Over the past several days, Sightline’s Parking? Lots! series has gotten some especially capitol attention. That’s right—the other Washington! DC Streetsblog picked up some of Alan’s number-crunching and policy-parsing for its own re-posting (here and here thus far, with more to come). It also distributed the pieces across several of their sister blogs around the country.
DC Streetsblog’s most recent article features a Streetsblog original Q&A with Alan. An excerpt is below, but be sure to catch the whole thing by clicking here:
Tanya Snyder: Where are the places that are really getting parking right?
Alan Durning: The city of Seattle and the city of Portland are both pretty darn good. Both have eliminated off-street minimums for multi-family buildings in much of the cities, though Portland has now back-tracked a little bit and created a very small parking minimum again. Seattle is doing a low-tech, crude version of performance pricing, which is where you vary the price of meters in order to ensure that there’s always one or two spaces on each block, and that’s supposed to eliminate cruising for parking. And that starts to approximate market pricing for parking. So, in the Northwest, those are the two leaders.
The places Donald Shoup talks about as having put it all together are part of Pasadena, California, of all places, and some places in San Diego. Some other cities are starting to do the whole package: 1) charging the right price for street parking, 2) rebating some of the meter revenue to the local neighborhoods — which is important because it creates political pressure to extend charging for parking — and 3) reducing off-street parking requirements. Redwood City, California; Austin, Texas — Mexico City is just getting started. Washington, DC, is doing some things.
