
The Overparked States of America - prostoalex
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/07/parking-has-eaten-american-cities/565715/
======
bb2018
I'm a bit confused by a lot of the metrics in this piece.

First, it tries to use city population as a metric to get per capita cost. It
seems to suggest that households are on the hook for a significant portion of
these spots. First, a city like Jackson Wyoming is mostly tourists and
therefore the spots pay for themselves easily. Second, most spots are
privately funded.

Second, the estimate of "cost of replacement" is pretty silly. It used 7100 as
an estimate per spot. I doubt the large parking spots in a ski lodge base are
going to cost anywhere close to 7100. And even if a spot in a city actually
cost 7100 to pave, if it then lasted 20 years is the cost anywhere close to
what the article suggests? Doubtful.

~~~
Brakenshire
I’m somewhat confused by your criticism!

It’s talking about cost mainly in terms of land value. If the parking spot was
lost and had to be rebuilt in a similar location, what would that cost? In the
centre of a city the cost of tarmac isn't going to be the dominant issue!

Using city population for a per capita calculation seems perfectly reasonable
as long as that’s understood, even in most tourism cases. For instance it’d be
a perfectly reasonable economic calculation to look at the tourism income
brought into a city per head of the resident population, it gives an idea of
how valuable that is to an ordinary person, even if they don’t work in the
industry themselves. The calculation being made here is similar.

This only dramatically falls down where the land value is dominated by car-
borne tourism value, for instance for a stop off on a long distance road
route, reducing parking spaces by 50% might well reduce income by 50%. But
that doesn’t apply in the central areas of most cities.

~~~
bb2018
As others have noted the number for Jackson seems wildly inflated. I suppose
that figure and also the $7100 for cost of a spot lead me to believe this is
either a poorly done study or a study done by someone with a vested interested
in getting high numbers here.

Perhaps the largest issue is with the statistic in the study named "parking
cost per household". This figure suggests strongly this cost is somehow a cost
which is a burden to each family's taxes or own money. However, this study
includes all parking spots. This leads me to believe the majority of these
spots are in parking garages which in almost all cases are privately funded
(and those public may still have fees which pay for themselves).

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kbsletten
The Jackson thing is cracking me up. It's like saying that there are 100 hotel
rooms for every resident of Maui, what are they doing with all those hotel
rooms?

Jackson is probably the _biggest_ tourist destination in our tiny little
state, so yes, we leave extra room for visitors.

~~~
eesmith
The report (not the summary from citylab) says:

> Jackson’s plentiful parking supply was underutilized. Despite its small land
> area and population, millions of visitors drive through the city every year
> so it is plausible that Jackson needs a lot of parking. But a Jackson-
> commissioned parking occupancy study of the residential core and midtown
> areas during peak tourist season in 2017 by Kimberly-Horn found, on average,
> 68 percent of parking stalls were empty in the residential core, and 61
> percent were vacant in the midtown area. Occupancy peaked at 43 percent for
> the residential core and 51 percent for midtown. These low occupancy rates
> could suggest that parking is overpriced in Jackson, but at the time of this
> study, all parking in Jackson was provided at no cost. The conclusion must
> be that Jackson has an oversupply of parking.

I am unable to find the original study, cited as "Town Of Jackson Parking
Garage Challenges to Success" from
[http://townofjackson.com/](http://townofjackson.com/)
services/police/pr/parking-garage-challenges-success/ .

EDIT: in looking around, I found this Reddit comment -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/JacksonHole/comments/6bpvhl/town_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/JacksonHole/comments/6bpvhl/town_of_jackson_wy_is_officially_renting_parking/)
\- that the town has such a housing crunch in summer that they will be renting
out parking spaces as housing.

That fits in with the thesis that there is too much free parking in Jackson.

~~~
brudgers
The unoccupied spaces optimize the system for _time_ efficiency. Surplus
capacity makes finding a parking space reasonably close to the destination
faster. That makes reaching the destination (and searching for parking spaces)
faster by reducing traffic.

