Tag Archives: Parking

What would a successful urban NFL stadium look like in DC?

I had started jotting down notes about a new stadium at RFK back in 2015 when Events DC hosted a series of planning meetings about the topic. Parts of this post have been sitting in my drafts folder since then.

And since 2015, a lot has changed. The local NFL team is now on its third name, and Virginia seems set on throwing money at the team to build a new stadium somewhere in the hinterlands of Loudoun or Prince William counties.

Legislators seem entranced by the idea of building a new city around the stadium, with a dome to host events year-round – Super Bowls, Final Fours, etc. Such promises of large-scale events are almost required in order to justify the multi-billion dollar price tag. Spending that much for a facility that only hosts a dozen events a year seems hardly worth it.

However, the only suitable parcels for such a large footprint are further and further from the center of the region. One of the potential locations (near the Jiffy Lube Live amphitheater) is so far from the core of DC that Baltimore’s NFL stadium is both closer and easier to access for a huge portion of the City. How attractive will a stadium that’s 30 miles from the city (and the bars and hotels and hospitality) be to a host committee picking venues for the Final Four or a Super Bowl?

Back in the District, Mayor Bowser expressed support for bringing the team back to RFK, but there doesn’t seem to be any appetite on the Council for matching Virginia’s offer.

And yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

There are lots of reasons to oppose any deal with the current team and owner. The team is bad and poorly run; the owner is (by all accounts) an awful person and unlikely to be a good partner in any city-building exercise; the financial incentives for NFL teams in general are extractive and lack strong ties to the community. All of this was true in 2015 and remains so today.

Then there are the externalities: stadium opponents will often cite large parking lots hosting tailgate parties as if those are requirements for building. Yet they do not need to be. And if we think beyond the narrow NFL vision for what a stadium should be, there are all sorts of opportunities.

It’s worth thinking through what it would take to get to ‘yes’ on a new football stadium in DC. Assume we had a different owner; one willing to fund a stadium privately. RFK has hosted sporting events since 1961; the site has lots of advantages. What would I need to see to get to ‘yes’ on a new stadium at RFK?

  • Minimal parking; no surface parking – Plan for fans to arrive via transit, potentially including infill Metro stations.
  • A civic center built to host multiple events
  • Connected to dense, urban development on the City side
  • Integrated into parkland on the river side

It’s not too hard to envision an urban stadium and waterfront park, both as a vision for the future of the RFK site and as a reference to past plans.

Planning Precedent

Before the District broke ground on D.C. Stadium in 1960, planners identified the need for a stadium in Washington to host large events, and at the intersection of East Capitol Street with the Anacostia River as early as the 1930s – often with the eye on hosting the Olympic Games.

1941 NCPC Plan for an East Capitol Mall.
1941 NCPC Plan for an East Capitol Mall.

A series of plans in the 1920s and 30s involved a massive expansion of DC’s monumental spaces. Very little of the plan was implemented, but one common element included a stadium and other athletic facilities (including a tennis arena, natatorium, and ballfields, with an eye toward hosting an Olympic Games) where East Capitol Street meets the Anacostia River.

east cap mall crop stadium
Cropped image of the 1941 plan; includes #71 stadium, #72 sport field, #73 natatorium, and #74 tennis stadium as well as a railroad station at the bottom of the image.

This version of the plan includes a new stadium located opposite of the existing DC Armory, as well as a large ‘sports field’ built into the hillside. The plan contains many similar elements to Berlin’s olympic park, including the massive Maifield located next to the Olympiastadion.

Aerial view of Berlin's Olympiastadion, along with the Maifield. Image from Bing Maps.
Aerial view of Berlin’s Olympiastadion, along with the Maifield. Image from Bing Maps.

The stadium was built for the 1936 Olympic Games in a park to the west of Berlin’s center city. The Maifield was built for holding annual May Day celebrations, as well as hosting large events. After World War II, the Maifield was the base of operations for the British soldiers occupying their sector of West Berlin.

Following reunification, there was a long debate in Berlin about what to do with the stadium built by the Nazis. Some favored demolishing it and replacing it with a new stadium, others argued it should be left to crumble as a ruin. The end result was a renovation, completed in 2004 in anticipation of hosting the 2006 World Cup.

The renovation includes an underground parking garage directly linked to the VIP seating areas via a large below-grade atrium. The renovation managed to add premium seating areas while completely preserving the exterior. There are a modest number of surface parking areas, but they are either well landscaped or paved in a manner that allows for other uses. Nearby transit lines include both the U2 U-Bahn line as well as the S5 S-Bahn, complete with a large multi-platform station to accomodate big crowds.

  • Built: 1936
  • Renovated: 2004
  • Capacity: 74,475
  • On-site parking: 815 spaces

The stadium isn’t without its challenges. The main tenant is Bundesliga club Hertha BSC, which wants to build a dedicated soccer stadium (without the running track) and a smaller total capacity.

Events DC’s master plan for RFK abides by the terms of the lease on the land for ‘recreational purposes,’ and actually ends up with a vision for a waterfront park (with or without a stadium) and various sports and recreation venues not dissimilar from the Olympic Park ambition.

RFK Stadium and the challenge of multi-use venues

As mentioned above, the dilemma for any modern NFL stadium is the relative paucity of events compared to the cost of the edifice. Building a multi-use facility is the obvious solution, but the history of such venues in the US is murky. RFK is the original concrete donut, built to host football and baseball – admirably adaptable, a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none kind of design.

