TonyJ

Will City Council Finally Approve Performance Parking Management?

July 22, 2018 By TonyJ Leave a Comment

CALL TO ACTION: City Council needs to hear from YOU about your support for Performance-based Parking Management. Send an email to cctestimony@portlandoregon.gov before Wednesday July 25 (put Performance-based Parking Management in the subject). Tell City Council why you think it’s time to get politics out of parking prices by using a data-driven approach to parking management.

Should a prime, convenient, and coveted parking spot, right in front of a busy storefront cost the same rate as a, relatively, crummy spot near I-405?

That is the question that Portland City Council will grapple with on Wednesday, July 25th when they consider the Performance-based Parking Management Manual and new Parking Pricing and Event District Policy for approval.

A month ago, on June 13, council heard a presentation and testimony on this policy, but concerns from various commissioners led to a delaying a second hearing. Some commissioners were, reportedly, worried that adjusting prices based on demand would make downtown Portland less accessible to people with lower incomes.

But a look at preliminary data from the city shows that there are many areas of downtown and the central city which would likely see rates decrease under the new policy. Furthermore, many of the blocks likely to see increases are near city-owned Smart Park garages, a lower-cost and longer-stay alternative to prime street parking.

A map showing areas of downtown and the Central Eastside which have previously been observed to have parking occupancy that would warrant an increase or decrease in parking rates. Much of the core of downtown would potentially see increases. — Most areas likely to see increases are near Smart Park garages, many areas will likely see decreases. Image courtesy of Sightline Institute.

PBOT has returned with a new resolution and ordinance that should, hopefully, clear up some other concerns that commissioners had about the proposal in June.

Concerns about the impact of a policy like this on low-income people are valid and important, but too often those worries manifest in policy that provides a subsidy to all car-drivers, the majority of whom are not low income. Meanwhile, transit dependent people are stuck paying ever-increasing rates to sit in buses, idling in traffic caused by single-occupancy commuters. Performance-based Parking Management is just one of many strategic policies the city can use to reduce traffic, save people time, and encourage other modes. The most promising option for a sustainable and equitable solution to Portland’s transportation problems is to prioritize transit above other modes via enhanced transit corridors and bus/freight only lanes.

After years of work, seemingly countless committee meetings, and several false starts, Portland seems ready to join San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Seattle, and many other cities and apply simple market economics to on-street parking. Will City Council finally take that step?

CALL TO ACTION: City Council needs to hear from YOU about your support for Performance-based Parking Management. Send an email to cctestimony@portlandoregon.gov before Wednesday July 25(put Performance-based Parking Management in the subject). Tell City Council why you think it’s time to get politics out of parking prices by using a data-driven approach to parking management.

Performance Based Parking Management Coming Before Portland City Council

June 11, 2018 By TonyJ 3 Comments

ACTION ALERT: send a quick email to cctestimony@portlandoregon.gov with subject Agenda Item 652: Parking Management Manual. Let City Council know that this is LONG overdue and that you support data-driven parking management for a safer, cleaner, and more prosperous city.

On June 13th, Portland City Council will consider adoption of a set of guidelines aimed at modernizing our parking management policies. The Performance Based Parking Management Manual (PBPM) will inform the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) when creating and managing parking meter districts.

If passed, Portland will join at least 11 other US cities in implementing policies developed and championed by Professor Donald Shoup, as explained in his book The High Cost of Free Parking:

Eliminate Minimum Parking Requirements
Price on-street parking so that there is always a space available per block
Use parking meter revenue in a way that benefits the locality in which it’s collected

Graph showing meter rates in various Portland parking districts. Downtown hourly rates were 20 cents in 1970 and are 2 dollars in 2018. There have been 8 increases in between. — Portland meter rates since 1970

Portland is slowly, but surely, reducing and eliminating minimum parking requirements throughout the city, but parking meter rate setting is still a lengthy and political process. Currently, to get a meter rate increase downtown, a stakeholder committee must be convened and city council must approve any rate increases. This was last done in 2016 and the process is so cumbersome that meter rates downtown have only been adjusted 8 times in the last 50 years!

Because of this antiquated and political process, some parking downtown is underpriced, and completely full at peak hours, while other areas have overpriced parking, leading to lower than ideal utilization.

The new process will use a data driven approach to adjust meter rates annually. Observed occupancy in a parking zone of above 85% will trigger a rate increase, while occupancy below 65% will trigger a rate decrease. The rate adjustment will be ±$0.20-$0.60 depending on how congested (or vacant) the parking zone is. The proposal would cap maximum rates at $5.00/hour and set a minimum rate of $1.00/hour in metered areas.

a chart showing how various observed occupancies will lead to meter rate adjustments. — Observed excess parking congestion or vacancy will trigger meter rate adjustments.

In practice, the average price for an on-street stall downtown will likely decrease. There are many areas in downtown where the current $2.00 rate is too high. This policy will allow cost-sensitive visitors to downtown to seek cheaper parking, perhaps a few blocks away from their destination, or incentivize parking in Smart Park garages. The areas with very high parking demand will see rate increases, but visitors to those areas who choose to pay the higher rate will find their costs offset by greater convenience and less time (and money) spent cruising for parking.

