parking

The Upside Down(town) Parking World

~ dankeshet ~ 2 Comments

I often refer to the housing market as a game of musical chairs. We don’t have as much housing (chairs) as there are people who want it and however you arrange people in those houses (chairs), somebody loses out. The solution is abundant housing. In the downtown parking market, though; we suffer from a very different kind of failure. At the same time that people are circling the streets in search of that ever-elusive open on-street parking space, tons of spaces go empty in parking garages. We don’t need more parking; we need better use of the parking we’ve got.

So what’s going on? The issue stems from the underpricing of on-street parking during peak hours. Although on-street spaces are the most convenient spaces, they are also the cheapest. This means that there is a ton of competition for those spaces. On weekend evenings, the winners of this competition are largely the service workers who arrive for their shift before their patrons.  (My instinct on this is partly confirmed by data from ATX Safer Streets, which surveyed downtown service workers and found about half park on-street.)  The result is an upside down world of parking: the spaces most suitable to high-turnover applications, such as quick visits, dropoff or pickup, etc. are being used for long-term applications, such as employee parking. Meanwhile, visitors scour the streets for nonexistent open spaces before parking in a garage or going home. If we charged more for on-street parking, we would likely see a more effective utilization of both on-street and off-street parking. Service workers would find that making monthly contracts with garages is now the better deal for them, freeing up on-street spaces for downtown visitors. The knock-on effects of more available parking would be less time wasted and traffic created by visitors–especially short-term visitors like dinner or dry cleaning pick-ups–“cruising” for parking.

Not convinced that raising prices could make a more efficient market? Let’s imagine an analogy. Suppose that, instead of providing below-market rates on parking to encourage visitors to shop at downtown businesses, the city instead decided to provide below-market rates on publicly-provisioned hotels to encourage the same. These hotels were the nicest ones in the city, with ever-fresh towels, and gorgeous downtown views. On top of that, the city charges a measly $1/hour. The only catch is that the city won’t take reservations for these hotels; visitors could just show up at rooms and if they are unoccupied, they would be allowed to claim them. If they failed to find a room, they could instead park themselves for the night at a market-rate hotel.

What you would find is that many visitors would arrive in Austin without a plan for where they would stay, just hoping to find a spot in the cheap hotels. On arrival, they would visit each cheap hotel hoping to score a deal. They would search for people taking elevators luggage in hand, in hopes as a sign they were going to check out. Traffic would soar as visitors circled the streets from hotel to hotel. Meanwhile, most of the rooms themselves would be scored not by visitors from afar, but by locals who know the rhythms of check-in and check-out. Downtown businesses would get complaints from tourists that finding a hotel room was too hard and complain in turn to the city that there aren’t enough hotel rooms. Is that a crazy way to run a tourism industry? Yes and also a crazy way to run downtown parking.

Parking is a Drag, but the Drag isn’t Parking Many People

~ dankeshet ~ 22 Comments

The city of Austin has initiated a corridor study of the Guadalupe Street Corridor from 18th to 29th, more commonly known as “The Drag.” I encourage you to fill out their survey. One of the questions I wanted answered about how we allocate space on the Drag is: how much mobility does the Guadalupe parking lane provide?  So I dragged my ever-patient friend Marcus to, well, the Drag, and we counted parking spaces. The short answer is to the question is: not much.

By our count, there are 70 parking spaces on the Drag.  To put this in context, there are 128 parking spaces on San Antonio St. between MLK and 26th St, and 26 parking spaces in a single McDonald’s parking lot. There are 70 parking spaces on the small surface parking lot on the southwest corner of 25th and Guadalupe and 218 parking spaces in the St. Austin’s parking lot at San Antonio and Guadalupe, which also houses 3 storefronts.  Let’s put that in table form:

Area Spaces
McDonald’s at MLK 26
The Drag 70
Surface Lot 70
San Antonio from 18th to 26th 128
St. Austin’s garage 218

The spots on this table–and most especially the on-street Drag parking–represent a tiny fraction of the parking in West Campus, or even the parking within a single block of the Drag. The University Coop owns a large garage on San Antonio and there is another commercial parking garage on San Antonio which dwarfs the St. Austin’s lot.  If every single on-street parking space on the Drag were eliminated but the St. Austin’s parking garage were cloned at 25th and Guadalupe, we would have a net 148 more parking spaces and 3 more storefronts, as well as a lot more room on the road to dedicate to travelers.

