What’s proposed

Proposed signage (left) and existing signage (right). From Marin Transit. Click to enlarge.

At the moment, the bus stop signage is limited to route numbers and some branding. There’s a little bit of extra information, but for the most part it’s assumed riders will use the map that’s often on the flag to determine where buses go.

The proposed signage adds data and makes the route numbers more clear. Below the route is the destination, and below that are the service days. Though not frequency data – a valuable part of any bus map – it does allow a traveler to at least know that they shouldn’t bother waiting for a route if it doesn’t run that day.

Most importantly, the sign adds the stop ID and how to get real-time arrival information. Though GGT isn’t there yet, MT already has real-time arrival data for the bus fleet it operates.

These are all excellent ideas, but there are problems when incorporating GGT’s regional routes in the signage.

GGT’s regional routes, however, do not get destination or service information. On the sample image, routes 40 and 42 are just big numbers without any indication that they’re bound for BART. As well, the route number’s box isn’t colored blue, the color of Basic routes maps, which is out-of-step with coloration for the MT shuttles and GGT-operated local routes. While possibly a conscious decision, it is nevertheless the wrong one.

What have other bus systems done to aid riders with signage?

Practices elsewhere

Seattle’s flag. Image from King County.

Seattle’s bus system underwent a similar redesign for its stop signage, and the result was similar, though there are differences. (See Seattle’s design manual here.)

Most significantly, the Seattle stop signs use tiles, which allows the system to easily take out or edit route information as needed. If a bus used to be routed to the airport and isn’t, Metro can just remove that tile from the route’s signs rather than order entirely new signs. And, at the stops the route no longer serves, Metro can just remove the line’s number. While more expensive than a typical sign, the tiles would save money over the long-term if service changes effect a large number of the metal signs.

Something else of note is the use of icons to show what services this particular route intersects. Marin’s transit system includes ferries and airport shuttles and will soon include a train. Designating transfers to alternative modes may be of use. Designating routes that intersect the 101 trunk lines may also be useful, though that would involve a unified brand for such service. A black highway shield may do the trick.

London’s bus stops use a similar design, but its bus stations do something a bit more horizontal, with more potential points of interest. If applied to Marin, Route 49 might list Civic Center, Lucas Valley, Hamilton, and Novato instead of just Novato. (You can find their design manual here.)

How’s the sign?

My principal concern with the MT signage as proposed is that it does not visually integrate with either the GGT system or the MTC regional hub signage standards. This is problematic, as a unified brand for the transit system is important to rider literacy, especially for the casual rider. It makes little sense for them to proceed, as they did yesterday, without first developing a unified standard.

Given the prominence of the San Rafael Transit Center to the transit system, it would make sense to take inspiration from the signage there, which will meet MTC standards, rather than to invent a new visual language from scratch.

From a physical design perspective, it may make sense to design these signs to be modular. That would decrease the cost of route changes, as new signs wouldn’t need to be stamped along with new route books.

Nevertheless, the new sign is still a step forward from what exists today. But it would be nice if MT would start thinking a bit more regionally.

If you want to offer input into the newly-approved signs, you can take the survey here.

Honestly, it was a whole lot of fun. It’s much more rewarding to talk with people who are skeptical of change than to comment at them online. I hope I sparked some interest in suburban urbanism and shed some light on where our county comes from. I hope I’ll have a chance to post about some of this in the future.

Below is the video in full. You can download Linda Jackson’s presentation here and mine here. You can also download the maps of the Interurban either in the Map Room or on the original post.

One point of clarification. The last commenter said that if the examples I gave were representative of the kind of affordable housing we’d get under Plan Bay Area she’d be all for it. Lucky for her, every one of the latter building examples are affordable housing. That’s not to say affordable housing is all grand in Marin (I’m hoping to write a piece highlighting some of the worst examples I came across while preparing for my talk), but it’s a representative sample. We need people like her fighting for good development, not fighting against all development because some will be bad. We can’t rely on design review boards and planning commissions to promote good design if all they hear from the public is negativity.

Okay, enough of my soapbox here. Go watch the video. I start at 50:22.

SANTA ROSA ROSE FESTIVAL PARADE, SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2013
On Saturday, May 18, from about 6:30am to 1:30pm, GGT Routes 80 and 101 will operate on a detour in downtown Santa Rosa due to the annual Rose Festival Parde. During this time, the Santa Rosa Transit Mall will NOT be served. Customers are directed to temporary stops at Fourth Street & B Street.

TIBURON WINE FESTIVAL, SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2013
On Saturday, May 18, from about 7am to 6pm, Tiburon Blvd will be partially closed due to the 29th Annual Tiburon Wine Festival. During this time, GGT Route 19 will NOT serve the stop at Tiburon Blvd & Main Street. Customers are directed to the nearby stops at Tiburon Blvd & Beach Rd or Tiburon Blvd & Mar West St.

MARIN-SONOMA CONCOURS TOUR D’ELEGANCE, LARKSPUR, SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2013
On Saturday, May 18, from 6am to 11am, GGT Route 22 will operate on a detour due to the annual Marin-Sonoma Concours Tour d’Elegance. During this time, the southbound bus stop at Magnolia Ave & Ward St will NOT be served. Customers are directed to nearby stops at Magnolia Ave & Bon Air Rd or Magnolia Ave & Madrone Ave.

SALUTE TO AMERICAN GRAFFITI CELEBRATION, PETALUMA, SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2013
On Saturday, May 18, from about 5am to 10pm, GGT Routes 80 and 101 will operate on a detour around downtown Petaluma due to the annual Salute to American Graffit Celebration. During this time, the following southbound stops willNOT be served: E. Washington St & Gray Cir, Fourth St & C Street, Petaluma Blvd South & F Street, Petaluma Blvd South & Mountain View, Petaluma Blvd South & Crystal Lane, Petaluma Blvd South & US Hwy 101 On-ramp. Also, the following northbound stops will NOT be served: Petaluma Blvd South & US Hwy 101 On-ramp, Petaluma Blvd South & Crystal Ln,Petaluma Blvd South & Mountain View Ave, Petaluma Blvd South & G Street, Fourth & C Streets, and E. Washington & Petaluma Blvd North. Customers are directed to the Copeland Street Transit Mall.

ASIAN HERITAGE STREET CELEBRATION, SAN FRANCISCO, SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2013
On Saturday, May 18, from about 5am to 9pm, GGT Routes 10, 70, 80 and 101 will operate on a detour in the SF Civic Center area. During this time, the following southbound bus stops will NOT be served: Golden Gate Ave & Polk St, Hyde St & McAllister St, and Hyde St & Grove St. Also, the following northbound stops will NOT be served: 7th Street & Market Street, McAllister St & Hyde St, and McAllister St & Polk St. Customers are directed to nearby stops at Mission & 5th Streets or Van Ness Ave & Turk St.

AMGEN TOUR OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA ROSA, SUNDAY, MAY 19, 2013
On Sunday, May 19, from about 6:30am to 1:30pm, GGT Routes 80 and 101 will operate on a detour in downtown Santa Rosa due to the AMGEN Tour of California bike race. During this time, the Santa Rosa Transit Mall will NOT be served. Customers are directed to temporary stops at Mendocino Ave & College Ave.

