Perspective: Paving Over Paradise - Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative

This month, MEHC board member Warren Wells offers MEHC’s Perspective on the outsized impact of policies which favor car culture, and the unintended consequences of parking requirements.

Did you know that Marin has 4000 acres of parking? Read on… and send us your comments.

Marin’s off-street parking requirements are driving up costs and increasing traffic. Here’s how.

UN-PAVING PARADISE
What if one local policy caused higher housing costs, more stormwater runoff, increased sprawl and worse traffic? Wouldn’t we want to revise it? Marin and each of its cities and towns has such a policy: off-street parking mandates.

What are parking mandates?
Starting in the 1920s, American planners have required off-street parking for nearly all land uses, including housing, schools, restaurants, mortuaries, and bars. While this may seem logical and may make parking easier, the impacts actually reduce our quality of life. Many cities are beginning to see the harms of parking mandates — San Jose, Gainesville, Minneapolis, Buffalo and hundreds of other cities have repealed or reformed mandates. Marin should do so also.

Parking, lots!
A recent report estimated that, in our county of 217,000 people of driving age, there are over 750,000 parking spaces in Marin, or 4,000 acres worth. Parking covers over 10% of Marin’s land. This is equivalent to paving over China Camp State Park, Angel Island State Park, Muir Woods National Monument, Camp Tamarancho, and Ring Mountain Preserve, combined. All of these paved surfaces increase stormwater runoff, and exacerbate the urban heat island effect, a potentially dangerous circumstance given more frequent and intense heat waves.

Parking makes housing more expensive
While parking mandates seem sensible to mitigate parking demand, they drive up the price of housing. Parking is an amenity, and if the housing is bundled with it, that unit will be more expensive, as if every unit came with a hot tub. Even if a tenant cannot or does not want to drive, the law requires parking to be built.This doesn’t come cheap! A report from San Diego found that each parking space added between $35,000 – $90,000 to the price of a condo, or ~$300/month more in rent. Yet, many cities require two off-street spots per apartment, increasing rents $600/month.

Parking makes people drive
Parking doesn’t simply accommodate the driving people already do. It encourages people to drive more! A recent study from UCLA found that, all else being equal, people whose building has off-street parking drive more than those with no off-street parking. This held even for people who owned cars! Just parking the car further away causes people to walk, bike or use transit more.

Aimless and arbitrary?
Does Marin need this parking? No. Parking mandates are based on faulty science, and have resulted in wildly different policies, based more on accidents of history than sound analysis. Let us consider residential parking requirements. The table below shows the number of car parking spaces required for a 50-unit multifamily development consisting of a mix of 1, 2, and 3-bedroom units, along with the amount of parking area per unit, based on each municipality’s parking mandates.Parking mandates applied to 50-unit multifamily development. Average number of stalls per development and floor area of stalls per unit.

Click here to view methodology for estimates.Does Mill Valley really need 25% more parking than Tiburon, or Fairfax 32% more than San Anselmo? These dramatically differing ratios wouldn’t occur if parking mandates were scientifically based.Even more troubling, the amount of parking floor area required per unit is often as large as an apartment! We require almost as much space for cars as we do for the tenants. If even a quarter of this space went to more apartments, it would go a long way toward solving our housing crisis.

Grandfathered in
Mandates only apply to new construction or uses. The beautiful downtowns of Mill Valley, Tiburon, Fairfax could not be built under today’s parking mandates. Do we think those iconic places should have been laid out with more parking and fewer of the shops and boutiques that make them unique? Should we make way for much more paving in paradise?

What should we do?
Parking mandates are an ineffective way to manage parking demand. In most cases, parking mandates require far more parking than will ever be used. Most large parking lots in Marin have enormous empty sections almost all of the time. Further, parking mandates only address future estimated needs, not actual, existing parking shortages. Virtually every Marin high school has a parking shortage, as does the Canal area of San Rafael as well as Marin City. Mandates do not solve these current problems.
(Marin IJ photo)

Rather than requiring arbitrary mandates up front, developers should be allowed to build to their estimated demand. Local governments then have a responsibility to manage parking demand so all residents can legally park in their neighborhood. Tested policies such as improved transit, shared parking lots, more secure bike parking, and appropriately priced street parking all improve parking efficiency. A further benefit is that policies that reduce parking demand also reduce traffic.In car-centric Marin, this may feel unrealistic. But communities all over the world have made great strides in reducing driving and increasing other forms of transportation. Seattle reduced solo car commuting by 9% between 2010 and 2019 , while employment grew by 31%. How? By investing in transit and bike infrastructure.E-bikes are a particularly intriguing option for Marin. E-bikes, particularly those with cargo capacity, have the ability to replace many of the > 50% of trips in Marin that are under five miles. Local trips like going to the grocery store or picking kids up at school represent a large share of day-to-day traffic. Research shows e-bike owners replace a large share of car trips, and do so while taking up far less space, emitting essentially no greenhouse gasses, and causing much less wear and tear on the streets. And an e-bike is far less expensive to own and operate than an automobile. Better bike infrastructure would encourage many households to trade a car for e-bikes.We urge Marin jurisdictions to reduce (or remove!) car parking minimums and add requirements for secure bike parking rooms. This will allow builders to provide housing at a lower price point. By encouraging people to ride bikes or transit, we will reduce traffic, reduce road wear, and reduce harmful emissions and pollution. And an ancillary benefit: we’ll be on the road toward returning land formerly dedicated to vehicles to beneficial use by humans and the natural world.

ARTICLES AND RESOURCES
° Parking Reform Network – parking mandates map: Explore the parking reforms of over 1400 cities on this page.
° SPUR: Inventorying San Francisco Bay Area Parking Spaces
° Vox: The Hidden Force that Shapes Everything Around Us: Parking
° Seattle sees nation’s biggest drop in solo car commuters as transit, walking surge
° San Diego Transit Priority Area (TPA) Multifamily Parking Update

Podcasts:
° Reinventing Parking

Books:
° The High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoop
° Paved Paradise: How Parking Shapes the World
° Marin IJ Lorenzo Marotti:
“Sausalito is considering swapping 186 parking spaces along the city’s glorious waterfront for an open green area with trees, a promenade, and bike and pedestrian paths. …”
° Marin IJ, Vicki Larson:
“We have given up way too much precious real estate to cars, as I wrote before. We should be making our downtowns more inviting to pedestrians, those who use wheelchairs and cyclists — not cars. That’s how we can make them more vibrant, livable, sustainable and community-oriented. …”