But That’s Not All

Performance-based pricing is the most critical policy outlined in the manual, but there are several other important topics addressed.

Creating New Parking Districts

The manual spells out how new parking districts can be requested and how they will be implemented. Getting meters installed would be a multi-step process starting with time-stays and ensuring multiple opportunities for stakeholders to give input.

Net Meter Revenue Allocation

Charging for on-street parking should not be a tax or a money grab by City Hall. Meter rates should be set to help create functioning and safe commercial districts and to signal that the city values its right-of-way as an essential public resource. The PBPM recommends “a majority of net meter revenue should go to services and programs within the meter district in which they were generated.” In addition, the committee recommended that PBOT review revenue allocation for downtown meter revenue, currently all downtown and Pearl District revenue goes to the general fund.

Time Limits and Loading Zones

The PBPM clarifies and standardizes how time limits and loading zones are determined and adjusted. The city currently has over 40 types of loading zones, the PBPM condenses them to five types.

Event Districts

The manual recommends a data-driven rate schedule for event districts (currently there is one event district, near Providence Park and in-force on Timber’s game days. Rates near the stadium during these hours would be adjusted ±$1.00-$3.00 depending on demand, with a cap at $10/hour.

A HUGE Step In a Great Direction

Overall, this is a comprehensive and well thought out manual. The stakeholder committee included representatives from the Portland Business Alliance, Venture Portland, Portlanders for Parking Reform [Disclosure: the author of this post served on the committee], freight interests, and several downtown neighborhoods. The committee supported the manual unanimously.

Certainly, improvements could be made to the manual. In particular, it may take several years of adjustments for some of the most congested downtown parking zones to see prices that provide relief from congestion. Ultimately, however, the most important policy objective is to depoliticize parking meter rates, and this proposal delivers.

If you agree, send a quick email to cctestimony@portlandoregon.gov with subject Agenda Item 652: Parking Management Manual. Let City Council know that this is LONG overdue and that you support data-driven parking management for a safer, cleaner, and more prosperous city.

Eliminate Minimum Parking Requirements In Favor Of More Affordable Residential Infill

May 13, 2018 By TonyJ 3 Comments

Action Alert: Submit testimony to the Planning and Sustainability Commission by Friday, May 18th. You can do this easily online at this link. We encourage you to support Portland for Everyone’s suggested modifications for the Residential Infill Project and to strongly support eliminating minimum parking requirements in all residential zones.

For several years, Portland’s planners have been crafting a proposal to encourage more housing to be built in our “single-family” neighborhoods. The general goal of the proposal is to discourage the 1:1 replacement of smaller, often more affordable, single-family homes with very large and expensive homes, often called “McMansions.” Instead, the city would like to see more housing created in these neighborhoods in the form of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and internal conversions of large older homes into duplexes or triplexes.

The plan hopes to achieve these goals by allowing homeowners and developers in “single-family zones” to build additional ADUs and allowing duplexes mid-block (currently they are restricted to corners). There are a lot of aspects to the proposal and you can read a detailed analysis and suggested improvements from our coalition partners at Portland for Everyone.

It is critical to push for a complete elimination of residential parking requirements if this plan is to succeed. Even though the plan recommends waiving parking requirements in many cases, many homes will never be built if shelter for cars continues to be given a priority over housing for humans.

As an example, a garage can be converted to an ADU without providing an additional off-street parking stall for the ADU, but in most cases the homeowner will still be required to maintain at least one off-street stall! This is even more ridiculous when one considers that an off-street stall requires a curb-cut which removes one public on-street parking stall from circulation.

Maintaining our current arbitrary parking requirements will lead to more traffic, less safe streets, more pollution, less housing, more expensive housing, and more trees removed. It’s a bad policy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

For some inspiration, here is the testimony I gave at the Planning and Sustainability Commission hearing on May 8th.

Send in testimony now (certainly before May 18th) to ask the planning commission to support Portland for Everyone’s recommendations for the Residential Infill Project and, particularly, to recommend eliminating minimum parking requirements.

Affordable Housing, Open Spaces, Abundant Parking: Pick Two

March 13, 2018 By TonyJ 2 Comments

It’s time for Portlanders to pick their priorities and stick with them.

ACTION ALERT: Send email to betterhousing@portlandoregon.gov by Monday, March 19th telling staff you choose affordable housing and open space over parking requirements.

Portland planners are preparing a host of policy suggestions under the banner of Better Housing By Design. The project which is a counterpart to the Residential Infill Project has four goals for improving the zoning code governing multi-family housing including (from the project website):

Help meet Portland’s diverse housing needs, including housing that is affordable to lower income households and units designed for people of all ages and abilities.
Include open space and green elements that support healthy living for residents.

These are laudable goals, but Portland’s desire for more affordable housing and open space are at direct odds with our minimum parking requirements.

a picture of housing, a picture of a garden, a picture of a parking lot, the text reads, pick 2 — Portland must choose between affordable housing and open space and more parking.

