parking Archives - Transportation For America

Does your community have too much parking? Here’s how to find out.

A parking lot hosts three cars and dozens of empty spaces

Many communities are either “overparked” (meaning they have too much parking) or are inefficiently allocating their existing parking resources. By understanding how communities’ parking assets are being used and regulated we can ensure that all modes’ access to jobs, services and amenities is supported.

How much parking do we really have?

In Miami, Florida there is a minimum of 1.5 parking spaces required per residential dwelling unit and a minimum of 3 parking spaces required for every 1000 square feet of office or commercial use. These parking requirements are quite common in community zoning codes, the regulatory framework guiding development. As a result, communities across the country now have an oversupply of parking.

Considering the factors above, it is important to be mindful of how we use parking in our communities. Building an understanding of the space available can allow communities to maximize the benefits of having sufficient parking while also ensuring that we help communities identify underutilized parking areas and enable municipalities to allocate space more effectively for various modes of transportation, including sidewalks, bike lanes, public transit, and community activation.

One essential way that parking is regulated today is through parking audits. Parking audits are comprehensive assessments of a city’s parking systems, encompassing facilities, policies, regulations, and management practices. These audits involve supporting strategic management and provision of sufficient parking and curb access around cities, and analysis to gain a deep understanding of a city’s parking resources, utilization patterns, and their impact on transportation and urban development.

How to conduct a parking audit

During a parking audit, people measure how much parking is available in a specific area. The interesting thing is that anybody can do this.

The specifics of your audit will depend on your local context. If your city is considering reducing or removing parking requirements, you might have an opportunity to partner with your local government to conduct parking audits with city staff. If city leaders and officials haven’t yet caught on to the parking dilemma in your area, you can use a parking audit to help advocate for change. In either case, using the audit to build connections with community members, policymakers, and city staff can be a powerful way to develop common ground.

To get started on a parking audit, check out these step-by-step guides from Strong Towns and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council of Boston.

Questions to consider

How long are people staying parked? Occupancy stay refers to how long a parking space is being used by a vehicle. This metric provides insights into the duration of parking sessions, helping planners understand the average duration vehicles remain parked in a specific location.

DDOT parking evaluations include time of day and spot usage on 17th St NW — *To understand parking in DC, the District DOT utilized time-lapse photography. (DDOT)*

How many times was the parking space used? Occupancy turnover measures how many times a parking space is used within a given period. It provides insights into the rate at which parking spaces become available for new users. High turnover rates indicate efficient use of parking resources, while low turnover may suggest underutilization or improper pricing.

What is the ratio? Occupancy is the ratio of the number of parking spaces in use to the total number of spaces available. It is a fundamental metric for understanding the utilization level of a parking facility at a specific point in time or as an average over the day. The purpose is to provide a snapshot of how full a parking area is and whether there is excess capacity or shortages during peak times.

Collecting all this data can take time, but fortunately, there are tools you can use beyond a clipboard, camera, and a stopwatch. To cover more ground, communities like New York City or Washington, DC have deployed time-lapse photography to understand parking and loading demand. To learn more about how to take time-lapse photos, check out this guide from the District Department of Transportation.

By embracing parking audits and utilizing metrics like occupancy stay, turnover, and overall occupancy, communities can enhance accessibility, promote safety, and maximize the utilization of valuable real estate. So, whether you’re strolling, biking, or driving, let’s park smarter and pave the way for a more sustainable and accessible future.

Don’t curb your e-thusiasm: Charging and the curb

Electric vehicle charging at the curb presents unique challenges to meet equity, accessibility, and eligibility for federal programs.

An electric vehicle fast-charging point in Hyderabad, Telangana, India, which can charge all types of electric vehicles. Photo by Ather Energy on Unsplash

In our last post in this series on integrating the electric vehicle (EV) transition and smart growth, we talked about the reality that many apartment dwellers will lack access to at-home charging in the foreseeable future, whether because the parking for their building doesn’t have charging, or they don’t have at-home parking. Charging at the curb will be important to meet the needs of these residents as well as folks away from home who need a charge.

In our EV blog series, we’ve shared strategies in the zero-emission fleet transition which work in concert with smart growth. These strategies can both advance the EV transition and reduce the need to drive so much. They include electric carshare services, charger-oriented development, the NEVI program, equitable access to chargers, integrating smart parking policy with EV-charging, and electric micromobility. To learn more about reducing transportation emissions, check out our report Driving Down Emissions and go here to learn more about CHARGE, the coalition we co-lead on EV issues.

Charging is parking

As we look to integrate EV charging in smart growth communities, inevitably we need to come to terms with the profound implications of our approach to parking. EV charging is, after all, a form of parking. Once we are talking about parking, we must address the inescapable fact that misguided parking policies have, over decades, pushed destinations further apart, leaving communities less walkable, hollowing out downtowns, and creating longer trip times for everyone.

