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The black rectangles represent the amount of space required for parking in proportion to 10,000 square foot office buildings (represented by the blue rectangles) in different U.S. cities. Image: Seth Goodman at Graphingparking.wordpress.com Click to enlarge.

Architect Seth Goodman is on a mission to illustrate the absurdity of parking requirements. The above image, showing mandatory parking requirements for office buildings in different American cities, is one of three infographics he created to show the extent to which American cities mandate the construction of parking.

The worst offenders in the office category were San Jose, Albuquerque and Austin (though Austin recently eliminated all parking minimums downtown). Goodman notes that the majority of U.S. cities exempt their downtowns from these requirements, but he says that’s not enough.”In many of these cities, the relatively small footprint of these exempt areas has failed achieve the critical mass necessary to create robust transit ridership and fully-functioning pedestrian oriented communities.”

Goodman has created two other infographics that explain different cities’ parking requirements for residences and restaurants. The below comes from his examination of residential parking requirements.  You can see that for two-bedroom apartments in U.S. cities, the median parking requirement consumes more than half as much space as the dwelling itself:

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Downtown Denver June 1976. Image: Nick DeWolf via Flickr

The above photo is downtown Denver in 1976.

Not pretty is it? But Denver doesn’t look like that anymore. And that’s no accident.

Even though that picture is what inspired Streetsblog’s Parking Madness competition, Denver didn’t even make it past the first round in our hunt for the worst parking crater in an American downtown.

This is what this part of Denver looks like today:

For reference, point A on the map shows the Daniels and Fisher Tower, the tall spire you can see on the edge of the parking expanse in the 1976 photo.

In the 1990s, in response to the creeping cancer of surface parking, the Mile High City took action. The city changed its downtown zoning to eliminate surface parking as a use by right. So if you owned a building, you were welcome to tear it down, but you couldn’t park cars on the lot. All existing parking lots were grandfathered in.

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This is the third installment in Streetsblog’s series on transportation demand management at American colleges and universities. Part one gave an overview of TDM techniques that schools employ, and part two profiled Stanford’s TDM programs.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a long track record of trying to minimize traffic. The Institute has run a formal transportation demand management (TDM) program for more than 10 years. But even as far back as the 1950s, MIT was encouraging employees to carpool, says Larry Brutti, operations manager with MIT’s facilities department.

A bike lane on MIT's campus. Image: Studio-s on Flickr

There are solid financial reasons for that. At MIT, land is so valuable, adding a single parking space costs the university about $100,000, said Brutti. Over the last five years, as the university has expanded its facilities, MIT has actually cut the total number of parking spaces it owns from 5,000 to 4,200. And it looks like those spaces aren’t coming back.

“We’re trying to not replace it,” Brutti said. “The Institute doesn’t mind putting some money into TDM if they can defer parking.”

MIT isn’t just trying to conserve funds or act as a good environmental steward. The city of Cambridge requires its major institutions to develop TDM programs to limit traffic on city streets. Since 1999, Cambridge has maintained a nationally recognized transportation demand management policy. If non-residential property owners want to add parking, the law requires them to develop a plan around promoting transportation modes other than driving. The parking lot owner must monitor its users’ single-occupancy commuting rates and bike and car parking space occupancy rates and report that annually to the city.

MIT’s strategy, Brutti said, basically comes down to holding out carrots for good behavior, almost exclusively to faculty and staff. “We subsidize most any other way to get to work,” Brutti said.

In total, only about 20 percent of all the people who enter MIT’s campus every day do so alone in a car.

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This is the second installment in Streetsblog’s series on transportation demand management at American colleges and universities. Part one gave an overview of TDM techniques that schools employ. This post looks at how Stanford University has used TDM to reduce driving and realize huge savings in the process.

Stanford graduate engineering student Matthew Haith made the switch to bike commuting after his wife had a baby, and the family needed to tighten their belts. For Andrea Corney, a faculty member in the school of business, it was parking shortages caused by construction that convinced her to try transit.

