I’ve complained often about the scourge of mandatory parking minimums and the damage they wreak on our economy, our communities, our public health, and our environment. Jonathan Hiskes raises the particularly absurd example of mandatory parking at bars:

Did you know that American cities usually require off-street parking at bars? To take a random example, the city of Long Beach, CA requires 20 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of gross floor area for “taverns”. I don’t know what the city thinks people are doing at these bars, but I assure you it’s drinking.

This is how insane our mentality is. Even bars, businesses whose sole purpose is to sell alcohol for on-site consumption, “need” off-street parking. Even though we know that people drive to them, drink, and drive home. Drink and drive. Yeah, let’s make sure these people have plenty of free parking.

Obviously it’s possible to go to a tavern, not consume alcohol, and drive home safely. I’ve even served as a designated driver in my day. But in general, public safety demands a very low ratio of “people driving home from the bar” to “customers drinking at the bar” so there’s clearly something absurd about the idea of regulating bar-related land use so as to encourage and facilitate extra driving.

And of course beyond the specific case of mandatory bar-parking, it’s always worth emphasizing that part of the cost of an auto-dependent built environment is to massively increase the number of people on the road who’ve got at least a drink or two under their belt. The human toll of this kind of drunk driving is, in the aggregate, quite severe.

My favorite local development blog features a project coming soon to the Brookland area on land acquired from St Paul’s College. One sticking point has been parking:

Chancellor’s Row is less than a 10 minute walk from the Brookland Metro and, as part of a compromise between the Office of Planning (OP) and the community, each unit will have one parking spot with the option to add a second for a nominal fee. The community expressed concerns that the new neighbors would (collective gasp) seek on-street parking; still, proximity to Metro trumped that concern and OP narrowly won the day with a theoretically smaller carprint.

A world in which a regulatory mandate of over one car per household less than a ten minute walk from a Metro station in a walkable, transit-oriented city counts as a victory against parking mandates is a sad world indeed. I’m not a libertarian and I think there’s nothing wrong with regulating private business to ameliorate, say, a genuine environmental externality. But mandatory parking is bad for the environment, bad for public health, and bad for low-income families on top of being economically inefficient. The only externality pushing in the other direction is the desire of incumbent homeowners to not see existing on-street parking opportunities get crowded.

What’s needed, I think, is some less destructive way of meeting this concern. If I ran the zoo, what I would do is try to scrap all these regulatory minimums—none whatsoever, developers will still build parking, of course, but not because the local community made them—and in exchange arbitrarily set up a new two-level residential parking permit system so that starting in 2011 anyone who wants a new permit to park on the street has to pay way more. That would be “unfair,” of course, in a way that the current system isn’t. But directly buying-off incumbent parkers would both do a better job of meeting the incumbents’ actual concern and also have fewer negative consequences for the community at large.

Sommer Mathis explains a new DC program to let you use your phone to pay for parking spaces:

The pay by phone option is being offered at 700 parking spaces in three areas of the city: around Dupont Circle, Union Station, and downtown on K Street, I Street, and New York Avenue NW. Meters that offer the service will be marked with a green sticker like the one at right, which lists a location number specific to that space.

DDOT has contracted with Verrus Mobile Technologies, Inc. to run the pilot program. In order to take advantage of the option to pay by phone, customers must first sign up for an account at paybyphone.com. You’ll need to provide a mobile phone number, license plate number and credit card info.

Not enough attention is paid in political circles to this kind of thing—finding small ways to make the government work more effectively.

Of course the real next frontier in street parking is to get the prices right. You want to monitor actual use of spaces, and make parking cheaper when demand is low and more expensive when demand is high. That will generate more revenue for cities and towns (allowing more services or lower taxes) and also ensure that it’s easier to find parking spaces, which will be more convenient for people and also reduce circling-induced traffic congestion.

Catching up on my local development news blog, I read that they’re going to replace the terrible strip mall around H and 8th Northeast with approximately 400 rental apartments over retail with a facade that will fit the surrounding area:

Below-grade parking will add 340 residential spaces and 65 retail spaces, with garage entrances off 8th and 10th Streets. According to ANC 6A Commissioner, Dr. Drew Ronneberg, “the city has a strong interest in having the site host 100 additional city-owned parking spaces that would serve retail establishments outside the building.”