Reforming American parking policy has been the subject of several books, including the foundational treatise The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup, and the more recently influential Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar. The consensus among parking reformers is that communities must eliminate minimum off-street parking requirements to allow more affordable and denser development. Managing on-street parking—with parking meters, permits, or other time-limiting features—can also pave the way for more sustainable development patterns while still making it reasonably easy to find a parking space. Fees collected in a given neighborhood can be re-invested in improved streetscapes or used to fund clean transportation options like public transit or bikeshare.

We know that the curb, as the access point to everything off-street, has additional value beyond just parking. Loading zones for passengers and goods, parklets, streateries, bike lanes, bus lanes, bike parking, bikeshare stations and more, are all potential uses for limited curb space. Many of these uses rose to greater prominence during the pandemic and have stuck around. Now we’re adding curbside EV charging to an already crowded interface.

This all adds up to the need to be thoughtful about how we place and price curbside EV charging stations. Communities should be careful to place curbside chargers where they don’t preclude other uses that enhance smart growth livability. This means curbside chargers would likely be better-placed on quiet residential side streets and municipal garages, rather than major commercial corridors in denser urban areas. This way, they won’t get in the way of the other curbside uses that enrich smart growth livability.

But we shouldn’t stop there. Below are several ways to think about curbside EV-charging, including what Congress and the Biden administration should do to fix current programs to give local governments the flexibility to better address these issues.

1. Pricing

Before making any decisions around pricing, cities should take account of the curb space available. How much space needs to be set aside for other important curb uses, like bike lanes, bus lanes, and streateries? The remaining space will be available for vehicle parking (and charging).

These parking spaces should be regulated and priced for 85 percent occupancy. At that occupancy level, usage is maximized with enough turnover that there’s pretty much always a parking spot available on every block face. That is ideal to maximize drivers’ access to the curb and businesses’ access to customers.

EV-charging in denser urban environments where space is at a premium adds another consideration into the mix. A charging spot has value for access to the neighborhood AND access to charging. Cities will need to right-price charging in these highly desirable locations to get outcomes that maximize the use of the chargers—and also achieve appropriate turnover access to the curb. To accomplish this, they may need to charge for both parking and charging in the same spot.

Finally, it’s important to note that the federal government’s primary program for investing in charging infrastructure in communities—the Community Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program’s Community Charging and Fueling Grants—allows pricing for both parking and charging for curb sites, but unfortunately not for parking lots. In dense neighborhoods and downtowns with lots of demand for the curb, a gated municipal garage may be the most sensible place for chargers. The program needs to be fixed so that cities have the flexibility they need to apply the appropriate price in the appropriate location—as long as it’s transparent, simple and seamless for the user.

2. Opportunism

We’re in the early stages of the EV transition, and we need to accelerate if we’re to reduce transportation emissions fast enough to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Since access to charging is one of the biggest impediments to drivers purchasing EVs, we need to get a bunch of it out there quickly and cheaply. It makes sense right now to be opportunistic and take advantage of existing grid infrastructure, even as we know we need to invest in the grid to build a more substantial charging network.

There’s a lot we can do quickly. For one, some EV owners are charging their cars at the curb with a cord that runs from their house across the sidewalk. Cities like Portland have adopted rules to allow Level 1 charging from house to curb as long as the cord runs through an ADA-compliant cord cover across the sidewalk. This can be a good way to quickly provide more access to charging for those without off-street parking, as long as residents aren’t misled to think they own the public parking in front of their house.

Cities are also looking at ways to deliver curbside, public, Level 2 charging using existing grid infrastructure. Los Angeles and other cities have been installing Level 2 chargers at streetlights. The electricity service is already there, so it’s a great place to put one or two charger ports. The private company Itselectric has developed a technique for using spare capacity in buildings fronting the street to install a Level 2 charger at the curb.

Federal programs are failing to support any of these opportunistic solutions. The Community Charging Grants arbitrarily require all charging stations funded by the program to have four ports. This precludes funding for the sensible, quick solutions above. It also reflects a gas station mindset of having a bunch of charging in a centralized location. As we discussed in the post in this series on Charger Oriented Development, this approach fails to maximize the potential of EV-charging. When all you need is access to a plug, especially for Level 1 and Level 2 charging, there is no reason why we can’t have charging infrastructure distributed more diffusely in the urban environment.

The bottom line

Communities are navigating brand new territory as they figure out what works best for public charging in their communities. New ideas and challenges will continue to emerge, and consensus on the most urgent needs will evolve as the EV transition continues to gain momentum. Public agencies will need to be flexible and nimble for us to get the most out of investments in public charging.

