Matt Yglesias and Ryan Avent can smile:
The Department of City Planning recently completed its most ambitious study of parking in Manhattan in three decades. The report found that the way cars are used in the city has changed since the early 1980s, when the Clean Air Act’s stricter codes limited the number of new parking lots. Developers were no longer required to provide parking in new developments, and special permission was needed to build large garages.
When the rules went into effect, 85 percent of off-street parking was taken by commuters. Now, depending on the neighborhood, up to 70 percent of those spaces are used by residents.
Over the last three decades, the number of off-street parking spots in Manhattan has fallen by one-fifth — to 102,000 from 127,000, according to the city study.
In the last six years alone, according to data compiled by Property Shark, 92 parking lots or garages have been sold and redeveloped. From the Avenue of the Americas, where a garage fell for a hotel, the Eventi, with rental apartments on top; to Varick Street, site of a condo-to-be, the humble lot has seen better days.
The longer story is here, and of course Manhattan has done fine over this same period of time. Ryan’s eBook is here, I believe Matt’s is due out soon, I look forward to reading it. Here is my earlier column on minimum parking requirements. Here is Matt on Donald Shoup.
Yes – I smile too – fuck cars
Might Manhattan be better off with no private cars at all?
Agreed. Spent one hour getting in to manhattan and another finding a spot to park, and then paying $60 day to park. The city is not made for cars. Period.
Well, literally no, most of Manhattan was developed in the nineteenth century!
I’ve wondered what would have happened if the decision had been made NOT to try to retrofit the old central cities (by widening streets, putting in expressways, etc.) to the car. Would they have just been abandoned over time?
I suspect abandoning the central cities as the car became the dominant form of transportation wouldn’t have been so bad, as long as (big if) they were abandoned and not demolished. If the car turned out to be the dominant form of transportation for centuries and centuries, then having suburbia as the “urban” environment, dotted here and there of the ruins of the obsolete central cities would have worked out fine. If the car turned out to be a blind alley due to the usual factors of fossil fuel shortages and environmental costs, then people would start returning to the central cities.
What kept this “natural” route from being taken was fragmentation of local governments -central city governments were not going to see their tax base decline, even if they had to destroy much of the city in the process to keep it- and a combination of central planning and a lack in the U.S. of the fatalism that you need to just let things that are sliding, slide. And I doubt planners would have resisted the impulse to just demolish the “obsolete” urban cores so they could be suburbanized too, not a good idea if cars do turn out to be a blind alley in the long run.
Well, you can look at it a different way–recognizing that public transportation permits greater density and is a better fit than running highways to and through cities. I think DC would have choked but for the metro, for example.
recognizing that public transportation permits greater density
People don’t want greater density. That’s why they’ve been sprawling and suburbanizing for decades. Central cities have been getting less dense too. They’re only about a third as dense on average as they were fifty years ago.
I want great density – suburbs are hellholes and would be better off bombed to bits
Some people want density, and so we have dense areas. Some (many!) people want their own home and their own land (and privacy, and safety).
The problem only comes about when one side starts trying to legislate the other out of existence.
I’m pretty sure you will see greater density over the next 100 years, and the number of people who drive as a lifestyle in what we call 1st world countries drop.
There are two hedges there. Guess which.
I’m pretty sure you will see greater density over the next 100 years, and the number of people who drive as a lifestyle in what we call 1st world countries drop.
Density may rise in the developing world due to large-scale urbanization (rural to urban migration), but it seems rather unlikely in the developed world. It would require a reversal of the trend of the past 60+ years. High density is already pretty rare, and continuing advances in automobile and communications technology will further reduce the incentive to build things close together.
Cars and fuels are getting cheaper and that is a trend that will continue??
Cars are getting better and more fuel efficient. There is enormous potential to increase the fuel efficiency of cars, and to switch to alternative fuels and electric propulsion. There just hasn’t been much incentive to do this so far because oil prices are still relatively low.
“There just hasn’t been much incentive to do this so far because oil prices are still relatively low.”
+1
Add to this the fact that battery technology has drastically improved in the last 20 years and is continuously incrementally improving and electric cars will continue to become more competitive even assuming that the price of oil remains at current levels. If oil raises much in price, say from $100 to $150 per barrel there will be a reasonably rapid conversion of vehicles to natural gas and electric. Conversely, if oil were to drop down to the $50 per barrel range conversion would drop to a stand still.
