{"id":9576,"date":"2011-12-26T12:40:53","date_gmt":"2011-12-26T19:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/?p=9576"},"modified":"2012-02-04T20:09:50","modified_gmt":"2012-02-05T03:09:50","slug":"the-high-cost-of-free-parking-in-boulder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/?p=9576","title":{"rendered":"The High Cost of Free Parking in Boulder"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The sidewalk in front of some relatively high-density residential development near downtown Boulder (photo by Zane Selvans on flickr)<\/p><\/div>\n

Over the last year or so, I\u2019ve been involved with the planning and design of the public space<\/a> that will accompany some of the first re-developments in the Transit Village\/Boulder Junction, mostly Pearl Parkway between 30th St. and the railroad tracks.\u00a0 I\u2019ve primarily given feedback as a cyclist and pedestrian \u2014 someone who uses our streets under my own power.\u00a0 Even in Boulder, those of us who don\u2019t own, and only very rarely use private motor vehicles are still unusual.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the long term goal of the TVAP is to have 60% of all trips in the region done by foot, bike or transit \u2014 anything but the much loved and loathed single occupancy vehicle (SOV).\u00a0 I was particularly taken by something Tim Plass said in the PLAN-Boulder election forum<\/a> this fall when asked to envision Boulder 30 years in the future: Every once in a while you\u2019ll see an electric car on the road, but mostly it\u2019ll be bikes and pedestrians and transit.<\/em>\u00a0 I agree with these goals; we should pursue them vigorously.\u00a0 But the city being described by Plass and the TVAP is very different from the status quo<\/em> today, and it\u2019s difficult to take the steps necessary to realize it.\u00a0 Sometimes I think of myself as a time-traveling constituent from this future city, describing what it is that we will<\/em> want then, when the majority of people aren\u2019t driving a private car everywhere they go.\u00a0 One thing that I\u2019m confident we won\u2019t<\/em> want is so much \u201cfree\u201d parking.<\/p>\n

How Much Does \u201cFree\u201d Parking Really Cost?<\/h2>\n

Parking often plays a surprisingly central role in our transportation and planning decisions.\u00a0 Without it private automobiles are rendered useless, but it requires a lot of precious urban space, and it\u2019s fabulously expensive \u2014 each parking space in a structure costs $15,000-$40,000 to build.\u00a0 Surface parking is cheaper of course \u2013$8,000-$15,000\/space \u2014 but it destroys the fabric of cities by pushing places of interest away from each other, making car-centric cities hopelessly unfriendly to pedestrians, cyclists and transit users.\u00a0 Yet somehow, despite its enormous impact, copious \u201cfree\u201d parking i<\/em>s generally treated as an inalienable right by both developers and cities.\u00a0 Its cost is hidden and almost completely socialized.\u00a0 Each of us pays roughly the same amount for parking regardless of whether we own 4 cars or none, because the cost of parking is bound up in the cost of nearly all the goods and services (not to mention real estate) we purchase.\u00a0 Broad ignorance of the real value and cost of parking results in some surreal discussions.<\/p>\n

An example: the first agenda item at the Transportation Advisory Board <\/a>(TAB) meeting last Monday was the expansion of the Neighborhood Parking Program<\/a> (NPP) district on University Hill.\u00a0 The problem is that lots of students, faculty and staff at the university don\u2019t want to pay for an on-campus parking permit, preferring to park in nearby neighborhoods.\u00a0 This ends up making it difficult for residents to park in front of their own houses.\u00a0 The district has been slowly expanding for years, forcing \u201ccommuters\u201d (many of whom actually live in Boulder and could bike or ride the bus instead) to park ever further from the university.\u00a0 Residents purchase an annual neighborhood parking permit for $17.\u00a0 At that price, the program can\u2019t even pay for the signage and man-hours required to run it.\u00a0 Commuters may also buy neighborhood permits, for $78 per quarter ($312\/year).\u00a0 Some members of TAB were concerned by the ad hoc<\/em> nature of the University Hill parking district\u2019s ongoing expansion.\u00a0 \u201cWhen will it stop?\u201d they asked, somewhat incensed.\u00a0 Staff had no answer, and that\u2019s the surreal part, because there\u2019s nothing mysterious going on here.\u00a0 The parking district will stop expanding when the cost (inconvenience) of parking for free just outside the parking district on the Hill and walking (or biking, or taking the bus) to campus, is slightly greater than the cost of buying a CU permit. (Remote lot parking permits at CU<\/a> cost about $120\/year; more convenient spots go for closer to $600.)\u00a0 On-street parking is finite and valuable, and it\u2019s being given away for free.\u00a0 It\u2019s not surprising that this results in queuing (think Soviet era bread lines).\u00a0 There\u2019s some participation in the commuter permit program, but it isn\u2019t as popular as the city would like, probably because people feel that buying a campus permit or walking from outside the parking district is a better value.\u00a0 Of course it might also be convincing people to use their RTD pass, or bike to CU.\u00a0 We can hope, anyway.<\/p>\n