Charging up EVs: Bridging the apartment gap

A woman leans against her EV while it charges outside of an apartment building

With the electric vehicle transition, access to transportation options like transit, walking and biking needs to come first. But—for smart growth and equity—equitable access to charging for apartment dwelling car-owners is an essential part of the picture.

Much of the group-think around the transition to electric vehicles comes from the picture in many people’s heads of the suburban built form, where every house is a detached single family home with its own garage where the electric vehicle (EV) sits charging.

Guess what? Not everyone lives in a single family home. If we’re going to integrate the EV transition with smart growth, and make it more equitable, we have to make sure people living in apartments have access to great mobility options. Apartments are good for smart growth, and low income and Black and Brown communities disproportionately rely on them for housing. So, if we want to advance smart growth and equity, there shouldn’t be a mobility penalty for living in apartments. Let’s talk about how to approach this issue.

Don’t: Require parking

For some EV enthusiasts, it’s tempting to focus on EVs first and start with the idea that apartment buildings should be required to have plenty of parking with access to an EV charger in every spot. Not so fast! Parking requirements significantly increase the cost of housing, make it difficult to create walkable environments, and incentivize car ownership and driving which increases emissions.

There is not enough space here to lay out all the problems with off-street parking requirements. Go here, here and here to learn how these outdated and misguided regulations increase housing costs, hamper efforts to create more walkable neighborhoods, generate traffic and more. Suffice to say that the best practice is to eliminate off-street parking requirements, allow the market to determine the number of parking spaces, and focus public standards and investment on biking and walking infrastructure and transit service.

Eliminating off-street parking requirements won’t change the world overnight. In most communities and particularly car-centric ones, developers will build apartments with parking even if they aren’t required to, and many residents will still own cars. Recognizing that it takes some time for communities to become less car-reliant, we need to address charging, the biggest impediment to the EV transition.

However, we don’t need to perpetuate the misguided parking policies of the past and the sprawl they generate. There are better approaches than parking requirements for ensuring people have the mobility choices they need including access to a car. For example, incentivizing or encouraging the integration of EV carshare service with low-car development is a great way to give a lot of folks access to a car on the occasions they need it.

Do: Require parking to be EV-ready

When a municipality eliminates minimum off-street parking requirements, builders still put parking in many of their projects. These buildings will be around for 50 years or more, and we need to be at zero emissions by 2050. With EV adoption doubling every two years, we’re risking a drastic shortfall of charging options for apartment dwellers much sooner, one that could see apartment dwellers relegated to gas-powered cars.

One of the benefits of EVs (if you can charge at home) is that you never have to go somewhere to fuel up unless you are driving more than your car’s range in a single day. Since American drivers cover an average of 37 miles each day, and less than one percent of trips exceed 100 miles, EVs are much more convenient and much more affordable to fuel than ICE vehicles, if you have at-home charging.

For EV-owners who can’t charge at home, convenient, affordable, publicly accessible neighborhood charging is really important. We’ll talk in greater detail about getting public charging right in the next blog in this series. However, it’s worth noting that of the $7.5 billion in the infrastructure law dedicated to public charging, 83 percent is dedicated to fast chargers out by the highway, leaving comparably few resources for public charging that serves those who can’t charge at home. This is very inequitable.

It’s pretty clear that all new residential parking spaces constructed from now on should have charging options. The cost of running electricity to parking as a retrofit is orders of magnitude more expensive, so we need to make sure any parking serving residential built today is EV-ready. In short, don’t require parking, but require parking to be EV-ready.

What is EV readiness?

Our partners at EV Charging for All have just released an EV Building Codes Toolkit on this piece of the puzzle—how building codes should dictate EV readiness for parking in newly-constructed apartments:

If you have parking, you should have access to charging—period. Every housing unit that has parking needs to have access to charging in at least one parking spot.
Low level 2 charging is good enough, and can be provided via a receptacle/outlet. The meters need to be set up so that electric use can be easily billed directly to the resident. This prevents middlemen from charging a surcharge on apartment residents, saves the building manager from the hassle of figuring out how to bill appropriately for electricity use, and allows multi-family residents to benefit from future ‘vehicle-to-home’ resilience measures (where the EV battery can provide backup for the apartment if the grid goes down).
Get the word out. Install prominent signage so residents know the spaces are EV-ready.

While this is the right approach for new buildings, remodeling existing buildings to provide access to charging is going to be challenging and necessary. Currently, multifamily property owners are eligible for the same Inflation Reduction Act 30 percent tax credit for installing charging infrastructure as home-owners. Decision-makers should keep an eye on how this program performs to determine whether the challenges of charging access for apartment dwellers warrant a bigger incentive for existing apartment buildings.