What confuses me most about this issue is that municipalities seem to insist on interfering with markets in one direction or another. They can’t just leave markets alone. When they get rid of the parking minimum requirements, they tend to replace them with parking maximum requirements.
There’s no reason why markets shouldn’t be able to decide how much parking a city. It’s very close to an optimal free market scenario. The only barriers to entry in the market are creations of the municipal authorities, and other than that supply and demand are highly elastic. The externalities are minimal: if authorities want fewer cars on the street they should institute congestion pricing, other than that building a parking lot causes basically the same amount of trouble as building anything else.
The only defenses I’ve heard in defense of parking minimums is that make any sense say that markets would build them that way anyway (I think this is Shoup’s line of argument). But if that’s true then that means that they are unnecessary. Am I missing something? Or is there just no justification whatsoever for government intervention in this area?
Er, sorry, by “Shoup’s line of argument” I meant O’Toole.
I’d argue that most non-parking uses of land (housing, retail) in an urban context have significant positive externalities – in my neighbourhood I benefit from extra eyes on the street, more retail options, economies of scale in retail, etc. Extra parking provides none of those (especially when it’s designed badly), and so I could potentially see some justification for either a tax on parking or subsidizing of other uses.
That said, I agree that just removing parking minimums and maximums would significantly improve on current policy, and after removing minimums there are much more pressing urban policy issues than taxing parking.
One point in favor of mandatory parking spaces is the possibility of businesses freeloading on another business’ lots. True there are enforcement solutions but those might be more expensive.
On a tangential note I really miss free parking, abundant restrooms / drinking fountains and gratis water with meals on every European trip. This is probably convention rather than legislation though. (Wonder if an American restaurent can operate legally without free drinking water?)
I second everything John has to say.
“Might Manhattan be better off with no private cars at all?”
When I was in grade school I thought this. I still don’t think this is a crazy idea. The island has lots of public transportation options, much of it is walkable, but residents and business really need non-private cars, eg delivery trucks, police cars, fire cars, sanitation cars, to some degree busses. Fewer or no private cars means less of a chance that these vehicles are stuck in traffic. Many, maybe most residents don’t even own a car. Add to that the fact that at least two thirds of the island was developed before the car, and some serious alterations were needed to the avenues to make them car-usable, which was never done to the colonial street grid at the lower tip of the island.
However, one point to note is that there are some eight million people who live on Long Island (using the geographical terminology to mean Brooklyn and Queens as well as Nassau and Suffolk), and if they are to get between the island and the mainland their options are to go through Manhattan using five bridges and two tunnels, or to use three bridges that don’t got through Manhattan. This may be the source of most of the private car traffic in Manhattan. Everyone hates Robert Moses’ idea of two cross-Manhattan expressways, but this was a serious attempt to solve this problem.
The other point to note is that there actually are areas in Manhattan where there are gaps in the public transit network. The far uptown neighborhoods are more like outer borough neighborhoods in this and other regards.
If private cars were actually ban, parking options should be expanded near stations where you could catch a train, bus, or subway into the city, and around the bridges and tunnels, but then we are back to the question of why not leave this up to the private sector. But very little in terms of land use and real estate development in New York City is truly “left up to the private sector” (the real estate business, with its origins in the landed aristocracy, is not a “private sector business” the way most people understand the term).
But I do favor banning private cars south of Chambers Street, which is a part of the city where the street grid, laid out in the seventeenth century, really can’t handle both foot and vehicle traffic very well. Also start converting some cross-town streets and some avenues to express bus/ bike/ emergency vehicles/ delivery trucks only, in return you can get the busses and trucks off some of the other streets.
How about removing the reason for cars to be in NYC – dismantle cities and the socioecononic messes they create. It’s the concentration of people that we subsidize. There was a time when concentration was necessary and desirable. That is becoming less true over time.
Concentration is still necessary and desirable for a massive subset of people. Witness the millions of people (even the idle jet-setters who really aren’t there because of a job) willing to pay outrageous rents to live in Manhattan, London or Paris and the distinct lack of people willing to move to Armpit, Nebraska despite minimal living costs.