Valuing an on-street parking spot isn\u2019t easy.\u00a0 There\u2019s only so much curbside space to be allocated, and demand is often large, because they\u2019re so convenient.\u00a0 Just as a point of reference, a metered space downtown brings in around $7,000 per year, most of which is re-invested in the downtown business district\u2019s infrastructure.\u00a0 I\u2019m not some kind of market zealot \u2014 I believe in the value of some public goods \u2014 but here I just don\u2019t see the case.\u00a0 NPP districts continue to give the parking away essentially for free, but restrict its use to only the people who live right by it, functionally converting the public right-of-way into private property.\u00a0 Ironically, the city is often usurping private property in the first place, in order to provide that right-of-way.\u00a0 It would be simpler to just give the property back, and let the owners store their vehicles on it.\u00a0 Or not \u2014 they might decide to use that space in some other way instead.\u00a0 Neighborhood permit parking also fails if you try and scale it up, city wide.\u00a0 If you\u2019re allowed to park in front of your own house but nowhere else, then you can\u2019t actually take your vehicle anywhere!\u00a0 Whereas letting anyone park anywhere for free results in queuing, NPP is the equivalent of preferential rationing.\u00a0 It\u2019s a centralized and inflexible resource allocation decision.<\/p>\n

One obvious solution is to meter the parking, and keep increasing the price until you have some target occupancy rate, allowing those who wish to pay to park to find a space easily.\u00a0 One could also imagine a hybrid metered\/NPP arrangement, in which residents can park at home for free (with a meter exemption permit for that block), but they have to pay the going rate when they park in other neighborhoods.\u00a0 In the case of University Hill, the equilibrium prices would end up reflecting people\u2019s willingness to walk from distant parking, the price of the permits for on campus parking, and their willingness to eschew the car altogether.\u00a0 If the meter revenue were dedicated to improvements within their neighborhood (as it is with the downtown general improvement district<\/a>) residents might not even complain about it too much.\u00a0 Again, we can hope, anyway.<\/p>\n

Planning the Parking in Boulder Junction<\/h2>\n

In the Boulder Junction\/Transit Village area the city is managing parking in a slightly different way.\u00a0 Within the area covered by the TVAP, residential units are subject to parking maximums<\/em>.\u00a0 That is, each residential unit will have no more than<\/em> one parking space associated with it.\u00a0 So the 319 unit apartment complex at 3100 Pearl Parkway will have only 319 parking spaces in its underground garage.\u00a0 Another 70 unit development will be built by the bus terminal and plaza to the north of Pearl Parkway.\u00a0 It will have 70 designated spaces in a shared district\/RTD parking structure.\u00a0 In this one block, there will be about 400 residential units, housing perhaps 1000 people.\u00a0 According to the developers, at least 600 parking spaces will be needed to service this population.\u00a0 The plan is to satisfy any additional demand with parking spaces that are shared between RTD, the planned hotel, and the district at large, within a single structure.\u00a0 The city has been incorrectly referring to this arrangement as \u201cunbundled parking.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s really \u201cshared district parking,\u201d and it ought to reduce the number of spots that need to be provided overall.\u00a0 This is because the times of peak parking demand for RTD, the local residences, the hotel, and retailers will be somewhat different, leading to more complete utilization of a very costly resource.\u00a0 Clearly, this is an improvement over having two huge parking structures across the street from each other, one of which (the Park-n-Ride) is full during the day, while the other (associated with the apartments) is full only at night.<\/p>\n

