Parking is anything but free, even if O'Toole says so

In 2010, Streetsblog posted this response from Donald Shoup, a professor of urban policy at UCLA to a blog post by Randal O'Toole, a Cato scholar. Here, Shoup addresses that post's arguments regarding the high-cost of free parking. Given that the Cato scholar will be speaking at a debate in Marin at the end of this month, it will be worth our time to explore some of the ways he has things wrong whether through error, incuriosity, or obfuscation. O'Toole has written extensively on subjects beyond parking, including mass transit and urban patterns. We'll explore those in time.

A fair warning: Shoup's response is very long, so there is a jump. The rest, from here, is Streetsblog, Shoup, and O'Toole.

Shoup (left) and O'Toole (right). One of these gentlemen has written the definitive volume on parking policy. The other says he has yet to read it.

Dear Randal,

I would like to comment on your August 16 post on the Cato@Liberty blog about “Free Markets for Free Parking.”

You were responding to Tyler Cowen’s article in the New York Times, “Free Parking Comes at a Price,” in which Tyler explained some of the ideas in my book, The High Cost of Free Parking.In commenting on Tyler’s article, you made several mistakes in describing my ideas and proposals. I will explain these mistakes, and if you agree with the explanations I hope you will post corrections on Cato@Liberty.

Before I examine your misunderstanding of what I have written, I will first summarize the three basic parking reforms I recommend in The High Cost of Free Parking: (1) remove off-street parking requirements, (2) charge market prices for on-street parking to achieve about an 85-percent occupancy rate for curb spaces, and (3) return the resulting revenue to pay for public improvements in the metered neighborhoods.

I will quote ten extracts from your post, and comment on each of them.

1.

"Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not."

Does the Antiplanner, who is “dedicated to the sunset of government planning,” really believe that government planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for every economic activity at every site in every city?

Even Houston, which does not have zoning, has minimum parking requirements, and they resemble the parking requirements in almost every other city in the United States. Houston requires 1.25 parking spaces for each efficiency apartment in an apartment house, for example, and 1.333 parking spaces for each one-bedroom apartment. Here is the link to the minimum parking requirements in Houston’s municipal code.

Does the Antiplanner, who is “dedicated to the sunset of government planning,” really believe that government planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for every economic activity at every site in every city, no matter how much the required parking spaces may cost and no matter how little drivers may be willing to pay to use them? Does the Antiplanner really support Houston’s minimum parking requirement of 1.333 spaces for each one-bedroom apartment because he believes that Houston’s government planners can accurately predict the “need” for parking at every apartment to one-thousandth of a parking space?

Since you say that many cities do not have minimum parking requirements, can you provide a list of some of these cities?

2.

“Shoup assumes that . . . without such requirements there would be less free parking. This last assumption is extremely unlikely, as entrepreneurs everywhere know that (outside of New York City) 90 percent of all urban travel is by car, and businesses that don’t offer parking are going to lose customers to ones that do.”

Removing a minimum parking requirement means that a city will never force developers to supply more parking spaces than are profitable, but developers would be free to provide as many parking spaces as they like. If developers did always voluntarily supply at least as many parking spaces as cities now require, the minimum parking requirements would be unnecessary. The only research I have seen found that developers usually do not provide more parking spaces than cities require (pp. 78–84 of The High Cost of Free Parking). Recent econometric research also strongly suggests that minimum parking requirements force developers to provide more parking spaces than they would voluntarily provide in a free market [PDF].

3.

“Shoup portrays such free parking as a ‘subsidy’ because not all people drive and so the ones who don’t drive end up subsidizing the ones who do. But any business offers a variety of services to its customers and employees, and no one frets about subsidies just because they don’t take advantage of every single service. How often do you actually swim in the swimming pools or work out in the exercise rooms of the hotels you stay at?”

Every person plays many different roles in life -- tenant, homeowner, worker, consumer, investor, and motorist. With bundled parking, we pay for parking in all these roles except, usually, as motorists.

You use swimming pools and exercise rooms as examples of bundled services at hotels, but cities do not require hotels to provide swimming pools and exercise rooms. Suppose, however, cities did require all hotels to provide swimming pools and exercise rooms, perhaps as a part of a public health campaign. Cities could require all these swimming pools and exercise rooms to be of at least a minimum size related to the number of rooms or gross floor area in a hotel. For example, cities could require every hotel to provide a swimming pool with at least 2,500 gallons of water per guest room. If cities did have minimum pool requirements, I expect that almost all hotels would bundle the use of the pools into the room rents. Would you then say that all these swimming pools are the result of free choices made in a free market? Would you say the market had demonstrated that hotel guests like to swim? Would you say the minimum pool requirements do not subsidize swimmers at the expense of nonswimmers? But let’s get back to parking; even swimming pools have parking requirements, and here is the minimum parking requirement for swimming pools in one city: 1 parking space for every 2,500 gallons of water in a swimming pool (Table 3-4 in The High Cost of Free Parking).

Every person plays many different roles in life -- tenant, homeowner, worker, consumer, investor, and motorist. With bundled parking, we pay for parking in all these roles except, usually, as motorists. Because we pay for parking indirectly, its cost does not deter us from driving. Because off-street parking requirements force up the supply of parking spaces, they “externalize” the cost of parking by shifting it to everyone but the parker. Only if we pay for parking directly does its cost affect our decisions whether to drive or not.

If cities require an ample supply of parking spaces for every building, this saves everyone the trouble of thinking about parking -- or its cost. Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else. Because we buy and use cars without thinking about the cost of parking, we congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air more than we would if we each paid for our own parking. Everyone parks free at everyone else’s expense.

The issue is not simply whether parking is subsidized. Even without minimum parking requirements some firms would choose to offer free parking, just as some hotels offer swimming pools and some coffee shops offer wi-fi. The real issue is whether the government should mandate the parking supply.

When the US Census Bureau surveyed owners and managers of multifamily rental housing to learn which governmental regulations made their operations most difficult, parking requirements were cited more frequently than any other regulation except property taxes.

If a city like Houston will not allow any developer to build a one-bedroom apartment without also providing at least 1.333 parking spaces, is it any surprise that most landlords bundle the cost of parking into higher rents for housing? As a result, we have free parking and expensive housing. Cars are more affordable but housing is less affordable. When the US Census Bureau surveyed owners and managers of multifamily rental housing to learn which governmental regulations made their operations most difficult, parking requirements were cited more frequently than any other regulation except property taxes. (p. 141 in The High Cost of Free Parking).

Off-street parking requirements collectivize the cost of parking, because they allow everyone to park free at everyone else’s expense. American drivers park free at the end of 99 percent of all their automobile trips. If the cost of parking is hidden in the prices of other goods and services, no one can pay less for parking by using less of it. Off-street parking requirements thus change the way we build our cities, the way we travel, and how much energy we consume. All the required parking spaces spread the city out, and the greater travel distances make driving almost a necessity. Free parking also reduces the price of driving wherever we want to go, so the increased travel distances combined with the reduced price of driving make cars the obvious choice for most trips: 87 percent of all trips in the U.S. are now made in personal motor vehicles. (pp. 621–625 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

Off-street parking requirements produce the free parking that everyone wants, but ubiquitous free parking helps explain why American motor vehicles, by themselves, consume one-eighth of the world’s total oil production. We import two-thirds of this oil and we are paying for it with borrowed money. America’s extravagant consumption of imported oil to fuel our cars is not sustainable, economically or environmentally, and anything that is not sustainable must eventually stop.

4.

“Shoup also supposes (and Cowen accepts) that universal parking fees would greatly reduce the amount of driving people do. ‘Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars,’ Cowen quotes Shoup as saying.”

Please cite any occasion on which I have recommended “universal parking fees.” I am not even sure what you mean by this term. If you mean all parking everywhere must have a substantial price at all times, I most certainly do not recommend that.

Figure 12-1 in The High Cost of Free Parking shows what I mean by the right price for parking, and the right price will often be zero. For example, if half of all the parking spaces at a suburban shopping mall are empty even when parking is free, it would not make sense to charge for parking. On the other hand, if all of the curb parking spaces in a congested business district are occupied and drivers are circling every block in search of a vacant curb space, the price of curb parking is too low. Here is the link to a video that shows how to set the right prices for curb parking.

5.

“Shoup claims that a single parking space costs, on average, 17 percent more than the cost of an average car, and as a result, the cost of parking greatly exceeds the value of all automobiles in the country. This is ridiculous... Even structured parking typically costs only about $10,000 a space.”

Table 7-3 in The High Cost of Free Parking shows that parking spaces built on the UCLA campus have cost, on average, 117 percent of the price of a new car in the years that the parking spaces were built, but I did not rely on this figure to calculate that the cost of parking exceeds the value of all automobiles in the country.

Using data on the capital and operating costs of parking lots and parking structures, I estimated that the subsidy for off-street parking in 2002 was between $127 billion and $374 billion, or between 1.2 percent and 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product. In comparison, in 2002 the federal government spent $231 billion for Medicare and $349 billion for national defense.

I relied on Census data to estimate that the cost of all parking spaces exceeds the value of all the automobiles in the country. The Department of Commerce estimated that the average value per vehicle was $5,507 in 1997. This average value may seem low, but the average age of all vehicles in 1995 was 8.3 years, and 62 percent of all vehicles were more than five years old. The depreciation of the older vehicles explains the low average value of $5,507 per vehicle. (Table 7-2 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

There are more parking spaces than vehicles because drivers must be able to park wherever they go, and many parking spaces are vacant much of the time. Cities typically require enough parking spaces to satisfy the peak demand for parking at every land use -- at home, work, school, restaurants, shopping centers, movie theaters, and hundreds of other places -- so that drivers can have convenient access to all addresses at all times. To see the result, think of what happens when almost all vehicles are parked at home in the middle of the night: almost all the spaces necessary to meet the peak demand for free parking at all other land uses are empty.

Cities require a specific number of parking spaces for every land use, but no city collects data on its total parking supply. No one knows the total number of parking spaces in the US, but the eminent land-use planner Victor Gruen estimated that every car has at least one parking space at home and three or four waiting elsewhere to serve the same car. More recently, Davis et al. (2010) used detailed aerial photographs to estimate the number of parking spaces in surface parking lots in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Parking lots were identified as paved surfaces with stripes painted on the surface or where more than three cars were parked in an organized fashion. Although the estimates did not include any on-street parking spaces, or any parking spaces in structures (other than the top floor if the structure has an open roof), or any residential parking spaces that are not in parking lots, the total area occupied by parking lots in the four states would cover about half the state of Rhode Island. In two cities in Indiana for which there were detailed observations, parking lots covered three times more land than parks.

Using this limited category of parking spaces (only the spaces in off-street surface parking lots), Davis et al. estimated that the parking supply ranged between 2.5 spaces per car in Indiana to 3 spaces per car in Michigan. Presumably, most cars also have one parking space at home, and many more parking spaces are on the streets and in structures.

To be extremely conservative, suppose there is one parking space at home for every car and only two additional parking spaces elsewhere (at work, school, supermarkets, and so on), for a total of three parking spaces per car. Let us also take your back-of-the-envelope estimate of $2,200 for the land and construction cost of a surface parking space, an extremely low value. The cost of the parking spaces available per car would be $6,600 (3 spaces per car x $2,200 per space). In this case, the per-car cost of parking exceeds the average value of a car ($5,507). If so, the total cost of the parking supply exceeds the total value of all cars. And this estimate does not include the cost of any parking spaces on the streets or in structures.

Please cite the source of your statement that “Even structured parking typically costs only about $10,000 a space.” The national average construction cost for an above-ground parking structure in 2010, according to Carl Walker Associates, is just over $16,000 per space (excluding land value). Underground parking structures are even more expensive. The most recent underground parking structure built at UCLA, for example, cost $31,500 per space (Table 6-1 in The High Cost of Free Parking). Yale is about to spend $20 million to build a 200-space underground parking structure for its new School of Management, which is a cost of $100,000 per space. Your rough estimates of $2,200 per space for surface parking and $10,000 per space for structured parking are probably far too low for parking lots and structures in many cities.

