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Here’s a decent newspaper article with a lousy headline. The article is about pending new legislation that would remove parking requirements in Seattle’s densest in-city neighborhoods. Not so scary, I think. But the headline is sneering and editorializing. Before we dive in, let’s get something straight. The new rules won’t eliminate parking, or make it illegal, or even tax it. All they do is–gasp–stop forcing businesses and developers to provide...

I don’t know yet what to think about Seattle’s proposal to spend $1.8 billion over 20 years on transportation improvements.  (Also see press coverage here and here.) Call me agnostic, until I understand the plan a bit better.  Still, at first blush, there’s certainly some stuff here to like.  I’ll start with parking taxes. About 20 percent of the proposed money (at least in the first full year of implementation)...

  Editor’s note: This post was contributed by Todd Litman, author of “Parking Management Best Practices,” and founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. For more information see his free summary report (pdf), Parking Management: Strategies, Evaluation and Planning. A great example of the maxim “no free lunch” is the common struggle over parking. Motorists often assume that parking should be abundant and free at nearly every...

The gist: Easing requirements for parking—as some Northwest cities are doing—would make the price of parking reflect its true costs, make housing more affordable, and reward northwesterners for driving less. The details: Antiquated provisions in zoning and tax codes, along with misguided street designs, bloat the Northwest’s parking supply and glut the market. The 16 most populous Northwest counties and cities all require off-street parking; suburbs require even more parking...

At the risk of making this blog too Seattle-centric, I thought I’d point out this nifty article in today’s Post-Intelligencer about the city’s efforts to promote alternatives to the car—everything from walking to biking to transit to ride sharing to van pools.  And there’s ample reason to be concerned about rising car traffic, particularly downtown—not just on environmental grounds, but on financial ones.  Cars, you see, take up lots of...

Talk about cultural creatives! Via a blog reader, here’s a nifty story about a "landscape remixing" effort in San Francisco that illustrates a point we’ve long made in a small, powerful way. Between noon and two on November 16, a collective called Rebar turned one of the city’s parking spaces into a small park. They fed the meter, rolled out some turf, put up a park bench and a tree,...

An interesting article from the Washington Post finds that taking Metro—DC’s light rail system—into downtown may not save suburban commuters all that much money.  Even with gas at $3 per gallon, the savings on fuel, plus wear and tear on vehicles, are offset by increased spending on transit fares.  You really only start to save if you can use transit often enough that you can ditch one of your cars;...

So what, exactly, do nuns drive?  Don’t search for the punchline; it’s an important question raised by Governing Magazine‘s Alan Ehrenhalt in his recent, useful recap of Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking: How many parking spaces should a convent be legally required to provide? If you immediately answered “zero,” then you probably have some common sense. Parking at a convent shouldn’t be a zoning question. Shoup condemns...

As expected, the Seattle City Council announced yesterday that it would reduce the number of parking spaces that developers are required to include in new projects in some of the city’s densest neighborhoods—part of the city’s new "tall, skinny, and livable" plan. This is an innovation that we’ve been excited about for years. Kudos to councilmembers Peter Steinbrueck and Richard Conlin for their work on the issue. Slashing parking requirements...

As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports, professor Donald Shoup of UCLA has just released his magnum opus on the consequences of free parking. Judging by its table of contents, the book sounds important. Shoup is perhaps the world’s leading expert on parking, so I’m optimistic. More when I’ve read it… Why parking matters so much is summarized here (registration required).