Tom Vanderbilt over at Slate has a great piece on the stupidity of city parking codes, which I highly recommend to Dallas, Plano, and any other city trying to revitalize its downtowns. In Dallas, a city code written in the 1950’s continues to hamper development, encourage sprawl, and keep downtown Dallas blacktopped with ugly parking lots. My last artillery attack on the city’s restrictive and absurdist parking codes was in 2005. I quote myself:
For some reason, decades ago, somebody got it into his head that it was the city’s responsibility to make sure every Tom, Dick, and Harry had a place to park. To make sure there was enough parking, ordinances were enacted that required anybody who did anything to provide off-street parking. The requirements were written with a precision that would make a Soviet planner quiver with delight.
Do you want to build an office building? You must provide one off-street parking space for every 333 square feet. Do you run a catering service? You must have one off-street parking space for every 200 square feet. You’re a lithographer? You need one space for every 300 square feet. You have a call to build a church? You need “one space for each four fixed seats in the sanctuary.”
Vandervilt quotes a Purdue University study found 85,000 unused parking spaces in one county they studied. The antiquated city code is why you see empty spaces where you don’t want to go and no spaces where you do want to go. Why not turn the matter over to the private sector? If a business doesn’t have enough parking, it goes out of business. If it has too much parking, it has wasted precious capital. Why is the city bureaucracy allocating private dollars?
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Anti-development neighborhood “activists” are currently using that code to disrupt valet parking arrangements for the new establishments on Henderson Avenue.
I was blown away by this quote by Lewis Mumford that Patrick Kennedy posted yesterday on his blog:
“The purpose of transportation is to bring people and goods to places where they are needed, and to concentrate the greatest variety of goods and people within that limited area, in order to widen the possibility of choice without making it necessary to travel. A good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportation; and in any event, it offers change of speed and mode to fit a diversity of human purposes.”
An area (say, a downtown) where parking lots–empty or full–are a dominant “good or product” is a failure.
This is a pet peeve of mine, not specifically targeted to downtown. Who in the world required places like Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, etc. to have acres and acres of asphalt parking lots? When have you EVER seen some of those spaces filled with cars?
Besides the issue of heat, water run-off, etc., it also prevents additional development. Where there is now wasted space, someone could put in additional small retail. Or GRASS for heaven’s sake!
Retail parking requirements shouldn’t be based on the number of shoppers for the 3 weekends around Christmas.
That 85,000 number is way low. Dallas has 35,000 surface parking spaces in downtown alone, all of which (or 99%) are empty nights and weekends (and too many people falsely think to get downtown retail we need more parking – those people don’t know what they’re talking about and instead spouting conventional wisdom). Furthermore, Prof Donald Shoup of UCLA once calculated there are 4 parking spaces for every car owned in this country. You can quickly see that 85K needs to expand factorially.
What parking minimums establish is a scenario where supply always vastly exceeds demand. Parking by nature is fluid and we have yet to arrive at a solution that responds to its nature. The only truly successful one is to reduce demand for parking by building walkable urban places and we have to rewrite the urban genotype to have the physical phenotype emerge in a way that is valuable, rewarding, sustainable, cost-efficient, and resilient.
The more important question is, how do we appropriately punish a place that has too much parking? Large seas of parking are disruptive to the necessary interconnected nature of the urban fabric. Furthermore, they trigger the very purpose of zoning in the first place, to prevent the erosion of property values on neighbors.
Having worked with numerous hospitals around the country on their urban plans once they realized their land-banking strategies of buying blocks, clearing houses for surface parking, in the event they need to expand buildings/services has created unsafe (perceived or otherwise matters not) situations and a corrosive effect on neighborhoods. I worked on one project (and won a Daniel Burnham AIA award for it) in Springfield, IL where the hospitals literally destroyed the historic neighborhood and residents wouldn’t put any $ or effort into maintaining their property knowing they would be bought out and house razed next. One look no further than Baylor downtown for a local example.
In a way the “market” is slowly, but surely solving the issue as hospitals realize they are at a competitive disadvantage without walkable, safe, vital urban neighborhoods around them. But, is it worth the market fumbling around and tearing apart the bonds of communities? I recommend the book Root Shock with regard to these effects by Mindy Thompson Fullilove.
Is any place really worth spending time in where parking is cheap and easy? Let’s start w/ that as a precept and work from there.
One simple solution is to set up zones, or overlays as Chris Leinberger suggested, where we set parking max’s rather than min’s. Off the top of my head, I think I recall hearing Professor Shoup say that LA’s parking standards (of which Dallas’s are similar) mandate something like 1000% (might even have been 1000x) more parking than San Francisco’s (numbers could be off, but point remains).
I’ve also recommended to someone involved that we ought to put the otherwise useless Comp Plan to work in establishing zones or at least categorizing a hierarchy of proposed density zones to guide the parking standards.