These multi-purpose stadiums were once common; now almost all have been demolished – usually requiring separate baseball and football venues as replacements.

At some level, a stadium is a stadium. The basic design parameters for a football field haven’t changed that much over the decades. There are plenty of college football stadiums approaching (if not exceeding) a century of service. They’ve been renovated and added to over the years, upgraded to meet modern standards and the increasing professionalization of college football. Yet the institutional context means teams won’t ever move to a different city in order to get a better deal. Similarly, it’s not an accident that the NFL’s longest tenured team in a single stadium (albeit one substantially altered over the years) is the league’s only community-owned franchise – the Green Bay Packers.

The modern challenge is building a stadium capable of hosting more events than just NFL gamedays in order to justify its own existence, yet doing so without draining the public coffers.

The latest set of domed NFL stadiums (SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis) all make use of ETFE roofing to provide an indoor venue that doesn’t ‘feel’ indoors – and arguably feels more open than the previous generation of retractable roof designs (in Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Indianapolis). But for all of them, the roof is a critical element to enable additional events that justify the stadium’s existence and expense.

However, successfully hosting those kinds of events also relies on a central location in the region. Many of the domed NFL stadia are ‘downtown’ or immediately adjacent. Others are centrally located within the region. Only Phoenix is truly on the fringe (yet still just 12 miles from downtown as the crow flies).

As part of a regional plan, it’s much easier to justify that level of investment and land use intensity at a place like RFK than it is in Gainesville (31 miles from the Capitol Dome) or Ashburn (25 miles). If it were just a football stadium, hosting a dozen events a year, surrounded by surface parking lots, then a location on the fringe is preferable.

It’s a shame that the institutional context doesn’t allow for the kind of long-standing reinvestment and evolution, building off of the planning history for the RFK site. It’s also a shame that there’s not an obvious partnership between the primary user of a stadium and both the surrounding grounds as well as the neighboring community. But that’s not the world we have.

But it can be fun to dream.

Missing a chance to create a great transit hub – New Carrollton

If you were to rank Metro station areas by some abstract measure of ‘potential,’ New Carrollton would have to be at the top of your list. It’s not in Washington’s ‘favored quarter,’ but as development moves east, it’s well positioned to take advantage of new and old transportation links.

The eastern terminus of WMATA’s Orange Line; easy MARC access to DC and Baltimore; Amtrak service to New York and the rest of the Northeast Corridor. For auto access, you’ve got freeway links in all directions via the Beltway and US 50 into the District and connecting to Annapolis. Now add in circumferential transit: construction is underway (if behind schedule) for the Purple Line light rail system.

Beyond just the transportation links, New Carrollton has land. Lots of parking lots and underdeveloped sites can support much more density – all within a short walk of these valuable transit connections.

There’s the opportunity to transform New Carrollton into a walkable, transit-oriented business district, but some of the Purple Line design choices might limit that potential.

The Vision: Mass Transit ‘Theater’

Start with MNCPPC’s 2010 plan for New Carrollton: It calls for, among other things, making the station entrance a civic place, surrounded by development and active uses. The stated goal is to create a ‘transit theater,’ not just connecting the infrastructure but creating a place to support adjacent walkable development.

Diagram of north side station area (including the Purple Line), 2010 TOD Plan. Note the existing IRS office building in the lower right.

The transit station is uniquely important at New Carrollton. Not just because of the transit links, but because of the development potential around it. While there’s substantial development potential on either side of the railroad tracks, there’s no way to get between the two sides except by going through the station. Even car circulation between the two sides requires getting on one of the adjacent freeways.

Fully realizing the development potential on both sides of the tracks means making the station itself the critical hub for all kinds of circulation. It’s the kind of place that doesn’t just need to function, it needs to be great. The success of the transit station and the surrounding development depend on it.

Executing the Vision with WMATA Joint Development

Complex development projects don’t move fast. Almost as soon as the MNCPPC plan finished, WMATA put out a solicitation to develop their parking lots – and the first phase of this development is just now taking shape.

Just to get a sense of the timeline: MNCPPC published their plan in May 2010. In September of that same year, WMATA and the State of Maryland jointly issued an RFQ for development partners to execute that plan. In 2011, the selected a development team (a joint venture of Urban Atlantic and Forest City).

Negotiations for the full development agreement concluded in 2015, when the developers released their vision for the south side of the station – fully embracing the 2010 plan’s vision. In April 2017, developers signed a tenant to anchor their office component, allowing them to break ground in October 2017 on the first phase.

Rendering of the WMATA Joint Development by Urban Atlantic/Forest City for the south side of New Carrollton

The developers and WMATA have taken care to create a sense of place, meet all of WMATA’s programatic needs (bus bays, parking, etc – documented in this lengthy report) and support a substantial development project. The lengthy partnership between the parties also helps align their incentives.

Purple Line Planning:

The 2010 plan located the Purple Line station next to Ellin Road, reserving space between the Purple Line and the Amtrak right-of-way for development.

Site Plan for New Carrollton – note the provision for future extension of the Purple Line to the south

By the time the Purple Line was in preliminary engineering, the plan called to shift the tracks and LRT platform to abut the Amtrak ROW and position the platform immediately adjacent to the existing Metro station entrance. Bus bays, kiss-and-ride, and short-term parking would occupy the rest of the space between the railroad and Ellin Road, suitable for future redevelopment and with logical circulation for both cars and pedestrians.

2013 Purple Line design, with the LRT platform as close as possible to the existing station entrance; bus bays and short-term parking configured around ‘normal’ signalized intersections.
Original Purple Line design for New Carrollton.

