First off, I want to point out that I am totally on team /c/fuckcars. I highly believe in transit, walking, and biking.
That being said, I think it’s fair to say that:
- Cars aren’t fully going away anytime soon
- Even in our wildest dreams, it still makes sense for cars to be usable in some way, just that the other transport methods are highly prioritized.
So the discussion I want to have is about parking garages, and the hate I see towards them from the urbanist community.
I feel like parking garages vaguely align with urbanist views, because they are high density, and they allow someone to drive to a general area after which they can do the rest of their transportation via other methods.
To put it into perspective, I’d rather have 1-3 dense parking garages in a neighborhood than have street parking along all the roads plus wide open parking lots around grocery stores and whatnot.
I understand this is a lesser of the two evils discussion but it seems to me like parking garages are the clear winner.
There are good parking garages and bad parking garages. What makes a good parking garage? I’d say good garages must be:
- Located away from attractions and venues. The garage should not operate as a way to funnel cars into a popular area but rather as a way to store cars for those unfortunate enough to be unable to arrive by alternative means.
- Located close to public transit. The garage should operate as a gateway into a local community, hence should have access to bike paths, trains and trams, buses, etc to carry their passengers into a community.
- Be priced to cover the garage cost. Garages are expensive and the hourly/daily fees with average occupancy should pay for the garage in 10 to 15 years.
- A tool to remove on-street parking and minimum parking requirements.
Bad garages are ones that break the good rules. They are:
- Are free or too cheap to pay off their construction cost and land value in a reasonable time period.
- Located inside downtown areas.
- A method to increase the capacity of car storage in downtowns.
It’s also possible for a good garage to become a bad one. Say a small town installs a parking lot on the edge of town, but then the town grows. That lot should be removed due to the increased land value it occupies. The new medium sized town can consider adding a parking lot or garage again, but certainly not in their popular, profitable, and active downtown.
Be priced to cover the garage cost. Garages are expensive and the hourly/daily fees with average occupancy should pay for the garage in 10 to 15 years.
I really disagree with this one. As stated, there are good uses of garages and not so good, but pricing is the easiest incentive to encourage or discourage. We should price by the goal we wan to achieve.
- park-n-ride is generally something we want to encourage so parking should be cheap or free
- driving into city center should be discouraged so parking should be expensive enough to encourage people to find better options
That’s a fair position to take, and thank you for debating. Have an upvote!
I don’t think park-and-ride should be made artificially cheap or free because that causes demand to drive to the town edges. Regional transit is needed and is already competing with subsidized highways. We don’t need more subsidies that induce even more regional car demand!
Besides, even with charging for the lost costs, park-and-ride is going to be cheaper over inner-city parking. Let me clarify my point of the cost of a garage: the cost of building a garage includes materials, maintenance, enforcement, and land value. City edge land is cheap to the point that park-and-ride probably won’t be built as a garage but as a lot. Engineered buildings are expensive and usually only make sense when the land value is very high. I suspect it’s only a million or two to build a paved, ~200 spot park-and-ride, which would place daily spot pricing on the order of $1.50 to $2.50 a day. That’s pretty cheap compared to privately owned garaged parking in major cities (> $25 a day).
My pricing beef orbits around how often city garages are heavily subsidized. I’ll make a real-life example from a nearby city of 64,000 people. They built a garage adjacent to their downtown for $12 million. Amortizing that over 15 years and the number of spaces puts the minimum revenue per spot at $8.98 per day. What is the city’s going rate for parking? $40 per month for a permit and $1.25 an hour with 9 hours of enforcement. Only the hourly rate at 100% occupancy, which this lot is not generating, meets just the construction costs, let alone figuring out discount rate and property taxes.
And speaking of taxes, I expect publicly built parking lots and garages to also pay for their taxable rate, even if it’s just an accounting trick by the city to price their lots. Running local property taxes as a land value tax would go a long way towards properly pricing the value of public garages. LVT would also discourage parking in the city center, where land is expensive, in favor of parking on the city edge, where land is cheap. Just another trick which drives down park-and-ride pricing and discourages city-center parking.
Especially your last paragraph I think is the key. We can’t top-down dictate and micromanage all city planning. Rather, we should strive to implement a tax and zoning system such that things are done or not done according to their true costs. So long as we tax land appropriately, reform our insane land use policies (e.g., parking minimums), and tax externalities correctly (e.g., vehicle weight, congestion pricing, carbon, etc.), we should be able to just let the economy run, and the market will reveal where and when it makes sense to build parking garages and parking lots.
Personally, I suspect what we’ll discover in the long run is parking, in all its forms, rarely makes financial sense.
I’m not aware of any hate for them, although they have some downsides. They require a lot of concrete to build (bad for the environment) and they are very expensive.
they also are a heaven for break-ins since who’s going to secure a parking garage? Some low-rent Pinkerton who doesn’t give a fuck who’s going to call the cops, who also don’t give a fuck.
