Streetsblog Los Angeles

(A letter from Donald Shoup on AB 904 to the American Planning Association can be found after the jump. – DN)

“Donald Shoup is an academic authority on parking and its effects on transportation, land use, cities, the economy, and the environment,” said the American Institute of Certified Planners in 2004 when it inducted Professor Shoup as a Fellow, the highest honor of the American Planning Association (APA).  In 2005, The APA published Shoup’s tome, The High Cost of Free Parking,  and calls it one of its “most popular and influential titles.”

However it seems the APA’s California Chapter did not consult with Professor Shoup before it sent an email to members urging them to oppose AB 904, an effort to cap parking developers are required to provide at transit oriented developments.

Parking policy requires a delicate balance between the goals of the state and region (reduced vehicle use, increased transit use) and the goals of the municipality (providing convenient parking with new development to mitigate competition for on-street parking spaces).  UCLA Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning Donald Shoup’s solution has been to charge a sufficient price for publicly-owned on-street parking spaces so as to ensure that one or two spaces will typically be available on each block.

New development, which Shoup says should be free to decide how much off-street parking it will provide, increases the area’s parking demand, which in turn increases the price of both public on-street parking and existing off-street private lots.  As the price increases, alternatives to driving such as transit, biking and walking become relatively more attractive.  The “invisible hand” of the parking market plays a regulating function that makes non-auto modes more attractive in denser environments, where such modes can be more effective.

Nearly all local governments have taken a different approach, in which they specify the minimum number of off-street parking spaces each new development must provide.   Such a policy is designed to reduce or eliminate competition for on-street parking, which can placate existing residents and businesses.   However, in many denser built environments parkers prefer a convenient but scarce on-street space to a less-convenient but abundant off-street spaces, and the minimum parking requirements fail to protect incumbent parkers from increased competition.

In many areas the minimum parking requirements far exceed typical demand, leading to areas where parking supply exceeds demand.   Though the resulting parking price is zero, the cost of providing parking and the additional automobile travel is borne by everyone: shoppers paying a higher cost of groceries at the store with free parking, children with asthma playing next to roadways suffering from increased automobile travel, and the type-2 diabetes sufferer who’s substituted convenient parking for walking and biking.

Professor Shoup’s sees AB 904 as a “parking disarmament policy” which will let cities allow parking prices near transit to rise without worrying that other cities with free or cheaper parking will steal their visitors.  In this letter to Kevin J. Keller, president of the APA’s California Chapter, Shoup discusses his reasoning for supporting the bill and displeasure that the Cal APA would oppose the bill without consulting its membership:

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Donald Shoup speaks at Buffalo University on January 10. Photo: Bettybarcode/Flickr

Memo to the City of Los Angeles: stop trying to ruin Donald Shoup for the rest of us.

Back in 2008 and early 2009, city officials claimed to be following the teachings of the UCLA professor and Parking Rock Star/Guru when it announced increases in parking meter fees from throughout the city.  This has led to a misunderstanding of Shoup’s teachings throughout the Southland.  Instead of a complex urban theory where funds raised from increased revenues spur redevelopment and lead to a reduction in local vehicle miles traveled, L.A.’s officials recognized Shoup’s theory as “charge more for parking.”

This fallacy, that the City of Los Angeles is somehow following Shoup’s guidelines for parking and urban planning was on display in an otherwise sparkling profile of Shoup in this Saturday’s Los Angeles Times.

Cities are starting to listen. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Redwood City, Glendale, Ventura, Portland, Ore., and the District of Columbia are among those implementing or contemplating changes to hew more closely to Shoup’s vision.

But Los Angeles isn’t really following the concepts outlined in Shoup’s 2005 tome “The High Cost of Free Parking,” they’re just raising rates.  At the 2010 StreetSummit, Shoup himself distanced himself from L.A.’s parking schemes and even argued that there are many places where metered  parking fees are too high.

In the picture at the top of the article, we can see Shoup’s three top concepts for parking reform, let’s see how the city is doing. Read more…

Streetsblog is pleased to present the third episode in UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup’s ongoing inquiry into whether the Cato Institute’s free market principles extend to the realm of parking policy. Read Shoup’s previous replies to Cato senior fellow Randal O’Toole here and here.

Dear Randal,

In your September 1 post on Cato@Liberty, you mentioned that the Cato Institute offers free parking to its employees.

When it comes to parking, which policy does public radio prefer, and which one is favored by the libertarian think tank?

I checked and found that not all employers in Cato’s neighborhood offer free parking. For example, consider National Public Radio, which is on Massachusetts Avenue three blocks from Cato. NPR charges all its employees the market rate for parking in the building. NPR has 125 parking spaces and it uses fair market prices to ration these scarce spaces among its 400 employees.

The different parking practices at NPR and Cato reveal quite different policy preferences. NPR prefers the free market while Cato prefers free parking.

Cato’s free parking severely distorts transportation prices. The market price of commuter parking in the commercial garage closest to Cato is $255 a month, so Cato’s free parking subsidizes the cost of driving to work by $255 a month. Because employer-paid parking is a tax-exempt fringe benefit, Cato pays the free parkers a tax-exempt subsidy of $3,060 a year ($255 x 12).