Stanford's shuttle system, the Marguerite, serves 160 stops on 13 routes. Image: Stanford

At Stanford, encouraging people to switch from solo driving to biking, transit, and carpooling is a science the university has been perfecting for more than a decade. Transportation demand management at Stanford is a multi-pronged effort that includes everything from free bus passes to actual cash payments for ditching the single-occupancy vehicle commute.

The program is paying off, both financially and in less tangible ways — not the least of which is employee and student health and satisfaction, school officials say. The university’s “Commute Club” even keeps a record of stories, like Haith’s and Corney’s, explaining how non-automotive commuting has improved the lives of students and employees.

“It made financial sense to save money on gas, car insurance, and maintenance for me to bike the 16-mile round trip to campus,” said Haith. “Plus, it’s nearly a $600 net gain to avoid the parking fee, and I receive incentives from being in the Commute Club.”

“I bike on beautiful residential streets and across campus, rather than sitting in traffic on El Camino,” Corney said, referring to the car-choked transportation artery of Santa Clara County. “It clears my head on the ride home. I’ve lost weight. I can go days without driving my car. I save money on gas and parking and get Clean Air Cash.”

Stanford began its TDM programs with a push Santa Clara County in 2000, when the county offered the university a general use permit to expand the campus significantly — but only if the school could keep rush-hour car commuting rates at the current levels. The county also gave Stanford the option to pay for redesigns to some 15 nearby intersections instead.

Stanford chose to get a handle on driving. The university started out by researching what kept people from taking transit or riding a bike to campus. Then, the university designed its programs around the responses.

“We tried to put together a program that dealt with as many of the barriers as possible,” said says Brodie Hamilton, the school’s director of parking and transportation services. “What were the excuses out there? The reasons people have: ‘I would use alternative transportation but …’”

Since then, Stanford has made great strides, reducing the share of its faculty and staff that car commute alone from 72 percent to 47 percent. (Since almost all undergraduates live on campus, along with 60 percent of grad students, most of the programs are focused on the staff and faculty.)

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Jeffrey Tumlin was managing transportation programs at Stanford in the mid-1990s, when he made an important finding: It was cheaper for the university to pay people not to drive than to build new parking structures.

Offering employees just $90 a year not to drive to campus was enough to entice many of them to use transit, carpools, or bicycles. Meanwhile, the annualized cost of each parking space can range from about $650 for surface spots in suburban locations to over $4,000 for structured spaces in cities, according to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute [PDF].

Biking means big savings at Stanford. Image: FHWA

Stanford offered further incentive by raising parking prices 15 percent. Then, it invested $4 million in bicycle facilities, including turning a main road through campus into a bike and transit mall. This $4 million enticed 900 people out of their cars and onto bicycles, according to a case study in Transportation & Sustainable Campus Communities, by Will Toor and Spenser Havlick. Building parking facilities to accommodate those 900 people would have cost $18 million.

What Stanford had discovered was “transportation demand management,” or strategies to minimize transportation costs by reducing driving. Today almost every college and university in the country employs some form of TDM, whether it’s providing discounted transit passes for students or offering special parking rates to carpoolers.

Colleges and universities — by nature of their fixed locations and limited resources — are excellent laboratories for transportation innovation, says Tumlin, who now works for the firm Nelson\Nygaard.

“Even the well-funded institutions have to make a choice about putting money into parking or putting money in a classroom,” said Tumlin.

Many schools are now well ahead of even the most progressive cities and state DOTs when it comes to saving money and improving public health by reducing car trips.

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Parking Madness, our hunt for the worst parking crater in an American downtown, continues today with two formidable contenders.

In one corner we have Tulsa: Oklahoma’s second largest city, birthplace of the teen sensation Hanson (mmmBOP!), home to nearly 400,000 people. In the other corner, Philadelphia: cradle of democracy, birthplace of the Fresh Prince, and home of the cheesesteak.

Don’t forget to vote at the bottom. Now, without further ado… Show us what you got, Tulsa!

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Earlier this month we asked you: What is the worst parking crater in America? What is the ugliest parking scar draining the life from a downtown?

