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.
In addition, the number of residents with cars in those cities is wildly different but must not be a dependent variable with those costs that are listed (Jackson must have had too low a population to be in these stats in 2016
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-v... )
New York ~50% households have a car
Philadelphia ~70% have a car
Seattle ~84% have a car
Des Moines ~90% have a car.
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.
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).
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.
> 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/ services/police/pr/parking-garage-challenges-success/ .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's well and good, but the article linked here is still garbage because of how meaningless the idea of parking spaces/resident actually is. I'm not saying Jackson is a good place to live, but just because you can make up a stat, doesn't make it insightful. The authors of the summary in question clearly didn't try to think about the situation holistically, just chuckled to themselves about their silly number.
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.
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.
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.
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.