BAY TO BREAKERS, SAN FRANCISCO, SATURDAY & SUNDAY, MAY 18 & 19, 2013
On Saturday and Sunday, May 18 and 19, GGT will operate on separate detours in downtown San Francisco due to the annual Bay to Breakers 12K race:

• On Saturday, May 18, from 9pm until about 3am on Sunday, May 19, the northbound stop at the Temporary Transbay Terminal and ALL southbound stops on Howard Street will NOT be served.
• On Sunday, May 19, from 3am until about 12pm, ALL southbound trips will END at Golden Gate Ave & Polk St andALL northbound trips will BEGIN at McAllister Ave & Polk St. GGT will operate a shuttle between the Civic Center (Golden Gate Ave & Polk St) and Mission & 2nd Streets. The southbound shuttle will drop passengers off at Muni bus stops along Market Street; the northbound shuttle will pick up passengers at stops along Mission St. Fares will NOTbe collected on the shuttle. NOTE: during this detour, GGT will NOT operate on Folsom, Fremont or Howard Streets.

 

O’Toole has written extensively on subjects beyond parking, including mass transit and urban patterns. We’ll explore those in time.

A fair warning: Shoup’s response is very long, so there is a jump. The rest, from here, is Streetsblog, Shoup, and O’Toole.

Shoup (left) and O’Toole (right). One of these gentlemen has written the definitive volume on parking policy. The other says he has yet to read it.

Dear Randal,

I would like to comment on your August 16 post on the Cato@Liberty blog about “Free Markets for Free Parking.”

You were responding to Tyler Cowen’s article in the New York Times, “Free Parking Comes at a Price,” in which Tyler explained some of the ideas in my book, The High Cost of Free Parking.In commenting on Tyler’s article, you made several mistakes in describing my ideas and proposals. I will explain these mistakes, and if you agree with the explanations I hope you will post corrections on Cato@Liberty.

Before I examine your misunderstanding of what I have written, I will first summarize the three basic parking reforms I recommend in The High Cost of Free Parking: (1) remove off-street parking requirements, (2) charge market prices for on-street parking to achieve about an 85-percent occupancy rate for curb spaces, and (3) return the resulting revenue to pay for public improvements in the metered neighborhoods.

I will quote ten extracts from your post, and comment on each of them.

1.

“Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not.”

Does the Antiplanner, who is “dedicated to the sunset of government planning,” really believe that government planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for every economic activity at every site in every city?

Even Houston, which does not have zoning, has minimum parking requirements, and they resemble the parking requirements in almost every other city in the United States. Houston requires 1.25 parking spaces for each efficiency apartment in an apartment house, for example, and 1.333 parking spaces for each one-bedroom apartment. Here is the link to the minimum parking requirements in Houston’s municipal code.

Does the Antiplanner, who is “dedicated to the sunset of government planning,” really believe that government planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for every economic activity at every site in every city, no matter how much the required parking spaces may cost and no matter how little drivers may be willing to pay to use them? Does the Antiplanner really support Houston’s minimum parking requirement of 1.333 spaces for each one-bedroom apartment because he believes that Houston’s government planners can accurately predict the “need” for parking at every apartment to one-thousandth of a parking space?

Since you say that many cities do not have minimum parking requirements, can you provide a list of some of these cities?

2.

“Shoup assumes that . . . without such requirements there would be less free parking. This last assumption is extremely unlikely, as entrepreneurs everywhere know that (outside of New York City) 90 percent of all urban travel is by car, and businesses that don’t offer parking are going to lose customers to ones that do.”

Removing a minimum parking requirement means that a city will never force developers to supply more parking spaces than are profitable, but developers would be free to provide as many parking spaces as they like. If developers did always voluntarily supply at least as many parking spaces as cities now require, the minimum parking requirements would be unnecessary. The only research I have seen found that developers usually do not provide more parking spaces than cities require (pp. 78–84 of The High Cost of Free Parking). Recent econometric research also strongly suggests that minimum parking requirements force developers to provide more parking spaces than they would voluntarily provide in a free market [PDF].

3.

“Shoup portrays such free parking as a ‘subsidy’ because not all people drive and so the ones who don’t drive end up subsidizing the ones who do. But any business offers a variety of services to its customers and employees, and no one frets about subsidies just because they don’t take advantage of every single service. How often do you actually swim in the swimming pools or work out in the exercise rooms of the hotels you stay at?”

Every person plays many different roles in life — tenant, homeowner, worker, consumer, investor, and motorist. With bundled parking, we pay for parking in all these roles except, usually, as motorists.

You use swimming pools and exercise rooms as examples of bundled services at hotels, but cities do not require hotels to provide swimming pools and exercise rooms. Suppose, however, cities did require all hotels to provide swimming pools and exercise rooms, perhaps as a part of a public health campaign. Cities could require all these swimming pools and exercise rooms to be of at least a minimum size related to the number of rooms or gross floor area in a hotel. For example, cities could require every hotel to provide a swimming pool with at least 2,500 gallons of water per guest room. If cities did have minimum pool requirements, I expect that almost all hotels would bundle the use of the pools into the room rents. Would you then say that all these swimming pools are the result of free choices made in a free market? Would you say the market had demonstrated that hotel guests like to swim? Would you say the minimum pool requirements do not subsidize swimmers at the expense of nonswimmers? But let’s get back to parking; even swimming pools have parking requirements, and here is the minimum parking requirement for swimming pools in one city: 1 parking space for every 2,500 gallons of water in a swimming pool (Table 3-4 in The High Cost of Free Parking).

Every person plays many different roles in life — tenant, homeowner, worker, consumer, investor, and motorist. With bundled parking, we pay for parking in all these roles except, usually, as motorists. Because we pay for parking indirectly, its cost does not deter us from driving. Because off-street parking requirements force up the supply of parking spaces, they “externalize” the cost of parking by shifting it to everyone but the parker. Only if we pay for parking directly does its cost affect our decisions whether to drive or not.

If cities require an ample supply of parking spaces for every building, this saves everyone the trouble of thinking about parking — or its cost. Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else. Because we buy and use cars without thinking about the cost of parking, we congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air more than we would if we each paid for our own parking. Everyone parks free at everyone else’s expense.

The issue is not simply whether parking is subsidized. Even without minimum parking requirements some firms would choose to offer free parking, just as some hotels offer swimming pools and some coffee shops offer wi-fi. The real issue is whether the government should mandate the parking supply.

When the US Census Bureau surveyed owners and managers of multifamily rental housing to learn which governmental regulations made their operations most difficult, parking requirements were cited more frequently than any other regulation except property taxes.

If a city like Houston will not allow any developer to build a one-bedroom apartment without also providing at least 1.333 parking spaces, is it any surprise that most landlords bundle the cost of parking into higher rents for housing? As a result, we have free parking and expensive housing. Cars are more affordable but housing is less affordable. When the US Census Bureau surveyed owners and managers of multifamily rental housing to learn which governmental regulations made their operations most difficult, parking requirements were cited more frequently than any other regulation except property taxes. (p. 141 in The High Cost of Free Parking).

