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Better Parking Policy For The City of Roses

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Walktober 2016: Curb Parking Walk-shop

October 9, 2016 By Shoupista Leave a Comment

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Join parking and active transportation advocates for a fun evening stroll in NW Portland and talk about parking!

On Thursday, October 20, Portlanders for Parking Reform is hosting a walk-shop on curb parking in Northwest Portland with Brian Davis & Gwen Shaw from Lancaster Engineering. We will discuss Portland parking policy topics such as: residential minimum parking requirements, parking permits, metered parking, performance pricing, and more!

This event is part of Oregon Walk’s annual Walktober: a whole month of celebrating walking!

Event detail:

Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, Meet @5:00pm, walk leaves @ 5:30pm
Location: Meet at Dark Horse Pub (519 NW 21st, Portland OR)
The walk-shop is about 1 hour.

Filed Under: Meetups

Wednesday Parking Round-Up: Oakland’s city-wide parking reform, park(ing) day empowers citizens to create better public space, is parking levy more desirable than congestion pricing, and more

September 21, 2016 By Shoupista Leave a Comment

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(We can either put 1 or 2 cars in our curb space or create an activate community gathering place that is also a rain garden. Photo source: Charlie Tso)

Oakland City Council approved city-wide parking minimum reduction, zero parking requirement near transit hubs, and some parking maximums. The new parking rules also included Transportation Demand Management options for new development, such as car-share, transit passes, and unbundled parking.

Cities like Seattle, Houston, and Washington DC are celebrating Park(ing) Day by allowing citizens to create more active and interesting public spaces out of curb parking spaces. Buffered bike lane, human-sized bubbles, park space, arts and crafts, the sky is the limit. Where is Portland’s Park(ing) Day?

Want better transit and reduce congestion? Try parking levy. Nottingham, UK, has successfully implemented a work-place parking levy to fund public transit. Some even argue that parking levy is more desirable than congestion pricing.

You might hate paying for parking, but that doesn’t mean paid parking is a bad idea. This article helps you see the rationale behind paid parking. Paid parking is better for businesses, for cities, and for everyone who uses the street.

Parking Benefit Districts: A key fix for parking and housing affordability issue supported by community groups is within reach but the City of Seattle is hesitant to reach out and grab it.

Parking concerns take a back seat in pursuit of affordable housing. Parking is a real enemy to affordable housing. In the age of car-share, ride-share, bike-share, autonomous vehicles, we should be thinking about making more room for people and not for more cars in our cities.

Google’s Waze now can navigate you to the “best” parking spot near your destination. Once again, we see private firms trying to make parking easier for people but forget the fact that the opportunity for tech-firms to developer parking products is mainly caused by local government’s mismanagement of parking resources. If cities are willing to reform its parking policy and charge the right price to achieve a targeted occupancy, every driver’s parking experience can be dramatically improved.

 

Filed Under: Parking Roundup

Curb Enthusiasm: Empowering Neighborhoods to Create Safer Streets with Parking Benefit Districts

September 6, 2016 By Shoupista 1 Comment

Residential Permit Zone Boundary Concept
(Photo source: PBOT)


The recent series of traffic crashes on Portland streets has raised a strong sense of urgency among transportation advocates, community leaders, and local residents to demand action to improve street safety. The tragic
death of a child and life-threatening injuries of another caused by two separate drivers have devastated families and our community. As a result, Vision Zero advocates and traffic safety experts are reminding us that while there are many approaches to making streets safer, the most effective approach to reduce fatalities and serious injuries is changing street designs and the built-environment to prioritize the safety of road users over vehicular speed.

However, safety improvements such as enhanced crossings or pedestrian medians that protect the most vulnerable users are often implemented slowly due to the fact the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) has limited resources for safety enhancement projects and any change to existing streets would likely cause strong local opposition (these are explanations but not excuses). This means that if there a dangerous street that you or your child must cross every day to go to work or school, your neighborhood will probably have to wait for years to receive any safety improvement due to lack of funding and lengthy public process.

But what if there is a way for neighborhoods to empower themselves, fund their own street safety improvements, and create the change they desperately need?