The original concept also included an extension of the existing WMATA station tunnel, new vertical circulation to connect passengers between the bus bays/LRT station to an extension of the existing tunnel to WMATA/Amtrak/MARC/South Side development.

As the Purple Line finally started construction, the contractor and State of Maryland agreed to several design changes to save money, particularly notable at Silver Spring. The contractor also put forward an Alternative Technical Concept for New Carrollton, which the State accepted.

As WMATA is involved in station planning to integrate the Purple Line at transfer stations, some of their Board of Directors presentations have hinted at the alternative designs.

Alt. Concept for New Carrollton, via WMATA. I believe the red box indicates the future north side joint development area.

The new layout limits costs by retaining the existing entrance (6 in the image above) and avoiding alterations to the pedestrian bridge. Bus bays and parking are re-arranged to allow the LRT station and tail tracks to shift north alongside Ellin Road.

Two concerns with the new design: first, the Purple Line platform is now further away from the Metro station entrance, asking more walking of passengers making the transfer. Second, the design doesn’t improve on the current north-side passenger experience – theres no sense of destination. Third, the barriers around the LRT station and tracks (including retaining walls) means that pedestrian circulation to the potential development sites to the north are limited and indirect.

All pedestrians from points north must use either the existing pedestrian bridge or the LRT entrance via the far side of Ellin Road/Harkins Road

Ellin Road’s current condition as a suburban stroad isn’t welcoming to pedestrians, so this hardly seems like a loss under the circumstances. But the potential of New Carrollton as a walkable place depends on the quality of the walk to and from the station.

Most of the parking shown here is part of future phases of the WMATA Joint Development, so this isn’t a permanent condition. Additionally, the developer’s efforts to improve the south side bus bays is encouraging. Still, there’s a big contrast between the importance of place to the development team (as shown on the south side) and the incentives to shave costs by the Purple Line team on the north.

The cone of uncertainty

One of the elements that makes prediction difficult is uncertainty. In one of the chapters of Donald Shoup’s High Cost of Free Parking (adapted for Access here), Professor Shoup poses the question:

HOW FAR IS IT from San Diego to San Francisco? An estimate of 632.125 miles is precise—but not accurate. An estimate of somewhere between 400 and 500 miles is less precise but more accurate because the correct answer is 460 miles. Nevertheless, if you had no idea how far it is from San Diego to San Francisco, whom would you believe: someone who confidently says 632.125 miles, or someone who tentatively says somewhere between 400 and 500 miles? Probably the first, because precision implies certainty.

Shoup uses this example to illustrate the illusion of certainty present in the parking and trip generation estimates from the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Many of the rates are based on small samples of potentially unrepresentative cases – often with a very wide range of observed parking/trip generation. Shoup’s concluding paragraph states:

Placing unwarranted trust in the accuracy of these precise but uncertain data leads to bad policy choices. Being roughly right is better than being precisely wrong. We need less precision—and more truth—in transportation planning

Part of the challenge is not just knowing the limitations of the data, but also understanding the ultimate goals for policy. David Levinson notes that most municipalities simply adopt these rates as requirements for off-street parking. This translation of parking estimates to hard-and-fast regulation is “odd” in and of itself. What is the purpose of a parking requirement? To meet the demand generated by new development?

Parking demand for a given building will be a range throughout the course of a day and a year, and demand for any given building category will itself fall within a large range. That range is reality, but that unfortunately doesn’t translate into simply codified regulations.

In the previous post, I discussed the challenges of accurate prediction and specifically referenced Nate Silver’s work on documenting the many failures and few successes in accurate forecasting. One area where forecasting improved tremendously is in meteorology – weather forecasts have been steadily improving – and a large part of that is disclosing the uncertainty involved in the forecasts. One example is in hurricane forecasts, where instead of publicizing just the predicted hurricane track, they also show the ‘cone of uncertainty‘ where the hurricane might end up:

Example of a hurricane forecast with the cone of uncertainty - image from NOAA.

Example of a hurricane forecast with the cone of uncertainty – image from NOAA.

So, why not apply these methods to city planning? A few ideas: as hypothesized before, the primary goal for parking regulations isn’t to develop the most accurate forecasts. The incentives for weather forecasting are different. The shifts to embrace uncertainty stems from a desire finding the most effective way to communicate the forecast to the population. There are a whole host of forecast models that can predict a hurricane track, but their individual results can be a bit messy – producing a ‘spaghetti plot,’ often with divergent results. The cone of uncertainty both embraces the lack of precision in the forecast, but also simplifies communication.

For zoning, a hard and fast requirement doesn’t lend itself to any cone of uncertainty. Expressing demand in terms of a plausible range means that the actual requirement would need to be set at the low end of that range – and in urban examples, the low end of potential parking demand for any given project could be zero. Of course, unlike weather forecasts, these regulations and policies are political creations, not scientific predictions.

Meteorologists also have the benefit of immediate feedback. We will know how well hurricane forecasters did within a matter of days, and even then we will have the benefit of several days of iterations to better hone that forecast. Comparatively, many cities added on-site parking requirements to their zoning codes in the 1960s; regulations that often persist today. Donald Shoup didn’t publish his parking opus until 2005.

There’s also the matter of influencing one’s environment. Another key difference between a hurricane forecast and zoning codes is that the weather forecasters are looking to predict natural phenomena; ITE is trying to predict human behavior – and the very requirements cities impose based on those predictions will themselves influence human behavior. Build unnecessary parking spaces, and eventually those spaces will find a use – inducing the very demand they were built to satisfy. There, the impacts of ignoring uncertainty can be long-lasting.