Off-street parking requirements collectivize the cost of parking, because they allow everyone to park free at everyone else’s expense. American drivers park free at the end of 99 percent of all their automobile trips. If the cost of parking is hidden in the prices of other goods and services, no one can pay less for parking by using less of it. Off-street parking requirements thus change the way we build our cities, the way we travel, and how much energy we consume. All the required parking spaces spread the city out, and the greater travel distances make driving almost a necessity. Free parking also reduces the price of driving wherever we want to go, so the increased travel distances combined with the reduced price of driving make cars the obvious choice for most trips: 87 percent of all trips in the U.S. are now made in personal motor vehicles. (pp. 621–625 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

Off-street parking requirements produce the free parking that everyone wants, but ubiquitous free parking helps explain why American motor vehicles, by themselves, consume one-eighth of the world’s total oil production. We import two-thirds of this oil and we are paying for it with borrowed money. America’s extravagant consumption of imported oil to fuel our cars is not sustainable, economically or environmentally, and anything that is not sustainable must eventually stop.

4.

“Shoup also supposes (and Cowen accepts) that universal parking fees would greatly reduce the amount of driving people do. ‘Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars,’ Cowen quotes Shoup as saying.”

Please cite any occasion on which I have recommended “universal parking fees.” I am not even sure what you mean by this term. If you mean all parking everywhere must have a substantial price at all times, I most certainly do not recommend that.

Figure 12-1 in The High Cost of Free Parking shows what I mean by the right price for parking, and the right price will often be zero. For example, if half of all the parking spaces at a suburban shopping mall are empty even when parking is free, it would not make sense to charge for parking. On the other hand, if all of the curb parking spaces in a congested business district are occupied and drivers are circling every block in search of a vacant curb space, the price of curb parking is too low. Here is the link to a video that shows how to set the right prices for curb parking.

5.

“Shoup claims that a single parking space costs, on average, 17 percent more than the cost of an average car, and as a result, the cost of parking greatly exceeds the value of all automobiles in the country. This is ridiculous… Even structured parking typically costs only about $10,000 a space.”

Table 7-3 in The High Cost of Free Parking shows that parking spaces built on the UCLA campus have cost, on average, 117 percent of the price of a new car in the years that the parking spaces were built, but I did not rely on this figure to calculate that the cost of parking exceeds the value of all automobiles in the country.

Using data on the capital and operating costs of parking lots and parking structures, I estimated that the subsidy for off-street parking in 2002 was between $127 billion and $374 billion, or between 1.2 percent and 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product. In comparison, in 2002 the federal government spent $231 billion for Medicare and $349 billion for national defense.

I relied on Census data to estimate that the cost of all parking spaces exceeds the value of all the automobiles in the country. The Department of Commerce estimated that the average value per vehicle was $5,507 in 1997. This average value may seem low, but the average age of all vehicles in 1995 was 8.3 years, and 62 percent of all vehicles were more than five years old. The depreciation of the older vehicles explains the low average value of $5,507 per vehicle. (Table 7-2 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

There are more parking spaces than vehicles because drivers must be able to park wherever they go, and many parking spaces are vacant much of the time. Cities typically require enough parking spaces to satisfy the peak demand for parking at every land use — at home, work, school, restaurants, shopping centers, movie theaters, and hundreds of other places — so that drivers can have convenient access to all addresses at all times. To see the result, think of what happens when almost all vehicles are parked at home in the middle of the night: almost all the spaces necessary to meet the peak demand for free parking at all other land uses are empty.

Cities require a specific number of parking spaces for every land use, but no city collects data on its total parking supply. No one knows the total number of parking spaces in the US, but the eminent land-use planner Victor Gruen estimated that every car has at least one parking space at home and three or four waiting elsewhere to serve the same car. More recently, Davis et al. (2010) used detailed aerial photographs to estimate the number of parking spaces in surface parking lots in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Parking lots were identified as paved surfaces with stripes painted on the surface or where more than three cars were parked in an organized fashion. Although the estimates did not include any on-street parking spaces, or any parking spaces in structures (other than the top floor if the structure has an open roof), or any residential parking spaces that are not in parking lots, the total area occupied by parking lots in the four states would cover about half the state of Rhode Island. In two cities in Indiana for which there were detailed observations, parking lots covered three times more land than parks.

Using this limited category of parking spaces (only the spaces in off-street surface parking lots), Davis et al. estimated that the parking supply ranged between 2.5 spaces per car in Indiana to 3 spaces per car in Michigan. Presumably, most cars also have one parking space at home, and many more parking spaces are on the streets and in structures.

To be extremely conservative, suppose there is one parking space at home for every car and only two additional parking spaces elsewhere (at work, school, supermarkets, and so on), for a total of three parking spaces per car. Let us also take your back-of-the-envelope estimate of $2,200 for the land and construction cost of a surface parking space, an extremely low value. The cost of the parking spaces available per car would be $6,600 (3 spaces per car x $2,200 per space). In this case, the per-car cost of parking exceeds the average value of a car ($5,507). If so, the total cost of the parking supply exceeds the total value of all cars. And this estimate does not include the cost of any parking spaces on the streets or in structures.

Please cite the source of your statement that “Even structured parking typically costs only about $10,000 a space.” The national average construction cost for an above-ground parking structure in 2010, according to Carl Walker Associates, is just over $16,000 per space (excluding land value). Underground parking structures are even more expensive. The most recent underground parking structure built at UCLA, for example, cost $31,500 per space (Table 6-1 in The High Cost of Free Parking). Yale is about to spend $20 million to build a 200-space underground parking structure for its new School of Management, which is a cost of $100,000 per space. Your rough estimates of $2,200 per space for surface parking and $10,000 per space for structured parking are probably far too low for parking lots and structures in many cities.

If the total cost of all parking spaces in the US exceeds the total value of all the cars parked in them, and if drivers park free for 99 percent of all their trips, the total subsidy for parking (the total cost of parking not paid for by drivers in their role as parkers) is huge. Using data on the capital and operating costs of parking lots and parking structures, I estimated that the subsidy for off-street parking in 2002 was between $127 billion and $374 billion, or between 1.2 percent and 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product. In comparison, in 2002 the federal government spent $231 billion for Medicare and $349 billion for national defense. (Chapter 7 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

Free curb parking may be the most costly subsidy that American cities provide for most of their citizens.

In addition, there is the subsidy for all the on-street parking spaces. Consider a 36-foot wide residential street with two 10-foot-wide travel lanes and two 8-foot-wide parking lanes: curb parking takes up 44 percent of the roadspace. Clearly, curb parking spaces account for a significant share of the total cost of roads, and an accurate estimate of the total subsidy for parking would take curb parking into account. The US Department of Commerce estimates that the value of roads is 36 percent of the value of all state and local public infrastructure (which also includes schools, sewers, water supply, residential buildings, equipment, hospitals, and parks). Because curb parking occupies a substantial share of road space, it must be a substantial share of all state and local public infrastructure. Drivers do not pay gasoline taxes while their cars are parked, except perhaps on the gasoline lost through evaporative emissions, which pollute the air. Since drivers do pay gasoline taxes while they are driving, curb spaces are subsidized much more than the travel lanes are. Free curb parking may be the most costly subsidy that American cities provide for most of their citizens. (p. 206 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

6.

“Strangely, one of the examples Cowen uses in his article is Manhattan, where (he claims) ‘streets are full of cars cruising around, looking for cheaper on-street parking, rather than pulling into a lot.’ Give me a break! I defy Cowen to find any free parking anywhere in Manhattan, where ownership of a single parking space can cost more than a median home in other parts of the country.”