Parking Benefit Districts

The answer is parking benefit districts. Parking benefit districts is a parking management tool for neighborhoods to capture parking revenue from both on-street parking meters and overnight residential permits and keep that revenue for the neighborhood. It works like this:

(1) neighborhoods work with the city to identify areas with on-street parking congestion and draw a parking benefit district to charge parking fees within the district boundary to reduce parking congestion;
(2) neighborhoods then can set up a “transportation safety enhancement” fund to collect and keep the net parking revenue after covering the administration costs of the program;
(3) the city can provide a menu of small capital projects or street improvement options to neighborhoods that adopt the program so they can decide how to invest their local parking revenue
(4) empowered by parking revenue, neighborhoods can now pay for more transportation options (e.g. bus passes) or small capital projects (e.g. rapid flashing beacon) or that increase the safety and comfort of every resident who uses the street.

The merits and benefits of parking benefit districts have been well documented by many scholars and organizations, such as Professor Donald Shoup at UCLA and the Sightline Institute (I highly recommend reading these articles). Instead of reiterating what these experts have already said, this article will focus on specifically how Portland neighborhoods can take advantage of the proposed residential permit program and create parking benefit districts that will bring locally dedicated revenues to pay for transportation safety enhancements.

Residential Permit Program: A Hypothetical Demonstration

In December, 2015, a stakeholder advisory committee tasked to advise the City of Portland on the development of new parking management tools proposed recommendations for a residential permit program. According to the draft proposal, “the permit area must be comprised of at least 20 contiguous block faces or 5 blocks or 4000’ linear feet.” and the recommended occupancy rate in residential zones is 85%.

Using data from a 1995 parking study in Portland, Shoup estimates that 33 parking spaces are available on a typical block’s 1,012-foot perimeter (The High Cost of Free Parking, p518). Using this measurement, we can conservatively assume that a typical street block face can accommodate 8 parking spaces. In order to not exceed the 85% target occupancy rate, each block face gets 6 residential permits. Thus, a single parking benefit district that contains 20 block faces (or 5 full blocks) in any inner Portland neighborhood can potentially sell 120 (6 x 20 = 120) permits to the residents living within and adjacent to the parking benefit district.

Hypothetically, if each residential parking permit is priced at $25 a month, and all 120 permits in this parking benefit district are sold, the district would generate $3,000 (25 x 120) a month or $36,000 a year in parking revenue for the neighborhood. The amount of parking revenue may be even higher if the permits are progressively priced as recommended by the parking stakeholder advisory committee. Meaning that the second parking permit will cost more than the first, etc., and residents with off-street parking will pay a higher price for their first permit. If the second permit costs twice as much as the first one, at $50 a month, and if two-thirds of the permits were sold in at the first-permit rate and the rest were sold at the second-permit rate, this would yield $4,000 a month ($25 x 80 + $50 x 40 = $4,000) or $48,000 a year in parking revenue.

Admittedly, the math here is crude. Also, no one knows certainly how much monthly permits will cost nor who will have the power to set the price. Nevertheless, this hypothetical scenario shows how much revenue neighborhoods can potentially receive if residents decide to charge for curb parking and the forgone opportunity cost for every day curb parking remains free.

If a neighborhood can receive $48,000 a year to spend on transportation safety enhancements, what kind of improvements can the residents collectively buy? A PBOT document  from 2013 for the East Burnside Street Transportation Safety Project shows cost estimates for some safety improvements recommended for East Burnside:

  • Speed Limit Reduction: $100 per sign; $2,000 – $5,000 per study
  • Travel Lane Modification: $150,000
  • Pedestrian Refuge Island: $10,000-$20,000
  • Curb Extensions: $30,000-$40,000 per corner
  • Flashing Beacon: $200,000

In addition, according to BikePortland, a traffic diverter could cost between $5,000 and $30,000. Based on these cost estimates, a neighborhood that sets up a 5-block parking benefit district can pay for a pedestrian refuge island, a curb extension or a traffic diverter within one year and still have some change left to pay for other public goods like street trees.

Think about a street like Hawthorne Boulevard. It is a major commercial corridor that attracts a lot of foot traffic but it is not a friendly environment for walking and biking. Nonetheless, PBOT’s data show that compared to other high crash corridors, Hawthorne is relatively safe. Therefore, it is difficult to justify using public money to pay safety improvements on Hawthorne when there are many other streets in worse shape in East Portland. If both Richmond and Sunnyside set up a parking benefit district in their neighborhoods, they could pool their resources together and enhance safety on Hawthorne rather than waiting for the City to take action.