However, truly unbundled parking is far more potent.\u00a0 It completely separates (unbundles) the finances of the parking spaces from the uses they serve.\u00a0 Assuming you need a parking space, you\u2019d sign two leases \u2014 one for the apartment, and one for the parking space.\u00a0 This does two things.\u00a0 First, and most obviously, it frees those of us who have no car from an unfair obligation to pay for other people\u2019s parking spaces.\u00a0 This can easily reduce rent by 10-20%, maybe $1000-$2000 per year.\u00a0 This is significant, especially for low-income households.\u00a0 Second, and more importantly, it creates a price signal for both developers and would-be drivers.\u00a0 If a developer builds 500 parking spots in a 319 unit development, at a cost of $20,000 each and can only get $500\/year for each space, they\u2019ve built too much parking, and are unlikely to even recover their nominal investment over the lifetime of the building.\u00a0 If, with only one parking space per unit, the rent per space goes up to $1000\/year, then suddenly they\u2019re making money.\u00a0 Not much though \u2014 that cashflow represents an internal rate of return<\/a> of only 3.8%.\u00a0 To make the 8% or so that they\u2019d like would require charging about $1700\/year.<\/p>\n

Now, if you\u2019re a motorist, I suspect you\u2019re thinking something along the lines of \u201cI would never<\/em> pay that much for parking!\u201d\u00a0 You\u2019d just live somewhere else, right?\u00a0 Somewhere with \u201cfree\u201d parking?\u00a0 Except that you would<\/em> pay that much.\u00a0 In fact, you probably already do.\u00a0 The other place has exactly the same parking costs \u2014 you just don\u2019t have any choice as to whether you pay them.\u00a0 The developer is still going to spend $20,000 to build each parking space, and they\u2019re still going to make their 8% return on the project over all.\u00a0 If their marginal investment in parking underperforms, they\u2019re just going to make up for it by charging higher rents.\u00a0 Worse, because residents have no incentive to use less of the valuable parking resource, apparent demand will be large, and will help to perpetuate the belief that lots of parking is required, and providing all that parking drives up the cost of future developments.\u00a0 With the TVAP the city has gone from imposing minimum parking requirements to imposing a cap, but without having any idea what the real demand for parking is.\u00a0 Without a transparently priced market, it\u2019s impossible to know.<\/p>\n

The city has no control over how the 319 parking spaces within the 3100 Pearl development will be managed; it\u2019s up to the developer.\u00a0 What if they were enterprising capitalists, and decided that voluntarily unbundling parking costs from residential rents was likely to make them more money than bundling it all together?\u00a0 How would people respond to seeing the real cost of a parking space?\u00a0 In the University Hill parking district they\u2019re apparently willing to walk several blocks each day to avoid paying the $300\/year that an NPP permit costs.\u00a0 Those who wish to drive would surely be willing to do the same to avoid the $1700\/year that an on-site underground parking spot at 3100 Pearl actually costs.\u00a0 They might park at Whole Foods or Target, and let those stores\u2019 customers foot the bill.\u00a0 Even more conveniently, if the Boulder Junction Park-n-Ride ends up being managed\u00a0like the one at Table Mesa<\/a>, then they could just park across the street for free, so long as the vehicle gets moved every day.\u00a0 Even if it doesn\u2019t, each additional day is only $2 \u2014 far less than the real $5\/day cost \u2014 meaning RTD would be subsidizing their vehicle storage instead.\u00a0 And then there\u2019s the on-street parking\u2026<\/p>\n