I see that you retracted this no-free-parking-in-Manhattan claim in a later post.

Unfortunately, this retraction includes several new errors of fact.

7.

“Many streets in Manhattan offer free parking, albeit often with the caveat that you have to move your car from one side of the street to the other every night.”

New York does not require owners who park on the street to move their cars every night. It requires owners to move their cars twice a week so the city can sweep the streets under them. Most of the curb parking spaces in Manhattan are free, on some of the most valuable land on earth. As you say, a parking space in Manhattan can cost more than a house in other parts of the country, so these free curb spaces must provide an awesome subsidy for cars. And the competition for this awesome subsidy requires cruising to find a rare vacant space. This cruising for free parking wastes time and fuel, congests traffic, and pollutes the air.

A study of cruising in one 15-block business district in Los Angeles found that, over the course of a year, the search for underpriced curb parking created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel—equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gasoline and produces 730 tons of carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in throughout the United States. (Chapter 14 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

8.

“But this doesn’t change my main point, which is that it is one thing for Cowen to argue that cities should not price parking below market rates where there is a market for parking. I have no problem with this. But it is quite another thing to argue, as many urban planners following the Shoup model do, that private businesses should be required to charge for parking (or be limited in how much parking they are allowed to provide) in areas where the market rate for parking is zero.”

Please cite the source of a Shoup model that would require businesses to charge for parking. Opposing minimum parking requirements is very different from proposing minimum pricing requirements.

I have supported the policy of “parking cash out” whereby employers who offer commuters free parking at work also offer commuters the option to choose the cash value of a parking space if they do not take a free parking space at work. This policy does not mandate parking charges because commuters who choose to drive can still park free. Parking cash out gives the same subsidy to every commuter, regardless of travel mode choice, while free parking gives a subsidy to drivers and nothing to other commuters.

Case studies of employers who offer parking cash out in Southern California show that it reduced vehicle travel to work by 12 percent — equivalent to removing one of every eight cars from the road during peak commute hours. Parking cash out cost the employers only $2 a month per employee because they saved almost as much on parking subsidies as they paid in cash to commuters. Federal and state income tax revenues increased by $65 a year per employee because many commuters voluntarily traded their tax-exempt parking subsidies for taxable cash. Employers said that parking cash out is simple and fair, and that it helps recruit and retain workers. Parking cash out thus produces benefits for commuters, employers, taxpayers, cities, and the environment. It accomplishes all these goals simply by letting commuters choose how to spend their own money.

Can you tell me if the Cato Institute offers free parking for its employees? If so, does it also offer commuters the option to cash out their parking subsidies?

9.

“Cowen’s complaint about Manhattan is not about free parking but that the government is pricing on-street parking below the market. If that were the extent of Shoup’s argument, I would have no problem, as I noted in my blog last week. But Shoup’s goal isn’t market pricing of public parking; it is to create artificial shortages of private parking. He doesn’t want to simply eliminate the minimum-parking requirements that are found in many zoning codes; he wants to replace them with maximum-parking limits so that places like WalMart will not be allowed to provide their customers with as much parking as they like.”

You have misunderstood what I recommend. Here are four quotes about parking requirements in The High Cost of Free Parking:

“Most markets depend on prices to allocate resources — so much so that it’s hard to imagine they could operate in any other way. Nevertheless, cities have tried to manage parking almost entirely without prices. . . cities have without a second thought imposed planning requirements to ensure affordable parking. Rather than charge fair market prices for on-street parking, cities require ample off-street parking for every land use.” (page eight)

Why do you say that planners are annoyed when developers voluntarily provide more parking than zoning codes demand? Most off-street parking requirements are a minimum with no maximum. Minimum parking requirements imply that planners care only about having enough parking spaces, and that there can never be too many.

“Planners cannot even agree on whether to require or restrict off-street parking. Consider the diametrically opposed approaches in the Los Angeles and San Francisco CBDs: Los Angeles requires parking, while San Francisco restricts it. For a concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, 50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as the maximum. . . If some physicians prescribed bloodletting and others prescribed blood transfusion to treat the same disease, everybody would demand to know what is going on. But when city planners do essentially the same thing, nobody questions the contradiction.” (p. 121)

“Despite their ambivalence on whether to require or restrict parking, planners always regulate it. This behavior recalls a Soviet maxim: ‘What is not required must be prohibited.’” (p. 121)

“Although market prices can allocate parking spaces fairly and efficiently, cities now require off-street parking everywhere — imposing enormous costs on the economy and the environment. Cities can and should regulate off-street parking to improve its quality, but they should deregulate its quantity and instead charge market prices for curb parking. If cities deregulate off-street parking and charge the right price for curb parking, market forces will improve transportation, land use, the environment, and urban life. You will not pay for my parking, and I will not pay for yours. Instead of planning without prices, we can let prices do the planning.” (p. 499)

I did not mention WalMart anywhere in The High Cost of Free Parking.

10.

“The empirical question is: do shopping malls, office parks, and companies like WalMart provide parking for their customers and employees because of zoning mandates, as Shoup claims? Or would they and do they provide parking just because it is good for their businesses? Texas counties are not allowed to zone, yet shopping centers and office parks in unincorporated Texas still provide plenty of parking. Much to planners’ annoyance, many developers elsewhere routinely provide more parking than zoning codes demand. This suggests that free parking is a free-market choice, and Cowen, who generally supports free markets, should have no objection to it.”

Your “empirical question” attacks a straw planner. I have never said that developers provide parking only because of zoning. I have said that zoning often forces developers to provide more parking than they would voluntarily choose to provide in a free market, where they take into account both the cost of providing the parking spaces and the revenue the spaces will generate. So please cite the evidence for your statement that many developers routinely provide more parking than zoning codes demand.

Why do you say that planners are annoyed when developers voluntarily provide more parking than zoning codes demand? Most off-street parking requirements are a minimum with no maximum. Minimum parking requirements imply that planners care only about having enough parking spaces, and that there can never be too many. Furthermore, the planning approvals for specific projects often require developers to provide more parking spaces than the zoning code requires. Few planners are annoyed when developers provide more parking than the code requires; they are annoyed when developers try to provide less parking than the code requires.

All the evidence I have seen suggests that developers often request planning variances to provide fewer parking spaces than the zoning codes require, because these requirements can seriously overestimate the peak demand for free parking. Developers must commission expensive transportation studies to justify a planning variance. Consider the results in a study commissioned by Home Depot for of the peak parking occupancy at its stores in the Southwest United States. The Parsons Transportation Group observed the parking occupancy at hourly intervals at 17 Home Depot stores on a Saturday, the busiest day of the week, and found “no correlation between the square footage of a store and its resultant peak parking demand.” Parsons used the sales data at each store to predict its peak parking occupancy on the 5th-busiest day of the year, which was selected as the “design day” for the parking supply. As Parsons explained, “Choosing the 5th-busiest day as the design day would mean that some customers may not be able to find a parking space immediately during the peak hour of the busiest four or five days of the year; however, they should have no problem finding a parking space in the lot at any other time.”