The rent-a-cops who occasionally patrol parking garages only wish they were Pinkertons. Which arguably makes them even worse.
This should be a perfect opportunity for video, especially with motion sensing. That low-rent Pinkerton may give more of a fuck when his response need only be “if you see something suspicious, don’t open the gate until the cops arrive”
- Induced demand
- They still take away a lot of space that could be used for housing or third places.
But induced demand is or can be counteracted by pricing
Then you are wasting space and resources to build a parking garage that will never be at full capacity.
Parking Garages Represent Lazy and Terrible Planning | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGG5WRBPeFk
It’s a chicken and the egg situation. You can’t get super dense urban cities overnight, things will need to change before you uproot people from their homes.
Very good points here already. So I just provide an example:
They are planning to build a parking garage in the middle of my town (17000 people). The promisse is, that they will remove parking spots in many streets around the center, as the parking garage would easily compensate for them.
I see the positive aspects, less cars parking on the roads and more parking space overall.
For me the negative aspects outweight the positive here:
- More parking spaces invite more people to take the car into the city. The sourrounding streets have less parked cars but will be much more used by cars in motion. The space we ‘won’ would be gone again.
- the parking garage is very ugly, in the middle of an otherwise nice city center. It takes away the space of projects that would attract more tourists.
- The city wants to have reduced car traffic in the city, but the parking garage is a long term investment into more car traffic, that is not easily reversed in the next 20-30 years.
- the induced car traffic leads to all the negative things we all know… More noise, pollution, unsafe, expensive, unhealthy
My town has lots and three garages around the center of town. They are set back so you don’t see any ugliness or direct traffic (plus they’re small because we’re not very big). However they do support a bustling “old time Main Street” as well as transit. They are a big win for exactly what OP stated: more people can drive to enjoy the town center, including shops and restaurants, walking, or taking trains or buses into the nearby major city. The alternative is they wouldn’t come to the town center. People who don’t live right there would find it easier to drive to their suburban shopping centers and malls with huge parking lots
While there is still on street parking, it’s all very walkable and the town has been experimenting with turning a section into a pedestrian mall
They are ugly, bad land use, and incentivise people to drive places rather than use other modes of transport.
They are better land use than surface level parking lots. North america can’t just snap its fingers and be rid of car dependancy. I think parking garages can be a good middle ground but should be accompanied by transit and walkability.
It can incentivise people to drive, to help fix this, make transit stops close to the area/throughout the area while having parking garages on the outskirts requiring people to walk farther than if they took transit. This will keep the cars away from pedestrian areas while still allowing die hard car owners to drive to locations.
Overall parking garages can be a step towards removing on street parking and densifying urban areas. Even The Netherlands, posterchild of urbanism, uses parking garages.
Yeah park and ride on the outskirts is a different story. Though in that case a surface parking lot would probably meet demand just fine and be easier to redevelop in the future. Stacked parking is typically used in city centres, where it is a terrible land use for the value of that land.
Too many people who oppose parking garages are stuck with black and white thinking when the world is mostly gray. I can agree that we should work for a future where people can live in a nice city with no need for cars, but you have to agree that we’re not there yet. Getting there is a very long process, perhaps a continuous process, and at least for US cities is many decades away. We need to be able to make improvements, even when they are not the ultimate goal
Many US citiea currently have large, surface level parking lots throughout downtown. Some well placed garages could free up that land and improve density. We will never be rid of private vehicle ownership
It doesn’t solve any of the social geographic “Daseinsgrundfunktionen” (Fundamental functions of existence). Motorised vehicles are needed in cities for specific services beyond these functions as well (fire brigade, ambulance) and one could argue they fit in with ‘Provide’ or ‘Dispose’, but parking garages won’t help with any of that, they are arguably merely a convenience for a privileged class.
In Amsterdam, the convenience of some new parking garages actually increased car traffic in surrounding neighbours. Personally, I don’t want my taxes going towards expressive car-centric infra and encouraging driving.
In addition to the other comments, I’ll add that parking garages are “non-places” and can make an area feel unsafe or sketchy. A few times I was walking around downtown with some friends and the girls were like “oh no, we’re not going down here”. I looked around and noticed that the entire block was parking garages. And no one was around. But if we turned around, we saw people and that felt safe.
And to add again, parking garages cost $50k or more per spot and is space that is not used for people or businesses. They rarely ever pay for themselves and, while is a more efficient car storage space than flat parking, is worse than actually doing something with the space such as home, businesses, etc.
One thing I noticed in the last downtown I was in was that roughly half of the volume of every building was parking and these buildings often had additional parking available next to the in the form of another garage. It’s pretty insane.