If the round-trip commute distance to Cato is 32 miles (the national average), and if commuters drive to work 22 days a month, Cato’s free parking reduces the cost of driving to work by 36¢ a mile ($255/22 days/32 miles). According to the American Automobile Association, the average operating cost of driving a car is about 18¢ a mile. Because the per-mile subsidy for parking is twice the per-mile cost of driving, Cato’s free parking reduces the out-of-pocket cost of driving to work by two-thirds. Free parking therefore grossly distorts market prices in favor of commuting by car.

In your campaign for market policies in transportation, I hope you will try to persuade the Cato Institute to charge market prices for parking, or at least to offer commuters the option to cash out their parking subsidies. Perhaps you might also write a post on Cato@Liberty about Congressman Earl Blumenauer’s bill (H.R. 3271) that would encourage many employers to offer parking cash out. I suspect that might even make the news on All Things Considered.

Donald Shoup
Department of Urban Planning
University of California, Los Angeles

It's no secret that Livable Streets advocates are big fans of the theories of Donald Shoup.  The Shoupista that introduced him on Saturday referred to him as "Shoup Dogg," and Streetsblog prefers to sing "Shoup there it is."  These kind of salutations for an Economics professor who dresses the part of the academic activist from his tweed jacket to a t-shirt that reads "All may park, ALL MUST PAY" may seem silly; but his message for Angelenos is not.  Our parking policy doesn't just make bad economic sense, it's also playing a major role in holding our city back.  The UCLA professor is considered one of the foremost expert at parking policy, and when it comes to his host city; he doesn't like what he sees.

But first, a quick overview of the Shoupian theory, made famous by the book "The High Cost of Free Parking."  When cities undercharge for street parking, they encourage people to "cruise for parking" instead of just parking close to where they need to go.  This creates an average increase of a half mile per trip, which rapidly adds up for even a cozy community such as Westwood.  Also, the municipality is missing out on a revenue stream that should be reinvested in the community and become a fund for urban renewal.  A local example of a city getting it right is the revival that South Paadena has seen in recent decades because of an intelligent use of their parking resources.

So what is Los Angeles getting wrong?  After all, didn't then City Council Transportation Committee Chair Wendy Greuel name-drop Donald Shoup every chance she had when the city raised it's parking rates and increased meter hours last year?

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Only the more rare white stickers would get the free parking benefit.

Some ideas just refuse to die.  Less than a year after the City of Los Angeles moved to end it’s free-meter parking for hybrids program, a new proposal to allow only the highest tech and cleanest cars to park for free has resurfaced.  The Council resolution asking LADOT to study the program was introduced by Council President Eric Garcetti and sponsored by Downtown Council Woman Eric Garcetti and "Tom LaBonge for Bill Rosendahl."  Despite the presence of LaBonge and Rosendahl as sponsors of the legislation, they led Transportation Committee in expressing concerns with the newest free-parking for expensive, high-tech, cars scheme.

Garcetti’s resolution would apply to many less vehicles than the program that was scrapped earlier this year.  Instead of all hybrids that qualified for the state’s HOV exemption sticker, only the cleanest cars would qualify.  Only electric and zero-emission vehicles would qualify, cars which get a white sticker, pictured above, from the state.  While the state no longer hands out the more ubiquitous yellow stickers to fuel-efficient hybrids, it is still handing out the white stickers to those that can afford it.

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Photo: Nahh/Flickr

In the late fall of 2008 and early in 2009, the City Council and Mayor Villaraigosa decided to fill a hole in the city’s budget by raising the cost of parking curbside at city-owned parking meters. The wildly unpopular move is estimated to generate $18 million dollars for the city, but the backlash from constituents has turned several Councilman who voted for the raise into "low-cost-parking" advocates including Tom LaBonge and Dennis Zine.

To help justify their plan, they tried to push the idea that they were following a Smart Growth model based on the teachings of UCLA Economics Professor and Parking Guru Donald Shoup.  Shoup has explained how street parking is undervalued throughout America and by capturing those revenues and putting it back into the communities from which it comes cities can begin to remake themselves.

The City of Los Angeles seems to have forgotten that last part, and now is facing a political backlash because the meter hike they pushed through is being rightly viewed as increased fees with all the negative things that come with them and no benefit seen in the community. 

While increasing meter rates isn’t a bad idea by itself; the political reality is that people don’t like to pay more money without seeing something in return.  In this case, Los Angeles blew a chance to build a political alliance for increasing meter fees and politicians burned by this experience are going to be less likely to take a stand in the future.  That’s not Don Shoup’s vision.

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Donald Shoup doesn't think the city is going to get a lot for its parking. Find out why after the jump.

For the politicians looking to close a loophole in the city’s budget through privatizing street parking, the biggest question is going to be “how much money can the city get” for leasing enforcement and collection of paid street parking.

Reporting from this week’s City Council hearing, Joe Linton writes, “The city is facing a $35M deficit in the current fiscal year.  The deficit projected for next fiscal year was projected at $433M (out of a $7B budget), but that forecast is being revised to about $530M.”  If Chicago got $1.16 billion for leasing control of its 36,000 meters, Los Angeles should be able to get at least that much for it’s 43,000 metered spaces, right?

Not necessarily.  First, given the backlash that the city experienced for just raising the hourly rate for many meters, can we really expect the Council to either let the investor decide the new rates or agree to a series of rate increases that would place L.A.’s parking rates at the top of the country’s?

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