Parsons then compared these estimates of peak parking occupancy with the number of spaces that cities typically require at the rate of 5 spaces per 1,000 square feet of floor area. The average municipal parking requirement based on floor area was more than double the estimated peak parking occupancy on the 5th-busiest day at a Home Depot store. That is, the study commissioned by Home Depot found that cities required twice the number of parking spaces needed to meet the peak demand for free parking at Home Depot stores at the busiest time of the year. (pp. 35–37 in The High Cost of Free Parking)

City planners have no training that would enable them to estimate the demand for parking, and no financial stake in the success of a development. They know much less than developers do about how many parking spaces to provide for each project. Planners may, at best, know a little about the peak demand for free parking at a few land uses, but they know nothing about the marginal cost of parking spaces at any site, or about how to estimate the demand for parking as a function of its price. Markets will quickly reveal the demand for parking if cities cease requiring off-street spaces. Developers, landlords, and residents will all be able to make their own independent decisions about the right number of parking spaces. Market-priced parking will allow cities to evolve naturally in response to developers’ costs and citizens’ preferences, while minimum parking requirements force evolution toward car dependency and sprawl. In planning for an uncertain future, flexible prices are far better than rigid requirements. Could things be any worse if there were no planning for parking at all?

The vision behind most planning for parking is a drive-in utopia, and cities legislate this vision into reality for every new building, regardless of the cost. Off-street parking requirements that satisfy the peak demand for free parking are, in reality, free parking requirements. Planners may believe in the immaculate conception of parking demand, and economists may believe that market choices reveal consumer preferences for travel by car. But the demand for parking was not immaculately conceived, and it does not result from consumer preferences revealed in a free market. Free parking is not always a free-market choice. Instead, governments and the market coupled long ago to produce today’s swollen demand for cars and parking.

After he has studied the evidence and reconsidered the issues, I hope the Antiplanner at the Cato Institute may decide to condemn rather than condone a complex web of wasteful and harmful minimum parking requirements that severely restrict the use of private property.

Well, that’s about it for pointing out mistakes in your blog post. Because you have said that you did not read The High Cost of Free Parking, I can understand why you have some misconceptions of what is in it. If you had read the book, you would probably have found much with which you agree. I do not expect that you will want to read a 733-page book on parking, however, so here are the links to a few sites that will give you a quick view of what’s in the book.

• A video of how San Francisco sets market prices for curb parking
• A video of a presentation on parking at Yale
• A proposal for pricing curb parking [PDF]
• An op-ed piece in the New York Times
• The first chapter of The High Cost of Free Parking [PDF]
• Book reviews of The High Cost of Free Parking [PDF]
• Roughly right or precisely wrong in ACCESS [PDF]
• People, parking, and cities in ACCESS [PDF]
• Turning small change into big changes in ACCESS [PDF]
• Cruising for parking in ACCESS [PDF]
• Playing with parking fees and matchbox cars
• Parking cash out in ACCESS [PDF]
• A video about parking cash out
• My website

I did not spend all this time simply to send you a personal message about your blog post. If you take responsibility for the accuracy of the facts you have confidently stated on Cato@Liberty, and if the Cato Institute stands behind the accuracy of what its staff members post on its blog, I hope you will use the information in this message to correct all the errors in your original post. If your post is so careless with the facts and so filled with errors, and it is not corrected or retracted, what should one assume about all the other posts on Cato@Liberty?

Donald Shoup

Department of Urban Planning

University of California, Los Angeles

Original post by Randal O’Toole on CATO@LIBERTY:

Free Markets for Free Parking
Posted by Randal O’Toole
August 16, 2010 @ 7:49 am

I am disappointed that the distinguished George Mason University economist, Tyler Cowen, has fallen for the “high-cost-of-free-parking” arguments of UCLA urban planner Donald Shoup. Shoup is an excellent scholar, but like many scholars, he has the parochial view that the city that he lives in is a representative example of what is happening everywhere else.

Should free parking be a thing of the past?

Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not, and that without such requirements there would be less free parking. This last assumption is extremely unlikely, as entrepreneurs everywhere know that (outside of New York City) 90 percent of all urban travel is by car, and businesses that don’t offer parking are going to lose customers to ones that do.

Shoup portrays such free parking as a “subsidy” because not all people drive and so the ones who don’t drive end up subsidizing the ones who do. But any business offers a variety of services to its customers and employees, and no one frets about subsidies just because they don’t take advantage of every single service. How often do you actually swim in the swimming pools or work out in the exercise rooms of the hotels you stay at?

Shoup also supposes (and Cowen accepts) that universal parking fees would greatly reduce the amount of driving people do. “Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars,” Cowen quotes Shoup as saying. Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, submitted this question to its transportation model and concluded that requiring all offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to charge for parking would reduce driving by about 2 percent. The model showed that charging for parking has a greater effect on driving than spending billions on light rail, building scores of transit-oriented developments, or increasing the urban area’s population density by 20 percent. But 2 percent still isn’t going to do much to relieve congestion or solve any of the other problems Cowen associates with driving. Plus he never really explains why he thinks reducing mobility is a good idea in the first place.

Shoup claims that a single parking space costs, on average, 17 percent more than the cost of an average car, and as a result, the cost of parking greatly exceeds the value of all automobiles in the country. This is ridiculous. Most free parking is surface parking, which costs about $2,000 a space plus the cost of land. In areas that have not used urban-growth boundaries and similar tools to create artificial land shortages, vacant suburban land with urban services typically costs about $20,000 an acre. Since each acre can hold about 100 parking spaces, the total cost is about $2,200 per space. From the point of view of a business owner, this cost can be amortized over 30 years at 6 percent, for an annual cost of about $160. If that parking space is used by just two customers a day, the cost is about 22 cents per customer. That’s pretty trivial, and the costs of collecting fees for such parking would probably be greater than the parking itself. Even structured parking typically costs only about $10,000 a space (or, using the above assumptions, $1 per customer), but structured parking is rarely provided for free.

Strangely, one of the examples Cowen uses in his article is Manhattan, where (he claims) “streets are full of cars cruising around, looking for cheaper on-street parking, rather than pulling into a lot.” Give me a break! I defy Cowen to find any free parking anywhere in Manhattan, where ownership of a single parking space can cost more than a median home in other parts of the country.

Cowen’s complaint about Manhattan is not about free parking but that the government is pricing on-street parking below the market. If that were the extent of Shoup’s argument, I would have no problem, as I noted in my blog last week. But Shoup’s goal isn’t market pricing of public parking; it is to create artificial shortages of private parking. He doesn’t want to simply eliminate the minimum-parking requirements that are found in many zoning codes; he wants to replace them with maximum-parking limits so that places like WalMart will not be allowed to provide their customers with as much parking as they like.

The empirical question is: do shopping malls, office parks, and companies like WalMart provide parking for their customers and employees because of zoning mandates, as Shoup claims? Or would they and do they provide parking just because it is good for their businesses? Texas counties are not allowed to zone, yet shopping centers and office parks in unincorporated Texas still provide plenty of parking. Much to planners’ annoyance, many developers elsewhere routinely provide more parking than zoning codes demand. This suggests that free parking is a free-market choice, and Cowen, who generally supports free markets, should have no objection to it.

Randal O’Toole • August 16, 2010 @ 7:49 am
Filed under: Energy and Environment

Come see me speak about transit-oriented development on Thursday, May 9, at 7pm! At Dominican University!

