Authored by Conrad Lumm
Photo by Elliott Brown
What do we really know about parking?
Of everything that the responsible urban planner has to think about, parking can be the most vexing.
Incredibly, no one knows how much of it there is in the U.S., which can make it tough to study. Part of the problem is that all parking is local, to paraphrase Tip O’Neil. You can’t borrow one of Albuquerque’s plentiful parking spots when you’re circling the block in Manhattan’s East Village. And although satellites can give us part of the story, it would take an unprecedented nationwide census (on par with the one we conduct of people) to deliver an accurate count.
Furthermore, parking is subject to a dizzying range of local regulations, mostly minimums that force developers to build more than they might want to. As long as they don’t contravene Federal regulations for accessible parking, cities have wide latitude to decide what their complexion should be like, and that includes figuring out how much parking new businesses need.
Unfortunately, these requirements are often boilerplate – according to Donald Shoup, 45% of all American cities just look at what the next town over did, and copy it. Since these guidelines were formulated when parking was seen as an unqualified plus, and they aren’t revisited very often, and outsized, half-baked requirements are a major problem.
Is Houston really a parking desert?
When MyParkingSign looked into parking minimums for a sample business type – miniature golf courses – we found that Houston requires 1 parking space per hole, while Phoenix, AZ requires 1.5 per hole plus one additional space per 60 sq. ft. of “game room” area, and Santa Ana, CA requires 3 parking spots per hole. According to stats from The Green Dividend, Houston tops the list of American cities for average vehicle miles traveled per day – it’s not a city that’s unfriendly to cars!
This level of variation tells us that at least some of these cities are basing their requirements on something other than careful study – there’s just no way that Santa Anans need three times as much parking at mini golf courses as Texans do, and we’ve looked in vain for Houstonians who couldn’t find a spot at their favorite courses.
So thanks to decades of planners treating it as an afterthought, we do know that Americans are drowning in oversupply – according to one of the few studies to look at nationwide stock, the U.S. has anywhere from a little over two and a half to as many as 8 parking spots per vehicle, and more is being built all the time, even as our overall appetite for cars dies down somewhat.
The trouble is, having too much parking nationwide does have nationwide consequences. According to Elan Ben-Joseph’s book Rethinking A Lot, each car’s share of parking adds 10% to its lifetime carbon dioxide emissions (as well as 20% to its sulfur, and a whopping 90% to its soot emissions, so-called “black carbon,” which also causes climate change). Since 27% of the U.S.’s carbon emissions come from transportation, eliminating emissions due to parking would mark a serious step toward reducing our overall pollution load. It’s important to note that these statistics use an assessment of parking stock that’s toward the low end of the spectrum so total emissions may indeed be higher.
Moreover, the more parking we build, the more we need cars to get around, and parking minimums can lead to development that doesn’t make sense.
One EPA case study looked at a hotel being built in Long Beach, CA, the D’Orsay. The study found that following the city’s parking minimums of one space per hotel room plus four spaces per 1,000 sq. ft. of floorspace would have led developers to spend $2 million over and above their projected needs on parking. (Fortunately, the developers managed to obtain variances and in-lieu arrangements that reduced the final cost.)
Still not enough information
A lot of this story will be familiar to anyone who’s read Donald Shoup’s seminal book, The High Cost of Free Parking, an urban-planning chestnut if ever there was one. But holes remain in what we know. For example, even though statistics from the International Parking Institute fill in some of the blanks about how many private lots there are, there are still lots of questions:
- Is new off-street parking construction accelerating or slowing? How about private parking facilities?
- How much of new parking construction uses permits to allocate spots? (Since permit-only lots are typically closer to capacity than baggy, mall-like lots, this is an important statistic!)
- Can encouraging turnover provide a substitute for providing more parking? How aware is the public of the benefits of higher turnover rather than big lot size?