Better Housing By Design allows more density in multi-family zones and adds new landscaping and outdoor space requirements to larger lots (20,000 sq/ft+). In addition, the proposal limits surface parking to 30% of the site area and limits impermeable paved surfaces to 15% of the site area. These restrictions are meant to reduce “heat islands” and excess runoff, and those are important goals, but this is greenwashing unless minimum parking requirements are completely eliminated first. What the suggested requirements in the discussion draft do are to complicate site planning for new housing and potentially make any required parking more expensive.

A developer building a project which triggers required parking will find it difficult to accommodate the open space requirements and the parking requirements without building structured parking. Structured parking takes up space that could be used for more homes and is much more expensive than surface parking.

This plan is over-thinking solutions to our most pressing problems. We need housing and we need open space much more than we need to require parking. Eliminating minimum parking requirements will allow the flexibility for builders to erect more aesthetically pleasing, functional, and affordable housing projects. Many developers will continue to build parking, but the parking they do build will be voluntary (and more “green”). If parking demand declines in the future, developers of new projects will be free to build fewer stalls without a city council fight to change requirements again.

The Discussion Draft of the plan has gotten better from the concept draft, staff are currently proposing to eliminate parking requirements for lots which are 7,500 sq/ft or smaller. They are also proposing to cut remaining parking requirements in half, from 1 required stall per home to 1 stall for every two homes in a housing development. This is a step in the right direction, but we need to go further. Ask staff to recommend eliminating minimum parking requirements for all multi-family housing zones as part of Better Housing By Design.

ACTION ALERT: Send email to betterhousing@portlandoregon.gov by Monday, March 19th telling staff you choose affordable housing and open space over parking requirements.

Parking Permit Pilots Must Avoid NW Portland Permit Pitfalls

January 25, 2018 By TonyJ 7 Comments

Portland’s city government is finally taking steps to manage on-street parking, but new permit programs will likely have to be more fair to renters if they’re going to get approval from City Council.

On January 24th, Portland City Council voted to approve a Parking Management Toolkit and directed the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) to seek out willing neighborhood partners to develop residential parking permit pilots. Once neighborhoods are identified, City Council will need to authorize the parameters of the new permit programs and comments from the commissioners exposed concerns about equity with the city’s current pilot program in NW Portland.

While most residents in NW Portland are currently guaranteed access to permits for as many cars as they own, people living in buildings with 30 or more units may not be able to buy a permit. Only 60% of units in existing buildings can get a permit under the policy and new buildings will be limited to 40% of units. A lawyer for MultifamilyNW (the landlord lobby) argued, earlier this month, that the rationing was discriminatory and potentially unconstitutional.

MultifamilyNW Has A Point

Consider the case of former Tonight Show host Jay Leno. Mr. Leno, currently star of Jay Leno’s Garage owns, by at least one estimate, 169 cars. If Leno purchased a home on NW 22nd Avenue with off-street parking for two vehicles, PBOT would be compelled to sell him permits for the remaining 167 cars for the, relatively low total cost of $2505 per month. With some diligence, Leno could park his cars on 22nd Ave and take up, literally, every on-street parking space between W Burnside and NW Northrup on the avenue.

Graphic showing that Jay Leno's 167 cars could take up all parking between W Burnside and NW Northrup on NW 22nd ave — If Leno moved to NW PDX, he could get permits for all 169 of his cars & park them all on NW 22nd.

But if Jay Leno moved into an apartment building with 30 units on NW 22nd Avenue he would have to compete for the 18 permits available for his building. The rest of his cars would have to be garaged at his expense, which in NW Portland would probably cost $100 or more a month.

We Can Do Better

Fortunately, there are lots of good ideas of how to manage on-street parking fairly and equitably, and perhaps City Council will have the courage to let PBOT and it’s volunteer neighborhoods try them out.

The NW Portland permit program, and future permit programs, should limit the number of permits available per household and/or use progressive pricing to discourage permit hoarding. Households seeking a second (or third) permit, or households with off-street parking, would pay a higher price for each additional permit up to the limit.

The city should not pick winners and losers for access to public parking. All residents should have equal access to permits in the neighborhood they live in, regardless of whether they live in an apartment, a commercial zone, or a single family home. The best, and fairest, way to allocate permits (assuming the demand exceeds supply) is to use an auction to distribute permits, specifically a uniform price auction. A uniform price auction asks participants to bid the maximum amount they would be willing to pay for a permit, but all permits are sold at the lowest price which clears the market. Most winning bidders will pay less than their maximum bid. Low income residents can be provided with cash subsidies from the proceeds, which they can use to bid on a permit or use as they otherwise see fit.

An Ounce Of Prevention…

Regardless of the methods chosen for rationing and distribution, it is critical that PBOT and City Council move quickly to develop a program and offer it to the rest of the city’s neighborhoods. Few, if any, other neighborhoods in Portland have parking as congested as NW Portland. Other neighborhoods are unlikely to need to claw back thousands of permits from existing residents. The key is to begin managing parking before it becomes a crisis.

Portland took a step in the right direction this week and it’s important to keep moving.