Okay, so my subject, “Marin Traditions and Models for Transit-Oriented Communities,” might not stir excitement in your heart, though it may if you’re a regular reader at TGM. Still, you should come. You’ll get to hear from experts from around Marin on what Plan Bay Area could mean for Marin, and how our county can approach that future without sacrificing our independence or character.

Still not interested? Then come for the Q&A panel discussion afterwards. We on the panel don’t agree on everything, so you’ll get a diversity of views on how Marin can approach the future in a positive way.

Still not interested? Then come to chat with me afterwards. I suspect that you may be able to sucker me into a post-panel beer.

Can’t come? The whole thing will be on MarinTV, Channel 26, though at a later date.

Hope to see you Thursday!

Larkspur Landing at dawn by udpslp, on Flickr

The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District (GGBHTD) could approve a parking garage at Larkspur Ferry Terminal in the next few months. Such a concession to a single mode would be bad news for transit-oriented development around Larkspur Landing and for ridership and would be a waste of money by the District.

Today I sent letters to all 19 members of GGBHTD’s Board of Directors asking them to reject the garage in favor of other solutions, such as a Transit Center shuttle or a parking district. I also sent letters to General Manager Denis Mulligan and Deputy General Manager of the Ferry Division James Swindler, asking them to recommend against a garage.

If you want to do the same, sign this letter and let your GGBHTD Board members know. Feel free to use the letter below, either to email or snail-mail your response or as talking points for a phone call. You can find members’ contact information on the Board website. Click on their portrait for more info.

Together, I’m confident we can defeat the money-wasting garages in favor of a solution that is more financially sustainable and better for our county and the region.

Dear Member of the Board,

I’m writing to you to express my concerns about the construction of parking garages at the Larkspur Ferry Terminal. In short, I feel this is an expensive solution to the problem of getting passengers to the ferry terminal. There are two less expensive ways to achieve the same ends:

Utilize unused parking stalls in Larkspur Landing.

1. According to the parking survey conducted in the Larkspur Station Area Plan, there are 520 surplus parking stalls in the Larkspur Landing neighborhood. The survey found that these stalls will never be used by the buildings that own them.
2. The larger garage under consideration by GGBHTD would add a net 569 new spaces, barely more than are available in Larkspur Landing at present.
3. A shared parking arrangement would allow GGBHTD to use those 520 spaces.
4. A shared parking arrangement would be beneficial to building owners, who would be able to charge the same parking fee as GGBHTD would on its parking lot.
5. A shared parking arrangement would be beneficial to the owners of Marin Country Mart, whose parking lot is also at 100% capacity on weekends.

Implement a shuttle from the Transit Center to the Ferry Terminal.

1. This replicates the promotional periods of the previous shuttle program, the only successful periods of that shuttle’s existence.
2. Since this replicates the promotional periods, ridership estimates should reflect those of the promotional period. This is approximately 550 trips per day.
3. Even if the shuttle has low ridership, the fare collected from each shuttle passenger remains $6 each way.
4. Every passenger who takes the shuttle will open a parking spaces for a new passenger, which means another $2 parking fee and two $6 ferry fares.
5. Therefore, each passenger on the shuttle will result in gross income of $26: two $6 fares from the shuttle passenger, two $6 fares from the driver who takes the shuttle passenger’s parking spot, and one $2 parking fee from the driver.
6. If ridership reflects the promotional periods, GGBHTD would receive $785,000 in new revenue per year. Less the cost of a dedicated shuttle, this means GGBHTD would receive a $125,000 profit from the shuttle.

Option 1 is free except for staff time to make the arrangements with the City of Larkspur and neighbors. Option 2 is free to implement and would be profitable. In contrast, both the small and large garage will require subsidies to operate, on the order of $14,000 and $30,000 per year apiece, assuming the cost of replacement is included in budgeting plans.

I urge you to reject the garage proposals in favor of one or both of these alternatives. A chart of costs is included below. Detailed proposals can be found at:

http://theGreaterMarin.wordpress.org/tag/golden-gate-transit/

Thank you for your time.

by jonathan_moreau, on Flickr

Marin’s environmentalists recently released the 2013 version of Community Marin (PDF), an outline of priorities for how to conserve Marin County’s character and environment while still addressing the challenges of commuting and growth.

Though the plan makes bold recommendations for development and transportation – most prominently restrictions on greenfield development and a maximum house size – the plan’s recommendations are contradictory. It talks about infill development but demands onerous environmental and affordability requirements that make it even less likely to appear than now. And, while it talks about better transit, the plan maintains the status quo of car dominance: parking minimums, weighing transportation projects based on congestion relief, and HOV lanes on Highway 101.

Ultimately, the plan boils down to the old environmentalism that believes open space should be preserved, driving should be accommodated, tall buildings are bad for the environment, and housing markets are a myth. This has been the dominant strain of belief in Marin for at least 30 years, and Community Marin thinks that’s just fine.

The good

A fundamental environmental problem in Marin County today is the possibility of greenfield development, or development where there has never been development before. This kind of zoning is held out from Marin’s years of sprawl, especially the 1980s. That hundreds of homes could be built on Grady Ranch is indicative of this problem. Community Marin is right to call for a harder growth boundary to prevent this kind of sprawl from continuing.

In its place, Community Marin wants more infill housing, especially around downtown San Rafael but also around the Civic Center and Novato North stations.

The transportation chapter of the plan calls for all transportation projects to take climate change into account. Aggressive transportation demand management policies, like subsidized bus passes, car sharing, and Class I bicycle lanes (cycletracks), would tackle congestion.

The bad

Despite the call for more infill development, Community Marin goes out of its way to ensure any development will only be possible with considerable government largesse. Among the restrictions for housing development are 20 percent of most developed units be affordable housing; mandated use of green materials; examination of environmental impacts of development; no homes above 3,500 square feet; no development in the 100-year floodplain; full environmental review; full design review; parking minimums; and a hard 3-story height limit on most buildings. Though some of these restrictions could be mitigated by lifting restrictions on density or unit size, Community Marin is silent on these issues.

Commercial development, on top of those building and environmental restrictions, would need to pay a commercial impact fee, which compensates the county in full for the cost to build enough homes to house their employees. That means that for, say, every 600 square feet of retail space built, a commercial developer would need to provide enough money to the county to build a new affordable housing unit.

These restrictions are tantamount to a moratorium on for-profit development in Marin and would drive the cost of housing ever higher. Problems of affordable housing and senior housing would not be resolved. Even senior housing, if there were staff, would need to pay that commercial impact fee.

The only way to solve the problem of affordable housing is to allow the market to correct itself and to focus regulations on form rather than density. The recommendations from Community Marin for tighter zoning will push development into other counties even further from jobs. If Community Marin wants infill development, they need make it easier, not harder, for private entities to build.

The ugly

There aren’t new ideas in this plan to reshape how Marinites get around. Quite the opposite: biking, walking, and transit are seen as tools to address concerns of traffic congestion (as measured by the flawed level-of-service metric) and sufficient parking, not necessarily as transportation modes in themselves. Despite good suggestions – traffic calming, prioritizing Class I bicycle lanes – the overall push is to relieve congestion and improve safety, is often an excuse to remove pedestrians and bikes from ever-faster roads.