Sometimes, when you’re missing an important data set, it’s helpful to look at phenomena at a little bit of a remove, like when Google looks at “flu” searches as a way to estimate flu incidence, or when analyst Richard Aboulafia looks at the ratio of fighter jet sales to business jet sales to measure world peace.
We can’t definitively answer all of those questions, but Myparkingsign.com is well situated to look (obliquely) at how parking is changing in America. As part of a report on parking and signage trends, we looked into what’s selling, what isn’t, and where the public interest is (as reflected in search statistics). It’s as noisy as any sales or search data is wont to be, but still points in the direction of a few changes in how we park.
What signs tell us about parking
Time-limited signage and turnover
In municipalities and on particularly crowded private lots, users occasionally have use for signs that encourage turnover by limiting the amount of parking time allowed.
[What we talk about when we talk about time-limited signage.]
- According to our findings, the median amount of time on the time-limited signs we sold in 2008 was 45 minutes – many customers bought 1 or 2-hour parking signs.
- In 2013, the median time was 20 minutes, marking a noticeable drop in the period of time allotted motorists for short-term parking. Our strongest sales were in 10-, 15- and 20-minute signs.
Although we only have anecdotes and customer feedback to go on to explain these trends, we believe that our customer base for these products has shifted toward small lots already at capacity, particularly takeout restaurants, doctors’ offices, and apartment buildings that need a loading and unloading area, and larger businesses that want to reserve prime spots near the door for quick purchases. In the case of retail, we believe that in a poor economy, when retailers in some sectors can generally expect profit per transaction to fall, maximizing turnover is one way to avoid “leaking” business and maximize volume.
Parking permits
An affiliate business, myparkingpermit.com, has seen a particularly rapid growth in sales. Part of this is due to customer-collecting – once a potential customer orders from us once, they’re likely to do it again on a cyclical basis, because permits are usually recurring expenses, bought on a schedule. But that shouldn’t affect search statistics, and “parking permits” sees 170% as much search traffic today as in 2008.
For comparison, traffic for “No parking” (a popular parking sign in off-street lots) has risen by only about 12% over the same period.
Over the past five years, our own sales volume has increased by several orders of magnitude, though this is due to internal factors like better search optimization, a broader range of SKUs, and more online advertising. At the same time, though, between the size of the average myparkingpermit.com order has decreased by 43%, from $283 to $161.
Put together, these two statistics – in conjunction with the overall growth of our business – tell us that smaller and smaller lots are opting to institute parking permits, even as lot owners are ever more likely to use permits in their lots.
What it means
Our report includes much more information drawn from our own sales, as well as a summary of the knotty economics of parking in the U.S. and a state-by-state map of permit sales. We think it provides a good précis of debates over parking policy and parking minimums. But what do moves toward increased turnover and the popularity of parking permits tell us?
Parking lots are gradually losing their status as public spaces. Sociologically, this can cut two ways. Businesses and schools no longer see their responsibilities ending at the door – which will make for safer, more organized environments (where we’re more likely to find parking when we need it). At the same time, more formalized parking arrangements can appear less welcoming.
Since the Americans with Disabilities act was signed into law in the 1990s, we’ve seen parking undergo a radical transformation. Once a free-for-all, preferential treatment was granted a minority of lot users – sensitizing owners to the value of spots close to the door. There’s just no reason to encourage turnover on the periphery of most lots, so we think retailers and residential property owners no longer see all parking spots as created equal, and are starting to incorporate parking lot turnover into their overall business strategies.
After all, there usually isn’t much difference between a customer who has an hour to buy and a customer who has two – but the difference between 20 minutes and 45 is much more important. A 2012 study in the UK showed that the much-rumored link between plentiful parking and retail success may have been overstated, too. Tighter, more organized lots are what we want as a sign company, yes – they help us sell our products – but we’re also citizens who want to live in a human-scaled environment.
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Conrad Lumm is a content director at MyParkingSign, an affiliate of SmartSign, which Internet Retailer calls one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in America. Conrad is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and a former journalist; although he lives in Manhattan, he pines for his hometown in northern Michigan.