If the total cost of all parking spaces in the US exceeds the total value of all the cars parked in them, and if drivers park free for 99 percent of all their trips, the total subsidy for parking (the total cost of parking not paid for by drivers in their role as parkers) is huge. Using data on the capital and operating costs of parking lots and parking structures, I estimated that the subsidy for off-street parking in 2002 was between $127 billion and $374 billion, or between 1.2 percent and 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product. In comparison, in 2002 the federal government spent $231 billion for Medicare and $349 billion for national defense. (Chapter 7 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

Free curb parking may be the most costly subsidy that American cities provide for most of their citizens.

In addition, there is the subsidy for all the on-street parking spaces. Consider a 36-foot wide residential street with two 10-foot-wide travel lanes and two 8-foot-wide parking lanes: curb parking takes up 44 percent of the roadspace. Clearly, curb parking spaces account for a significant share of the total cost of roads, and an accurate estimate of the total subsidy for parking would take curb parking into account. The US Department of Commerce estimates that the value of roads is 36 percent of the value of all state and local public infrastructure (which also includes schools, sewers, water supply, residential buildings, equipment, hospitals, and parks). Because curb parking occupies a substantial share of road space, it must be a substantial share of all state and local public infrastructure. Drivers do not pay gasoline taxes while their cars are parked, except perhaps on the gasoline lost through evaporative emissions, which pollute the air. Since drivers do pay gasoline taxes while they are driving, curb spaces are subsidized much more than the travel lanes are. Free curb parking may be the most costly subsidy that American cities provide for most of their citizens. (p. 206 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

6.

“Strangely, one of the examples Cowen uses in his article is Manhattan, where (he claims) ‘streets are full of cars cruising around, looking for cheaper on-street parking, rather than pulling into a lot.’ Give me a break! I defy Cowen to find any free parking anywhere in Manhattan, where ownership of a single parking space can cost more than a median home in other parts of the country.”

I see that you retracted this no-free-parking-in-Manhattan claim in a later post.

Unfortunately, this retraction includes several new errors of fact.

7.

“Many streets in Manhattan offer free parking, albeit often with the caveat that you have to move your car from one side of the street to the other every night.”

New York does not require owners who park on the street to move their cars every night. It requires owners to move their cars twice a week so the city can sweep the streets under them. Most of the curb parking spaces in Manhattan are free, on some of the most valuable land on earth. As you say, a parking space in Manhattan can cost more than a house in other parts of the country, so these free curb spaces must provide an awesome subsidy for cars. And the competition for this awesome subsidy requires cruising to find a rare vacant space. This cruising for free parking wastes time and fuel, congests traffic, and pollutes the air.

A study of cruising in one 15-block business district in Los Angeles found that, over the course of a year, the search for underpriced curb parking created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel—equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gasoline and produces 730 tons of carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in throughout the United States. (Chapter 14 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

8.

“But this doesn’t change my main point, which is that it is one thing for Cowen to argue that cities should not price parking below market rates where there is a market for parking. I have no problem with this. But it is quite another thing to argue, as many urban planners following the Shoup model do, that private businesses should be required to charge for parking (or be limited in how much parking they are allowed to provide) in areas where the market rate for parking is zero.”

Please cite the source of a Shoup model that would require businesses to charge for parking. Opposing minimum parking requirements is very different from proposing minimum pricing requirements.

I have supported the policy of “parking cash out” whereby employers who offer commuters free parking at work also offer commuters the option to choose the cash value of a parking space if they do not take a free parking space at work. This policy does not mandate parking charges because commuters who choose to drive can still park free. Parking cash out gives the same subsidy to every commuter, regardless of travel mode choice, while free parking gives a subsidy to drivers and nothing to other commuters.

Case studies of employers who offer parking cash out in Southern California show that it reduced vehicle travel to work by 12 percent -- equivalent to removing one of every eight cars from the road during peak commute hours. Parking cash out cost the employers only $2 a month per employee because they saved almost as much on parking subsidies as they paid in cash to commuters. Federal and state income tax revenues increased by $65 a year per employee because many commuters voluntarily traded their tax-exempt parking subsidies for taxable cash. Employers said that parking cash out is simple and fair, and that it helps recruit and retain workers. Parking cash out thus produces benefits for commuters, employers, taxpayers, cities, and the environment. It accomplishes all these goals simply by letting commuters choose how to spend their own money.

Can you tell me if the Cato Institute offers free parking for its employees? If so, does it also offer commuters the option to cash out their parking subsidies?

9.

"Cowen’s complaint about Manhattan is not about free parking but that the government is pricing on-street parking below the market. If that were the extent of Shoup’s argument, I would have no problem, as I noted in my blog last week. But Shoup’s goal isn’t market pricing of public parking; it is to create artificial shortages of private parking. He doesn’t want to simply eliminate the minimum-parking requirements that are found in many zoning codes; he wants to replace them with maximum-parking limits so that places like WalMart will not be allowed to provide their customers with as much parking as they like."

You have misunderstood what I recommend. Here are four quotes about parking requirements in The High Cost of Free Parking:

“Most markets depend on prices to allocate resources -- so much so that it’s hard to imagine they could operate in any other way. Nevertheless, cities have tried to manage parking almost entirely without prices. . . cities have without a second thought imposed planning requirements to ensure affordable parking. Rather than charge fair market prices for on-street parking, cities require ample off-street parking for every land use.” (page eight)

Why do you say that planners are annoyed when developers voluntarily provide more parking than zoning codes demand? Most off-street parking requirements are a minimum with no maximum. Minimum parking requirements imply that planners care only about having enough parking spaces, and that there can never be too many.

“Planners cannot even agree on whether to require or restrict off-street parking. Consider the diametrically opposed approaches in the Los Angeles and San Francisco CBDs: Los Angeles requires parking, while San Francisco restricts it. For a concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, 50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as the maximum. . . If some physicians prescribed bloodletting and others prescribed blood transfusion to treat the same disease, everybody would demand to know what is going on. But when city planners do essentially the same thing, nobody questions the contradiction.” (p. 121)

“Despite their ambivalence on whether to require or restrict parking, planners always regulate it. This behavior recalls a Soviet maxim: 'What is not required must be prohibited.'” (p. 121)

“Although market prices can allocate parking spaces fairly and efficiently, cities now require off-street parking everywhere -- imposing enormous costs on the economy and the environment. Cities can and should regulate off-street parking to improve its quality, but they should deregulate its quantity and instead charge market prices for curb parking. If cities deregulate off-street parking and charge the right price for curb parking, market forces will improve transportation, land use, the environment, and urban life. You will not pay for my parking, and I will not pay for yours. Instead of planning without prices, we can let prices do the planning.” (p. 499)

I did not mention WalMart anywhere in The High Cost of Free Parking.

10.

“The empirical question is: do shopping malls, office parks, and companies like WalMart provide parking for their customers and employees because of zoning mandates, as Shoup claims? Or would they and do they provide parking just because it is good for their businesses? Texas counties are not allowed to zone, yet shopping centers and office parks in unincorporated Texas still provide plenty of parking. Much to planners’ annoyance, many developers elsewhere routinely provide more parking than zoning codes demand. This suggests that free parking is a free-market choice, and Cowen, who generally supports free markets, should have no objection to it.”

Your “empirical question” attacks a straw planner. I have never said that developers provide parking only because of zoning. I have said that zoning often forces developers to provide more parking than they would voluntarily choose to provide in a free market, where they take into account both the cost of providing the parking spaces and the revenue the spaces will generate. So please cite the evidence for your statement that many developers routinely provide more parking than zoning codes demand.

Why do you say that planners are annoyed when developers voluntarily provide more parking than zoning codes demand? Most off-street parking requirements are a minimum with no maximum. Minimum parking requirements imply that planners care only about having enough parking spaces, and that there can never be too many. Furthermore, the planning approvals for specific projects often require developers to provide more parking spaces than the zoning code requires. Few planners are annoyed when developers provide more parking than the code requires; they are annoyed when developers try to provide less parking than the code requires.

All the evidence I have seen suggests that developers often request planning variances to provide fewer parking spaces than the zoning codes require, because these requirements can seriously overestimate the peak demand for free parking. Developers must commission expensive transportation studies to justify a planning variance. Consider the results in a study commissioned by Home Depot for of the peak parking occupancy at its stores in the Southwest United States. The Parsons Transportation Group observed the parking occupancy at hourly intervals at 17 Home Depot stores on a Saturday, the busiest day of the week, and found “no correlation between the square footage of a store and its resultant peak parking demand.” Parsons used the sales data at each store to predict its peak parking occupancy on the 5th-busiest day of the year, which was selected as the “design day” for the parking supply. As Parsons explained, “Choosing the 5th-busiest day as the design day would mean that some customers may not be able to find a parking space immediately during the peak hour of the busiest four or five days of the year; however, they should have no problem finding a parking space in the lot at any other time.”

Parsons then compared these estimates of peak parking occupancy with the number of spaces that cities typically require at the rate of 5 spaces per 1,000 square feet of floor area. The average municipal parking requirement based on floor area was more than double the estimated peak parking occupancy on the 5th-busiest day at a Home Depot store. That is, the study commissioned by Home Depot found that cities required twice the number of parking spaces needed to meet the peak demand for free parking at Home Depot stores at the busiest time of the year. (pp. 35–37 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

City planners have no training that would enable them to estimate the demand for parking, and no financial stake in the success of a development. They know much less than developers do about how many parking spaces to provide for each project. Planners may, at best, know a little about the peak demand for free parking at a few land uses, but they know nothing about the marginal cost of parking spaces at any site, or about how to estimate the demand for parking as a function of its price. Markets will quickly reveal the demand for parking if cities cease requiring off-street spaces. Developers, landlords, and residents will all be able to make their own independent decisions about the right number of parking spaces. Market-priced parking will allow cities to evolve naturally in response to developers’ costs and citizens’ preferences, while minimum parking requirements force evolution toward car dependency and sprawl. In planning for an uncertain future, flexible prices are far better than rigid requirements. Could things be any worse if there were no planning for parking at all?

The vision behind most planning for parking is a drive-in utopia, and cities legislate this vision into reality for every new building, regardless of the cost. Off-street parking requirements that satisfy the peak demand for free parking are, in reality, free parking requirements. Planners may believe in the immaculate conception of parking demand, and economists may believe that market choices reveal consumer preferences for travel by car. But the demand for parking was not immaculately conceived, and it does not result from consumer preferences revealed in a free market. Free parking is not always a free-market choice. Instead, governments and the market coupled long ago to produce today’s swollen demand for cars and parking.

After he has studied the evidence and reconsidered the issues, I hope the Antiplanner at the Cato Institute may decide to condemn rather than condone a complex web of wasteful and harmful minimum parking requirements that severely restrict the use of private property.

Well, that’s about it for pointing out mistakes in your blog post. Because you have said that you did not read The High Cost of Free Parking, I can understand why you have some misconceptions of what is in it. If you had read the book, you would probably have found much with which you agree. I do not expect that you will want to read a 733-page book on parking, however, so here are the links to a few sites that will give you a quick view of what’s in the book.

I did not spend all this time simply to send you a personal message about your blog post. If you take responsibility for the accuracy of the facts you have confidently stated on Cato@Liberty, and if the Cato Institute stands behind the accuracy of what its staff members post on its blog, I hope you will use the information in this message to correct all the errors in your original post. If your post is so careless with the facts and so filled with errors, and it is not corrected or retracted, what should one assume about all the other posts on Cato@Liberty?

Donald Shoup

Department of Urban Planning

University of California, Los Angeles

Original post by Randal O’Toole on CATO@LIBERTY:

Free Markets for Free Parking Posted by Randal O'Toole August 16, 2010 @ 7:49 am

I am disappointed that the distinguished George Mason University economist, Tyler Cowen, has fallen for the “high-cost-of-free-parking” arguments of UCLA urban planner Donald Shoup. Shoup is an excellent scholar, but like many scholars, he has the parochial view that the city that he lives in is a representative example of what is happening everywhere else.