Among other concessions, the developers agreed to a laundry list of community benefits to mitigate traffic congestion and encourage “green” living. The project will have to meet LEED silver requirements, though does not have to seek actual certification. There will be bicycle spaces aplenty in the parking garage, and lockers and showers for retail employees who bike to work. The developers agreed to provide one $20 SmartTrip Card to all initial and future residents up to $15,000, to fund up to $45,000 for a bike share station on undefined public property (quite a bit less than the Union Station bike hub cost), provide car sharing spaces, and pay for a one-time, one-year car sharing membership for initial occupants to max out at $19,000. We can see the marketing materials already.

Those concessions to mitigate traffic and encourage green living sound nice, but if Dr Ronneberg is serious about achieving those goals he should rethink his desire to further increase the quantity of parking spaces in the area. After all, the whole point of building parking spaces would be to encourage more people to drive to H Street. Indeed, the best traffic-mitigation strategy the community could possibly pursue would be to get the developer to reduce the number of residential parking spaces associated with the new building. To a small extent that would push new residents into competition with existing users of the area’s on-street parking, but to a much larger extent it would simply discourage people who are committed to car ownership from moving into the building.

Many DC households do not own cars, and if you build an apartment building with many fewer parking spaces than units, you’ll attract those households and similar ones. That will not only minimize the extra traffic burden in the area, but it will create additional customers for businesses that are close enough to access on foot. That, in turn, will spur the creation of neighborhood retail establishments and decrease the amount of time that even car-owning households in the area spend driving from place to place, further reducing traffic.

Now, living with a car in a dense urban area is still considerably greener than living with a car in a far-flung exurb (at a minimum, you’re driving to closer destinations) so I have no problem with developers building below-grade garages beneath new apartment buildings if that’s what they want. But insofar as community activists want to push things in a greener direction, they certainly shouldn’t be encouraging additional parking.

Here once again is the parking lot by the entrance to the Capitol South Metro Station that I’m always complaining about:

For the past 48 hours or so I’ve decided to think of it as the future location of the Pelosi House Office Building to go alongside Canon, Rayburn, and Longworth.

I’m sure I’ve complained about this before, but every time I use the Capitol South Metro station I’m re-enraged by Congress’s view that the best use for the parcel of land immediately adjoining the station is . . . a surface parking lot!

Subways are wonderful, but they’re expensive to build. Really, really expensive. You can’t just throw up another line or another station on a whim. Consequently, metropolitan areas who’ve invested in building them have a real responsibility to use the land near the stations in an efficient way—buildings with offices, houses, and shops rather than parking lots. Obviously Congress, by its nature, is insulated from the market forces that might otherwise compel someone to do something more useful with this valuable land. But they always have the option of doing the right thing.

It’s a bit frustrating sometimes that the only people who seem interested in reforming parking meter policy are generally car-skeptical urbanist types like me. My interest in this, after all, is a bit second-order* whereas people who actually drive cars around all the time have a strong interest in getting this right. What does getting it right mean? Well, the basic insight is that supply and demand apply to parking. Making parking cheap somewhere where lots of people want to park doesn’t actually make cheap parking widely available—it just creates a parking shortage. What you want is a fee high enough so that there are usually empty spaces available. The target experts agree on is 85 percent occupancy. If occupancy rates are higher than that, you need higher prices, not as a punitive anti-driver measure to make sure that people who really want to park on that bock can.

But you need to get your definitions right. For example, DDOT has decided it should raise rates on three blocks in Columbia Heights where average occupancy exceeds 85 percent. As Michael Perkins writes this is mighty crude since demand varies across the time of day:

If the goal of performance parking is to ensure that a space on every block is always available to people that are arriving to the area, then reporting average occupancy rates doesn’t do much good, because overcrowded parking at one time could be balanced by empty parking at another time. And empty spaces at 10 am don’t help people who are looking for spaces at 6 pm.

All six blocks had some time periods over 85%; according to the report, the maximum utilization on all six blocks ranged from 110% to 190%. (Maximum utilization can exceed 100% when people park extra-tightly, use very small cars, and/or park illegally.) But we also don’t know if those high utilizations were only one hour of one day, or common every day at a certain busy hour.

Getting all this data together, then implementing it, then getting people used to variable pricing is all kind of a hassle. That said, once you get a system up and running that does a decent job of matching pricing to demand there will be long, enduring benefits. Not only will it be easier for people to park, but the government will get much more revenue and can thus have lower taxes. What’s more, everyone who’s not trying to park will have fewer people circling the block to deal with.

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I’ve never been to Abu Dhabi, but I know that they’re in the midst of building out their brand new and successful metro system. But Gregg Carlstrom points to a totally non-worthwhile emirati initiative, a new plan to make landlords provide parking spaces to their tenants: “The owners of new buildings must offer adequate parking or pay the Government Dh160,000 (US$43,000) for each car space they cannot provide.”

