The Overparked States of America
citylab.com
citylab.com
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.
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.
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).
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/ .
EDIT: in looking around, I found this Reddit comment - https://www.reddit.com/r/JacksonHole/comments/6bpvhl/town_of... - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I also wonder how many of the parking spaces in Jackson, WY are lost to piles of snow during winter months.
Judging by the number of stripped shared bikes I see around town it'll certainly be interesting...