Should free parking be a thing of the past?

Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not, and that without such requirements there would be less free parking. This last assumption is extremely unlikely, as entrepreneurs everywhere know that (outside of New York City) 90 percent of all urban travel is by car, and businesses that don’t offer parking are going to lose customers to ones that do.

Shoup portrays such free parking as a “subsidy” because not all people drive and so the ones who don’t drive end up subsidizing the ones who do. But any business offers a variety of services to its customers and employees, and no one frets about subsidies just because they don’t take advantage of every single service. How often do you actually swim in the swimming pools or work out in the exercise rooms of the hotels you stay at?

Shoup also supposes (and Cowen accepts) that universal parking fees would greatly reduce the amount of driving people do. “Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars,” Cowen quotes Shoup as saying. Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, submitted this question to its transportation model and concluded that requiring all offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to charge for parking would reduce driving by about 2 percent. The model showed that charging for parking has a greater effect on driving than spending billions on light rail, building scores of transit-oriented developments, or increasing the urban area’s population density by 20 percent. But 2 percent still isn’t going to do much to relieve congestion or solve any of the other problems Cowen associates with driving. Plus he never really explains why he thinks reducing mobility is a good idea in the first place.

Shoup claims that a single parking space costs, on average, 17 percent more than the cost of an average car, and as a result, the cost of parking greatly exceeds the value of all automobiles in the country. This is ridiculous. Most free parking is surface parking, which costs about $2,000 a space plus the cost of land. In areas that have not used urban-growth boundaries and similar tools to create artificial land shortages, vacant suburban land with urban services typically costs about $20,000 an acre. Since each acre can hold about 100 parking spaces, the total cost is about $2,200 per space. From the point of view of a business owner, this cost can be amortized over 30 years at 6 percent, for an annual cost of about $160. If that parking space is used by just two customers a day, the cost is about 22 cents per customer. That’s pretty trivial, and the costs of collecting fees for such parking would probably be greater than the parking itself. Even structured parking typically costs only about $10,000 a space (or, using the above assumptions, $1 per customer), but structured parking is rarely provided for free.

Strangely, one of the examples Cowen uses in his article is Manhattan, where (he claims) “streets are full of cars cruising around, looking for cheaper on-street parking, rather than pulling into a lot.” Give me a break! I defy Cowen to find any free parking anywhere in Manhattan, where ownership of a single parking space can cost more than a median home in other parts of the country.

Cowen’s complaint about Manhattan is not about free parking but that the government is pricing on-street parking below the market. If that were the extent of Shoup’s argument, I would have no problem, as I noted in my blog last week. But Shoup’s goal isn’t market pricing of public parking; it is to create artificial shortages of private parking. He doesn’t want to simply eliminate the minimum-parking requirements that are found in many zoning codes; he wants to replace them with maximum-parking limits so that places like WalMart will not be allowed to provide their customers with as much parking as they like.

The empirical question is: do shopping malls, office parks, and companies like WalMart provide parking for their customers and employees because of zoning mandates, as Shoup claims? Or would they and do they provide parking just because it is good for their businesses? Texas counties are not allowed to zone, yet shopping centers and office parks in unincorporated Texas still provide plenty of parking. Much to planners’ annoyance, many developers elsewhere routinely provide more parking than zoning codes demand. This suggests that free parking is a free-market choice, and Cowen, who generally supports free markets, should have no objection to it.

Randal O'Toole • August 16, 2010 @ 7:49 am Filed under: Energy and Environment

Allow me to plan your Thursday night

Allow me to cut to the chase: Come see me speak about transit-oriented development on Thursday, May 9, at 7pm! At Dominican University!

Okay, so my subject, "Marin Traditions and Models for Transit-Oriented Communities," might not stir excitement in your heart, though it may if you're a regular reader at TGM. Still, you should come. You'll get to hear from experts from around Marin on what Plan Bay Area could mean for Marin, and how our county can approach that future without sacrificing our independence or character.

Still not interested? Then come for the Q&A panel discussion afterwards. We on the panel don't agree on everything, so you'll get a diversity of views on how Marin can approach the future in a positive way.

Still not interested? Then come to chat with me afterwards. I suspect that you may be able to sucker me into a post-panel beer.

Can't come? The whole thing will be on MarinTV, Channel 26, though at a later date.

Hope to see you Thursday!

choosingourfuturePBA2013v4-18-3

Tell the Bridge District No to Larkspur parking garages

Larkspur Landing at dawn The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District (GGBHTD) could approve a parking garage at Larkspur Ferry Terminal in the next few months. Such a concession to a single mode would be bad news for transit-oriented development around Larkspur Landing and for ridership and would be a waste of money by the District.

Today I sent letters to all 19 members of GGBHTD's Board of Directors asking them to reject the garage in favor of other solutions, such as a Transit Center shuttle or a parking district. I also sent letters to General Manager Denis Mulligan and Deputy General Manager of the Ferry Division James Swindler, asking them to recommend against a garage.

If you want to do the same, sign this letter and let your GGBHTD Board members know. Feel free to use the letter below, either to email or snail-mail your response or as talking points for a phone call. You can find members' contact information on the Board website. Click on their portrait for more info.

Together, I'm confident we can defeat the money-wasting garages in favor of a solution that is more financially sustainable and better for our county and the region.

Dear Member of the Board,

I’m writing to you to express my concerns about the construction of parking garages at the Larkspur Ferry Terminal. In short, I feel this is an expensive solution to the problem of getting passengers to the ferry terminal. There are two less expensive ways to achieve the same ends:

Utilize unused parking stalls in Larkspur Landing.

  1. According to the parking survey conducted in the Larkspur Station Area Plan, there are 520 surplus parking stalls in the Larkspur Landing neighborhood. The survey found that these stalls will never be used by the buildings that own them.
  2. The larger garage under consideration by GGBHTD would add a net 569 new spaces, barely more than are available in Larkspur Landing at present.
  3. A shared parking arrangement would allow GGBHTD to use those 520 spaces.
  4. A shared parking arrangement would be beneficial to building owners, who would be able to charge the same parking fee as GGBHTD would on its parking lot.
  5. A shared parking arrangement would be beneficial to the owners of Marin Country Mart, whose parking lot is also at 100% capacity on weekends.

Implement a shuttle from the Transit Center to the Ferry Terminal.

  1. This replicates the promotional periods of the previous shuttle program, the only successful periods of that shuttle’s existence.
  2. Since this replicates the promotional periods, ridership estimates should reflect those of the promotional period. This is approximately 550 trips per day.
  3. Even if the shuttle has low ridership, the fare collected from each shuttle passenger remains $6 each way.
  4. Every passenger who takes the shuttle will open a parking spaces for a new passenger, which means another $2 parking fee and two $6 ferry fares.
  5. Therefore, each passenger on the shuttle will result in gross income of $26: two $6 fares from the shuttle passenger, two $6 fares from the driver who takes the shuttle passenger’s parking spot, and one $2 parking fee from the driver.
  6. If ridership reflects the promotional periods, GGBHTD would receive $785,000 in new revenue per year. Less the cost of a dedicated shuttle, this means GGBHTD would receive a $125,000 profit from the shuttle.

Option 1 is free except for staff time to make the arrangements with the City of Larkspur and neighbors. Option 2 is free to implement and would be profitable. In contrast, both the small and large garage will require subsidies to operate, on the order of $14,000 and $30,000 per year apiece, assuming the cost of replacement is included in budgeting plans.

I urge you to reject the garage proposals in favor of one or both of these alternatives. A chart of costs is included below. Detailed proposals can be found at:

http://theGreaterMarin.wordpress.org/tag/golden-gate-transit/

Thank you for your time.

Community Marin Plan is at odds with itself

Wrong Way Marin’s environmentalists recently released the 2013 version of Community Marin (PDF), an outline of priorities for how to conserve Marin County’s character and environment while still addressing the challenges of commuting and growth.

Though the plan makes bold recommendations for development and transportation – most prominently restrictions on greenfield development and a maximum house size – the plan’s recommendations are contradictory. It talks about infill development but demands onerous environmental and affordability requirements that make it even less likely to appear than now. And, while it talks about better transit, the plan maintains the status quo of car dominance: parking minimums, weighing transportation projects based on congestion relief, and HOV lanes on Highway 101.

Ultimately, the plan boils down to the old environmentalism that believes open space should be preserved, driving should be accommodated, tall buildings are bad for the environment, and housing markets are a myth. This has been the dominant strain of belief in Marin for at least 30 years, and Community Marin thinks that’s just fine.

The good

A fundamental environmental problem in Marin County today is the possibility of greenfield development, or development where there has never been development before. This kind of zoning is held out from Marin’s years of sprawl, especially the 1980s. That hundreds of homes could be built on Grady Ranch is indicative of this problem. Community Marin is right to call for a harder growth boundary to prevent this kind of sprawl from continuing.

In its place, Community Marin wants more infill housing, especially around downtown San Rafael but also around the Civic Center and Novato North stations.

The transportation chapter of the plan calls for all transportation projects to take climate change into account. Aggressive transportation demand management policies, like subsidized bus passes, car sharing, and Class I bicycle lanes (cycletracks), would tackle congestion.

The bad

Despite the call for more infill development, Community Marin goes out of its way to ensure any development will only be possible with considerable government largesse. Among the restrictions for housing development are 20 percent of most developed units be affordable housing; mandated use of green materials; examination of environmental impacts of development; no homes above 3,500 square feet; no development in the 100-year floodplain; full environmental review; full design review; parking minimums; and a hard 3-story height limit on most buildings. Though some of these restrictions could be mitigated by lifting restrictions on density or unit size, Community Marin is silent on these issues.

Commercial development, on top of those building and environmental restrictions, would need to pay a commercial impact fee, which compensates the county in full for the cost to build enough homes to house their employees. That means that for, say, every 600 square feet of retail space built, a commercial developer would need to provide enough money to the county to build a new affordable housing unit.

These restrictions are tantamount to a moratorium on for-profit development in Marin and would drive the cost of housing ever higher. Problems of affordable housing and senior housing would not be resolved. Even senior housing, if there were staff, would need to pay that commercial impact fee.

The only way to solve the problem of affordable housing is to allow the market to correct itself and to focus regulations on form rather than density. The recommendations from Community Marin for tighter zoning will push development into other counties even further from jobs. If Community Marin wants infill development, they need make it easier, not harder, for private entities to build.

The ugly

There aren’t new ideas in this plan to reshape how Marinites get around. Quite the opposite: biking, walking, and transit are seen as tools to address concerns of traffic congestion (as measured by the flawed level-of-service metric) and sufficient parking, not necessarily as transportation modes in themselves. Despite good suggestions – traffic calming, prioritizing Class I bicycle lanes – the overall push is to relieve congestion and improve safety, is often an excuse to remove pedestrians and bikes from ever-faster roads.

Take recommendation 8.14, which wants safer highway interchanges for all modes by improving traffic flow. That means higher speeds at interchanges, which means capacity improvements that will induce more driving, the least safe mode of transportation. Though the interchange will be safer, the population will be more exposed to crashes and death by automobile.

Most glaring are recommendations that encourage parking minimums, the steroids of automobility. Parking minimums externalize the cost of parking to the community at large, allowing the actual users of parking to get away with it for free or nearly for free. When combined with recommendations that level-of-service not be harmed by development, it’s a recipe for widened roads and intersections, which in turn makes them less safe or welcoming for pedestrians and bicyclists.

When it comes to transit, a necessary prerequisite to improved service is a moratorium on capacity improvements. Transit and cars are in competition with one another. Investments in roads and parking mean lower ridership on transit and more traffic on roads. Yet the plan seems ignorant of this well-understood law of transportation planning and calls for more road investment under the guise of “congestion relief”. A recommendation for a more extensive bus network rings hollow when another recommendation will suck ridership from the network that already exists.