The big picture

Municipalities can aid in the EV transition by ensuring that parking is EV-ready, while also supporting other publicly accessible, equitably priced charging options, which we’ll describe in further detail in our next blog in this series. They don’t need to require that more parking be built in order to support EV users—and in fact, building more parking could take us further from our emissions goals.

Congress and the administration can do a lot to support this approach. The Joint Office on Energy and Transportation (JOET) could develop guidance and sample building codes. The Department of Housing and Urban Development could include EV readiness as a criterion when prioritizing affordable housing investments. Besides fundamentally re-orienting the transportation program from highway expansion to better support transit, walking, and biking infrastructure, Congress could support JOET’s work on guidance and provide support for low-income multifamily housing projects to incorporate clean mobility options like EV carshare and affordable EV charging.

Introducing “Empty Spaces,” new research about parking requirements for transit-oriented developments

The oversupply of parking around transit — usually at the direction of outdated engineering guidelines — takes up valuable land, raises the cost of development, and misses key opportunities. This new research from Smart Growth America analyzes the amount of parking actually used in five transit-oriented development areas and how it compares to the guidelines that many planners, engineers or developers follow.

The land near transit stations is a valuable commodity. Hundreds or thousands of people travel to and through these places each day, and decisions about what to do with this land have implications for local economies, transit ridership, residents’ access to opportunity, and overall quality of life for everyone in a community.

Many communities choose to dedicate at least some of that land for parking. The question is, how much? Standard engineering guidelines are designed for mostly isolated suburban land uses—not walkable, urban places served by transit. But few alternative guidelines for engineers exist.

Empty Spaces: Real parking needs at five TODs, released today by Smart Growth America, set out to determine how much less parking is required at transit-oriented developments (TODs) and how many fewer vehicle trips are generated than standard industry estimates.

Professor Reid Ewing and his research team at the University of Utah College of Architecture + Planning selected five TODs across the country, each with a slightly different approach to development and parking: Englewood, CO; Wilshire/Vermont in Los Angeles, CA; Fruitvale Transit Village in Oakland, CA; Redmond, WA; and Rhode Island Row in Washington, DC. The research team counted the number of people entering and exiting the TOD buildings, and conducted brief intercept surveys of a sample of them. The team also counted parking inventory and occupancy.

The study found that all five TODs generated fewer vehicle trips than standard guidelines estimate, and used less parking than many regulations require for similar land uses. Most of the TODs included in this study also built less parking than recommended by engineering guides, yet even this reduced amount of parking was not used to capacity: the ratio of demand to actual supply was between 58 and 84 percent. Fewer vehicle trips is one likely reason why parking occupancy rates were lower than expected. Another possible reason is that standard engineering guidelines do not fully account for other travel modes that are available and actively encouraged at TODs.

This was crossposted from Smart Growth America

Join us for the kickoff webinar, today at 1 pm

If you’re reading this before 1 p.m. Eastern on 1/31, join us for a kickoff webinar. You are invited to join us:

Register for the event to to learn more about the findings and to hear from the report’s author, national policy experts, and planners from two of the cities included in this survey. Developers, regulators, and practitioners are already rethinking how much parking is needed at TOD. This new information can help them make better informed decisions, and ultimately create the development needed most at these in-demand locations.

Seattle finds a way to communicate effectively about parking prices

The City of Seattle (a T4America member) is one of relatively few cities that price on-street parking responsively and dynamically to most effectively manage demand.

This maximizes the use of available parking space while generating turnover so that it’s possible to find a parking spot on any block at any given time (cutting down on the congestion generated by drivers circling blocks while searching for on-street parking.). Seattle DOT recently put together this impressively clear video to explain how and why they adjust parking prices and regulation to manage parking supply and demand.

In this day and age of scarce transportation funding, communicating clearly about your city’s policies can make a big difference in building the trust you’ll need when it’s time to ask for more funding — Seattle just won a $930 million funding measure in November at the ballot — or increase your parking meter rates.

Transit benefit once again slated to be cut in half — tell Congress to move

Last November, we posted an action alert on the potential for millions of Americans to see the cost of their commute suddenly rise. Congress wisely chose to extend to $230 per month tax benefit for transit as part of the 2010 package extending the Bush tax cuts, continuing transit parity with the $230 deduction available for parking. Before that parity was put in place, the federal government was effectively subsidizing employees who drive alone to work — picking winners and losers rather than leveling the playing field for all travel options.

The clock is now ticking once again, and absent Congressional action, the $230 per month benefit will revert back to $120 per month on December 31. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) have introduced legislation to make the benefit permanent.

Tell your member of Congress that you support parity for all travel modes. Commuter Benefits Work For Us, an advocacy coalition supporting the Schumer-McGovern legislation, makes it easy for you to let your representatives know where you stand.

It’s a matter of fairness — and Congress needs to move.