

What do parking reformers, such as parking management advocates or Shoupistas, think of spillover? Well, compared with supporters of conventional suburban parking policy, they are pretty relaxed about it. But still they mostly seem to talk about it as a problem (albeit one they are confident can be managed or minimised).

But is spillover really a problem in and of itself? Maybe parking reformers should stop saying "it is a problem but we can handle it" and instead say clearly that spillover is NOT the real problem at all. And maybe we should even proclaim that spillover can be a good thing!

Let me spell it out before you dismiss me as crazy.

Most previous parking policy conflates nuisance parking and spillover. But if you think about it for a moment, you will realise they are not necessarily the same thing at all. What does the ultimate destination of a vehicle's occupants have to do with whether their parking is a nuisance to others? Sure, there is often an overlap between the two categories but there is no necessary connection.

Most parking policy portrays spillover parking as an externality - like pollution - imposed by a development that does not have enough parking to meet its own demand.

But is pollution really a good analogy? Unlike the victims of a polluting factory, the neighbours of a development with a full parking lot are not helpless victims. We CAN prevent parking that we don't want. Or we could welcome it and price it (and maybe even profit from it). The same argument applies to spillover parking in the streets. It can be prevented with enforcement or it can be welcomed, managed and priced.

Spillover? Bring it on!

The spillover-as-pollution analogy rests on false assumptions. And the assumptions look even worse once you start thinking in terms of park-once neighbourhoods and stop assuming that parking and destinations have to have anything to do with each other.

In a park-once, shared-parking district, parking outside your destination is not a problem. And park-once, shared parking districts are, in many ways, a good thing that we should want more of.

So this is where we stand up and unashamedly say that spillover can be a good thing. We like park-once neighbourhoods but we can't have them without spillover! Spillover that is not a nuisance! Parking outside some of your destinations is the whole idea of a park-once district where motorists walk to various destinations after parking anywhere in the area. Park where? We don't care so long as it is legal and not a nuisance.

Deliberate parking crunch in Singapore's city centre?

2011-06-24T18:46:00.000+08:00

The imminent closure of one of Singapore's few stand-alone parking facilities, the Market Street Car Park, has provoked some breathless reporting on a supposed 'parking crunch' in the financial district here.*

A local journalist asked my opinion on Singapore CBD parking policy. He wanted to know if the Singapore government has been deliberately restricting the amount of parking in the central area, and if so, do I think it is a good idea. I spent some time on my comments, so I have adapted them into a post.

Singapore has been reducing its minimum parking requirements over the years, especially for the city centre**. Confusingly, many people here are under the impression that these policies amount to a restriction on parking in the CBD.

Huh? These are MINIMUM parking requirements, not maximums! How could parking minimums have anything to do with restricting parking?

Actually, developers have good reason to view the parking standards as maximums and not just as minimums. Why? Because only the required parking is exempted from counting as part of their allowed floor area (gross floor area, GFA) under the development controls (zoning). This means that if they build any more parking over and above the minimum requirements, they will have to reduce something else. And those ‘something elses’ (like shops, offices, hotel rooms, etc) earn much more revenue than parking (at least for now). So developers in Singapore apparently don't usually build any more than the minimum amount of parking.

So did the LTA and the Ministry of Transport set the new parking standards low in order to control traffic?

Maybe. Kind of. Hard to say. ... Here is what the Land Transport Master Plan 2008 says:

Besides ERP, parking policy is another lever that will restrain car usage. We will continue with the current approach where Government determines the minimum parking provision while car park operators determine the parking charges based on market demand. As we apply the prevailing parking provision standards (which have been progressively lowered since 1990) to new developments, and allow conversion of some excess parking spaces in old buildings, parking supply in the city will gradually decline over time and parking charges will rise.

They seem to be having it a little bit both ways. The official approach to setting parking standards is to aim to be realistic and to approximately match the actual demand. It seems that they must be setting the minimum parking requirements to ensure roughly ‘enough’ parking at roughly a reasonable or realistic price. But what prices are realistic? The quote above implies that the prices assumed are higher than the status quo.

Is Singapore CBD parking facing a crunch? Are prices too high?

Parking supply in the city centre of Singapore is probably roughly static but commercial floor space is increasing quite rapidly. In addition, the southeastward expansion of the CBD into Marina South is all happening under the newer lower parking standards, so that whole area is getting a lower ratio of parking to office space right from the start. So, with demand rising and supply static or rising much more slowly, prices are rising. Hence the perception of a 'crunch'. But is it a problem or out of the ordinary for the CBD of a major city? I don't think so.

One way to think about the ‘right price’ of parking is to ask if the returns from parking fees are high enough to match the alternative uses of that same space (this means thinking in terms of opportunity cost and thinking of parking as a form of real-estate). From that perspective, Singapore’s CBD parking still looks cheap. Remember the real-estate developers generally don't build extra parking because it earns less revenue than other uses of space.

* The closure of the Market Street Carpark actually has little to do with the LTA's parking requirement policies. It is a privately owned garage and its owner has decided to redevelop the site as an office building.