If we want to decrease the mode share of cars and decrease how many miles we travel, we need to make a strategic investment in transit and bicycling alone, with roads restricted to maintenance funding.

There are other recommendations that betray a belief that Marin cannot be anything other than car-oriented. Recommendation 8.5 calls for more parking and more park & rides. Recommendation 8.11 supports the ludicrously expensive Novato Narrows project and a new interchange to service the Redwood Landfill, which will eventually close. Perhaps the framers of Community Marin don’t want to rock the boat too much, but it is bizarre to see environmentalists arguing for more cars. Given the strength of their lobby in Marin, they should throw their weight behind MCBC and urbanists to fight for fewer cars and less driving.

In all, Community Marin does well when discussing preservation concerns but falls flat when entering the realms of transportation and development. I suspect the framers of Community Marin share much in common with urbanists – the desire for strong towns and town character, a desire for affordable housing, a desire for open spaces and clean air – but they have gone about their recommendations in a way that does not reflect the proven best practices to achieve those ends. Indeed, their recommendations are often at odds with their stated ends.

Marin’s governments need to study these recommendations carefully before jumping onboard. If they’re serious about reducing CO2 emissions, about creating a more equitable housing market, about moving beyond the automobile, about investing in transit and bicycling and downtowns, this is not the blueprint to use.

Urbanism isn't Pruitt-Igoe

from Wikimedia by USGS It’s likely that Pruitt-Igoe, the public housing project in St. Louis, is the most famous and maligned image in architectural history. Its slab-like blocks rose from a scar in the urban fabric, the Corbusian ideal and an American dystopia. Yet at only 50 housing units per acre, this towering symbol of all things bad in urban design wasn’t all that dense. If we want to talk about density, we need to set Pruitt Igoe aside.

I mention Pruitt-Igoe because the image has emerged in Marin’s affordable housing debate. Bob Silvestri recently used it as an example of what he says the state and regional governments will force the Bay Area to build in a recent forum on affordable housing. Density mandates for 30 housing units per acre, he argued, would lead us to the worst kind of affordable housing and away from best practices.

Though there are plenty of reasons to oppose the regional housing needs assessment (RHNA) process, density and the specter of Pruitt-Igoe-like towers from Napa to San Jose is not one of them.

Rowhouses, when built right, come in around 50 units per acre, with older neighborhoods going a bit higher. Boston’s North End is over 50 units per acre. Washington, DC’s fabled Georgetown comes in at over 50 units per acre. In San Francisco, Russian Hill has 50, North Beach has 90, and the area west of Union Square goes as high as 536 units per acre. If density were the downfall of Pruitt Igoe, you’d think Union Square would be the center of a particularly wretched hive of humanity, not a trendy shopping district.

Urbanism means more places like this. Image from Google Maps

The causes of Pruitt-Igoe’s monumental failure could (and has) filled reports and books, but the failure can be boiled down to a deliberate denial of urban form. Stacking 50 units per acre atop one another while leaving empty grassy space around each tower for generic community gathering is a discredited idea that should have never earned such credence in the first place.

But to use this particular packaging of this particular density as an argument against density itself is disingenuous. It ignores common sense and the facts at hand. Good urban form can be low density and it can be high density, just as poor urban form can be either one.

And good urban form is based on the needs of the human as a creature. We walk, so a good city tries to maximize the pleasure of that activity. We are social, so a good city tries to maximize the incidence of casual socializing. That requires a certain level of compactness of buildings so that we can walk to the store and we can walk to the neighbor's home, but that look like Midtown Manhattan and it can look like downtown Mill Valley.

Let's have a debate about height and character that is really about how to build new development than enhances character, how to grow in that uniquely Marin way and make our county better. Let's leave behind the straw men and phantoms.

The Larkspur ferry crunch, part 4: The ferry's capacity

Larkspur Landing Larkspur Ferry Terminal (LFT) has an access problem: not enough people can get to the ferry. This shouldn’t be solved with parking garages, but rather with a shuttle and parking district in the short-term and transit-oriented development in the medium to long-term. But the terminal itself can only take so much ridership. In our fourth and final installment, we’ll examine the existing need, potential need, and the real and legal constraints on ferry service from LFT.

Need

At the moment, LFT is about 45 passengers over capacity on the morning rush hour departures. These benighted folks need to take an overflow shuttle bus into the city rather than the much more luxurious ferryboat. If GGT adds access for 500 more people to take the ferry, as seems to be desired, that would aggravate the overcrowding.

Adding capacity isn’t trivial. Though there are enough vessels to take people, there aren’t enough crew. Each vessel needs a captain and a crew, but these folks need to be paid for a full day, and there isn’t any need for a third full-time crew because of very low mid-day demand. While GGT is considering using one of their licensed office staff members as a captain for one morning departure as a cost-saving measure, there will be too much demand if ridership continues to increase and access is boosted as planned.

Rush hour, under the intense TOD scenario I outlined or from the SMART Station Area Plan, would probably bring about 350 extra riders, along with 120 or so from SMART and another 450 from parking expansion. If 70 percent of them use the ferry at the peak of the peak, that means another 600-650 ferry riders in the morning, or enough for one more peak hour ferry departure, which means yet another crew.

To make this make financial sense for GGT, the agency needs to figure out how to boost reverse-commute ridership and mid-day travel, which will mean more intense, or at least more interesting, development at Larkspur Landing. That, in turn, will probably require more trips. How far can GGT go?

Constraints

Corte Madera Channel. Image from NOAA. Click for much larger map.

Like all transit, ferry capacity is measured in how many vehicles of what size can be accommodated per hour. Physically, LFT is constrained by the size of the 2-mile long Corte Madera Channel, which provides an outlet for the ferries. It’s wide enough (about 265 feet) that two ferries can pass, but with a depth of only 9 feet it’s relatively shallow, so boats with even a moderate draft (how deep the boat’s hull goes under water) won’t be able to use it.

Logistically, LFT is constrained by its need for high-speed catamarans, which have a lower passenger capacity than slower monohull vessels. The largest catamarans in GGT’s fleet can fit 450 people, while its slower Spaulding monohull vessels can fit 715. Passenger demand for fast service to the Embarcadero wins out over capacity here.

Environmentally, LFT is further constrained by the need to protect the marshland around the Corte Madera Channel. Too many departures and the wakes will erode what is very rich habitat. To help combat this problem, GGT has limited the number of crossings between LFT and San Francisco to 42 per day. Each crossing, whether from or to San Francisco, uses one of those slots.

GGT is further constrained by the number of high-speed vessels in its fleet. With only 4 vessels, it can only run 3 departures per hour.

A theoretical maximum

But if we leave aside the environmental and fleet concerns and focus solely on the physical and logistical ones, we find that GGT could probably get 6 departures per hour from LFT. The highest-capacity catamarans that can sail the channel can hold about 500 passengers, so we can get 3,000 peak passengers per hour from LFT to San Francisco and vice versa. This is approximately 1.5 highway lanes worth of capacity in each direction. The Ferry Building should be able to handle that kind of intensity from LFT, but GGT may need to find or build a new berth in San Francisco.

To achieve this level of service, GGT would need eight vessels total – seven running and one in reserve.* The MV Del Norte, runt of the fleet, would need to be retired and the other catamarans would need to be retrofitted to fit 500 passengers. Five new vessels and three refurbishments should add out to about $56 million. Operating cost per hour of this maximum service is $12,420, so if GGT ran this for four hours per weekday, it would be about $13.2 million annually, less passenger fares, of course. Anything above this level of service would require a deeper channel, which would be more expensive to build and maintain.

The real maximum

As mentioned above, not only does GGT not have the fleet to run its maximum service but it’s limited to only 42 crossings per day. Using up 24 of those on rush-hour service isn’t going to cut it. Instead, we can reasonably assume a capacity of three departures per hour, or about 1,350 passengers per hour. It’s not fantastic, but that’s how much capacity the system is considering.

If GGT adds more service than this, and they very likely will need to, it will need to carefully manage its fleet, perhaps by running an asynchronous schedule. Two vessels would run between San Francisco and LFT all day, while three would only run during peak hours and remain in reserve in San Francisco during the day. This should allow it to stay within its needed 42 crossings without allowing headways to get too high or sacrificing late-night and early-morning service.

Alternatively, GGT could request more crossings from neighbors and the state. This would require a new environmental impact report that would identify mitigating measures to lessen the damage on the nearby wetlands. Under this route there’s a chance their request would be denied.

GGT must smooth its ridership profile through TOD. There is no other way for it to achieve continued ridership growth in a sustainable way. Ever-higher peak demand will be burden the system with high crew costs and wasted capacity. GGT can do this by shaping the development at Larkspur Landing and inviting SMART to build closer to the terminal (and therefore draw San Francisco commuters heading north). But GGT must also be careful not to overload its southbound capacity. Even at its theoretical maximum, GGT’s Larkspur ferry cannot move as many people as a rail line, and it cannot just pack the ferries ever-tighter as BART does.

A better Larkspur Landing will have new development, new parking capacity, a reinstated shuttle, and enough ferry capacity going in both directions. It will be a net positive to the transit agency’s bottom line and to its mission to take people off the bridge. It will boost the profile and financial situation of Larkspur and Marin County. New parking garages are the easiest but least effective way to boost access to LFT and improve the financial situation of GGT. It’s vital the agency look beyond those garages and to a better, stronger future.

*The total minimum round-trip is 70 minutes: 5 minutes loading/unloading at LFT, 30 minutes transit to SF, 5 minutes loading/unloading at SF, and 30 minutes transit back to LFT. Longer headways that don’t evenly divide into 70 would need to add time to the layovers.

The Larkspur Ferry crunch, part 3: Development

by flyron on Panoramio Larkspur has a parking problem. More accurately, it has an access problem, one that can be solved by harnessing extant parking and by running a shuttle service. These are ultimately stop-gap measures. If Golden Gate Transit is serious about turning its ferry service into the workhorse it could be, it needs to start thinking beyond the park and ride model to ferry-oriented development.

The financial case

Transit-oriented development could make GGT a mountain of money. Though as a public agency GGT isn’t necessarily supposed to make money, profits mean more stable finances and stronger service.

From a strictly real estate perspective, GGT could earn $2-4 million per year by leasing its parking lot to development, assuming fairly low-rise (four story) development to match the height of existing buildings around the neighborhood. If GGT wants to build on the land itself rather than lease to a developer, it could reap the full value of its land. If developed like the draft Larkspur Station Area Plan, that means roughly $7.8 million in gross revenue from residences and retail. If GGT adds 50,000 square feet of office space, it could quadruple its income to $33.8 million.*

Because GGT land isn’t taxable thanks to its status as a government agency, Larkspur should encourage any residential development on the terminal parking lot to have small units like efficiencies, studios, and one-bedrooms. Childless households attracted to small units are less of a burden on city services, so the lack of parcel and property taxes won’t be as great a problem. Sales taxes would still come in from these households, though, so Larkspur would get some boost from GGT land use changes.

If private property owners follow through on the SMART Station Area Plan, of course, the City of Larkspur would be able to reap the full benefits of more intense use.

The access case

What prompts this analysis, of course, is the current lack of access to the ferry, not simple financial concerns. GGT thinks Larkspur ferry ridership is limited by the ability of people to get to and from the terminal and wants to break through that barrier.

Transit-oriented development of the whole neighborhood of the sort called for in the draft Station Area Plan will provide a way to break through this barrier. More people will be able to walk to the ferry terminal, and that’s a good thing. The existing residents of Larkspur Landing seem to be heavy users of the ferry, with 0.6 weekday trips per person.** We don't know how many people may eventually live where the parking lot now stands, but there's every reason to believe they will be just as apt to use the ferry.

Residential TOD is a good way to build in riders who won’t be deterred by the lack of parking. With SMART or a bus shuttle, there’s a good chance GGT could attract car-free or car-light residents, which would boost other transit ridership.

Office TOD could be even more valuable and attract the reverse-commuter. There’s a glut of counter-commute capacity from San Francisco. Attracting San Franciscans to the ferry would allow it to make the most of its existing resources and are an easy way to boost farebox recovery.