Here’s to embracing the cone of uncertainty!

Prediction is hard – so why do we make key decisions based on bad information?

Comparison of USDOT predictions for Vehicle Miles Traveled, compared to actual values. Chart from SSTI.

Comparison of USDOT predictions for Vehicle Miles Traveled, compared to actual values. Chart from SSTI.

Back in December, David Levinson put up a wonderful post with graphical representations looking to match predictions to reality. The results aren’t good for the predictors. Lots of official forecasts call for increased vehicle travel, while many places have seen stagnant or declining VMT. It’s not just a problem for traffic engineers, but for a variety of professions (I took note of similar challenges for airport traffic here previously).

Prediction is hard. What’s curious for cities is that despite the inherent challenges of developing an accurate forecast, we nonetheless bet the house on those numbers with expensive regulations (e.g. requiring off-street parking to meet demand) and projects (building more road capacity to relieve congestion) based on bad information and incorrect assumptions.

One of the books I’ve included in the reading list is Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, Silver’s discussion of why most efforts at prediction fail. In Matt Yglesias’s review of the book, he summarizes Silver’s core argument: “For all that modern technology has enhanced our computational abilities, there are still an awful lot of ways for predictions to go wrong thanks to bad incentives and bad methods.”

Silver rose to prominence by successfully forecasting US elections based on available polling data. In the process, he argued the spin of pundits added nothing to the discussion; political analysts were seldom held accountable for their bad analysis. Yet, because of the incentives for punditry, these analysts with poor track records continued to get work and airtime.

Traffic forecasts have a lot in common with political punditry – many of the projects are woefully incorrect; the methods for predicting are based more on ideology than observation and analysis.

More troubling, for city planning, is the tendency to take these kinds of projections and enshrine them in our regulations, such as the way that the ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers) projections for parking demand are translated into zoning code requirements for on-site parking. Levinson again:

But this requirement itself is odd, and leads to the construction of excess off-street parking, since at least some of that parking is vacant 300, 350, 360, or even 364 days per year depending on how tight you set the threshold and how flat the peak demand is seasonally. Is it really worth vacant paved impervious surface 364 days so that 1 day there is no spillover to nearby streets?

In other words, the ideology behind the requirement wants to maximize parking.

It’s not just the ideology behind these projections that is suspect; the methods are also questionable at best. In the fall 2014 issue of Access, Adam Millard-Ball discusses the methodological flaws of ITE’s parking generation estimates. (Streetsblog has a summary available) Millard-Ball notes that the “seemingly mundane” work of traffic analysis has enormous consequences for the shape of our built environment, due to the associated requirements for new development. Indeed, the trip generation estimates for any given project appear to massively overestimate the actual impact on traffic.

There are three big problems with the ITE estimates: first, they massively overestimate the actual traffic generated by a new development, due to non-representative samples and small sample sizes. Second, the estimates confuse marginal and average trip generation. Build a replacement court house, Millard-Bell notes, and you won’t generate new trips to the court – you’ll just move them. Third, the rates have a big issue with scale. Are we concerned about the trips generated to determine the impact on a local street, or on a neighborhood, or the city, or the region?

What is clear is that these estimates aren’t accurate. Why do we continue to use them as the basis of important policy decisions? Why continue to make decisions based on bad information? A few hypotheses:

  • Path dependence and sticky regulations: Once these kinds of regulations and procedures are in place, they are hard to change. Altering parking requirements in a zoning code can seem simple, but could take a long time. In DC, the 2006 Comprehensive Plan recommended a review and re-write of the zoning code. That process started in earnest in 2007. Final action didn’t come until late in 2014, with implementation still to come – and even then, only after some serious alterations of the initial proposals.
  • Leverage: Even if everyone knows these estimates are garbage, the forecasts of large traffic impacts provide useful leverage for cities and citizens to leverage improvements and other contributions from developers. As Let’s Go LA notes, “traffic forecasting works that way because politicians want it to work that way.”
  • Rent seeking: There’s money to be made from consultants and others in developing these inaccurate estimates and then proposing remedies to them.

Driverless cars: implications for city planning and urban transportation

Nevada autonomous vehicle license plate. CC image from National Museum of American History.

Nevada autonomous vehicle license plate. CC image from National Museum of American History.

Building on the implications of driverless cars on car ownership, as well as the notion that planners aren’t preparing for the rise of autonomous vehicles,  I wanted to dive further into potential implications of widespread adoption of the technology. Nat Bottigheimer in Greater Greater Washington argues that city planning as a profession is unprepared for autonomous vehicles:

Self-driving cars address many of the safety and travel efficiency objections that Smart Growth advocates often make about road expansion, or the use of limited street space.

Part of Bottingheimer’s concern is a lack of quantitative analysis, particularly as it relates to the impacts of self-driving cars. However, the real debate is about qualitative values that feed into our analysis.

The officials responsible for parking lot and garage building, transit system growth, bike lane construction, intersection expansions, sidewalk improvements, and road widenings need to analyze quantitatively how self-driving cars could affect their plans, and to prepare alternatives in case things change.

There is one over-arching problem with this approach: our current quantitative analysis all too often is nothing but bad pseudo-science. Donald Shoup has extensively documented the problems with minimum parking requirements in zoning codes, for example. Here, poor policy with vast unintended consequences is based on some level of flawed quantitative analysis, the kind that does not acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in our understanding or ability to project the future. Instead, the analysis is based on assumptions, yet the assumptions are really value-laden statements that carry a great deal of weight.