Parking is both spatial and temporal. That's why all those empty spaces in
Jackson Wyoming don't alleviate parking woes in lower Manhattan. The spatial
frequencies at which parking spaces are fungible are less than 400m. Often
much less. When human preference comes into play 4m (one stall) can effect
selection.

~~~
eesmith
City planning should optimize for the needs of the city, and not only the time
efficiency of people who want to find a parking spot.

Indeed, the point of many of these "there is too much (often free) parking"
pieces is that the optimization efforts have historically only considered the
needs of drivers and/or design principles that were more ideological than
anything based on reality.

~~~
brudgers
I agree. It's Richard Florida, not the people of Jackson Wyoming proclaiming
too much parking in Jackson. To put it another way, it's an outsider (an
internet personality) telling the locals they're doing it wrong. Jackson has a
highly efficient mass transit system: the base of the ski lift is right smack
dab downtown.

~~~
eesmith
Umm, no? I mean, yes, Richard Florida wrote that CityLab piece, but the quote
I gave at the start of this thread ("The conclusion must be that Jackson has
an oversupply of parking.") is from the report that Florida cites, that is,
"Quantified Parking: Comprehensive Parking Inventories for Five U.S. Cities",
by Eric Scharnhorst, Principal Data Scientist Parkingmill.

As I pointed out, it seems that Jackson is willing to rent out parking spots
for housing, which suggests that they think there is too much free parking at
the height of the tourist season, and not enough housing.

I don't see the point of your seemingly ad hominem statements. Eg, "internet
personality"? What does that mean? Wouldn't "urban studies theorist" or "best-
selling author" be better descriptions?

Since it wasn't Florida making the statement I quoted - it was not made by an
'internet personality' \- does it make the statement more accurate?

If only we could find the "Town Of Jackson Parking Garage Challenges to
Success" document.

~~~
brudgers
Thanks for explaining. For what it's worth, back in 2002 I worked as an urban
planner for the city of St. Petersburg. The one in Florida. Like every city in
the US we were fooling round with parking and since I had a background in
structured parking going back to 1991, I was tasked with looking at some
options. Not options I chose but options that various people with various
levels of political power but a pretty much uniform lack of parking
expertise...beyond the non-professional kind that one gets from parking cars
over the years.

So anyway, being a diligent design professional, I went to the planning
department library and studied all the previous downtown parking studies I was
able to find on the shelves. About a dozen going back to 1961...roughly forty
years worth. Each of them was similar in that if parking was free in 1961, the
1961 study recommended charging for parking. The 1965 study would recommend
making parking free. The 1970 study would recommend installing parking meters.
The 1974 study would recommend taking parking meters out...and so on. In 2001,
paid parking was prevelant. You can guess at the options under consideration.

To Richard Florida's credit, he doesn't have to vary his policy pitch. There's
always a market for voices advocating exclusionary policies for urban
neighborhoods...e.g The Mortgage Bankers Association that commissioned the
study and Parkingmill that is in the business of managing scarce parking.
Richard Florida doesn't actually do studies. Influencers don't _do_ studies.

------
Animats
Where did the author get their numbers for Jackson, WY? Looking at the
aerials, there are no huge parking lots. No parking structures. The biggest
mall has about 300 spaces. There's an RV park, but it's not huge. There is no
way that town has 100,119 parking spaces. That's five times as much parking as
Disney's entire Orlando operation.

~~~
topspin
Have to agree. Did some math; given 9'x18' spaces ('standard' outdoor slot
size supposedly) the entire land area of Jackson WY can contain 172K parking
spaces.

I don't know what the correct figure is, but it's also clear the majority of
Jackson parking spaces belong to private residences, not part of some vast
paved hellscape.

------
tomhoward
An earlier article/discussion about the same study:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562972)

------
boxcardavin
My company is working on self-delivering bikes so citylab always pops up in
our network, they do some great work. Not quite sure why they are so prolific.

~~~
zhoujianfu
What’s your company (if it’s not stealth)?

~~~
UncleEntity
This one it seems =>
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16972672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16972672)

Judging by the number of stripped shared bikes I see around town it'll
certainly be interesting...

