Could parking garages be headed for extinction?
Cities expect fewer cars in the future
Stateline.org
WASHINGTON — For decades, providing downtown parking was a top priority for urban planners. Huge parking garages for commuters’ cars occupied prime real estate that otherwise might have been used for housing, stores or offices.
But ride-hailing services and autonomous cars are going to revolutionize parking in cities across the country — in garages, in lots and along curbs. By 2030, 15 percent of new cars sold will be totally autonomous, according to one estimate. One in 10 will be shared. And as it becomes easier for people to summon shared or autonomous cars when they need them, fewer people will want to own their own vehicle, meaning fewer cars overall.
The bottom line: We’re going to need much less space to store cars. Some cities are gearing up to take advantage of the shift.
“Urban parking lots are dead or dying, and how we use the curb is changing,” said Rich Barone, vice president of transportation for the Regional Plan Association of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The RPA released a report in October urging cities to “get ready” for autonomous vehicles. It predicts that by 2045, 70 percent to 90 percent of all cars in major urban areas could be autonomous.
Parking in downtowns is going to “morph from being big massive surface lots and garages to much smaller areasconfigured for pickup and drop-off of autonomous vehicles,” Mr. Barone said. “Cities will be more walkable, more people-friendly, and there will be more space for parksand other amenities.”
Joe Schwieterman, a professor of transportation at DePaul University in Chicago, agrees. “The whole view of the function of streets has had a metamorphosis,” Schwieterman said. “It’s made us rethink the opportunity cost of plopping a parking garage in prime downtown property.”
In addition, curbside parking will be redesigned. The National Association of City Transportation Officials suggests in a recent study that reuses could include bike parking, small green spaces, called “parklets,” for pedestrians to enjoy, and pickup and drop-off areas for driverless vehicles and ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.
“We always thought of curbs as the place where parking meters are, but it’s a different space now,” said Faye DiMassimo, general manager of Renew Atlanta, a 20-year, $252 million infrastructure bond approved by voters in 2015. “Now we find sidewalks and trails, and technologies like ride-sharing and autonomous cars pulling up and dropping off people. The curbside has to be managed differentlythan in the past.”
Roadways are getting updates, too. In September, Atlanta unveiled its first “smart road” to install technology for traffic control and eventually driverless cars, and it tested a driverless transit shuttle. The $3 million North Avenue Smart Corridor Project has five miles of adaptive traffic signals and other sensors that make adjustments based on traffic demand, communicate with autonomous vehicles, and open traffic signals to emergency vehicles like fire trucks and police cars, Ms. DiMassimo said.
As urban planners start to shift focus from making it easy to park a car downtown to makingitharder,citiessuchas Buffalo, Miami and Seattle are reducing or dropping their minimum parking requirements for new developments. Instead, they are capping the amount of parking that developersmayprovide.
Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., just approved reducing the number of parking spots it requires for housing developments based on how close the developments are to its mass transit system. The requirements will drop from 0.8 parking spaces per housing unit to 0.2 for units close to the Metro subway system.
One hope is that allowing developers to forgo parking lots will let them build more affordable housing.
“Affordable housing is a really big issue, and Arlington is a very expensive place to live,” said Dennis Leach, Arlington County’s director of transportation. A single underground garage space can cost $35,000 to $45,000 to build, he said. Underground parking in denser urban areas can cost much more.
Oakland, Calif., also recently adopted new regulations that allow apartment buildings to be built with fewer dedicated parking spaces. Instead, the new rules require developers in areas near public transit systems to offer transit passes.
“Oakland realized that its conventional approach to parking was failing in every way,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, principal of Nelson\Nygaard, a San Franciscobased transportation consulting firm that helped Oakland design the regulations.
“Drivers are realizing it’s cheaper to take an Uber than drive,” he said. “Developers see autonomous cars coming and think, ‘Am I really going to build this garage at $70,000 a space?’”
Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA and the author of “The High Cost of Free Parking,” notes that in Los Angeles, parking takes up 40 percent more land than all the freeways and streets combined. Mr. Shoup predicts that parking garages and surface lots in his city, and manyothers,willbetorndown and redeveloped into housing, officeand retail space.
The private developer of one 475-unit apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles is taking another approach: building a garage that is designed to be converted into shops, a gym and a theater when it is no longer needed for parking.