Sammy raises a good issue. We often bend over backwards to lure businesses like Walmart or what not, but if there are enough people (or rooftops, or demand, or however you wish to name it), those businesses will make concessions to get into a certain area. For example, the Walmart neighborhood market off 75 and Hall was willing to build at less than 2 spaces per 1000. That is 40% of what code typically mandates.
That surplus of 83,000 parking spaces isn’t for the *country*, it’s for a single *county* (Tippecanoe County, Indiana).
@ Mark: Corrected. Thanks!
There are lots of empty parking spaces in Downtown Dallas because the economy is in the ditch. In 1999-2000 parking spaces in the CBD were very scarce. Occupancy was up.
There are only a handful, maybe 2-3 office buildings downtown where they also own an adjoining surface parking lot. The “blight” of surface lots downtown are related to people mothballing real estate, not trying to squeeze nickels and dimes from car parking. Some are even managed by REITs in Japan.
The flipside to the ordinance is that you have grandfathered buildings like the old Statler Hilton with ZERO parking. None. If that building is ever remodeled, they will need to reserve a large chunk of budget for a parking garage of some kind.
There seems to be two separate issues at work here.
One is the city code.
The second is the aftermath of the downtown skyscraper boom of the early to mid 80s.
It was then that so many bidnessmen wannabees bought up and tore down the older two and three story buildings in downtown in order to put up the next big tower. (Remember the Good Luck Gas Station at Ross & 75? Cattleman’s Steakhouse? Among many others.) Those sites remain empty to this day and that is where your excess of surface parking lots come from. Eventually development will come and much of the surface parking will go away.
@ Skymaster
I am trying to figure out if your comment is about the residents who are tired of bar patrons parking on their residential streets because they won’t pay $50 for a valet spot, or the businesses that don’t have enough parking (and what parking they do have is controlled by the landlords). Please explain.
Our neighborhood – BelmontNA – took 12 streets and made them Resident Parking Only under city code (http://www.residentparkingonly.com is our website). Our crime rate dropped 40% in two years.
We are NOT anti-business, but we are anti-idiots who don’t want to pay $50 (yes, I said $50) for a valet or self-park spot. The so-called restaurants don’t have enough spaces and that is THEIR problem not ours. We did not move into the neighborhood – and at 30 years year, I am still a newbie – to provide parking spaces for them.
The Henderson Avenue area looks like Lower Greenville did ten years ago, only with more polo shirts, and it clears out by 215am. But the residents there have been clamoring for RPO and one street at a time they will get it.
I don’t have any problem with resident parking only on neighborhood streets. I would want that option if I lived on one of those streets.
What I was referring to is using provisions of the code to prohibit use of the grass lots on Henderson that have been used (successfully) for valet parking. That has actually led to MORE parking on neighborhood streets because the valets now cannot handle all the demand.
“Why is the city bureaucracy allocating private dollars?”
because over the years we have gone running to the government (city, state, federal) to solve our problems rather than letting the market place solve the problem
@ Peterk: Nice, pat answer. Geez, Peter, these regulations were written before you were born. They didn’t develop “over the years.” They were imposed when cities were exploding in the post-war period — which, I suppose, to you was the Golden Era. They may have even worked then. But they don’t work now, and we need to get rid of them.
As has been said at some of our City Plan Commission meetings and in casual conversation, for whatever reason a lot of big box stores and shopping centers are set up to be able to park for the day after Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday shopping season. We’ve learned such thinking is flawed.
I agree that changes need to be made going forward. I also say that we have to look at ways to redirect valets from parking cars on the streets to using parking lots (some do, but not all of them). I feel that street spaces should be used only for individuals looking to get in and out of retail places vs having people pay $10 to look at their car out the window in front of the place they are shopping/eating/etc (See Iron Cactus, Dallas Fish Market, & Dallas Chop House for example).
Ultimately any changes will be voted on the by CPC and City Council. I definitely support it, and hopefully concerned citizens will contact their own reps to get things changed.
@ SkyMasterson
The provisions to not use grass lots (aka unimproved surface) have been around for years.
What you have here is simple – No one paid attention to the problem before because it simply did not exist until the restaurants and bars started taking over the strip.
Then every parking space or possible parking place became valuable, and used. And then enforcement started.
It was not an issue before, but that does not mean it’s not an issue now so you start crying “but but but…”
Here’s another example:
Twenty years ago, the M Streets were given one-side parking only signs due to restaurant parking (on streets < 25 feet).
Ten years later, my area said, Hey, we have narrow streets, we want the same signs. And we go them.
Fast forward to now – The smaller (< 25 feet wide streets) around Henderson started filling up. So the DPD and Dallas Fire/Rescue did a safety survey and installed the same signs on the narrow streets.
Time and progress do march on…