There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (Nor a Free Parking Space)

“Dying is easy; parking is hard.” --Art Buchwald, in his last days.

Last week, the California State Senate passed SB 518, authored by Senator Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) and sponsored by NRDC.  SB 518 aims to reduce traffic congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, and public costs by creating incentives for local governments to implement policies that reveal the actual cost of parking and reduce governmental or government-required subsidies for parking. 

A long understudied aspect of our transportation system, parking nevertheless has a tremendous impact on our travel choices and, therefore, the environment.  It’s estimated that each car in America needs at least four parking spaces (home, work, and at least two for shopping, errands and socializing)—with 4.7 billion cars in the United States, we’re talking about 19 billion parking spaces, an area the size of France! And at costs as high as $40,000 a space, we’re also talking a lot of money. 

The Financial Costs of Parking

With local governments and everyday Californians navigating the most treacherous economic waters in decades, everything deserves a second look.  The financial costs of parking are hard to ignore.  In California, upwards of 90% of parking is “free” to the driver.  But is anything really “free?”  Private parking lots and public parking spaces need to be purchased, constructed, maintained, lit, insured and protected.  If a driver uses the space for free, those costs are picked up by customers (in the form of higher prices) and by taxpayers (in the form of higher taxes).  Although parking may seem “free,” the reality is that most of us are paying for other people’s parking nearly every day.

The Environmental Costs of Parking

Now, what does parking have to do with the environment?  The answer is “plenty.”   SB 518 outlines two primary impacts of free or underpriced parking:

• Free parking encourages vehicle trips, thereby increasing traffic congestion, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. For example, at employment sites, employer-paid parking increases rates of driving by as much as 22%.
• Excessive governmental parking requirements to ensure free parking greatly expand the built environment and increase travel distances, thereby increasing per capita vehicle miles traveled and reducing the viability of other transportation modes, such as walking, bicycling, and transit.  Indeed, we’ve all spent at least some time in places like this:

Plus, there are other important impacts.  The more we pave over, the poorer our water quality becomes, and paving for vast parking lots also contributes to the Urban Heat Island effect, which increases energy consumption and exacerbates local pollution.

Yet despite all of these serious impacts, little real innovation has entered into parking since the first parking meter was introduced in Oklahoma City in 1935.  

SB 518: A Reasonable, Voluntary Approach

There is clearly a lot that needs to be done to reform our current approach to parking.  SB 518 is a modest step forward and a beginning of the conversation.  Carefully crafted to preserve the authority of local governments to control land use, the bill mandates nothing to local governments, yet offers incentives for those localities interested in taking a new look at parking. 

Cities and counties can receive a few extra points on applications they submit to the State for infrastructure funding if they enact a minimum number of reforms from a broad menu of over 20 policies included in the legislation.  For example, to qualify for the incentives, localities could choose to:

• Reduce minimum parking requirements for residents or businesses, or in areas close to transit, bringing down the cost of development.
• Permit shared parking, so that spaces provided for offices during the day can be used by restaurants at night.
• “Unbundle” parking from property leases, so that renters and lessees can see the cost of the parking they are paying for.
• Permit Parking Cash-Out, so that employees have a choice to pay for their parking.
• Create parking benefits districts and residential parking districts so that revenues from parking can go directly towards improvements in areas where the parking is actually located (as opposed to the revenue going into a locality’s general fund).  Ventura, California finalized just such a plan last week.
• Create a parking program that aims to ensure a 15% vacancy rate (one in seven spaces, give or take) so there’s parking available more often than not.

In other words, SB 518 gives communities the choice of reconsidering their approach to parking while enabling them to better compete for vital State revenues. Localities should not be able to impose these reforms on their residents and businesses without public hearings and action by City Councils and Boards of Supervisors.  Indeed, supporters of SB 518 include not only environmentalists like NRDC and the Sierra Club, but also city planners at the American Planning Association, air quality advocates at the American Lung Association, affordable housing groups, and Genentech, the biotech firm that itself is a leader in innovative approaches to parking.

It’s true: free parking isn’t really free.  It’s high time we look honestly at how parking impacts our lives and our planet.  SB 518 is a fair approach: a purely voluntary encouragement to take a second look at something we always take for granted. 

Comments