And Streetsblog readers answered. In all we received 23 submissions from nearly as many states, from the blazing blacktop of San Bernardino, California, to the asphalt expanses of Philadelphia — and a lot of pockmarked places in between. We received so many, we had to break it down into a March Madness-style tournament, matching up 16 finalists in a single-elimination bracket.

Who will take home the championship? That’s up to you. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be matching up city versus asphalt-maimed city and asking for your vote to determine who will advance. Ladies and gentlemen, the bracket:

We’re kicking off the competition today with a matchup between two proud metros. One gave us the Champagne of Beers, the other gave us Frank Sinatra. It’s Milwaukee versus Jersey City.

Remember to vote at the bottom.

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A representative of the American Automobile Association was a keynote speaker at this week’s National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C., the annual gathering of bicycle advocates. There the organization debuted a heartwarming new video reminding drivers to share the road with cyclists.

A spokesman for AAA says not forcing developers to build an arbitrary amount of parking is "dangerous for D.C." Image: DDOTDC Flickr

Meanwhile, also in D.C., AAA representatives are fighting a series of smart parking reforms. AAA spokesman Lon Anderson told members of the media that a proposal to allow developers to decide how much parking to build, instead of being compelled by law to build a minimum amount, is “a dangerous proposal” that “threatens the future of Washington, D.C.”

Matt Yglesias at Slate annihilates this argument:

Almost 100 percent of Washington-area residents like to sleep on a soft comfortable surface at night. But there’s no regulatory requirement that residential buildings contain mattresses. The lack of mattress mandates doesn’t mean people are forced to sleep on the floor. It means that if people want to sleep on a mattress—and they generally do—they need to go buy one. That’s why there are mattress stores. Insofar as people want to park cars—and lets make no mistake, lots of people want to park cars—they will pay for the privilege, and property developers will provide parking spaces.

What’s at issue here is whether non-parkers should be forced to offer a cross-subsidy to parkers. The case against such a subsidy seems strong. It encourages extra traffic congestion and extra pollution, as well as inducing some kind of deadweight loss in the form of stifled real estate development.

Alright, Streetsblog readers. Send us your best shots.

After running our “worst intersection in America” photo contest, we heard from readers who want to see “more public shaming” of terrible transportation and planning blunders around the country. We aim to please. So here is the next contest: Where is the worst sea of downtown surface parking in America?

We’re looking for aerial photos, and once we’ve got a sizable sample, we’ll put it up for a vote. The competition should be fierce.

We’ve already held Cleveland’s formidable Warehouse District up to the spotlight:

Is this as bad as it gets? First we need submissions from our readers. Then it will be up to you guys to decide.

Send your entries to Angie [at] streetsblog.org or tweet us at @streetsblogNET. Let the race to the bottom begin.

They call their mission “The Cause.” And they say it’s critical to solving Michigan’s woes. Fortunately, though, the solution they have in mind is a simple one, and their name should make it obvious: “Michigan Needs More Parking.”

That's Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans and major downtown Detroit property owner. The quote is real. Image: Michigan Needs More Parking

This group has taken to the pages of Facebook and the local media to share their vision for a revitalized state finally relieved of its burdensome parking problem.

“Detroit — and Michigan’s — unemployment crisis will only be addressed when we close the parking gap. More parking equals more jobs,” the group’s Chene Park told Model D media last month. “Parking now or poverty later. It’s really that simple.”

Michigan Needs More Parking says the situation is not hopeless, however. They have proposed a series of reforms they say will put the state back on track to financial health. For instance, they re-envision Mackinac Island, the state’s beloved car-free tourist destination, as “series of surface parking lots and decks” connected to the mainland by a causeway.

And in 2014, they’re planning a voter referendum to “defend the right of parking for every man, woman and child,” by enshrining it in the state constitution.

“Remember: we’re never more than one generation away from the end of parking freedom in America,” Park says.

If it all sounds a bit frightening, the really scary thing is that the message from “Michigan Needs More Parking” isn’t all that different than what people in real positions of influence are saying.

We highly recommend reading the whole interview and hooking up with these guys on Facebook.

Streetsblog will be offline Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and will be back publishing on Tuesday.