Even the very structure of the planning and  regulation for the future carries a bias: a requirement to provide parking spaces in anticipation of future demand will, by nature, ignore the complexity of the marketplace for off-street parking and the natural range of parking demand.

Bottigheimer is also concerned about the impacts of self-driving cars on future land use forecasts:

Planners need to examine how travel forecasting tools that are based on current patterns of car ownership and use will need to change to adapt to new statistical relationships between population, car ownership, trip-making, car-sharing, and travel patterns.

By all means, we need to adjust our forecasting tools. However, we shouldn’t be doing so simply based on the arrival of a new technology. We should adjust them because they’re not particularly accurate and their erroneous projections have large impacts on how we plan. Driverless cars aren’t the problem here. The problem is in our assumptions, our inaccurate analysis, and our decision-making processes that rely on such erroneous projections.

Leaving the limitations of quantitative analysis aside for the moment, we can still hypothesize (qualitatively, perhaps) about the future world of driverless cars. Assuming that autonomous vehicles do indeed reduce car ownership and begin to serve as robo-taxis, we can sketch out plausible scenarios for the future. We assume car ownership will decrease, but vehicle-miles traveled may increase.

City Planning and Street Design:

One of Bottigheimer’s chief concerns is that “planners and placemaking advocates will need to step up their game” given the potential benefits for safety, increased car capacity,

As mentioned above, much of the ‘safety’ benefits are about cars operating in car-only environments (e.g. highways), when the real safety challenges are in streets with mixed traffic: pedestrians, bikes, cars, and buses all sharing the same space. In this case, the values planners and placemaking advocates are pushing for remain the same, regardless of who – or what – is driving the cars. The laws of physics won’t change; providing a safe environment for pedestrians will still be based on the lowest common denominator for safe speeds, etc.

The biggest concern should be in the environments that aren’t highways, yet aren’t city streets, either. Will driverless cars forever push stroads into highway territory? Borrowing Jarrett Walker’s phrasing, technology can’t change geometry, except in some cases at the margins.

Instead of a technical pursuit of maximum vehicle throughput (informed by quantitative analysis), the real question is one of values. The values that inform planning for a place or a street will set the tone for the quantitative analysis that follows. Maximizing vehicle throughput is not a neutral, analytical goal.

Congestion: 

Congestion is a more interesting case, as it will still be an economic problem – centralized control might help mitigate some traffic issues, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental economic conundrum of congestion. Here, too, the economic solutions in a world of human-driven cars will have the same framework as one with computers behind the wheel.

Driverless cars might change the exact price points, but they don’t alter the basic logic behind congestion-mitigation measures like a cordon charge in London or Stockholm, or like Uber’s surge pricing (efficient and rational as it might be, but perhaps too honest). Again, technology can’t fundamentally change geometry. Cars will still be cars, and even if driverless cars improve on the current capacity limitations of highways, they do not eliminate such constraints.

Qualitative Concerns:

Instead of twisting ourselves in knots over projections about the future that are sure to be wrong, planning for autonomous cars should instead focus on the values and the kind of places we want to plan for. We should adjust our policies to embrace the values of the communities (which alone is a challenging process). We should be aware about the poor accuracy of forecasts and work to build policies with the flexibility to adapt.

Driverless cars: a city of cheap robotaxis and the end of car ownership

CC image from the Museum of American History.

CC image from the Museum of American History.

To date, most of the writing about driverless cars seems to focus on technology’s potential to make driving safer by eliminating collisions between vehicles. The thinking is similar to other auto safety improvements such as air bags or anti-lock brakes. These technological advances (endorsed by the US DOT)  incrementally improve the safety of those driving – assuming that you are using a narrowly focused definition of ‘safety.’ However, an auto-centric definition of safety only works in auto-centric environments; in urban environments where cars and bikes and pedestrians are all sharing the same space, the definition of safety cannot solely focus on eliminating collisions between high-tech cars (more on this later).

Other articles predict that driverless cars mean the end of transit – an unlikely scenario that ignores the basic geometry of car-based systems and the capacity advantages of transit (imagine shutting down New York’s transit system and trying to fill that role with nothing but taxis – good luck). Furthermore, if driverless cars make vehicle automation easy, then it should also help drive down the costs for automating transit itself (among other potential uses) and unlock the benefits of automated transit.

Ownership:

The far more interesting scenario is one where autonomous vehicles completely upset the benefits of owning your own car. In the Atlantic Cities, Eric Jaffe questions the assumptions of car ownership in a world of driverless cars:

But we’re not so far away from this future that it’s too early to start considering what it might look like. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Slate in August, Google, the leaders in autonomous car technology, must have had some vision in mind to shell out $258 million for the car-slash-ridesharing service Uber: “ubiquitous taxis — summoned via smartphone or weird glasses — that are so cheap they make car ownership obsolete.”

Think about this world of shared autonomous vehicles for a moment. You wake up and get ready for work, and a few minutes before it’s time to leave you press a button and order an SAV [Shared Autonomous Vehicle]. The car has been strategically positioned to wait in high-demand areas, so you don’t have to wait long. You might share the ride with a couple travelers just as you share an elevator, or perhaps pay a premium to ride alone. Either way, you clear your inbox or read the paper during the commute, which is safer and more reliable than it used to be.