Getting these reverse-commuters will require some skill on the part of developers. Only 2 percent of Marin’s jobs are held by transit-commuting San Franciscans. There aren’t many San Francisco commuters to begin with, and most of them are driving, not taking transit. A combination of marketing office space to San Francisco businesses, free transfers to Muni and BART, and discounted fares for employees of Larkspur Landing businesses could help boost the number of reverse commuters.

Any redevelopment plans need to be carefully evaluated. The Larkspur parking lot is on old marshland that will be very expensive to redevelop. GGT land isn’t taxable, so developments’ strain on city and county services needs to be weighed carefully. Neighbors and businesses need buy-in to improve the area. And traffic, surface transit, and parking are all thorny problems that need to be addressed (and are bigger issues than can be addressed here).

Then again, Larkspur Ferry Terminal may not have the capacity for more ridership. There’s already an overflow bus for morning commuters, and GGT is considering adding another morning ferry to cope with demand. In our fourth and final installment, we’ll examine the ferry terminal’s capacity constraints and what to do about them.

*Larkspur offices lease for about $43 per square foot, and apartments in Marin rent for about $2,000 per month. Retail rents for about $20 per square foot.

**At the moment, 25 percent of ferry riders walk to the ferry. It’s very likely that most of these riders live in the nearby homes north of Larkspur Landing Circle, as those are the only homes within walking distance.

Markets are the third way to affordable housing

Boston, with 53 units per acre of pure character and almost nothing over 4 stories. Image from Google Maps It’s no secret that the cost to buy or rent a home in the Bay Area is extremely high and rising. Thanks to a regional economic rebound and renewed interest in the kind of walkable living that defines San Francisco, demand for Bay Area housing is at a high.

Unfortunately, this means that only the most privileged can afford to purchase a home in our inner-ring suburbs. Blue collar workers, service workers, and young professionals making less than astronomical sums are having an increasingly difficult time finding homes they can buy or even apartments they can rent. And so a debate over how to accommodate affordable housing swirls around every planning meeting and town council election.

Advocates rally behind nonprofit housing and the state’s regional housing needs assessment (RHNA) process, which assigns each municipality and county a certain number of units they must accommodate. Others, especially in Marin, say cities and counties are managing their affairs just fine and resent anything that could be construed as meddling from Sacramento or ABAG.

Yet both perspectives neglect the economic underpinnings of our housing cost. Fundamentally, we have a shortage of housing for any income. Until either side begins to address this fact, we’ll continue to face deadlock and continuing cost escalation.

Market urbanism

Our housing shortage isn’t everywhere. Stockton and Vallejo can attest to that. Rather, the cost hikes have been in the walkable areas that have come into vogue over the past 10 years. Downtowns both large (San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland) and small (San Rafael, Napa) have seen their prices rise since the end of the recession.

While some of the demand in the big cities may come from name recognition, the principal reason for the price spike is that the supply of housing in walkable neighborhoods has not grown with demand for it. We have a classic housing shortage, and the only way out is to boost supply of walkable housing for all incomes, from luxury to low-income, by making it profitable to build such housing.

To some, this will sound like nonsense. We need affordable housing, not luxury housing. But the theory that increasing supply will stabilize prices has been borne out in at least one market.

Washington, DC, has seen a massive population boom. Since 2000, it has grown by nearly 10 percent, and now is adding 1,300 new residents every month. Though housing costs have increased (partly due to a lack of financing in 2007-2008 and partly due to a lag between demand for apartments and their completion), this year they are expected to be stable despite the continuing influx of people. Regionally, nearly 40,000 apartments are coming online in the next year, with another 30,000 the following year.

No government program could have forced such broad rent stabilization without direct price controls. Next year’s stable rents will only have come about because the region’s governments have worked with demand rather than against it. In the central city, DC is working on a revised zoning code that will promote high- and moderate-density walkable living. In the suburbs, counties are converting drivable retail centers into walkable mixed-use areas, sometimes far from the Metro rail system, relieving some of the demand in the central city.

The Bay Area could join DC and stabilize its housing market only by stepping back from the dysfunctional No Development vs. Affordable Housing debate. We must boost the supply of housing for all incomes or we’ll never get a handle on the problem.

Reform the laws, boost supply

Bay Area developers face a potent mix of restrictive zoning and anti-developer sentiment. We fear that any changes to our much-beloved downtowns will destroy their character, and that rapacious developers just won’t care.

Arguably, they didn’t care in the 1950s or 1960s. Ugly concrete replaced beautiful Victorian. Grassy hills became rolling tract homes. Governments helped by marking poor neighborhoods “obsolete” and tagging for them for demolition.

The laws put in place to stop this kind of idiocy worked, and developers now try to work within a city’s character rather than against it. Developers now face strict design review to ensure developments work with local character and architecture, or are built on characterless strip malls and dead zones.

Still, some of those laws hold back development to an undue degree. Take density limits, put in place to maintain neighborhood character. These ensure that only, say, 30 units per acre can be built in a given acre. While that seems like plenty of density, they encourage the largest units instead of the most rentable mix of units. A developer can’t charge as much for a studio apartment as he can for a two-bedroom, but since both count as a “unit” he’ll build a bunch of two-bedrooms. In Marin, this has meant continuing undersupply of studios and a rent hike of 14 percent since 2011.

Other constraints, such as parking minimums and inclusionary zoning, squeeze even more money from a project, rendering small infill developments unprofitable and impossible.

Cities should reform their zoning codes to make attractive and character-rich development profitable again. Density could be substituted with height limits, which would allow cities to keep a low-rise or mid-rise character while also adding housing units. Parking minimums, too, should be abolished in favor of alternative means of transportation and neighborhood parking plans.

Even in large cities, this will encourage dense development beyond BART stations. Though BART-oriented development is useful, there aren’t enough BART stations to make much of a dent in the housing supply. More importantly, these developments are often islands of walkability in a pedestrian-hostile sea if infill development is restricted to the BART station. Real cities are integrated fabrics, with buses, walking, and biking dominating short trips. Most of the walkable centers in the region follow this pattern and aren’t anywhere near rail transit. There’s no reason not to expand those town centers into the retail strips that dot the region or the vast office parks that dominate swathes of the East and South Bay.

Matthew Yglesias has written extensively about the need for infill development and upzoning. It is simply not tenable to prevent first-wave development from being redeveloped. Our land is simply too valuable to remain parking lots for offices and strip malls.

If the Bay Area is serious about affordable housing, its governments must tackle laws that keep supply from catching up with demand. We cannot rely upon nonprofits or government largesse to solve this economic problem effectively, nor can we freeze our cities and rents and call it a day. Only the market can fix the market.

The blog Sightline Daily has an 11-part series on legalizing real affordable housing, from zoning to density to rooming houses. It should be required reading for anyone involved in affordable housing policy.

 

Microblogging, expanded

gum wall Yesterday, I realized I have more ideas for blog posts than I have time to do them. I’m in the middle of a series of posts on Larkspur Landing – I have two more to go – and the issue of affordable housing has reared its ugly and nonsensical head once again in Marin. I’ve also started blogging about the broader region at our sister site, Vibrant Bay Area. Unless one of you wants to pay me, you’re probably not going to get as much analysis as you or I would like to see.

Thankfully, I’m on a microblogging site you may have heard of called Twitter, so I condensed them down into a series of hypotheses. Though I’m confident there is enough data to back up these statements, I haven’t investigated them to confirm that my hunches are correct.

Pardon the swear here. Bicycling, if it's going to take off in the US, needs to be more than some paint on the side of the road. Known in California as the Class II bike lane, the bike lane is far better than nothing but far worse than ideal. To me, if you're uncomfortable riding a cargo bike on it, or if you wouldn't send your 8-year-old to school on it, then it's not good enough to put cars and bikes at parity.

Cities are not isolated pockets around subway stations. They are integrated fabrics. San Francisco is walkable even far from BART stations, when the only transit is a bus. Since most of the Bay Area is designed around retail strips like El Camino Real, upzoning plans need to take that into consideration. Bubbles of walkability, like Santana Row in San Jose or the BART transit villages, don't encourage people to live car-free lifestyles, only a car-free commute. By connecting high-density rail-oriented areas with moderate density bus-oriented areas, the Bay Area could improve its mode share mix immensely.

The term "hipster" has become so over-used it's lost what little meaning it once had. Hipsters are supposed to save the city (a simplification of Richard Florida's theory of the creative class) and destroy the city (a simplification of Joel Kotkin's opposite theory). They're poor and unproductive one moment, rich and entitled the next. The latest in this devolving debate has Richard Florida positing that a lot of creative class types in a single city lowers income inequality. Joel Kotkin responded with a glorified, Told you so, which led to a Florida response of, No, idiot.

Through it all, I just wish people would leave the poor/rich/entitled/gentrifying/unproductive saviors of our society alone. Income inequality is more complicated than theories of cities, and no single class of people is the salvation or damnation of our society.

And stop calling them hipsters.

Actually, it probably won't. In occurred to me that urbanism was the pursuit of maximum efficiency of access within the constraints of the age. In our age, those constraints are principally about preservation of land, character, history, and preexisting residential neighborhoods. In other ages these were sunlight and fresh air; defensibility; or access to water.

I define access as the number of destinations within a given travel time by a given mode, and I define efficiency as minimizing negative externalities and maximizing positive externalities in the course of one's daily routine. That's too technical. In other words, how much does our urban design pollute? How much does it make us healthier or sicker? How much land does it use up? How much does it cost? And so on.

My definition could be rephrased. Urbanism is the pursuit of the most access at the least cost to ourselves and to our environment within a community's chosen or necessary constraints. Decisions from transportation to zoning hang from this.

The East Bay has a wealth of rail infrastructure. It has two parallel passenger rail lines running from Richmond to Fremont and branches going in all directions, while the Peninsula has only one rail line going north-south. The Peninsula's rail capacity will be constrained by the blended Caltrain-High Speed Rail plan, while the East Bay's capacity will not be.

Rather than pursue BART expansions and inefficient ferry service to San Francisco, it should bolster its Amtrak and ACE service to be true rapid transit in parallel to BART and Caltrain. It should restructure its zoning to encourage new neighborhoods to develop for San Franciscans fleeing ludicrous rents. And it should invite tech companies to build new neighborhoods around their train stations instead of new office parks in the middle of nowhere.

Each of these ideas should be pursued, but I fear I must decline the call. That shouldn't stop you from heeding the call, of course. If you agree, or even if you disagree, pitch me a story on one of these themes. I might end up running it.

The Larkspur ferry crunch, part 2: Bring back the shuttle

Larkspur Ferry Terminal It’s impossible to discuss the access crunch at Larkspur Ferry Terminal without the subject of shuttle buses. It seems like an easy solution to the seemingly intractable problem of how to get people to the ferry, but history shows it’s not so straightforward.

As mentioned Monday, the shuttle was a monumental failure with riders, principally thanks to free parking. Though ridership would spike to 10 percent of ferry patrons during promotional periods, it would drop back down after the promotion was over. It’s tough to compete with free and convenient.

Pay parking eliminates this concern. Thanks to a quirk in Clipper, riders will get a free transfer while drivers will not, replicating the situation during promotions. It is not unreasonable to assume that 10 percent of riders, the same number who used it during promotions, would use the shuttle. At that rate, the shuttle would actually make a profit, but not like a normal bus may.

Normally, fares paid directly for the bus service goes towards the route’s bottom line. Greyhound makes a profit on its buses, while GGT wants to recover no less than 20 percent of its operating costs with fares. A ferry shuttle, however, would be a loss leader. The real money isn’t in the fare paid for the shuttle ride; it’s in the much higher fare paid for the ferry ride.