A Benefit in Search of A Beneficiary

In The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup notes that “curb parking revenue is a benefit in search of a beneficiary”. No one likes to start paying for something they have always had for free. However, charging for on-street parking in residential neighborhoods would be a lot more political favorable if the people who have to pay see their money come back to their neighborhood and used for their benefits. By adopting a residential permit zone to charge the right price for parking and a parking benefit district, neighborhoods that have experienced on-street parking congestion can (1) reduce over-crowding of curb parking caused by new development, (2) maintain access to convenient curb parking spaces, and (3) empower themselves to invest in transportation safety enhancements within the neighborhood boundary. Long-term residents who bemoan the loss of “livability” and increase in traffic on local streets can turn back the tides by charging for curbside car-storage.

Indeed, evidence from at least nine other U.S. cities show that parking benefit districts are invaluable neighborhood assets. For example, parking benefit districts in Pasadena and San Diego generate over a million dollar of parking fees annually dedicated for local investments. In Austin, TX parking revenue has created better public spaces and infrastructure for walking and bicycling by paying for sidewalk repair, cycle tracks, bike racks, street trees, and benches.

Some people might say “Portland is not Austin” or “Portland is not San Diego”. How do we know parking benefit districts will work in Portland and bring all the benefits it promises to bring? It will work in Portland because it already did – in the Lloyd District. The Lloyd District used to be an auto-oriented, suburban style neighborhood of office buildings and shopping mall and devoid of street life. However, in 1997 the district association turned on its first 1,000 parking meters and soon some employers started charging commuters for parking as well. Today, funded by parking revenue from 1,900 metered stalls, Go Lloyd provides incentives to commuters to use transit, walking, and bicycling and improve workers’ access to more transportation options.

The results of investing parking revenues in non-drive alone mobility options is impressive. According to BikePortland, between 1994 and 2013, the percentage of drive-alone commuters in the Lloyd District dropped from 72 to 42 percent. Transit usage increased more than three-fold, and walking and biking to work also increased significantly. It is also no surprise that this area has some of the best bicycling and walking infrastructure in the City. The story of the Lloyd District shows when a neighborhood decides to abandon the entitlement of free-parking, it opens itself to a future of increased safety, livability, and mobility options for its residents and workers.

From Curb Enthusiasm to Neighborhood Empowerment

The parking war in 2013 that led Portland City Council to adopt mandatory parking minimums for new development demonstrates that on-street parking is perhaps the most sacred amenity in Portland’s residential neighborhoods. This outcome also affirms that neighborhood voices are extremely powerful in the politics of parking. But the desires for better parking management and safe streets for our children and families are not mutually exclusive. In fact, there is a lot of untapped synergy that can create strong political momentum to accelerate infrastructure investments that will benefit neighborhoods locally.  

The good new is PBOT is working on developing various parking management programs, such as residential permit zones and performance-based pricing, that will increase the feasibility of parking benefit districts. We are already halfway there, but our elected officials are averse to political risks and they need to know that the desire for parking benefit districts comes from the neighborhoods, not planners. In the wake of the recent spree of traffic violence on our streets, it is clear that we urgently need infrastructure improvements and waiting for the City to to fix our streets may result in another devastating, yet, preventable, traffic death in our community. Parking benefit districts can empower neighborhoods with locally-collected and locally-spent revenue and that allows neighborhoods to pay for safety enhancement projects and reduce traffic fatality and serious injuries.

 

Filed Under: Parking Benefit Districts, Permit Pricing, Permits

Wednesday Parking Round-Up: Carless renters pay $440 million a year for parking they don’t use, Oslo plans to ban cars from the central city by 2019, and more

August 24, 2016 By Shoupista Leave a Comment

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(Photo source: Wikipedia)

Carless renters forced to pay $440 million a year for parking they don’t use. A study published by two UCLA urban planning scholars show that minimum parking requirements creates huge equity issues for carless renter households.

A future without cars: Oslo, Norway, plans to completely phase out cars from the central city by 2019. How will they do that? By replacing parking with bike infrastructure.

The high cost of public parking garages: Des Moines has a parking problem. But it’s not one that drivers complain about. Public downtown parking garages cost the city a $19 million deficit in the past decade due to mainly a surplus of parking.

The most Dallas thing ever! Dallas plans to build parking garage, next to a park, on a deck that covers a freeway.

Special treatment for church-goers? San Francisco launched a pilot project to legalize on-street double-parking on Sundays

Keep Philly Weirdly Parked? A newcomer urbanist in Philadelphia wants to ban illegal parking in the middle of the road that has been a long city tradition. That, of course, upsets a lot of people.