So, basically Robo-Uber. Or Auto-Car2go. Or Johnny Cab. This kind of behavior seems to be a far more likely outcome of the technology than the continued paradigm of each individual owning a car for personal use. Just as transit consultant Jarrett Walker talks about the importance of frequent transit service in providing freedom for users, the on-demand nature of the personal car is similarly freeing – but it required a) ownership of the car to ensure on-demand use, and b) the owner to actually do the driving.

Travel Behavior:

But what kind of changes in behavior can we expect from this shift away from car ownership? Writing at Greater Greater Washington, Nat Bottigheimer notes that planners haven’t even begun to address the issue. Jaffe’s article, however, cites some preliminary research from Austin on the impact of robotaxis.

Civil engineer Kara M. Kockelman of the University of Texas at Austin recently modeled the potential ownership change with grad student Daniel Fagnant…

The results offer an enticing glimpse of a world without car-ownership. Each SAV in the Austin model replaced about 11 conventional household vehicles. The roughly 20,000 people who made up this shared network, formerly owners of roughly as many cars, were now served by a mere 1,700 SAVs. Travelers waited an average of only 20 seconds for their ride to arrive, and you could literally count the number who waited more than 10 minutes on one hand (three). That’s to say nothing of personal savings in terms of cost (insurance, parking, gas) and time.

“Even when we doubled or quadrupled or halved or quartered that trip-making, we didn’t have big changes in our key variables,” says Kockelman. “This replacement rate, this eleven-to-one, those things were very stable.”

Kockelman is quick to point out the caveats. The biggest is that for all the savings in private car-ownership, vehicle-miles traveled doesn’t go down in the Austin model. In fact, it goes up about 10 percent. That’s because not only are SAVs making all the trips people used to make on their own, but they’re repositioning themselves in between trips to reduce wait times (see below). The additional wear also means manufacturers produce about the same number of cars, too, though each new fleet is no doubt a bit smaller and cleaner than the last.

So, a huge decrease in the total number of cars (presumably, with a corresponding decrease in parking demand, making the already-questionable logic behind zoning code parking requirements even more dubious) but an increase in the total vehicle miles traveled indicates that such technology won’t be a magic cure for congestion. It won’t spell the end of public transit in our cities. If the safety benefits accrue mostly to highway travel, it won’t change the need for safer streets where pedestrians, bikes, and cars mix.

The next question is on the impacts of driverless cars on cities and city planning.

Parking is in the news: the trend of cities rolling back zoning requirements for off-street parking

CC image from Peter Rosbjerg

CC image from Peter Rosbjerg

It’s hard to miss the discussion these days about parking, from sources as varied as Grist and the Wall Street Journal. Some links and brief discussion:

Each article highlights the challenges parking presents in an urban environment, and the additional challenges of inflexible rules requiring it. Matt Yglesias makes the case for the straight-up removal of all parking requirements as the simplest option, rather than the selective reductions in certain districts or reductions in the numerical requirement itself. He writes (quoting extensively):

First on a concrete level, this is a form of compromise that really fails in its goal of de-mobilizing opposition. If you are a street parker and your priority in parking policy is to defend your access to cheap street parking, then any reduction in parking mandates should spark opposition. Watering the reform down doesn’t lead to any genuine reconciliation of interests. What you need to do is recognize that street parkers have a real reason for wanting to keep mandates in place and find a way to buy them off. I think what I propose at the end of the column would do that. But once you’ve managed to configure reform as a win-win, then you should go whole hog.

The second is that gradualism, by focusing reform on the places that are most indisputably well-served by transit and pedestrianism, actually denudes parking reform of its main promise—transforming neighborhoods. If you imagine a neighborhood that doesn’t have great bus frequency or amazing neighborhood-serving retail and add some housing with less than one parking space per adult, then you’re going to get the additional customers that would be the basis for more frequent buses or new stores. Why would anyone in a neighborhood like that want a unit with no parking space? Why would a couple want a unit with just one space? Probably most people wouldn’t. But some non-zero quantity of people would do it for the main reason people everywhere put up with sub-optimal housing situations—to save money. But those initial people with fewer cars than adults become the customers for the services—whether that’s carshare or the bus or a walking distance store—that make the neighborhood more attractive down the road.

The way things work right now is that parking minimums risk destroying existing walkable neighborhoods through the reverse dynamic where subsidized car ownership leads to excessive car ownership leads to further auto-oriented development. Selective liberalization of parking rules can break that vicious cycle, which is nice, but only citywide liberalization drives the virtuous process forward.

The partial reductions in requirements are certainly due to political opposition to the idea. Even in places like Portland that had no requirements in some areas of the city have since re-instated limited requirements, ostensibly due to political pressure. However, while removing the offending language is unlikely to win any supporters, keeping it in might rile up even more opposition due to the inherent asymmetry to the procedures of changing regulations such as zoning codes.

On the merits of policy, removing the requirements would be a simple solution. Given that there is no ‘right’ answer to the number of spaces that should be required given the diversity of market segments a developer might build for, and given that in many cases, the ‘right’ number of spaces for a site and market segment could be zero, selecting any one number as the requirement (and getting it ‘right’) is an impossible task – unless that number is zero.

 

Parking: often ugly, expensive

CC image from Joe Shlabotnik

CC image from Joe Shlabotnik

A few items on parking, and zoning requirements to provide it.

A case study of absurd and pernicious parking rules – from Grist (as part of a series)

Alan Durning documents many of the absurdities of zoning code requirements for off-street parking, focusing his own experience in Seattle. Durning does not own a car and wanted to renovate his existing attached garage into extra space in his house, but such alterations would not comply with the zoning code. Worse, the curb cut for his one-car garage meant one less on-street space.