Since demand for the ferry already outstrips the ability of people to get to it, every ferry rider who switches from car to shuttle frees a parking spot available for someone new. If 10 percent of ferry riders switch to the shuttle, another 275 people can drive to the ferry. Our drivers would take round-trips, so GGT would earn $12 per day in fares from them. And, since they’re driving, they’d pay out another $2 per day as a parking charge. Add it up and GGT gets nearly $3,000 per new passenger per year, a total of $785,000 in new revenue.

A simpler shuttle program

The shuttle program used in the past was a complicated and vast thing, with shuttle routes overlapping existing routes inefficiently while running long distances.

There's no need for that. While most ferry riders come from Central Marin, nearly all bus traffic runs through the San Rafael Transit Center. It's impractical for a shuttle to replicate all these routes, and why should it? If it wants to pick up more passengers up 101 or down Miracle Mile or out in the Canal, it has ceased to be a ferry shuttle and has become part of the wider bus system.

As well, running the shuttle outside of a very restricted 6-minute Transit Center-Ferry Terminal circuit opens the route up to delays from traffic or crash. Given the often long waits between ferry departures, a delay could force a long wait on riders. If ferries are held to wait for the bus, it would add delays for the rest of the commute hour.

Unfortunately, a dedicated shuttle would be rather expensive. At $660,000 per year, it would make a $125,000 annual profit, but there's a lot of waste. When ferry headways are long - up to 95 minutes - the shuttle wouldn't have anything to do. GGT could realize significant cost savings by extending an existing route to the ferry terminal instead.

By extending a short, frequent route, like Route 35, GGT would be able to operate a shuttle for only $340,000 per year. When ferry headways are long, the bus would be able to continue on its normal route and head to the ferry terminal for shuttle runs. When ferry headways are short, every run would hit the ferry terminal.

It’s important to point out that, since GGT will charge for parking no matter the outcome of its parking expansion, it must implement a shuttle to take up the slack of those who don’t want to pay the charge. If GGT rejects the shuttle but institutes the parking charge it will face a decline in ferry ridership rather than an expansion.

This kind of shuttle is not on the radar of GGT officials. They cite the old system's high cost, poor response, and ferry riders who said they want a shuttle for other people but not themselves. Though they want to time Route 29 to the ferries - a fantastic idea - they may miss an opportunity to add revenue to the system. Staff should draw up some shuttle options with projected ridership and combined ferry/bus revenue. The Board needs to see its options.

If reorganizing neighborhood parking is the “organization” side of ferry access, the parking charge is the “electronics” side of ferry access. The modest investment would add efficiency by segmenting the access market into those who really want or need to drive and those who would prefer to leave their car at home.

As we discussed Monday, there is no reason to invest in parking garages for Larkspur Ferry. Not only can GGT provide 520 more parking spaces for free but it can free up 275 parking spaces with a profitable shuttle service.

So we can accommodate plenty of Marin commuters, but GGT’s ferry faces other problems, namely severely underused afternoon and reverse-commute capacity. And if the aim is to boost ridership, there’s no more efficient way than increasing the number of people who walk. The next installment will tackle these issues with transit-oriented development.

 

The Larkspur ferry crunch, part 1: There's already enough parking

All the parking lots in Larkspur Landing. Image from Google Maps.

There’s no question that Larkspur Ferry has an access problem. If you drive, there’s a vanishingly small chance you’ll get a parking space after 8:30am. If you don’t drive, your options are to live in the neighborhood, walk for almost a mile along the freeway, bike for 15 minutes from the Transit Center, or take the miserably slow GGT Route 29 bus.

In response to this perceived lack of access, GGT is again investigating some exceedingly expensive parking garages paid for by a new parking fee. (They had last discussed a parking solution in 2007, when ridership was about what it is today.) While this would expand access, this solution fails to take into account the breadth of options available, including 520 unused parking spaces in Larkspur Landing that already exist.

Organization before electronics before concrete

An old adage marks best practice for facilities design: organization before electronics before concrete. The first, organization, rearranges existing resources to maximize their utilization. The second, electronics, upgrades the systems you already have so you can make even better use of your resources. The third, concrete, adds resources to your now-optimized pool. By prioritizing cheaper solutions before expensive ones, organizations can save a lot of money.

In the case of Larkspur Terminal, GGT’s supply of access to the ferry (the parking spaces, bus seats, bicycle racks, housing units, and office space in the vicinity) is the resource. As currently designed, there is a shortage of access, but GGT doesn’t need to add more garages just yet.

The Larkspur Station Area Plan revealed that, during the day, 520 parking spaces in the neighborhood went unoccupied. Though GGT does have a parking problem on its own property, the area’s parking supply is more than ample to meet the demand.

Graphic and data from City of Larkspur.

These spaces aren’t being used because the parking supply isn’t well-organized. People driving to the ferry have the option of parking for free on the street, for free in the ferry parking lot, or for $4 per day at the Marin Airporter. The other lots aren’t an option to them, as they’re reserved for more office workers than exist and patrons of Marin Country Mart who mostly come on the weekend.

Through a reorganization of the neighborhood’s parking supply, GGT could expand ferry parking by 520 spaces essentially for free.

GGT, Larkspur, and the businesses in Larkspur Landing would need to work together to figure out the precise rules, but the core of any plan would be pricing: a $2 charge per day for anyone parking in the area who doesn’t get parking validated by a retail store or who doesn’t have an employee parking pass. The owner of each lot would get income from their charge. Larkspur would earmark on-street parking charges to neighborhood improvements.

Coincidentally, 520 spaces is nearly the same number of spaces GGT wants to add in a large, 969-space garage. Since it would be built on 400 existing parking spaces, the garage would net 569 parking spaces. Unlike the essentially free 520, however, the 569 spaces would cost an astounding $44,000 apiece.

No need for concrete

Organization before electronics before concrete means other options should be explored before investing in costly new infrastructure. An examination of the neighborhood finds that parking already exists to meet demand, if GGT can harness it.

Of course, if the politics prove impossible and those open spaces can't be used for ferry riders, GGT will need to turn to the parking equivalent of electronics: a shuttle from the Transit Center. We'll tackle that question next.

The vibrant Bay Area

barareasopace The Bay Area is quite a tapestry. We have people from around the world trying to make a living here and even more pounding at our doors. We are a global economic force in industries both ancient (wine) and contemporary (tech). From a hilltop above rural Bolinas you can spy the western symbol of urbanism, San Francisco. And over it all, we have over a hundred governments and even more elected boards and semi-independent agencies shaping policy.

The Bay Area is a vibrant, fascinating, diverse, and interconnected place in ways we hardly ever stop to think about. And so, I'm starting a new blog today, in addition to this one, called Vibrant Bay Area.

For the past two years, I've written The Greater Marin, an exploration of these themes for a single county. Yet the deeper I dug into local concerns, like the SMART train and affordable housing, the more I understood that policies in Marin shape the region, and vice versa.

And so, a group of like-minded activists and writers gathered to create a new platform to explore the region's urban affairs from the bottom up.

Vibrant Bay Area is a collaborative attempt to peel back the region’s layers to find the lines that connect our communities and the lessons we can learn from one another. Though each writer has his or her own perspective, we all approach the region from a decidedly urbanist perspective. We believe the future of the Bay Area lies in vibrant town centers accessible by biking, walking, and well-designed transit.

The challenges faced by the Bay are substantial and as diverse as our cityscape. While Vallejo struggles with the financial consequences of unsustainable sprawl, Windsor wonders whether its character can survive an apartment building boom. While VTA runs nearly empty, BART's commuters crush through the Transbay Tunnel. From crime in Oakland to education in San Francisco, transit in Napa and development in Contra Costa, we want to explore this whole great, fascinating region of ours.

And we can't do it alone. Have a tip? Want to write a post? Get in touch with us: info [at] vibrantbayarea.org. We're also on Twitter at @vbayarea. And by all means, if you see that your community or issue isn't receiving the attention it deserves, step up! Our all-volunteer corps can't be everywhere at once, so lend your voice.

The Bay Area is vast, but it is not inscrutable. Join us in shedding a light on the dark corners of our fascinating, vibrant region.

Make your own streets in Abu Dhabi

If you're like me, you've often looked at a street and thought, If only I could make a lane diagram that didn't look terrible. Though I don't think many people are like me, I have some friends at heart in the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council. The ADUPC has made an online tool so you can make your own street cross-sections, and I am a fan. Expect to see a lot more of these diagrams from here on. The key to building a good cross-section is flexibility. A planner needs to show sidewalks, street furniture spaces, bike lanes of all classes, curbs, medians, transit-only lanes and, of course, regular traffic lanes. These need to be adjustable to any width, and we need to be able to show accessories. The ADUPC tool lets you adjust down to a tenth of a meter and add trees, grass, light poles, coloration, and patterns.

I don't like that I can't show the results in feet. American planners of the professional and armchair variety know their lanes in terms of feet: 12 feet for a freeway lane, 10 feet for a surface street lane, etc. It's an adjustment to go metric, and it adds an unfortunate barrier to what is otherwise straightforward.

Yesterday I posted about a short stretch of Second Street. While it was easy see from Google Streetview how small a space we'd reserved for pedestrians, I didn't describe the width of the lanes. Even if I had, the point can be lost in a cloud of numbers. A diagram presents all that information in a much more concise fashion.

Second Street as it is now, with widths in meters. The lanes vary a bit through this block, but not much. Image from ADUPC.

At the top is the total width of the right-of-way, 16.9 meters. Below each element is its width in meters: the three lanes, the dirt path on the south side of the street and the grassy filler space in the north side. The widths are approximations from the tools on Google Maps.

Now we can easily see that this bit of road is actually quite wide. Since lane widths on a surface street are usually only 10 feet (3 meters), we have quite a bit to work with.

Using the same tool, I can reconfigure how much space is dedicated to what. I came up with the cheapest solution: add a 6.5 foot (well, 2 meter) sidewalk to the existing road. To accommodate, I narrowed the lanes to 3.5 meters apiece. It's above average, but it's a difficult curve and drivers might need a bit more wiggle room as they come off Miracle Mile.

It's really easy to add a sidewalk.

But maybe you'd like to do something else with this stretch. Perhaps you want to move the planter to be a space between the road and the sidewalk. Perhaps you'd like to narrow all the lanes to 3 meters and widen the sidewalk. Or perhaps you'd like to widen the lanes a bit more, maybe squeeze in another travel lane through there. That's the wonderful thing: you can easily show us what you'd like to build on this roadway, or any roadway.

So go to it.

The case of the missing sidewalk

No sidewalk. Click for Google Maps. Recently, I was driving down Second Street on my way to Pacifica and I noticed something I’d never noticed before: a block without a sidewalk, in downtown San Rafael.

Of course, this isn’t really new, simply unnoticed. It’s a blindness, really, to the needs of pedestrians on a street that has gone from a place to stroll down to a long onramp, but those needs are quite real.

On Second, between Hayes and Shaver, neither side of the block has a sidewalk. It’s a very built-up area, and there are sidewalks on the blocks before and after on Second. It’s a bit like paving the whole length of a road except for one isolated block that stays gravel.

It looks as though this block was an oversight. The transit line ran through here from San Anselmo, and buildings were built to turn away from that line. There wouldn’t be a sidewalk here anymore than there would be one along a BART line. Once the tracks were torn up and it became a road, sidewalks were installed on a lot of the right of way, but not this bit.

Not that people don’t use it. You can see a dirt track where people walk. The only other option is a detour onto First but, as any driver would know, not many people will take a five minute detour to get around a 15 second bit of gravel. If you have a stroller or are in a wheelchair, however, forget it. It’s not just that the dirt track is dirt, it’s also really narrow. There’s a power pole right in the middle of it, which cuts the space down to about a foot or so. Nobody except an able-bodied person would be able to get around it.

We wouldn’t accept this kind of treatment to drivers, so why is it acceptable to pedestrians? This is the most basic infrastructure for the most basic form of transportation available in a place where we want people to walk in the first place: downtown. Nader Mansourian, as an engineer and as director of Public Works at San Rafael, should have fixed this a long time ago. Maybe Mayor Phillips can get the ball rolling.