Also, concentration is not subsidized: it is cheaper per capita to build city infrastructure than to build for a suburb or town in the boonies: the hundred-mile freeway, the inefficient miniature sewage and water network, the hundred mile broadband fiber, the inefficient small school/library/court/police system might be cheaper in total but cost twice as much per capita.
Also, concentration is not subsidized: it is cheaper per capita to build city infrastructure than to build for a suburb or town in the boonies: the hundred-mile freeway, the inefficient miniature sewage and water network, the hundred mile broadband fiber, the inefficient small school/library/court/police system might be cheaper in total but cost twice as much per capita.
Dense urban areas seem plenty subsidized to me. Mass transit is massively subsidized. Other common features of inner cities — sports stadiums, arts centers, central libraries, convention centers, civic centers, concert halls, and various forms of “urban renewal” or “urban revitalization” typically receive large public subsidies. Construction costs for high-rise housing are two or three times higher per square foot than construction costs for low-rise housing.
They may seem that way but, almost universally, urban areas subsidise rural areas.
They may seem that way but, almost universally, urban areas subsidise rural areas.
The issue isn’t urban vs. rural, but high density urban vs. low density urban. If you seriously believe that dense urban areas subsidize suburbs, show us your studies.
I think some guy named Pol Plot has a similar idea.
Manhattan has done fine over this same period of time
I don’t know about Manhattan specifically, but between 2000 and 2010 New York City had a net outflow of more than a million domestic migrants. I don’t have figures for earlier decades, but this is a longstanding pattern. Something is causing people to leave New York for other parts of the country. The difficulty of getting around by car in New York, the dependency on public transit, is likely to be one of the reasons.
The only defenses I’ve heard in defense of parking minimums is that make any sense say that markets would build them that way anyway (I think this is Shoup’s line of argument). But if that’s true then that means that they are unnecessary. Am I missing something?
Businesses have an incentive to provide less parking than they need, because their customers can poach parking space from neighboring businesses and local streets. That’s a cost to those neighboring businesses and to local residents. Hence the need for parking minimums.
I don’t know about Manhattan specifically, but between 2000 and 2010 New York City had a net outflow of more than a million domestic migrants. I don’t have figures for earlier decades, but this is a longstanding pattern. Something is causing people to leave New York for other parts of the country. The difficulty of getting around by car in New York, the dependency on public transit, is likely to be one of the reasons.
Manhattan? Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.
If NYC was really becoming a less desirable place to live, residential prices would have fallen. Instead, prices have skyrocketed despite no decrease in the number of residential units. Read Ryan Avent’s book (or some of Ed Glaeser’s work) to learn more about the regulatory limits preventing an influx of people to NYC.
Also, really? It’s not hard for businesses to provide parking to their customers only if they so choose – just use pay parking and redeem the price to your customers. Completely standard in my neck of the woods. It’s also not clear why residents have a right to on-street parking at lower than market rates.
And are you really going to argue that the costs caused by “unethical parkers” are greater than those caused by diverting valuable urban space to a use that the market would not provide, and encouraging more driving with all of its associated negative externalities?
If NYC was really becoming a less desirable place to live, residential prices would have fallen.
That doesn’t follow at all. Prices have been driven up by the huge increase in the number of very wealthy people, for whom NYC is a desirable place to own a residence. That doesn’t mean it’s more desirable to Americans in general. It is clearly less desirable. That’s why they’ve been leaving in droves.
It’s not hard for businesses to provide parking to their customers only if they so choose – just use pay parking and redeem the price to your customers.
Enforcing parking restrictions is costly. It generally only makes sense where land is expensive. That’s why most parking in most places is free (unpriced).
It’s also not clear why residents have a right to on-street parking at lower than market rates.
It seems to be clear to most people. It’s a lot easier than putting a parking meter every 10 feet. It’s same reason we don’t charge “market rates” for using roads.
It is clearly less desirable.
Or, as you noted (for reasons I disagree with – again, see Ryan Avent’s book or Glaeser’s “Why is Manhattan so Expensive?”), higher prices are what discourage more people from living there, rather than NYC being intrinsically less pleasant for some reason.