** Are you surprised that Singapore has minimum parking requirements at all within its very transit-oriented Central Business District? After all, many large Western cities have a zero minimum parking requirement in their CBDs. Singapore's CBD parking requirements are quite low (or at least they have been since the LTA lowered them in around 2003). Office buildings in the CBD are now required to have only one parking space per 450 square metre of floor space. But this is actually not extraordinarily low for a CBD location (after all it is above zero and it is still about double the requirements in Seoul’s central areas).

Asian parking policy surprises (magazine article)

2011-06-22T22:26:00.001+08:00

Global-is-Asian is the magazine of my employer, the LKY School of Public Policy, which is part of the National University of Singapore.

For the latest edition I contributed a summary of the key findings of the Parking Policy in Asian Cities study.

You can read it HERE, browse the whole magazine here or download the pdf for the magazine here.

TRB 2011 parking papers for browsing

2011-06-18T09:03:00.000+08:00

I attended my first TRB Annual Meeting in January this year. It was quite an experience.

Outside the 'Hinckley Hilton'

I have just realised that you can browse but not download many of the papers from the 2011 TRB 90th Annual Meeting via the Annual Meeting Online Portal. TRB stands for Transportation Research Board.

Here are links for browsing some of the parking papers:

Parking Requirements in Asia by Barter, Paul A.
Parking Pricing and Curbside Management in New York City by Schaller, Bruce; Maguire, Thomas; Stein, David; Ng, Willa; Blakeley, Manzell
Curbside Parking Management Processes: Analysis and Methods by Tivendale, Knowles; Tsigos, Anna
Parking Demand and Zoning Requirements for Suburban Multifamily Housing by Willson, Richard William; Roberts, Michael
Influential Factors Analysis in Travel Time Under Influence of On-Street Parking by Guo, Hongwei; Gao, Ziyou; Zhao, Xiaomei; Wang, Wuhong
Are Parking Requirements Binding? Evidence from New York City by McDonnell, Simon Thomas; Madar, Josiah; Been, Vicki
Food Shopping in the Urban Environment: Parking Supply, Destination Choice, and Mode Choice by Maley, Donald W.; Weinberger, Rachel R.
Death by a Thousand Curb-Cuts: How Minimum Parking Requirements Stimulate Driving by Weinberger, Rachel R.
Who Is Really Paying for Your Parking Space? Estimating the Marginal Implicit Value of Off-Street Parking Spaces for Condominiums in Central Edmonton, Canada by Jung, Owen
Exploring Parking Pricing for Congestion Management Using the SFCTA Activity-Based Regional Pricing Model by Zorn, Lisa
Space-Use Efficiency and Profitability Implications for Unbundled Parking: Case Study Research Using License Plate Recognition by Jones, Casey
Assessing Multifamily Residential Parking Demand and Transit Service: Comparison of Two Urban Centers in King County by Rowe, Daniel Hollis; Bae, Christine; Shen, Qing
Car Drivers’ Preferences Regarding Location and Contents of Parking Guidance Systems: Stated-Choice Approach by Van der Waerden, Peter J. H. J.

Please let me know if these links stop working.

Visual tour of Buenos Aires parking

2011-06-16T18:44:00.003+08:00

Much of Buenos Aires is beautiful, even some of its parking facilities.

Beautiful?

My understanding of the workings of Buenos Aires parking is superficial and based mainly on walking around its central areas. I learned a few things from the Rosario conference but I am still a novice on Latin American cities and their parking.

So this post does not pretend any great expertise. Instead, I offer some visual impressions, comments and some questions.

There is a lot more to be said, so if you know Buenos Aires please share your insights via the comments!

A beautiful facade but parking inside. Hmm.

Not so beautiful ...

Lots more below. Scroll down.

Most blocks we walked down seemed to have at least one commercial public garage, even in leafy Palermo quite a long way from the central commercial area.

On-street parking seems mostly to be free of charge, with predictable results.

Once consequence is illegal parking attendants, like this one in Palermo Viejo. I watched him operate while eating a delicious lunch of asado. I am not sure how common this is in BA.

But I also saw some areas with parking meters (saw both single-space meters and pay-and-display). The standard on-street price seems to be 1.40 Pesos per hour. One peso is about 25 cents US.


Short stays in the nearby commercial garages cost a lot more than 1.40 per hour. Presumably, this is a recipe for a lot of 'cruising for parking'.			.

Various inner-city parks and plazas have local government parking lots under them (like Seoul and Taipei). Even the enormous boulevard, Avenida 9 de Julio, has a parking facility beneath.

I didn't see many vacant lots used for parking but there are a few. These and the ubiquitous commercial garages made me wonder if there may be property tax anomalies that make the parking business an attractive use of inner city spaces.

An impressive network of segregated two-way cycle ways is taking shape. I imagine parking has been an issue with some of them.

This monstrous surface lot is in the new but very central riverside area of Puerto Madero. Sadly, I also spotted various big box stores set amid oceans of parking from the toll road heading northwest through the outer suburbs.