A parking minimum of two (or more) is even worse public policy. Like a one-space minimum, a two-car minimum sometimes yields no net spaces: Many builders planning two-car garages install double-wide driveways, which block two on-street spaces. Worse, as I’ll argue in subsequent articles, off-street mandates tend to glut the market for parking spaces and trigger a chain of cause and effect that ensures massive subsidies to driving. Whatever the number, furthermore, required off-street spaces dramatically push up the minimum cost of building a house. Curb cuts, driveways, and parking spaces cost thousands of dollars. The requirements also result in more pavement getting poured, armoring our watersheds and increasing the quantity of polluted runoff reaching our streams.

In demonstrating the opportunity costs of parking, Durning compiles a laundry list of potential uses for his garage, other than automobile storage.

Ugly by law – from the Sightline Institute (also part of a series)

In the second installment of the series, Alyse Nelson documents the visual impacts of parking and parking requirements. The series also includes several examples of buildings erected prior to on-site parking requirements and those built after, demonstrating the impact of such demanding requirements.

Before parking minimums, buildings in Cascadia could be built to the property line because parking wasn’t a constraint. Now, developers must contend with building heights, setbacks for buildings, and parking regulations—all of which make it harder to develop affordable housing projects. This is especially true at medium densities and lower building heights because it’s harder to make parking garages or underground parking pencil for these smaller projects.

The economic argument is important. The space required to meet the requirements is both expensive to build and requires space to be used for parking, rather than the demanded use. Both of these factors serve to drive up the cost of urban development, but also make infill development difficult and more expensive. Meeting parking requirements in a greenfield site is not the greatest challenge, but meeting suburban-style requirements on an infill development site surrounded by existing buildings on all sides is difficult.

The parking garage, in practice – from Old Urbanist (also part of a series)

Charlie Gardner highlights several examples of garage parking used in practice around the world, providing a set of case studies for how developers deal with the spatial challenges of providing parking.

Outside of Toronto, a residential development features a fairly dense cluster of townhouses built atop of a common-use underground parking garage. Another typology is the ‘Texas Doughnut,’ featuring multi-family development wrapped around a shared-use above-ground parking garage:

This is of course the notorious “Texas Doughnut,” a mid-rise residential liner wrapped around interior structured parking.  The product of on-site parking requirements and building codes which permit cheaper wood framing for lower-rise buildings, these structures have proliferated throughout the Sunbelt, though they can be found, with less frequency, outside that geographic range. To the extent these cities are experiencing urbanization near their centers (hello, Dallas), this is the form that urbanism frequently takes, for better or worse.

Despite the prominence of the parking facilities and the transportation mode choices that suggests, note that many residents are required to walk non-trivial distances to reach their vehicles. In some cases, the walk may actually exceed three minutes for some residents.

In debates about parking in urban areas, pricing and availability tend to garner the majority of the attention, with proximity only a secondary concern (although many complaints about these first two issues implicitly involve proximity). Similarly, attempts to reduce reliance on the car through parking reform have tended to focus on eliminating or reducing parking maximums or establishing a market pricing mechanism for parking spaces, rather than considering the location of the vehicle itself.

It should be common sense, though, that in an otherwise reasonably walkable area with some transit options, the further the car is from one’s residence, the less use that car is likely to receive, since transportation is above all a matter of immediate convenience.
Charlie’s third installment discusses the challenges of building a municipal parking garage to boost a retail district, when all of the focus is on a handful of on-street spaces:
Washington Street itself offers only 22 spaces, in comparison to the over 1,000 public garage spaces in close proximity, plus many hundreds more in public and private surface lots. Although these spaces only supply a tiny fraction of the total, by their conspicuousness they play an outsized role, inducing many motorists to circle the block several times in hopes of winning the parking lottery, rather than simply proceeding to one of the garages.
The desire of merchants to compete with suburban shopping malls (easy, plentiful, cheap), contrasted with the spatial constraints of streetscapes planned well before the rise of the automobile results in “a parking policy at war with itself,”

Development costs and housing affordability

Vancouver towers along False Creek. Photo by author.

Two competing narratives often emerge when talking about policy responses to housing costs. One asserts that lowering the costs of construction and development will allow those savings to be passed on to eventual users of the real estate; the other asserts that markets set prices, and lowering the cost of development would yield pure profit to developers who will charge what the market will bear. So, which is it? The Vancouver Sun has a series of articles on housing affordability in Vancouver, BC. One of these articles focuses on development impact fees(among other causes) and their role in affordability. The two basic narratives are on display:

“The significant cost premiums of building new homes in Vancouver, compared to Surrey, leads to two observable results,” said Anne McMullin, president and CEO of the Urban Development Institute. “Either the increased costs will inevitably be passed on to homebuyers or the viability of building new market housing will be suppressed. Regardless, the end game is a more unaffordable and less socially sustainable city.”

She says the most obvious way to address affordability is to look at the costs and supply of housing.

“Costs affect supply — if it’s too expensive to build, you’re going to limit the supply. But we still have the demand. There’s always going to be a demand — there are buyers who can afford it.”

But Brian Jackson, the City of Vancouver’s general manager of planning, says market demand drives the price of housing much more than the costs of development.

“If we took $1,000 off the cost of the CACs or we took $1,000 off the cost of the DCLs,” Jackson said, referring to two types of city development fees, “is the developer going to take $1,000 off the cost of selling the house? I don’t think they would – they’re going to get the highest price that they could.”