The Futility of On-Street Parking for Residents<\/h2>\n

In the 3100 Pearl Parkway block there will be a grand total of 12-16 on-street spaces.\u00a0 They will be managed by the Boulder Junction General Improvement District<\/a> (GID) via its Transportation Demand Management<\/a> (TDM) and Parking advisory boards.\u00a0 These boards will be made up of local property owners and citizens at large.\u00a0 Throughout the design process, the provision of on-street parking has been held sacrosanct.\u00a0 The developers threatened to walk away without it.\u00a0 The city sees it as a way to bring activity to the street, and wants it to serve the short-term parking needs of nearby retail\/commercial developments.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the developers want on-street spots to be available as overflow parking for their residents, whom they cannot believe will really make do with one vehicle per unit.\u00a0 These goals are mutually exclusive.\u00a0 If the spots are managed as NPP, and are essentially free, then their convenience, combined with the sheer number of residents in the area will ensure that they are always occupied, and that turnover is very low.\u00a0 This will render the on-street parking incapable of supporting local retail, and minimize the activity it brings to the streetscape.\u00a0 Serving those two goals means high turnover, and consistent availability of at least one spot per block, and the best way to do that is by metering the spots.\u00a0 Otherwise, these free spots will cannibalize demand for paid spots in the shared district parking structure, and encourage resident drivers to cruise for an empty spot on the (supposedly) low traffic, pedestrian friendly frontage streets.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not just speaking hypothetically here.\u00a0 In Pasadena, where I used to live, a similar transit oriented development was built straddling the light rail line to downtown Los Angeles at Del Mar.\u00a0 It too had restricted parking, and in Pasadena all on-street parking is permitted overnight, and available to residents for a nominal fee if they can demonstrate they don\u2019t have sufficient space to store their vehicles off street.\u00a0 The city was shocked (shocked!) to discover that many residents simply requested permits, and so the reduced on-site parking had no impact on the number of cars per household.\u00a0 This resulted in curbside parking adjacent to the development being completely occupied, much to the displeasure of the neighbors and nearby businesses.\u00a0 This is a completely predictable failure, which we should avoid.<\/p>\n

\"Zipcar<\/a>

Zipcar parking, Portland Oregon (photo by Rosa Say on flickr)<\/p><\/div>\n

If we really<\/em> wanted to use the on-street parking to serve residents, the only way to make it significant would be to dedicate some of it to carshare vehicles.\u00a0 Zipcar, the largest carshare company in the US, estimates that<\/a> each shared car substitutes for 15-20 private vehicles<\/a>.\u00a0 Incidentally, this is also roughly the number of people who can be served by one parking spot converted into a bike corral.\u00a0 A single parking space in front of 3100 Pearl, if dedicated to car sharing, would do the job of all<\/em> the parking spaces combined when they\u2019re dedicated to private vehicles.\u00a0 Our own local non-profit car sharing company, eGo CarShare<\/a> has surveyed their membership<\/a> and come to similar conclusion: a large proportion of their membership either gets rid of<\/a> or avoids buying a second car as a result of the service.\u00a0San Francisco now mandates by law that all new developments (either for rent or for sale) larger than 50 dwelling units unbundle their parking and provide on-site parking for carsharing.\u00a0 The Bay Area\u2019s non-profit City CarShare<\/a> has put together a great selection of best practices and case-studies<\/a> (PDF) looking at developments that integrate both of these strategies.\u00a0 When I mentioned the possibility of a dedicated car share spot to TAB they were supportive of the idea.\u00a0 Planning Board raised the objection that this would amount to allocating public right-of-way to private use.\u00a0 Even if it\u2019s true legalistically, this strikes me as somewhat disingenuous.\u00a0 Neighborhood permit parking has the same effect, but ensures that the limited parking resource serves many fewer people.\u00a0 Anyone can join the car share, and it means the limited parking resource ends up serving many more people.\u00a0 If you want on-street spots to serve residents, it\u2019s clearly the best option.<\/p>\n