Take recommendation 8.14, which wants safer highway interchanges for all modes by improving traffic flow. That means higher speeds at interchanges, which means capacity improvements that will induce more driving, the least safe mode of transportation. Though the interchange will be safer, the population will be more exposed to crashes and death by automobile.

Most glaring are recommendations that encourage parking minimums, the steroids of automobility. Parking minimums externalize the cost of parking to the community at large, allowing the actual users of parking to get away with it for free or nearly for free. When combined with recommendations that level-of-service not be harmed by development, it’s a recipe for widened roads and intersections, which in turn makes them less safe or welcoming for pedestrians and bicyclists.

When it comes to transit, a necessary prerequisite to improved service is a moratorium on capacity improvements. Transit and cars are in competition with one another. Investments in roads and parking mean lower ridership on transit and more traffic on roads. Yet the plan seems ignorant of this well-understood law of transportation planning and calls for more road investment under the guise of “congestion relief”. A recommendation for a more extensive bus network rings hollow when another recommendation will suck ridership from the network that already exists.

If we want to decrease the mode share of cars and decrease how many miles we travel, we need to make a strategic investment in transit and bicycling alone, with roads restricted to maintenance funding.

There are other recommendations that betray a belief that Marin cannot be anything other than car-oriented. Recommendation 8.5 calls for more parking and more park & rides. Recommendation 8.11 supports the ludicrously expensive Novato Narrows project and a new interchange to service the Redwood Landfill, which will eventually close. Perhaps the framers of Community Marin don’t want to rock the boat too much, but it is bizarre to see environmentalists arguing for more cars. Given the strength of their lobby in Marin, they should throw their weight behind MCBC and urbanists to fight for fewer cars and less driving.

In all, Community Marin does well when discussing preservation concerns but falls flat when entering the realms of transportation and development. I suspect the framers of Community Marin share much in common with urbanists – the desire for strong towns and town character, a desire for affordable housing, a desire for open spaces and clean air – but they have gone about their recommendations in a way that does not reflect the proven best practices to achieve those ends. Indeed, their recommendations are often at odds with their stated ends.

Marin’s governments need to study these recommendations carefully before jumping onboard. If they’re serious about reducing CO2 emissions, about creating a more equitable housing market, about moving beyond the automobile, about investing in transit and bicycling and downtowns, this is not the blueprint to use.

Pruitt-Igoe: a 50-unit per acre scar. From Wikimedia by USGS

It’s likely that Pruitt-Igoe, the public housing project in St. Louis, is the most famous and maligned image in architectural history. Its slab-like blocks rose from a scar in the urban fabric, the Corbusian ideal and an American dystopia. Yet at only 50 housing units per acre, this towering symbol of all things bad in urban design wasn’t all that dense. If we want to talk about density, we need to set Pruitt Igoe aside.

I mention Pruitt-Igoe because the image has emerged in Marin’s affordable housing debate. Bob Silvestri recently used it as an example of what he says the state and regional governments will force the Bay Area to build in a recent forum on affordable housing. Density mandates for 30 housing units per acre, he argued, would lead us to the worst kind of affordable housing and away from best practices.

Though there are plenty of reasons to oppose the regional housing needs assessment (RHNA) process, density and the specter of Pruitt-Igoe-like towers from Napa to San Jose is not one of them.

Rowhouses, when built right, come in around 50 units per acre, with older neighborhoods going a bit higher. Boston’s North End is over 50 units per acre. Washington, DC’s fabled Georgetown comes in at over 50 units per acre. In San Francisco, Russian Hill has 50, North Beach has 90, and the area west of Union Square goes as high as 536 units per acre. If density were the downfall of Pruitt Igoe, you’d think Union Square would be the center of a particularly wretched hive of humanity, not a trendy shopping district.

Urbanism means more places like this. Image from Google Maps

The causes of Pruitt-Igoe’s monumental failure could (and has) filled reports and books, but the failure can be boiled down to a deliberate denial of urban form. Stacking 50 units per acre atop one another while leaving empty grassy space around each tower for generic community gathering is a discredited idea that should have never earned such credence in the first place.

But to use this particular packaging of this particular density as an argument against density itself is disingenuous. It ignores common sense and the facts at hand. Good urban form can be low density and it can be high density, just as poor urban form can be either one.

And good urban form is based on the needs of the human as a creature. We walk, so a good city tries to maximize the pleasure of that activity. We are social, so a good city tries to maximize the incidence of casual socializing. That requires a certain level of compactness of buildings so that we can walk to the store and we can walk to the neighbor’s home, but that look like Midtown Manhattan and it can look like downtown Mill Valley.

Let’s have a debate about height and character that is really about how to build new development than enhances character, how to grow in that uniquely Marin way and make our county better. Let’s leave behind the straw men and phantoms.

Larkspur Landing by cucchiaio, on Flickr

Larkspur Ferry Terminal (LFT) has an access problem: not enough people can get to the ferry. This shouldn’t be solved with parking garages, but rather with a shuttle and parking district in the short-term and transit-oriented development in the medium to long-term. But the terminal itself can only take so much ridership. In our fourth and final installment, we’ll examine the existing need, potential need, and the real and legal constraints on ferry service from LFT.

Need

At the moment, LFT is about 45 passengers over capacity on the morning rush hour departures. These benighted folks need to take an overflow shuttle bus into the city rather than the much more luxurious ferryboat. If GGT adds access for 500 more people to take the ferry, as seems to be desired, that would aggravate the overcrowding.

Adding capacity isn’t trivial. Though there are enough vessels to take people, there aren’t enough crew. Each vessel needs a captain and a crew, but these folks need to be paid for a full day, and there isn’t any need for a third full-time crew because of very low mid-day demand. While GGT is considering using one of their licensed office staff members as a captain for one morning departure as a cost-saving measure, there will be too much demand if ridership continues to increase and access is boosted as planned.

Rush hour, under the intense TOD scenario I outlined or from the SMART Station Area Plan, would probably bring about 350 extra riders, along with 120 or so from SMART and another 450 from parking expansion. If 70 percent of them use the ferry at the peak of the peak, that means another 600-650 ferry riders in the morning, or enough for one more peak hour ferry departure, which means yet another crew.

To make this make financial sense for GGT, the agency needs to figure out how to boost reverse-commute ridership and mid-day travel, which will mean more intense, or at least more interesting, development at Larkspur Landing. That, in turn, will probably require more trips. How far can GGT go?

Constraints

Corte Madera Channel. Image from NOAA.

Like all transit, ferry capacity is measured in how many vehicles of what size can be accommodated per hour. Physically, LFT is constrained by the size of the 2-mile long Corte Madera Channel, which provides an outlet for the ferries. It’s wide enough (about 265 feet) that two ferries can pass, but with a depth of only 9 feet it’s relatively shallow, so boats with even a moderate draft (how deep the boat’s hull goes under water) won’t be able to use it.

Logistically, LFT is constrained by its need for high-speed catamarans, which have a lower passenger capacity than slower monohull vessels. The largest catamarans in GGT’s fleet can fit 450 people, while its slower Spaulding monohull vessels can fit 715. Passenger demand for fast service to the Embarcadero wins out over capacity here.