More importantly, the number of parking spaces is tiny compared to the potential alternative uses for this lane. The Drag is home to most of Austin’s most popular bus routes (1/3/5/640/801/803), and some less popular ones as well (19).  A single 803 bus can carry 78 passengers and a single 801 bus can carry 101 passengers. In an hour of traffic, many many multiples more people take the bus along the Drag (in either direction) than have their cars parked there.  There is so much more we could be doing with this space than provide one long surface parking lot.

A Very Positive Development

~ dankeshet ~ 5 Comments

As Austin Contrarian documents, Council Members Riley and Spelman, and Mayor Pro Tem* Cole, have introduced a very positive item on the agenda for Thursday’s City Council session.  The item would allow buildings to 1) waive “minimum site area” rules and 2) waive minimum parking requirements when they build apartments less than 500 square feet on either Core Transit Corridors or in Transit-Oriented Development zones.

Quick glossary (and readers, correct me if I’m wrong):

  • The minimum site area is essentially a cap on the number of units an apartment complex can have per acre.
  • Minimum parking requirements are rules requiring a certain number of parking spaces per apartment.  The exact requirement varies based on the number of bedrooms in the apartment.
  • Core Transit Corridors are essentially big streets like Lamar or Burnet. You can identify them by the presence of large apartment complexes.
  • Transit-Oriented Development zones are special zoning areas near transit stations that allow developments with less parking (to take advantage of their proximity to transit) in exchange for some special design requirements.

The reason this is such a big deal is that, as Austin Contrarian says in the link above, minimum site areas and minimum parking requirements are some of the biggest impediments to providing homes in Austin. If developers weren’t required to build parking for every lot, they could create targeted developments to people who don’t own cars.  Even if currently there are few people who would be willing to go without a car, the developers can still make money by reducing the price because they won’t have to pay for the extra land for parking.  The reduced price for a nice, centrally located apartment might lure some people to give up their cars.

On its own, this change will not bring a construction boom or affordability to Austin.  As I discussed, only allowing density on select streets greatly limits opportunities for building.  The same logic that makes it useful to get rid of minimum parking requirements on the Core Transit Corridors themselves should apply to areas near the CTCs as well.  After all, most people who don’t have a car can walk a block to the transit corridors as they can get a unit on the exact street itself.  Even if those streets weren’t upzoned to multi-family, eliminating parking requirements would allow many more people to build Accessory Dwelling Unit–also known as granny flats, garage apartments–small “extra” units on a Single Family lot. Indeed, the same logic that says that minimum parking requirements aren’t needed near transit should apply everywhere.  Few people may want to live far from transit without a car, but if somebody wants to, more power to them.

Similarly, the same logic that says that a unit less than 500 square feet could benefit from reductions in parking minimums could just as easily apply to units greater than 500 square feet. 500 square feet is plenty for many single people, but reducing parking requirements for larger units might allow more families currently priced out of the core to ditch a car (perhaps one of two cars or perhaps both if their circumstances were right) and move to a more central location.

Still, this really is a fantastic development, both because of the direct effect it would have and because of the way it focuses on some of the real issues: onerous minimum site area and parking requirements getting in the way of building transit-friendly, centrally-located housing. I urge you to write City Council and express your support for Item 40, your thanks to Riley, Spelman, and Cole for sponsoring it, and a request that Leffingwell, Morrison, Martinez, and Tovo support it as well.

One last explanatory note: the Item itself is not an ordinance. It is merely a request that staff write an ordinance and bring it to Council.  This is actually the second stage in the process; the first was a resolution sponsored by Council Member Spelman asking staff to study the issue of microapartments.  Even if this item passes Council on Thursday, there will still be a long way to go before it becomes law.

* For those not in the know, “Mayor Pro Tem” is essentially “vice mayor.”  Both the mayor and the Mayor Pro Tem are councilmembers with equal vote weighting as any other councilmember.  City Council etiquette dictates that you always refer to and address the Mayor and Mayor Pro Tem as such, though, and not merely as “Council Member.”