paving paradise

Parking is one of the most emotive of urban planning issues. Why? Because it's a powerful force. Without places to park, cars would be useless. So developers who happily say they support public transport suddenly develop hives if you ask them to reduce the parking supply for their shiny new buildings. Tenants want parking for their employees and for their customers, so developers figure they need to provide parking in order to sell or lease space.

And municipalities go along with this. They want to attract development, and even if they are not concerned about chasing potential developers away, they want to make sure that a shortage of parking doesn't cause cars to spill over to quiet streets and raise the ire of local residents. Even municipalities that are trying hard to maintain or increase the viability of public transport will lose heart when it comes to limiting or charging for parking. As Rory Sutherland pointed out on Wednesday, politicians go weak at the knees when faced with demands for free or cheap parking.

But parking is not only politically powerful; it has the strength to change the physical shape of cities. Parking is the automobile's partner in crime. Together they have trashed urban areas, and increased our reliance on a carbon-intensive lifestyle. This dangerous duo doesn't want you to walk or cycle or ride the bus, and has made it progressively more difficult to do so, effectively limiting choice.

I find it ironic that advocates of free parking believe they are entitled to the freedom it brings them. It is not free, and it does not bring freedom. Roads and parking lots provide a measure of independence for those who have the means to use them, but to those who have to pay the hidden costs, this is no real benefit.

It's all smoke and mirrors. Buy into the car culture. Forget about bus timetables, weirdos on the train and dog shit on the sidewalk. You are the master of your domain, the driver of your destiny. But we've turned a corner, and suddenly we face unfriendly city streets that make life hard for everyone who is not in a vehicle, and fail even in their promise of efficient car travel.

But if an abundance of affordable parking is part of the problem, increasing the cost is not necessarily the solution. When you buy or rent an apartment, there may be a parking bay included in the price, which encourages you to buy a car. And if you don't get a free parking bay at work or on your college campus, more than likely you have the option to pay monthly, and this still encourages you to drive: why leave the car at home if there's a bay that you've paid for, sitting empty? It's all in the details, and there are better ways to pay, that encourage more efficient use of space and ensure that you are not locked in to using a car every day.

Sutherland suggests that mobile technology is one tool to improve the efficiency of balancing parking supply and demand. For public parking, this may indeed hold some promise, although as I have suggested, I think the challenge is to address the transport problem on a number of fronts. Once I have a car, it will take a lot to discourage me from using that investment. After all, it costs me even to leave it at home. Pay-as-you-drive insurance will help reduce the stay-at-home cost, but I suspect we'll need to do more than that.

Two relatively recent developments in some cities are helping to counter the tendency for residents to be locked in to car ownership, and simultaneously increasing mobility. Both of these benefit from mobile technology.

One is the emergence of car sharing companies that have fleets of vehicles spread around cities, and people pay to use the vehicles by the hour rather than by the day. Mobile phones and credit cards can be used to make bookings. The beauty of this is you pay only for the time you need. Sutherland mentions Streetcar in the UK. Zipcar is an example in North America. Others are listed here.

The other trend is known as "New Mobility" and is essentially a new model for transport planning that is based on a network of nodes, or hubs, that could be as small as a spot where you can rent or borrow a bicycle (as in the Velib bicycle system in Paris) or as large as a train station where a variety of transport modes come together. This concept started in Bremen, Germany, and has been promoted by SMART at the University of Michigan.

New Mobility's main departure from traditional transport planning is in its focus on hubs that integrate the modes (physically and electronically), rather than on the links between origins and destinations. It is an inherently more flexible approach that meets the needs of a wide variety of people who need to be mobile, and is particularly appropriate in cities that have moved away from the spatial pattern of one or two big employment nodes that can be served by mass transport. Where employment is spread throughout a city, cars have become virtual necessities, and public transport can only compete if it is better integrated and co-ordinated with land-use planning.

Comments

[Rory Sutherland]

Very interested by the mobility hub.

Interestingly one of the problems with public transport is not public transport at all, but the appalling way in which public transport interfaces with private transport - or indeed with other modes of public transport.

The idea of a series of hubs where you can painlessly switch seems inspired.