Environmentally, LFT is further constrained by the need to protect the marshland around the Corte Madera Channel. Too many departures and the wakes will erode what is very rich habitat. To help combat this problem, GGT has limited the number of crossings between LFT and San Francisco to 42 per day. Each crossing, whether from or to San Francisco, uses one of those slots.

GGT is further constrained by the number of high-speed vessels in its fleet. With only 4 vessels, it can only run 3 departures per hour.

A theoretical maximum

But if we leave aside the environmental and fleet concerns and focus solely on the physical and logistical ones, we find that GGT could probably get 6 departures per hour from LFT. The highest-capacity catamarans that can sail the channel can hold about 500 passengers, so we can get 3,000 peak passengers per hour from LFT to San Francisco and vice versa. This is approximately 1.5 highway lanes worth of capacity in each direction. The Ferry Building should be able to handle that kind of intensity from LFT, but GGT may need to find or build a new berth in San Francisco.

To achieve this level of service, GGT would need eight vessels total – seven running and one in reserve.* The MV Del Norte, runt of the fleet, would need to be retired and the other catamarans would need to be retrofitted to fit 500 passengers. Five new vessels and three refurbishments should add out to about $56 million. Operating cost per hour of this maximum service is $12,420, so if GGT ran this for four hours per weekday, it would be about $13.2 million annually, less passenger fares, of course. Anything above this level of service would require a deeper channel, which would be more expensive to build and maintain.

The real maximum

As mentioned above, not only does GGT not have the fleet to run its maximum service but it’s limited to only 42 crossings per day. Using up 24 of those on rush-hour service isn’t going to cut it. Instead, we can reasonably assume a capacity of three departures per hour, or about 1,350 passengers per hour. It’s not fantastic, but that’s how much capacity the system is considering.

If GGT adds more service than this, and they very likely will need to, it will need to carefully manage its fleet, perhaps by running an asynchronous schedule. Two vessels would run between San Francisco and LFT all day, while three would only run during peak hours and remain in reserve in San Francisco during the day. This should allow it to stay within its needed 42 crossings without allowing headways to get too high or sacrificing late-night and early-morning service.

Alternatively, GGT could request more crossings from neighbors and the state. This would require a new environmental impact report that would identify mitigating measures to lessen the damage on the nearby wetlands. Under this route there’s a chance their request would be denied.

GGT must smooth its ridership profile through TOD. There is no other way for it to achieve continued ridership growth in a sustainable way. Ever-higher peak demand will be burden the system with high crew costs and wasted capacity. GGT can do this by shaping the development at Larkspur Landing and inviting SMART to build closer to the terminal (and therefore draw San Francisco commuters heading north). But GGT must also be careful not to overload its southbound capacity. Even at its theoretical maximum, GGT’s Larkspur ferry cannot move as many people as a rail line, and it cannot just pack the ferries ever-tighter as BART does.

A better Larkspur Landing will have new development, new parking capacity, a reinstated shuttle, and enough ferry capacity going in both directions. It will be a net positive to the transit agency’s bottom line and to its mission to take people off the bridge. It will boost the profile and financial situation of Larkspur and Marin County. New parking garages are the easiest but least effective way to boost access to LFT and improve the financial situation of GGT. It’s vital the agency look beyond those garages and to a better, stronger future.

*The total minimum round-trip is 70 minutes: 5 minutes loading/unloading at LFT, 30 minutes transit to SF, 5 minutes loading/unloading at SF, and 30 minutes transit back to LFT. Longer headways that don’t evenly divide into 70 would need to add time to the layovers.

by flyron on Panoramio

Larkspur has a parking problem. More accurately, it has an access problem, one that can be solved by harnessing extant parking and by running a shuttle service. These are ultimately stop-gap measures. If Golden Gate Transit is serious about turning its ferry service into the workhorse it could be, it needs to start thinking beyond the park and ride model to ferry-oriented development.

The financial case

Transit-oriented development could make GGT a mountain of money. Though as a public agency GGT isn’t necessarily supposed to make money, profits mean more stable finances and stronger service.

From a strictly real estate perspective, GGT could earn $2-4 million per year by leasing its parking lot to development, assuming fairly low-rise (four story) development to match the height of existing buildings around the neighborhood. If GGT wants to build on the land itself rather than lease to a developer, it could reap the full value of its land. If developed like the draft Larkspur Station Area Plan, that means roughly $7.8 million in gross revenue from residences and retail. If GGT adds 50,000 square feet of office space, it could quadruple its income to $33.8 million.*

Because GGT land isn’t taxable thanks to its status as a government agency, Larkspur should encourage any residential development on the terminal parking lot to have small units like efficiencies, studios, and one-bedrooms. Childless households attracted to small units are less of a burden on city services, so the lack of parcel and property taxes won’t be as great a problem. Sales taxes would still come in from these households, though, so Larkspur would get some boost from GGT land use changes.

If private property owners follow through on the SMART Station Area Plan, of course, the City of Larkspur would be able to reap the full benefits of more intense use.

The access case

What prompts this analysis, of course, is the current lack of access to the ferry, not simple financial concerns. GGT thinks Larkspur ferry ridership is limited by the ability of people to get to and from the terminal and wants to break through that barrier.

Transit-oriented development of the whole neighborhood of the sort called for in the draft Station Area Plan will provide a way to break through this barrier. More people will be able to walk to the ferry terminal, and that’s a good thing. The existing residents of Larkspur Landing seem to be heavy users of the ferry, with 0.6 weekday trips per person.** We don’t know how many people may eventually live where the parking lot now stands, but there’s every reason to believe they will be just as apt to use the ferry.

Residential TOD is a good way to build in riders who won’t be deterred by the lack of parking. With SMART or a bus shuttle, there’s a good chance GGT could attract car-free or car-light residents, which would boost other transit ridership.

Office TOD could be even more valuable and attract the reverse-commuter. There’s a glut of counter-commute capacity from San Francisco. Attracting San Franciscans to the ferry would allow it to make the most of its existing resources and are an easy way to boost farebox recovery.

Getting these reverse-commuters will require some skill on the part of developers. Only 2 percent of Marin’s jobs are held by transit-commuting San Franciscans. There aren’t many San Francisco commuters to begin with, and most of them are driving, not taking transit. A combination of marketing office space to San Francisco businesses, free transfers to Muni and BART, and discounted fares for employees of Larkspur Landing businesses could help boost the number of reverse commuters.

Any redevelopment plans need to be carefully evaluated. The Larkspur parking lot is on old marshland that will be very expensive to redevelop. GGT land isn’t taxable, so developments’ strain on city and county services needs to be weighed carefully. Neighbors and businesses need buy-in to improve the area. And traffic, surface transit, and parking are all thorny problems that need to be addressed (and are bigger issues than can be addressed here).

Then again, Larkspur Ferry Terminal may not have the capacity for more ridership. There’s already an overflow bus for morning commuters, and GGT is considering adding another morning ferry to cope with demand. In our fourth and final installment, we’ll examine the ferry terminal’s capacity constraints and what to do about them.

*Larkspur offices lease for about $43 per square foot, and apartments in Marin rent for about $2,000 per month. Retail rents for about $20 per square foot.

**At the moment, 25 percent of ferry riders walk to the ferry. It’s very likely that most of these riders live in the nearby homes north of Larkspur Landing Circle, as those are the only homes within walking distance.