A parking guru gave New Haven a glimpse of what we look like from the sky — and then suggested removing some of the cars from the picture.
Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, offered his slides and his prescriptions Tuesday night, at a gathering at Yale’s Harkness Hall. He was joined by Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).
The crowd was mostly non-Yalies, including Joseph Marie, the state’s transportation commissioner; Mike Piscitelli, the city’s director of transportation, traffic and parking; and Matthew Nemerson, chairman of the city’s parking authority.
Melinda Tuhus Photo
Shoup (pictured) showed aerial shots of New Haven to the capacity crowd. In the photos, buildings appeared to float in a sea of surface parking lots.
“New Haven has an awful lot of parking,” Shoup said. “If more parking were the solution to urban problems, New Haven would be a very prosperous city.”
He said parking infrastructure in most American cities is a “planning disaster.” It raises the cost of housing, promotes sprawl, harms the environment, and impedes the reuse of older buildings on properties that can’t comply with newer parking requirements.
His proposed solution, implemented in a number of cities around the country: charge the “right price” for parking – not too little (or free) and not too much so as to discourage people from coming downtown.
That could be done either by varying the price according to time of day, or by charging for length of stay, Shoup said. He said optimally, most parking spots would be full but there’d be enough open spaces to make finding a spot relatively easy.
Second, he proposed returning parking meter revenue to the neighborhoods that generate it, to pay for improvements neighbors and merchants want to see.
Then cities should remove or reduce off-street parking requirements, shrinking the amount of pavement surrounding urban buildings and facilitating the creation of more human-scaled development, he recommended.
Shoup argued that city planners use supposedly scientific counts in calculating requirements for off-street parking spaces. “No one can say how many spaces are really needed,” he maintained.
City traffic czar Piscitelli said he knows.
After the talk, city traffic czar Piscitelli was asked by a reporter if he knows the utilization rate of parking spots in downtown New Haven. He was ready with his answer.
“Every year we do a point in time count – the parking garages and all the meters,” he said. “This year we ran at approximately 85 percent [capacity].”
That puts the city right in line with Shoup’s guidelines. “We have a couple of garages on the table [proposed for construction], but they won’t get built until the demand truly justifies it,” Piscitelli added.
Responding to the aerial photos of surface parking galore, he said, “Around the medical district, about half of that land area is surface parking. So one of the efforts with [the city’s plans for redevelopoing] Route 34 is to build structured parking so we can build more office and residential [buildings], and allow the medical area to grow.” (Click here to read about the Route 34 proposal.)
“Donald Shoup’s message is critical,” train and bicycling advocate Richard Stowe argued during a post-talk discussion. Parking – something that should be market-priced, is treated as part of the commons,” and, he said, that has to change.
Parking authority Chairman Nemerson (pictured) said parking “is going to become a very complex political and financial issue over the next few years. A lot of the freedom to do the right thing in cities is limited by the fact that we have tiny cities in Connecticut and private ownership of land in the suburbs. We have to be careful not to price ourselves out of markets [and keeping people from coming into the city]. Any city is always battling with suburbs and their ability to price parking below them,” as evidenced by the oceans of free parking at suburban malls.
“We have to figure out how to maximize the value of those parking assets,” Nemerson continued. “They are crucial revenue producing assets, including from people who don’t live in our city.” And because of cutbacks from the state, that source of revenue becomes even more important.
He was asked if the city would consider reducing the amount of parking in an effort to “green” transportation options by encouraging more transit and bicycle commuting. Emphatically not, he resopnded. “We’re not going to be eliminating any parking. We [already] make sure that land and houses and streetscapes get as much priority as any city in Connecticut.”
The event was sponsored by Yale Transportation Options and the Yale Journalism Initiative.
esplain the east rock street cleaning parking ticket b.s. to me .. whose gettin that dough, huh? is that being returned to the neighborhood? I don't think so. Or, maybe they're using it to pay people to make potholes rather than filling them up. certainly no being used to police the streets. Cars drive up Bishop street faster then they go on 91. Bike theifs are seen regularly riding down the street with several bikes in their hands. blah blah blah