Larkspur's SMART station: Answering the critiques

Last time, we examined how the station got to be placed where it is. The gap in building the first and second segments gives activists a window to try to change the mind of SMART staff and board members, and by the looks of things they'll need the extra time. After seven years, the planned site of the Larkspur station is pretty well set in stone, at least if you ask the agency. Whenever asked to move it, SMART has taken the position that the location is final.

This, to put it mildly, is frustrating.

How can the concerns raised by Larkspur years ago and those raised by SMART be addressed?

Larkspur

When Larkspur first voiced opposition to a ferry terminal station, the city council was opposed to the project entirely and objected on three grounds: glare, aesthetics, and a desire to avoid renegotiating Marin Country Mart's planning documents.

The concern over glare is so odd it hardly deserves mention. Sun glints off parked cars in the ferry terminal and all over the neighborhood. Adding a train would not increase glare.

A train viaduct in Berlin. Image by Jarrett Walker.

Aesthetic concerns deserve more of a mention. Larkspur argued that views of the Bay would be blocked by an elevated structure and the neighborhood would be marred by a rail viaduct.

Though the vista is dominated by the ferry parking lot, viaducts are very rarely attractive things, at least in the United States. Since the train would run through the parking lot of a major shopping center and across the field of view of some of the stores, SMART should take a page from Germany and incorporate the shopping center into the viaduct itself.

A huge number of trains in Berlin run on elevated tracks, often running right through the city. Unlike the loud and grungy viaducts in Chicago or New York City, these have been integrated into the city by becoming buildings in themselves. Cafes, shops, and restaurants have taken up residence beneath the rails. In essence, the viaducts are very long buildings with trains running on the rooftop.

Marin Country Mart wants to emulate a maritime village, something vaguely European. By using the viaduct as buildings, Marin Country Mart could emulate something actually European. Though it would require cooperation from the SMART board, it would ameliorate the aesthetic concerns of the neighbors and add value to the shopping center's owners.

Marin Country Mart brings us to the third objection: planning. Larkspur officials in 2006 did not want to revise the Planned Unit Development plan that governs the shopping center, something that would need to happen if SMART extends a viaduct through their property, as two buildings would have to come down on the edge of the property.

But if both parties are willing to renegotiate, there's no reason why Larkspur couldn't amend the plan. Extending SMART through the shopping center makes a more direct connection between the train and shopping. That means value added to the center, especially if the viaduct can be made up as nice as the ones in Berlin.

SMART

Now that opposition in Larkspur has passed, SMART itself stands opposed to an in-terminal station. As far as I can tell, it's mostly intransigence. It's not in The Plan, so therefore shouldn't be added to The Plan. But publicly, SMART will likely say that it's an issue of cost (too high) and ridership (won't change much). These are things we can assess, though intransigence might go a bit deeper.

For cost, elevated rail structures like this one typically cost about $70 million per mile to build, including stations. SMART would need to build a viaduct 2,200 feet long, or about 0.4 miles. Multiply that against the average cost per mile and one arrives at $30 million. Let's add in $150,000 for building demolition, $100,000 for EIR amendments, and a generous $1 million for land acquisition, for a total cost of $31.3 million. That brings the cost of the whole system from $724 million to $755 million.

This is a bargain, especially for a project of regional significance. If SMART extends to the Larkspur terminal, it could transport a significant number of ferry riders. If it transports even a tenth of them (540 per weekday), the project will cost about $96,000 per trip, not counting the people who will occupy the now-freed spaces in the parking lot. The Greenbrae Interchange Project, in contrast, will add meaningful capacity for about 825 trips* in the peak hour at a cost of about $173,000 each.

Intransigence

SMART staff have dug in their heels on this project, but that's not to say they can't be persuaded or forced to come up with a good plan. However, will will take time.

The first thing you can do is understand the costs involved, as above. While the numbers in this post are estimates, SMART has not studied the issue in depth; they know just a hair more than I do about potential costs and ridership. Until there is a proper study, we cannot know for certain how much it will cost, nor how much benefit those monies will buy us.

The second thing you can do is start to lobby boards, commissions, and SMART staff. Since a ferry/train connection is a project of regional importance, TAM, SCTA, and MTC should rank it high on their list of congestion mitigation projects. $31.3 million is a pittance compared to what is doled out in a given year, and this is a critical link in the North Bay's transportation infrastructure. Residents of San Francisco and Sonoma have leverage as well, as the station will effect the usefulness of their own transportation systems.

Golden Gate Transit needs to push SMART to improve access, too. This will directly benefit GGT's ferry business and increase the value of their park and ride lot, should they ever decide to lease it to developers.

Find your SMART, SCTA, MTC, TAM, and GGBHTD representatives and tell them you want SMART in Larkspur.

*This is the number of new northbound cars that will be accommodated on the freeway. The project won't add any southbound or HOV capacity that will be used.

Marin: The original smart growth county

San Anselmo from Red Hill. Photo by the author. Last weekend I had the privilege to attend the annual New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Kansas City. Mayors, activists, councilmembers, and the odd blogger came out to share successes and failures in their communities in the hopes that others could learn from their examples. And after it all, one thing is clear: Marin has it pretty good.

Smart growth came about in the early 90s as the response to auto-oriented sprawl. Though it can mean many things, the basic purpose is improving access for walking and bicycling. Within a 15 minute drive is a certain number of residences and businesses. Within a 15 minute walk there is less. In a place with high access for walkers, however, there is too much density for everyone to move around in cars, leading to congestion if that demand isn’t well-managed. Similarly, in a place with high access for cars, there is too little density for people to be able to walk with any efficiency.

While there have always been low-density places for the people who want peace and quiet away from the town center, the last 60 years has seen a great proliferation of such places. In cities like Tulsa or Houston, the city centers themselves were transformed to improve automobile access at the expense of walking access. What activists term sprawl was the outward growth of this style.

In Marin, we rebelled in the 1960s after we saw what freeways were doing to the rest of the Bay Area. Though our beloved trains and ferries were long gone, destroyed by the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway 101, we refused to allow West Marin to be built over. We developed our landmark Corridors plan, ensuring sprawl would not rule our day.

A centerpiece of smart growth is a commercially strong and walkable town, and almost every city and community in Marin has one. These are spaces where you can walk from a nearby neighborhood or park your car once and stroll the strip. They are places with a high density of destinations. They define their community. After all, what would Mill Valley be without Miller Avenue? Or San Rafael without Fourth Street?  Other cities aren’t so lucky.

But a place where you can walk isn’t much good if you can’t walk anywhere else, or if it’s unsafe to bike around town. On this, too, Marin has a leg up on its peers.

Surprising though it is, the fact that we have sidewalks on nearly all but the most rural streets and arterial roads is a rarity, and it shows in the pedestrian fatality rates. Across the US, there are 1.38 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people. In California, it’s 1.6 per 100,000, but in Marin it’s less than half that. In 2008, Marin only had 0.6 pedestrians die per 100,000 people. Though every death is a tragedy, Marin is doing far better than the country at large.

Our focus on smart growth – not to mention the transit-oriented bones left by that rail system – has paid off in how we commute. Our county has the second lowest rate of car commuters in the state, surpassed only by San Francisco. If we add carpools, we are tied with San Mateo County for third. One in three Marin commuters travel by a means other than a single-occupant vehicle. One in ten take transit, third best in the state.

That’s not to say Marin doesn’t have its shortcomings. Our bicycle infrastructure is good but not complete. Our zoning codes needlessly inhibit small units and drive up housing costs. And between those walkable town centers are drivable strips, meant more to be sped through than lingered in.

But Marin has a lot to teach the rest of the country. I was raised on the Marin sense of pride, the understanding that if only the United States would be more like Marin we’d have a more sustainable, prosperous world. Marinites should smile that the movement towards smart growth around the world is in essence an attempt to take the path Marin took 40 years ago. We should smile, that is, and roll up our sleeves.

Larkspur has a second chance to do SMART right

Elevated Ferry Station While Sonoma gets to reap the benefits of SMART, including a $15 million expansion of the IOS to the Santa Rosa Airport, Marin’s commuting public rightly grouses that it doesn’t serve their needs. Yet by ignoring Larkspur Landing for now, SMART has a chance to do what it should have done from the start and plan for a station in the ferry terminal.

A core principal of transit planning is connectivity. Any network is only as good as the strength of its connections, and transit is not excluded. The strongest sort of transit connection is the cross-platform connection, which allows you to hop off your train or bus, cross the platform to your transfer and be on your way. It's like switching planes in an airport by walking one gate over.

In contrast, a weak transit connection forces riders to leave one station, walk a couple of blocks, and enter another station. Rather than boarding a connecting flight at the gate next to yours, we need to hike across the airport to another terminal entirely. Though this may be tolerable once in a while, as a daily commute it can crush even the hardiest transit enthusiast.

Sadly, SMART has opted against convenience and in favor of soul-crushing. Current plans call for locating the ferry station a half mile from the ferry terminal, requiring transferring riders to either walk along parking lots and unfriendly streets or wait around for a shuttle. A commute that might already involve 2 transfers will become one involving 3.

Larkspur residents, most of whom who won't even get direct SMART access, rightly complain that this makes little sense. The Station Area Plan for the Larkspur Landing neighborhood calls for relocating the station into the terminal and decries the poor site chosen by the SMART board.

SMART's draft environmental impact report contained a draft plan (very large PDF) to put the station in the ferry terminal. Back when station sites were being planned, staff created four alternate proposals for Larkspur, including two with better access to the ferry. The best one placed the station adjacent to the current terminal entrance at the end of a half-mile of elevated track. Given the current going rate for elevated rail, this option would cost about $30 million plus land acquisition costs. That’s about one-fifth the cost of the Greenbrae Interchange Project next door.

Yet at the request of the Larkspur City Council (PDF), SMART went for the station plan staff explicitly recommended against. The city complained that the removal of two buildings would require modifying the plan that governs Marin Country Mart, and that an elevated rail line would obstruct views of the Bay. They also were concerned about cost, though Larkspur wouldn't need to pay for the extension. Another concern raised earlier by staff is that a station in the ferry terminal would make extensions to Corte Madera or San Quentin more difficult.

Though these concerns are well-intentioned and should be addressed in any plan to relocate the station, it's foolish to scuttle a dramatic service improvement over parking lots and fantasy expansions that are decades from reality.

And here is where we have a new opportunity. By splitting construction of the line in two, SMART has given Larkspur residents a chance to change that seven-year-old bad decision. Nobody likes to run across an airport to catch a plane, and no commuter likes to walk across a half-mile of parking lots and traffic to make a transfer. Larkspur needs reverse its earlier request and demand a world-class transit connection, and residents should ask for the same. And SMART should listen.

Next time, I'll examine the city council's original concerns and how they might be addressed.

New bike share plan suitably cautious

Capital Bike Share (Ballston) Last Thursday, TAM released a cautiously optimistic report (PDF) on implementing bike sharing in Marin. The preliminary report’s caution is well-warranted, as the county’s infrastructure and urban form are far different from bike share pioneers Paris and Washington, DC. If Marin can thread the needle and create a quality bike share program, it could be a pioneer for other suburbs.

Introduction to bike share

Bike share, the system examined by TAM, is a bicycle rental/transit hybrid. Bikes are stored in stations, like the one pictured at right, which are scattered through the area. Users purchase a membership for a certain amount of time, usually just a day, week, month, or year. While a member, users can pick up a bike from any station and drop it off at any other station. If done within a certain time, like 30 minutes, the trip is free. If the trip goes over that time limit, a fee is levied for every subsequent half-hour.

The point isn’t to check out a bike for a round-trip but rather for each short leg of a short journey. Want to get from downtown MillValley to Whole Foods? Check out a bike, ride it to Whole Foods, dock it there and do your shopping. After you’re done, check out another bike from the station and ride it back downtown or wherever you want to go next.

I’ve been a member of the Washington, DC, system for most of the time it’s been active. Capital Bikeshare, or CaBi, is used by tourists to get between museums on the National Mall, commuters to get to work, revelers to get around after the Metro system closes, and for general trips around town. I’ve used it for all those purposes and it works great for all of them.

