{"id":1939,"date":"2012-01-08T23:34:04","date_gmt":"2012-01-09T04:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/?p=1939"},"modified":"2012-01-08T23:34:04","modified_gmt":"2012-01-09T04:34:04","slug":"los-angeles-magazine-nyt-take-long-looks-at-parking-and-all-those-spaces-sitting-idle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/2012\/01\/08\/los-angeles-magazine-nyt-take-long-looks-at-parking-and-all-those-spaces-sitting-idle\/","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Magazine, NYT take long looks at parking &#8212; and all those spaces sitting idle"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"e26b170012445c56d240655bdd03f7bf\" data-index=\"1\" style=\"float: left; margin: 10px 10px 10px 0;\">\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\r\ngoogle_ad_client = \"ca-pub-5595881567027133\";\r\n\/* Medium Rectangle *\/\r\ngoogle_ad_slot = \"8584504377\";\r\ngoogle_ad_width = 300;\r\ngoogle_ad_height = 250;\r\n\/\/-->\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\r\nsrc=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what my life is coming to. Friends sent me two lengthy and interesting pieces about parking today &#8212; and I read them both in their entirety.<\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lamag.com\/features\/Story.aspx?ID=1568281\" target=\"_blank\">Between the Lines<\/a> in LA Mag, which focuses largely on the work of Donald Shoup and begins with his critique of the huge underground parking complex at Disney Hall:  <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Yet before an auditorium could be raised on K [the parcel of land where it was built], a six-floor subterranean garage capable of holding 2,188 cars needed to be sunk below it at a cost of $110 million\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmoney raised from county bonds. 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. The debt on Disney Hall\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s garage would have to be paid off for decades to come, and as it turned out, a minimum schedule of 128 annual shows would be enough to cover the bill. The figure \u00e2\u20ac\u0153128\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was even written into the L.A. Philharmonic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lease. In 2003, Esa-Pekka Salonen opened Frank Gehry\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s masterpiece to a packed house with Mahler\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Resurrection, and in the years since, concertgoers\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwho lay out $9 to enter the garage\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhave steadily funded performances that exist to cover the true price of their parking.<\/p>\n<p>Donald Shoup, a Yale-trained economist and former chair of UCLA\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Department of Urban Planning, loves telling this story. Gehry\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s auditorium may be wonderful, says Shoup, but it is also a fine example of poor planning. The garage\u00e2\u20ac\u201ddesigned to serve the public good\u00e2\u20ac\u201dinstantly made the Metro immaterial to concertgoers, placed several thousand cars on the road every week, and pumped a few hundred tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Like any parking lot entrance, the one on Bunker Hill sucked air from street life. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153L.A.,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Shoup, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153required 50 times more parking under Disney Hall than San Francisco would allow at their own hall.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Downtown already had an oversupply of garages and lots where music fans could leave their cars. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153After a concert in San Francisco,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Shoup, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the streets are full of people walking to their cars, eating in restaurants, stopping into bars and bookstores. In L.A.? The bar next door at Patina is a ghost town.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Receipts that should have gone to the philharmonic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s endowment instead are funding enough parking for nearly every ticket holder to park a car every night downtown.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Another snippet:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Shoup is not opposed to all parking lots; he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s against cities requiring parking lots. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Would you require every home to come with a pool or every office to include a dining room because someone might want it?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d asks Shoup. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why not let developers build parking where the market demands it and charge its true value?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a market-based utopian wager: If you ask drivers to pay the actual price of their parking at the Grove or Santa Monica Place or Disney Hall, what would they do? If the fair price of your parking space is $60, would you view your car differently? In Manhattan a small portion of the population owns cars\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too expensive to park them. L.A. has the highest density of parking spaces in the world. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have the number of cars we have in L.A. without our parking lots,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Shoup. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And you can never create urban density with the parking lots we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve built.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d They make driving too easy.<\/p>\n<p>L.A. sits on a mountain-size surplus of parking it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what to do with. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153For decades,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Willson, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cities have asked urban planners, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcHow much parking do we need?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 keeping in mind that it should be free for everyone who wants it and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no mass transportation involved. Shoup is saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcHow much parking do you want for the city you desire to live in?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u2030\u00e2\u20ac\u009d San Francisco or New York might have ten times the parking each has now if they had buildings like 1100 Wilshire, where the first 15 floors are all garage. But the downtown areas of those cities won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t allow it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The piece includes history of parking L.A., some details on how variable rate meters work based on demand, and lots of other fun information.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/01\/08\/arts\/design\/taking-parking-lots-seriously-as-public-spaces.html?_r=1&#038;ref=arts\" target=\"_blank\">Paved, but Still Alive<\/a> in the NYT talks about the excess parking in the country and explores various ideas for reuse of underutilized lots: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIn \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Rethinking a Lot,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Absent hard numbers Mr. Ben-Joseph settles on a compromise of 500 million parking spaces in the country, occupying some 3,590 square miles, or an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. If the correct number is 2 billion, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re talking about four times that: Connecticut and Vermont.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And more:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For starters we ought to take these lots more seriously, architecturally. Many architects and urban planners don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. Beyond greener designs and the occasional celebrity-architect garage, <strong>we need to think more about these lots as public spaces, as part of the infrastructure of our streets and sidewalks, places for various activities that may change and evolve, because not all good architecture is permanent. Hundreds of lots already are taken over by farmers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 markets, street-hockey games, teenage partiers and church services. We need to recognize and encourage diversity.<\/strong> This is the idea behind Parking Day, a global event, around since 2005, that invites anybody and everybody to transform metered lots. Each year participants have adapted hundreds of them in dozens of countries, setting up temporary health clinics and bike-repair shops, having seminars and weddings.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For big cities like New York it is high time to abandon outmoded zoning codes from the auto-boom days requiring specific ratios of parking spaces per housing unit, or per square foot of retail space. These rules about minimum parking spaces have driven up the costs of apartments for developers and residents, damaged the environment, diverted money that could have gone to mass transit and created a government-mandated cityscape that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s largely unused. We keep adding to the glut of parking lots. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m surrounded by parking lots, almost literally. There&#8217;s a big parking lot for the health department next to my property &#8212; it&#8217;s usually only a little more than half full. On the blocks near mine, there are parking lots for several large churches. Those lots are full for a couple of hours a week, but the rest of the time they contribute literally nothing to the neighborhood.<\/p>\n<div class=\"e26b170012445c56d240655bdd03f7bf\" data-index=\"4\" style=\"float: none; margin:4px 0 4px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\r\ngoogle_ad_client = \"ca-pub-5595881567027133\";\r\n\/* Another large rectangle *\/\r\ngoogle_ad_slot = \"0042810896\";\r\ngoogle_ad_width = 336;\r\ngoogle_ad_height = 280;\r\n\/\/-->\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\r\nsrc=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n\n<!--CusAds0-->\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know what my life is coming to. Friends sent me two lengthy and interesting pieces about parking today &#8212; and I read them both in their entirety. From Between the Lines in LA Mag, which focuses largely on&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/2012\/01\/08\/los-angeles-magazine-nyt-take-long-looks-at-parking-and-all-those-spaces-sitting-idle\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[87,41],"class_list":["post-1939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-urban-form","tag-parking","tag-transportation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gN9R-vh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}