How much parking do you need?

A couple of months back, LA Magazine did a piece looking at the costs of parking and why mandating current minimum numbers of parking spaces for a building might be a bad thing.

“For 5,000 years,” says Cole, “we built cities around people, and they worked well. For 50 years we’ve built them around the parking lot—a ridiculous use of land, of money, and an intrusion into the intimacy of human scale. Now we’ve painted ourselves into a corner

How much parking actually gets used?

Willson plotted a case study to gauge whether parking requirements connected to reality. He chose ten office parks and discovered that their peak occupancy rate was around 56 percent. Twice as many parking lots had been mandated by cities than was actually needed. “I interviewed the planners and the developers,” says Willson. “The planners would say, ‘It’s not our fault—the developers want that much.’ The developers would say, ‘We thought the planners knew what they were doing.’?”

Using a natural experiment in which county employees working in a particular building got free parking while federal employees had to pay produced some interesting results:

"... 72 percent of county workers drove to work alone but 60 percent of federal employees carpooled, took public transportation, or even walked. These were workers in the same professions, driving to the same location." When forced to pay a practical value for their parking, drivers were twice as likely to carpool—traffic congestion was halved, carbon emissions were halved.

The impact of parking lots on downtown life was also intriguing. If you have time to read the article look at the comments on San Francisco vs. LA in parking requirements for a theatre hall and the impact of this on the nightlife in surrounding areas.

One other tidbit I found particularly interesting was the cost to build different types of parking structures:

Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate. In aboveground structures they cost as much as $40,000 apiece. Belowground, all that excavating and shoring may run a developer $140,000 per space.

Is something costing $140,000 worth, e.g., $5/hour to rent on a short-term basis?