The key is to have bicycles and docks always available at a given station, and to have stations conveniently located. There’s nothing worse than arriving at a station to find the bikes are all gone or to find there’s nowhere to dock your bike, especially if there’s nowhere nearby that does have a bike or dock.

The company contracted to operate the system will “rebalance” the bikes from one station to the other. In DC, the operator pays a fee if any station is empty or full for more than two hours. Users know where bikes, docks, and stations are by looking at screens on the stations or with a smartphone app.

The Marin system

Bike share phases 1, 2, and 3

TAM wants a bike share system to serve primarily the commuting public, to solve what transit planners call the Last Mile Problem. When a rider hops off a bus, they’re at a location that might a ways away from their final destination. To get to the final destination, riders typically walk, though bikes are a common sight on Marin’s bus fleet. With bike share, a rider doesn’t need to bring their own bike.

With that in mind, the first stations would be focused on moving people from downtowns to ferry terminals and transit centers. Twelve stations, one in most of the downtowns and one at the two ferry terminals, would provide a way to get commuters around the county. Subsequent phases would make more stations around activity centers, which would make the system more like CaBi.

Total cost would be around $720,000 for the first phase and $2.2 million for full build-out.

Obstacles

A major barrier to the success of the bike share system will be the paucity of quality bike facilities between downtowns and activity centers. Though it is possible to ride through most of Marin, it isn’t always pleasant, and the safest route is sometimes far out of the way.

Between most downtown pairs lies a few miles of bike-hostile arterial roads. Though most have safer parallel routes, those parallel routes don’t access the businesses that grew up along the arterial. Since bike share is a utility rather than leisure system, the separation of businesses and bike routes diminishes just how much utility bikers can get from the system. Given how low density Marin’s origins and destinations already are, the last thing we need is to diminish separate bikes from businesses.

Marin’s demographics are another potential obstacle. The foundation of most bike share systems is the 25-34 age group. Though they’ve been growing in Marin, the group is a fraction of the size it is in DC or San Francisco. Planners want to harness the 35-45 age group instead, though they’ve been reticent about adopting bike share elsewhere.

Opportunities

The bike share report seems to underestimate the power of tourists in Marin. Particularly in Sausalito, a major driver of use will be tourists. DC’s system was never designed for tourists, but once the system opened on the National Mall the bikes became ubiquitous. Sausalito already gets thousands of tourists. If Marin’s system is integrated with San Francisco’s quite delayed plan, I suspect a huge number of tourists and day trippers will use bike share to hang out around Sausalito and Tiburon. As well, commuters to the City will be able to use their bike share membership at home and for their commute, taking away some of the demand for bike space on ferries and buses.

Bike share is its own best advertiser. Once a small system is up and running, demand springs up elsewhere. People, even transit-savvy New Yorkers, often don’t understand what bike share does before it’s active, but once it is people know it and love it. Richmond, Novato, and maybe even the closer-in West Marin villages like Bolinas and Stinson will want in on the action.

As a nifty indirect effect, bike share puts people in touch with the infrastructure in their communities. A street looks different from a bike. What feels like a narrow lane behind a windshield can feel like a broad avenue on a bike, and what feels slow in a car feels fast to a biker. Advocacy for better bicycling facilities can come from a well-used bike share system.

Oddities

The report isn't without its problems. The draft plan doesn’t adjust the projected level of usage over time which, frankly, doesn’t make sense. People will use the system more as more stations become available and as people get used to the idea of bike share. It looks like they copied the final station proximity numbers into Phase 1 and Phase 2 but kept the introductory usage numbers for each phase. It would be good to get that sorted out.

The first phase includes only one station in Novato, a small loner in the middle of downtown more than an hour from the next nearest station. Though it is census area with the most bike commuters in the county (6.1 percent!), it doesn't make sense to add only one station. Riders who arrive and find the station full will be stranded in the middle of nowhere with the clock ticking on their bike.  Stations in Tiburon and Mill Valley are similarly isolated.

There are missed opportunities for new stations in San Anselmo and Mill Valley. In San Anselmo, the commercial centers along Center, namely Yolanda Station and Lansdale Station, should be quality sites for infill. Miller Avenue at La Goma and Tam High should score higher as places for expansion.

It is a true shame that College of Marin doesn't get a station until Phase 2. Young people form the core of any bike share program. Leaving out a major destination for them until later in the program is foolish in the extreme. One of the more isolated stations - Novato or Tiburon - should be placed there instead.

National context

Bike share is sweeping the nation. It is transforming cities across the country and will soon reach the Bay Area. Marin should not get swept up in the trends for their own sake, and I’m glad the county is proceeding with caution. The next phase of planning is another baby step – $25,000 to find sponsors and study the potential subscriber base, which will put more flesh on the report’s bones.

If Marin’s system does pan out, it will mean bike share is far more flexible than the high-density systems that launched the wave. That means suburbs like Marin, from Surrey, BC, to Staten Island, NY, will have an example of a functional system to hold up as an example. The good news for Marin, then, would mean good news for the country.

San Rafael tries to draw workers away from solo commuting

A new commuter program from the City of San Rafael aims to draw municipal workers away from driving alone to work. Though it needs work to encourage active commute options, namely bicycling and walking, it will do wonders to promote transit and vanpool commutes. The pilot program, designed by city officials with help from city analyst Rebecca Woodbury, puts a monetary incentive behind commuting by vanpool, carpool, and transit:

Vanpools and carpools:

  • After two months of carpooling, participants will receive a one-time stipend of $50 and be eligible for quarterly raffles.
  • Those who lease a van for a vanpool get $600 in help on top of TAM's $3,600 vanpool subsidy. After six months participation, vanpoolers get a one-time stipend of $200.
  • Prime parking spaces for carpools and vanpools.

Transit:

  • Public transit riders get a $20 “try it” transit voucher. A free Clipper card with $20 pre-loaded or a one month SCT pass might be a better way to encourage use.

Both:

  • Use up to $240 per month in your pre-tax paycheck dollars for vanpool and public transit. It's unclear if the $75 state transit benefit is included in the package.
  • For each trip made using an alternative mode of transportation, get a raffle entry. This includes bicycling and walking.

Drivers also get a $100 subsidy towards the purchase of an electric vehicle. You can read more about all the programs on San Rafael's website.

At first glance, there's a fair amount of emphasis on encouraging these modes without a lot of emphasis on subsidizing them after the fact. This makes some sense, as people tend to stick with the transportation mode they're used to rather than switch to another one. After six months of vanpooling, I suspect the routine will be established well enough that it just won't occur to people to switch.

The focus on start-up costs could be applied to biking as well. I'll bet a number of employees live within biking distance, but their bikes sit gathering dust and rust in the garage. There are also safety issues, like bicycle lights, that might not be available to the casual daylight biker. The city could offer to pay for the cost of a bike tune-up and lights or sponsor bike clinics at City Hall and Courthouse Square. Though not part of the formal program as it should be, this kind of bicycle benefit might end up as part of Bike to Work Day events, so bikes won't be entirely sidelined.

Walkers are harder to subsidize, as shoes don't typically wear out so quickly. However, a one-time financial reward or a $50  gift card to a local shoe shop could be enough to get some people out on the sidewalks.

Given how intransigent San Rafael can be when it comes to biking and walking issues, especially through downtown, getting staff on their feet and in bicycle seats could subtly shift the overall stance of the city.

Woodbury told me that they have a limited budget for this pilot program, and money could shift if people don't embrace a particular mode. Biking, she said, might end up as one of the beneficiaries if the interest is there.

So far, unfortunately, interest in general has been fairly slow. Two weeks in, Woodbury is the only one to use the transit benefit, for example. She told me the group who devised the plan will be meeting soon to discuss marketing and outreach, so it may be a few months before things start to really roll.

Programs like this one helps move people towards the diversity of transportation options available to them. It benefits the health of employees, boosts transit ridership, and helps the environment all at once. Here's hoping the city as employer will lead the city as government to do a better job promoting its position as the relatively transit-rich center of the county that it is.

The 101 corridor: Transportation myopia in practice

Last week, Systemic Failure called out the Greenbrae Interchange Project as a waste of money when we already have an under-funded rail project not far away. Why spend $143 million on a road project that won’t even add capacity? While the Greenbrae project isn’t the best project, it’s about rearranging ramps, not adding capacity. While the Drunk Engineer is a great watchdog of Bay Area transportation policy, he’s looking at the wrong project. For that, we need to look a bit further north, to the billion-dollar freeway investment underway in Sonoma.

Let’s step way back to two things, money and problems, and restrict our potential solutions to roads and rail. Fresh on our desk is a dictate from The Man saying the transportation system between Windsor and Larkspur doesn’t have enough capacity to meet the demand for travel, and we have $1.4 billion ($1 billion from roads, $404 million from rail) available to fix it.

Adding two carpool lanes for the length of freeway that currently doesn’t have any will cost $1 billion, we know, and will add about 4,000 people per hour worth of capacity through the area. We can add about another 1,000 with a $500 million rail project*, but we can't afford it, so we'll truncate our line at San Rafael and Santa Rosa.

What if we pumped all $1.4 billion into the road? Lanes only have so much capacity, and that decreases as the freeways get wider. We might be able to add travel lanes at the most congested part of the road, but all the merging could just gum up the works more.

What if we flipped all $1.4 billion into rail? As it turns out, this would give us almost as much capacity.

  • Base SMART: $680 million, 650 passengers per hour (164 seats per train, 2 trains running in either direction per hour)
  • 7.5 minute service with three-car trains: $1.2 billion, 3,936 passengers per hour or 5,280 with standees**.

If SMART were to get a clearance from the FRA to run European trains, the cost of 7.5 minute service drops to $1 billion, leaving us with $400 million to spend on years of operations, grade separations from traffic, or a 10-mile extension to Richmond’s BART and Amtrak station. Success! Not only did we meet our goal, we added capacity much further north and south than the 101 project and have some money left over for other projects. That's pretty damn good.

Alas, this is not how we do things. Instead, we're spending 40% more money than we need to for a worse transportation product. That the most efficient project, SMART, cries poverty – much of its own making, true – is even more egregious. All the while, local and state authorities pump almost double the cost of the entire project for parallel road capacity. Rather than a truly transformative investment, SMART will be relegated to only a shadow of its potential.

This is the height of what Cap'n Transit calls transportation myopia, and something that happens all the time in the Bay Area. Caltrans and MTC tend to see road capacity problems as vehicle problems rather than transportation problems. When they do take transit into consideration, they just duplicate efforts in parallel to the road project because they forget that transit a means of transportation, not a goal to be achieved on its own, and functions in competition to cars. That means that nobody takes SMART seriously as transportation in its own right. Even SMART views itself as a supplement to driving.

MTC, TAM and SCTA need to cut off funding to the Highway 101 project and invest it in SMART. Caltrans is hunting for funds now, and none of these agencies should cough up the cash. Not only will the train add more capacity than the freeway, but it will also strengthen towns up and down the 101 corridor in a sustainable way, attract employers, and knit together the North Bay in a way a wider 101 never could.

We spend so much energy in the North Bay talking about the environment. Let's actually do something for the environment and save money in the process.

*The cost of the IOS + Windsor is about $500 million.

** The maximum length of a train is limited by the size of a city block to three cars, so that's how many we can put on a single train. The Sharryo train cars SMART will use have 82 seats with space for 28 standees, so a three-car train has space for 330 riders. The 7.5 minute headway is the minimum allowable without widening the Puerto Suello tunnel, and it means 8 trains per hour per direction. The cost of sidings to allow that much frequency is about $180 million more than the current system. Each Sharryo car costs $3.3 million, and 7.5 minute headways requires 34 trains. Add together the cost of 34 three-car trains and more sidings to the base cost of $680 million and you have about $1.2 billion.

UPDATE: If you're wondering where I got my costs, I detailed a double-track system here and a cheaper sidings-based system here.