Parking Has Eaten American Cities

A skateboarder in an empty parking lot
Jae C. Hong/AP

Parking Has Eaten American Cities

  1. RICHARD FLORIDA
 11:27 AM ET
A new study documents the huge amount of space taken up by parking, and the astronomical costs it represents, in five U.S. cities.
Parking eats up an incredible amount of space and costs America’s cities an extraordinary amount of money. That’s the main takeaway of a new study that looks in detail at parking in five U.S. cities: New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming.
The study, by Eric Scharnhorst of the Research Institute for Housing America (which is affiliated with the Mortgage Bankers of America), uses data from satellite images, the U.S. Census, property tax assessment offices, city departments of transportation, parking authorities, and geospatial maps like Google Maps to generate inventories of parking for these five cities. (The inventories include on-street parking spaces, off-street surface parking lots, and off-street parking structures.)
It not only estimates the total number of parking spaces in these cities and their overall estimated replacement costs, but develops interesting metrics such as parking spaces per acre, parking spaces per household, and parking costs per household—as well as providing maps of parking densities across these cities.
In sum, it provides additional empirical confirmation for parking guru Donald Shoup’s idea that American cities devote far too much space and far too many resources to parking.
City
New York
Philadelphia
Seattle
Des Moines
Jackson, WY
Total parking spaces
1.85 million
2.2 million
1.6 million
1.6 million
100,119
Parking density per acre
10.1
25.3
29.7
28.4
53.8
Parking spaces per household
0.6
3.7
5.2
19.4
27
Total replacement cost of parking
$20.1 billion
$17.5 billion
$35.8 billion
$6.4 billion
$711 million
Parking cost per household
$6,570
$29,974
$117,677
$77,165
$192,138
Scharnhorst finds that there are more than 2 million parking spaces in Philadelphia, 1.85 million in New York, 1.6 million each in Seattle and Des Moines, and just over 100,000 in tiny Jackson, which has a population of about 10,000.
Parking takes up a huge amount of space: Jackson has more than 50 parking spaces per acre, 25 times its residential density of just two households per acre. Jackson has a whopping 27 parking spaces for each of its households.
Jackson: parking density map. (Scharnhorst, Research Institute for Housing America, May 2018.)
Des Moines has nearly 30 parking spaces per acre, roughly 20 times its residential density (1.5 households per acre). Seattle also has roughly 30 parking spaces per acre, more than five times its residential density (5.7 households per acre). So there are more than 5 parking spaces for every household in Seattle.
Seattle: parking density map. (Scharnhorst, Research Institute for Housing America, May 2018.)
Philadelphia has 25 parking spaces per acre, almost four times the city’s household density of 6.8 per acre. New York is the only city in the study that has fewer parking spaces per acre than households: 10 spaces compared to 16 households. That works out to slightly more than half a parking space (0.6) for each household. (New York also has the highest share of transit commuters in the U.S.)
New York: parking density map. (Scharnhorst, Research Institute for Housing America, May 2018.)
Parking also sucks up a lot of resources in the five cities. Measured in terms of replacement, it costs more than $35 billion in Seattle, $20 billion in New York, $17.5 billion in Philadelphia, $6 billion in Des Moines, and $711 million in Jackson.
These figures are more staggering when tallied in per-household terms. Parking eats up almost $200,000 per household in Jackson, more than $100,000 in Seattle, and over $75,000 in Des Moines. It is a bit less in Philadelphia and New York: roughly $30,000 in Philly, and a meager $6,570 in New York.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visualizing the Hidden ‘Logic’ of Cities

Geoff Boeing Visualizing the Hidden ‘Logic’ of Cities DAVID MONTGOMERY   JUL 26, 2018 Some cities’ roads follow regimented grids. Others twist and turn. See it all on one chart. SHARE TWEET In Chicago or Beijing, any given street is likely to take you north, south, east, or west. But good luck following the compass in Rome or Boston, where streets grew up organically and seemingly twist and and turn at random. Geoff Boeing calls this structure the “logic” of a city, and he would know: An urban planning scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Boeing  developed a tool to let anyone visualize this urban logic in seconds . It works by using an old geography technique: the “polar” or circular chart. Boeing’s tool calculates what percentage of a city’s roads run along each section of a compass, and plots it on a circular bar chart. The island of Manhattan, for example, runs from south-southwest to north-northeast, and most of its streets are paralle...
Read more

Finding the Untapped Potential of Alleys

Green Garage Detroit/Midtown Detroit Inc./Madison McVeigh/CityLab Finding the Untapped Potential of Alleys LYNN FREEHILL-MAYE   JUL 13, 2018 “We’re starting to realize they’re just as powerful as a park or plaza.” SHARE TWEET In the early aughts, a former skateboard kid named Daniel Toole was chafing at his slick corporate marketing job in Seattle. To feel more like his rulebreaking teenage self, he cut through back alleys on his way to work. He liked their grittiness and started taking pictures. Sometimes people threatened to kick Toole’s ass, which he handled just fine until three of those people were FBI agents. Turned out he’d photographed the security cameras on their building. They wiped the camera’s memory and warned him never to come back. It’s a scene that’s just shady enough for its setting, but it made Toole wonder: Do alleys have to be such unwelcoming spaces? Today, Toole, 31, is the architect behind Jade and Steel Alleys, an expansive new project ...
Read more

CityLab University: Inclusionary Zoning

Madison McVeigh/CityLab CityLab University: Inclusionary Zoning BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER   JUL 17, 2018 You’ve seen the term. But do you really know what it means? Here’s your essential primer. SHARE TWEET If you’ve hung around the CityLab site, sat through a City Council meeting, or hobnobbed with a housing developer, you’ve probably run across the term “inclusionary zoning.” You might even think you know what it means. But wait, do you? Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. Welcome to the pilot edition of “CityLab University,” a resource for understanding some of the most important concepts related to cities and urban policy. If you like this feature, have constructive feedback, or would like to see a similar explainer on other topics, drop us a line at  editors@citylab.com . KEY POINTS Inclusionary zoning is a policy that was   first developed in the 1970s in response to exclusionary and often racially segregated “snob zoning.” It’s a   popular ...
Read more