It’s a lot easier than putting a parking meter every 10 feet.
In places where land isn’t nearly worthless? I disagree.
Or, as you noted (for reasons I disagree with – again, see Ryan Avent’s book or Glaeser’s “Why is Manhattan so Expensive?”), higher prices are what discourage more people from living there, rather than NYC being intrinsically less pleasant for some reason.
There is no “intrinsic.” One of the reasons why NYC is less desirable is because it is so expensive.
In places where land isn’t nearly worthless? I disagree.
No, in most places. That’s why most parking is unpriced. That isn’t likely to change.
From the article, it sounds like if you aren’t doing very well financially, you can’t have a car in Manhattan. This is progress?
And all you “walkable neighborhood” zealots might give a thought to people in wheelchairs (like me.) Using a standard taxicab is very difficult — impossible with a power chair that doesn’t fold up. I don’t know if the NY subways are wheelchair accessible. The DC Metro is, but only when all the elevators are working. An escalator is impossible in a chair. Many are deliberately narrowed at the ends to prevent someone in a chair from trying it.
I also thought Tyler was against the kind of central planning pervasive in the article.
The suburbs look better all the time.
Parts of the subway are wheelchair accessible. Imagine the largest quotation marks in the universe for the previous sentence.
Some stations have elevators going up to street level. However, most stations do not.
Darwin will take care of you!
“When the rules went into effect, 85 percent of off-street parking was taken by commuters. Now, depending on the neighborhood, up to 70 percent of those spaces are used by residents.”
That paragraph tells us nothing about the change — maybe the average is still 85% commuters.
“…the Clean Air Act’s stricter codes limited the number of new parking lots. Developers were no longer required to provide parking in new developments, and special permission was needed to build large garages.”
So one politically-driven regulatory regime has been replaced by another, and we still don’t know how much parking the market actually wants or what prices would cause that market to clear. It’s no better to forbid construction of parking spaces than to require it.
Manhattan works because the city is able to supply a large-number of extremely high paying jobs that entice people to work there despite the hassle of getting into the city (if you live in the suburbs) or the low quality of most rental housing there (if you don’t). I don’t know whether this can be replicated in other cities.
It’s tough to tell what the future of dense cities is. The U.S. still has plenty of open space to develop while Europe and Japan will have shrinking populations in the future. Developing Asia, on the other hand, is very much geared toward cities at the moment but the quality of life in many of these places is terrible for ordinary people in terms of traffic and extremely long commutes.
Anecdotally, I’ve found parking relatively easy to find above 68th street. However, I grew up in San Francisco and whenever I visit, the frustration found in parking can only be replicated by some of the lower circles in Dante’s Inferno. I could go on, but I won’t, lest I eat the next junior employee crossing my path.
Part of the transformation from commuters to residents parking on the streets likely stems from non-car commuting options improving and tolls getting pricier (congestion pricing makes everything better).
As for migration outflows, plenty of people who moved here in the late 70s and early 80s are packing up. They’ve received enormous returns on their apartments and the rest of the country has not fared quite as well as the four boroughs (someone, somewhere, someday will care about Staten Island). I presume these people are moving to places where they can enjoy a nice retirement with a much higher standard of living than they would have moving to a smaller apartment in Manhattan. Also, people are always coming here. I’m pretty sure a good chunk of Brooklyn at this point is composed entirely of “upper middle class” transplants from the Midwest. They’ll stay for about 4 years and if they can’t make it or marry someone who has, they’ll probably return to wherever they came from. The glorious pillars of this city are built on the bones of a hundred million crushed dreams and dashed hopes. On an unrelated note, I think many leave because they would rather raise kids in an environment where they grow up a bit more slowly.
Interesting, I don’t tend to visit any place where I can’t park for free. Places with free parking tend to have lower prices. Of course, malls don’t with their minimum operating hours, but they are interesting to walk around. The downtown butcher shop actually has free parking and their prices are as good if not better than the supermarket. I could never understand why people locate in the cities and then our executive committee determined that they must have a downtown presence to promote the brand. The saner underlings on the committee wanted a suburban location. I guess it is that mentality keep those nutty real estate markets going, otherwise the core would just wither and die under the weight of pawn shops and tattoo parlors.
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