Filed Under: Parking Roundup

Diversifying Portland’s Parking Toolkit with Unbundling Parking and Parking Cash Out

August 15, 2016 By Shoupista Leave a Comment

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(Commuter traffic coming off the Broadway Bridge. Photo source: BikePortland.org)

Two weeks ago, Portlanders for Parking Reform wrote about the proposed Central City 2035 (CC2035) Plan may create more parking by increasing existing parking maximums in some of the Downtown parking sectors. While “parking is a fertility drug for cars”, to change travel behavior, parking policy cannot only target the supply side of this issue. If the City of Portland wants meaningful parking policies to help meet its mode-share targets–85% non-single occupancy vehicle (SOV) trips–and climate goals, such policies must address both supply and demand. Not only may the CC2035 Plan take a step backward on curbing parking supply, it also does not mention any parking demand management policy.

The good news is that there are viable parking policy options that can be applied to Portland’s downtown and neighborhoods to reduce the demand for parking. The Planning and Sustainability Commission and City Council ought to consider adopting unbundling parking and parking cash out for Portland’s Central City and gradually expand these policies into other neighborhoods.

Bundled Parking: Paying for Desserts That You Don’t Eat

Building and operating parking has high costs. Unbundling parking means separating the costs of parking and charging the users of parking directly. To illustrate how parking is currently bundled with the prices of housing, goods, and services that we consume and the need to unbundle it, let us think about the following scenario:

Imagine that the City of Portland requires restaurants to provide free dessert with every meal ordered by customers. The price for meals would increase to cover the cost of “free” desserts. While this may be good news to people who love desserts, such requirement has negative consequences. First, all diners now have to pay more for each meal whether or not they want to eat dessert. Second, some people would eat desserts they would not have ordered if they had to pay for them separately. Bundling desserts with food induces people to over-consume desserts, which leads to more obesity, diabetes, and heart diseases.

The City of Portland does not require free desserts with every meal but it does have parking minimum requirements for new development. Although the Central City district is exempt from such requirements, there are no guidelines on unbundling the costs of parking from development. Just as unbundled desserts would give diners more control over what they eat, unbundled parking will give travelers more choices by allowing people to decide how much parking they need and want to pay for.

When cities require developers to build off-site parking spaces, the cost of parking usually doesn’t get separated from the other costs of the development, making unbundling parking difficult. The good news is Portland’s Central City has no parking minimum requirement, which makes implementing unbundling policy more feasible. Parking can be unbundled from housing by offering residents the option to lease apartments and parking spaces separately, thereby reducing the cost of housing for those who do not own cars. Parking can also be unbundled from office and retail leases, allowing businesses to only purchase the number parking spaces they deem necessary for their employees and customers. Alternatively, parking costs can be listed as a separate line item in commercial lease agreements to show tenants how much parking costs and allow businesses to recover such cost by charging parkers directly.

Unbundling: Tried and Tested

Many cities in the U.S. has adopted unbundling parking policies. For example, San Francisco’s zoning code requires off-street parking spaces for residential buildings with 10 or more dwelling units to be sold or leased separately from the rental or sale of dwelling units. Berkeley also adopted a similar ordinance that requires unbundling parking. In central Seattle, approximately 50% of all multifamily units have unbundled parking from rent.

Lastly, Los Angeles’s Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (ARO) has permitted developers to unbundle parking to encourage converting and redeveloping old buildings. A recent research study shows that ARO apartment units with bundled parking cost about an additional $200 per month, proving that housing does become more affordable when it gets separated from parking.

Unbundling parking may be difficult to apply retroactively to all existing buildings, but it is not impossible. The City should at least explore the option of unbundling parking for current affordable housing units. This will offer existing low-income residents the same benefits of not paying for parking they do not use, freeing up more budget for housing. Portlanders for Parking Reform urge the Planning and Sustainability Commission and the City Council to consider adopting unbundling in CC2035 first for new development and then apply the same policy to existing affordable housing units.

Parking Cash Out: A Second Paycheck

According to the Parking Cash Out Report, “free parking is the most common fringe benefit offered to workers in the U.S., and 95 percent of American automobile commuters park free at work.” Most employers in Portland either provide parking for free or partially-subsidized employee parking. Even though many workplaces provide additional commuter benefits such as transit passes, the financial subsidy for parking often exceeds the subsidy for transit or other modes. Therefore, free or partially-subsidized parking is an invitation to drive alone to work.