Thy (Unbundled) Parking Structure Overfloweth<\/h2>\n

The biggest problem with making the true cost of parking transparent is that it\u2019s difficult to do in isolation.\u00a0 You can\u2019t effectively charge for something when someone else is giving it away for \u201cfree\u201d next door \u2014 hence the issues with overflow from the NPP on University Hill.\u00a0 To really work, all of Boulder Junction will have to have a unified parking market \u2014 the on-street parking, the shared RTD structure, and the underground lots associated with the residences need to have comparable prices, adjusted for how desirable they are.\u00a0 Otherwise, people will simply flock to the underpriced, subsidized options, and leave the ones which are appropriately priced vacant.<\/p>\n

Imagining a restaurant that was run the same way may help clarify the absurdity.\u00a0 The normal \u201cfree\u201d parking arrangement in the US is analogous to everyone in the restaurant ordering whatever they want, with the bills from all<\/em> of the tables getting added up and divided equally between all the night\u2019s patrons.\u00a0 The 95 lb vegetarian waif and the 500 lb sumo wrestler gorging on sashimi pay the same amount.\u00a0 Making parking costs transparent and unbundled in just one<\/em> location is the like telling a single table that they\u2019ve got to pay their own check, but that they\u2019re free to go eat food from other tables.\u00a0 This table then orders nothing for themselves, and wanders around grazing, letting the rest of the patrons pick up their tab.\u00a0 Neither of these arrangements is fair, and both encourage people to order more expensive food than they normally would.\u00a0 This is why most restaurants tend to charge people for the food that they themselves order.<\/p>\n

Overflow isn\u2019t necessarily<\/em> a bad thing, if it ultimately results in transparent pricing being implemented in adjacent areas.\u00a0 Eventually, as with the University Hill NPP district, the parking market becomes large enough that people just bite the bullet and start paying, or biking, or taking the bus.\u00a0 This assumes that they\u2019re really committed to their destination within the parking district.\u00a0 The fear on the part of the city and developers is that people aren\u2019t<\/em> particularly committed to their destination.\u00a0 Faced with the cruel injustice of being forced to pay for their parking in an obvious way, people might decide to go somewhere else instead and pay for their parking in an obfuscated way.\u00a0 Fair enough.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have control over parking policy in Broomfield or Longmont.\u00a0 Actually implementing transparent parking prices might drive some people away.\u00a0 But we get something in exchange \u2014 we get a different kind of city, that will attract a different kind of citizen to replace those drivers.<\/p>\n

Note From a Future Citizen<\/h2>\n
\"Quartier<\/a>

Freiburg, Germany (photo by adeupa de Brest on flickr)<\/p><\/div>\n

Those new citizens are the educated, innovative young people driving us toward \u201cPeak Car\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0 We Millennials are less interested in having \u201cstuff\u201d than having access<\/a>.\u00a0 We\u2019re dreaming a new American Dream that looks less like a McMansion and more like a neighborhood<\/a> that makes you feel at home, with all your day-to-day needs met within a five minute walk.\u00a0 When you aren\u2019t driving you never even think about parking.<\/em>\u00a0 If we\u2019re planning for a future when 60% of trips aren\u2019t done by private car, when \u201cevery once in a while you see an electric car, but mostly it\u2019s bikes and pedestrians and transit,\u201d then we\u2019re planning for a future in which most of the time, most people don\u2019t care how much parking there is or how much it costs.\u00a0 Allowing our durable urban form to be dictated by current expectations about parking is politically expedient, but a mistake in the long run.\u00a0 It\u2019s expensive, space intensive, and precludes us from building a truly livable, sustainable, human city.\u00a0 If we simply allow people to see how costly parking really is and give them the freedom to make transportation decisions based on that information, we will have made a surprisingly large step in the right direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last year or so, I\u2019ve been involved with the planning and design of the public space that will accompany some of the first re-developments in the Transit Village\/Boulder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":9586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[236,491,144,553,137,125,67,25,120],"class_list":["post-9576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-neighborhoods","tag-bicycles","tag-boulder-junction","tag-housing","tag-neighborhood-parking-permits","tag-parking","tag-pedestrian","tag-transit-village","tag-transportation","tag-university-hill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9576"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9819,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9576\/revisions\/9819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}