Policy rationales for a regulatory parking mandate might include a belief that the poor should subsidize the consumption of the rich, the belief that increasing the volume of traffic congestion would be useful, the view that the planet suffers from insufficient levels of C02 emissions and other air pollution, or the idea that economic growth and the efficient allocation of resources are undesirable. Otherwise, this is a terrible idea, albeit one that’s extremely common in American cities. It’s too bad, too, because according to the same article Abu Dhabi is doing sensible things with its public parking: “parking charges – at Dh2 to Dh3 per hour, already higher than neighbouring emirates – will continue to increase as more public transport becomes available.”

As Atrios observed yesterday:

Even within dense cities, such as mine, residents push for increased parking requirements for new developments. In isolation, perhaps their demands make sense (though I think often they are self-defeating), but across numerous projects they make the city less pedestrian friendly, ultimately increasing the amount of traffic.

You see this go round and round all the time. In DC, people are afraid that if new developments are allowed that don’t contain vast parking structures, that everyone will own cars anyway and compete with them for underpriced (and therefore scarce) street parking. You can turn around and try to say that the correct solution to this is to stop underpricing street parking, but ultimately people would rather keep their cheap existing parking. I think the solution is to just accept the fact that the interests of people who don’t live in the city but could if more development were allowed are by nature going to be underrepresented in the political process. Then instead of trying to come up with a solution that’s both fair and broadly acceptable, we could just directly buy off the incumbents.

For example, you could drop mandated parking minimums and just say that anyone who applies for a new residential parking permit will need to pay some fee that’s much higher than the fee that applies to anyone who already has an RPP. And you can mandate that the excess revenue generated by the higher RPP fees be used, in the first interest, to finance reductions in RPP fees for incumbent permit holders. You could even make the incumbent RPPs transferable (but one-time only) so that incumbents could directly profit by selling their right to park to a newcomer.

None of that makes much sense on the policy merits. But it ought to be a policy that incumbent permit holders can embrace, and it’s also in the interests of incumbent residents who don’t drive, and it’s better policy than the mandate-ridden status quo. Best of all, over time the silly payoffs will phase out and we’ll be at a new equilibrium with more residents, fewer cars per resident, and less parking scarcity (presumably more cars and more parking overall since even without mandates many developers will want to build parking). Sometimes in the policy world it makes sense to just squarely face the interest group pressures and buy them off rather than trying to find some kind of halfway compromise between doing the right thing and doing nothing.

A couple of days ago, Cato’s Tad DeHaven took aim at a new bicycle storage facility being built at Union Station in Washington, DC. I remarked ” I look forward to the day when the Cato Institute does a blog post denouncing each and every publicly financed parking lot or garage in the United States of America.” To which DeHaven responded yesterday:

I denounce each and every federally financed parking lot or garage in the United States of America on non-federal property. I’m one of those quaint individuals who recognizes that the Constitution grants the federal government specific enumerated powers. Using federal tax dollars to finance local parking garages, lots, bike centers and racks is not one of the powers granted to the federal government. So let me rephrase my statement from yesterday: Look, I harbor no animosity against [car drivers], but under what authority — legal or moral — does the federal government tax me in order to build [parking garages or lots] for parochial, special interests?

To be honest, rather than addressing my concern I think this response highlights the hypocrisy I was pointing out. I have no doubt that on some abstract level DeHaven is opposed to all kinds of federal funding of local transportation projects (though I note that a facility relating to a train station in the national capital seems like a plausible area of federal concern) but in practice he denounces a specific bicycle parking project as an example of unconstitutional waste while not in practice complaining about car facilities.

But I fired up the old Google and found plenty of specific examples of federally-funded parking garage projects. This one in Fairfax County cost $28.8 million. Here’s a story about “an application for $130 million in federal grant funds to help pay for a parking garage complex in downtown Bartow.” Here’s an account of a $9 million parking garage in Vermont “Partially funded with federal transportation money.”

And, look, I’m not kidding about this: I really do look forward to the day when the Cato Institute starts specifically denouncing all of this stuff and really going after it. As a supporter of bicycle initiatives, I think it’s nice to see the federal government kick some bucks into a bicycle facility. But as you can see that money is dwarfed by what’s spent on public (and, yes, federal) subsidies for automobile parking facilities. I would gladly equalize federal funding for car parking and bike parking at $0 per year. But I get annoyed when friends of limited government pick on the crumbs handed to cyclists while completely ignoring the loafs going to cars.