Another policy to effectively reduce demand for parking is to offer workers the option to “cash out” their employer-paid parking subsidy. Parking cash out provides commuters the option of cashing out their employer-paid parking subsidy, and use it on other transportation modes or to keep it as a second paycheck. In addition, parking cash out would reward commuters who do not use parking by giving them financial incentives to use healthier and greener modes of transportation, such as walking, biking, and public transit, thereby changing travel behaviors and contributing to the City’s mode share targets and climate goals.

California passed a state law in 1992 that requires many employers to provide cash out options to their workers. A 1997 study in Los Angeles County estimated that mandatory cash out reduced the number of daily vehicle trips to work by 11 percent and commuter parking demand by 13 percent, or 0.4 spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space. If Portland wants to meet its mode-share targets for Downtown (85% non-SOV trips), it would need to set parking maximums at 0.25. That is an ambitious number that will undoubtedly cause a lot of political push back. However, parking cash out is an appealing policy option to help meeting that goal because it brings modest and incremental change and does not require employers and commuters to suddenly change behaviors.

Good for Employers

According to the U.S. EPA, “employers provide an estimated 85 million free parking spaces for commuters—spaces with a net worth of nearly $31.5 billion”. The same U.S. EPA report estimates that annual per space costs vary between $360 and $2,000. In the High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup shows that employers save $40 a year per $1 annual cost for doing parking cash out, with the assumption that the capital cost per parking space is $10,000 (this number is likely far below the average cost of an office parking space in downtown Portland).

Subsidizing parking costs employers a lot of money. Coupled with unbundling parking, parking cash out can significantly reduce demand for parking and offer savings to businesses. There are several benefits to employers associated with decreasing commuter parking demand:

(1) Employers can reduce costs associated with leasing or owning and maintaining parking spaces.
(2) Lower parking demand allows businesses to convert employee parking to customer parking, which may attract more customers.
(3) Businesses can also convert parking spaces into profit-generating activities.
(4) Reduced commuter parking demand will eliminate the need for new parking construction.
(5) Recruit and retain workers by offering parking cash out as a valuable fringe benefit.

Good for Employees

Not only does parking cash out create benefits for employers, it also does for employees.  For starters, it increases equity among all commuters. Employer-paid parking does not benefit commuters who ride public transit, walk, or bike to work. However, cash out allows commuters receive the same benefit regardless of how they travel. Secondly, cash out benefits non-auto commuters without disadvantages for auto-commuters. Workers who want to park for free can continue to do so, but they will be able to receive the same amount of benefits if they decide not to drive.

Research in transportation planning has repeatedly demonstrated that higher-income individuals are more likely to drive to work alone, while lower-income individuals are more likely to carpool, ride public transit, bike, or walk. As a matter of fact, using the best available data from the Census Transportation Planning Products, BikePortland reported that only about 5% of all downtown Portland workers who drive alone to work are low-income.*

5% of all drive-alone downtown commuter earn less than $30,000 a year
Image source: BikePortland

The same general trend is also applied for homeowners versus renters (Portland renters are 6 times more likely to not own a car). Thus, without parking cash out, many employers regressively provide subsidies to help wealthy commuters save money on transportation but excludes poor commuters from the same benefit. In addition, just as unbundling parking would lower housing costs, cash out would provide financial benefits to car-less low-income households and renters who are increasingly getting priced out of Portland’s housing market.

Basically, parking cash out is a win, win, win.

Moving Forward

On July 26th, Portlanders for Parking Reform asked the Planning and Sustainability Commission to amend the proposed CC2035 draft, incorporate unbundling parking and parking cash out as recommended policies, and direct city staff to study how these policies will be implemented and administered. Portland has set ambitious transportation and climate goals for the next twenty years, but our currently proposed policies, namely parking ratios, only focus on managing parking supply and lack demand-based approaches.

Unbundling parking and parking cash out are the other side of the parking equation that have proven to be effective, low-cost, and more politically favorable. These policy ideas are not only important to Portland’s long range plan but will also influence the results of the City’s current parking projects, such as the residential permit program, performance-based pricing, and shared parking. Unbundling and cash out will diversify our current parking toolkit but most importantly, they will also contribute to other community goals such as housing affordability and access to more travel options.

Update: *The author added a sentence and a chart to highlight percentage of drive-alone downtown commuters who are low-income

Filed Under: CC2035, Equity, housing, Parking Cash Out, Unbundling

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