These two narratives aren’t necessarily at odds with one another. In the short run, a small decrease in development fees (thereby lowering the cost of development) wouldn’t likely lower costs. However, the total fee amounts per unit in Vancouver are substantial – on the order of $76,000 per unit, according to the Sun’s figures. That’s roughly equivalent to the cost of an underground parking space. If you were to remove the fees, would developers merely pocket the difference as extra profit? Recall research on the liberalization of parking space requirements in Los Angeles: removal of these requirements lowered the cost of development in Downtown LA, but the results were not merely additional profit for developers. Instead, the lower development costs allowed developers the flexibility to build for a wider variety of sub-markets and price points.

Instead of the high-cost regulations forcing them to build Cadillacs, lower costs allow them to build a wider variety of products to meet a wider range of price points. If the costs are too high, developers have little choice but to aim for the luxury submarkets.

Markets do indeed set prices; and in the short term, developers won’t necessarily lower their prices. However, the markets are deeper and more complex in the longer run and allowing flexibility to build to those submarkets will produce a wider range of products, not just catering to the luxury set. As that housing ages, it can filter to lower-priced submarkets. Filtering isn’t a set policy so much as it is a description of  how housing markets work.

Note that some of these Vancouver fees might only apply to units in re-zoned developments. However, that raises the question of if there is enough by-right development capacity not just within a city or political jurisdiction, but in areas with demand for market-rate development. Also note that in many places, by-right development is increasingly rare, subject to negotiation and incentives as a part of the approvals process. A profile of New York’s Amanda Burden in last year’s New York Times noted that “there really doesn’t seem to be any true as-of-right development anymore.”

Those development fees aren’t just collected for fun, however. They’re paying for something. However, as is the case with parking, is collecting these fees the best way to accomplish the goals? Over at Human Transit, Jarrett Walker notes some of the perverse incentives baked into development fees, and the unintended consequences therein. Jarrett cites this post from the Pembina Institute, looking at the often-perverse incentives packaged into these fees:

Developers continue to build in sprawling greenfields because it is often cheaper and easier than building developments in walkable, transit-oriented neighbourhoods. Lack of supply means homebuyers are priced out of these locations and are literally “driven” to the urban and suburban fringes, where long and stressful auto commutes are required — and this only leads to more congestion.

Building transit is only one half of the solution. Toronto also needs to make sure we get the right mix of development in the right places to support and use transit infrastructure. Perhaps this current process of examining revenue tools will create an opportunity to do so.

As noted previously, a great deal of development will follow the path of least resistance. These kinds of fees might provide an easy way to fund new infrastructure, but they also add to the overall cost of development. Other tools for capturing that value and channeling it to the needed projects might offer fewer unintended consequences. One such unintended consequence is to push development into outlying areas, or force development to only serve the luxury submarket.

Prescriptive urbanism vs. market urbanism – the tension between demand for more housing and the desire to curate great cities

San Francisco skyline w/ crane. CC image from Omar Omar

Tales from two cities:

San Francisco: From Ilan Greenberg in The New Republic – San Francisco’s Gentrification Problem isn’t Gentrification. Greenberg compares the public debate (often writen, and discussed previously here) in San Francisco compared to more the more familiar narrative in other cities.

Here, the debate is dominated by fierce new champions of the anti-gentrification cause who aren’t concerned so much about the truly poor being forced from—or tempted out of—their neighborhoods. In their view, the victims of gentrification are also affluent, just less so than the people moving in. And the consequences are supposedly catastrophic not only to these relatively well-off people who are living amidst people even more well-off, but a mortal threat to nothing less than the rebel soul of San Francisco.

While the conversation may not fall into the same narrative as other cities, that doesn’t make it more useful. Greenberg notes that the San Francisco conversation can “suck the air out of a reality-based conversation” about affordability.

Greenberg spoke with Peter Cohen, a San Francisco housing advocate:

Sitting in the worn lobby of a hotel patrolled by security guards near Twitter’s new corporate headquarters, and armed with documents showing statistics on skyrocketing rents and rising tenant evictions, Cohen came to talk about disenfranchised people struggling to keep financially afloat and about the legal intricacies of deed-restricted affordable housing. He said he expects to have an uphill climb to reach new residents obsessed with buzzy restaurants and city officials in thrall to new tech business interests, but now also struggles to be heard over the din of middle-class residents moaning about the “gentrification” of their neighborhoods—residents who themselves may have been gentrifiers, or more likely followed in gentrifiers’ footsteps.

Greenberg writes of this narrative as if it were inevitable: “The compact city has a long history of clubby NIMBYism and knee-jerk preservationist politics that torpedoes even the most sensible development projects.” In addition to the outright opposition, fees and a long approvals process increases barriers to new housing supply in the city.

Some opposition to new development is that it makes the city dull. This isn’t the first time such arugments have come up. Inga Saffron, also writing in The New Republic made the same case that gentrifcation brings monotony. Writing specifically of San Francisco, Charles Hubert decries the “homogenization” of the city.

Part of the challenge is that rebuffing that monotony probably requires more development to meet the demand, not less. It’s a somewhat counter-intuitive proposition. Another challenge is the notion that cities do not (or should not) change, when history says otherwise.

Brooklyn: San Francisco’s experience is not to say that fears of monotonous development aren’t somewhat warranted. Unleashing the market alone won’t solve all urban ills. The Wall Street Journal looks at the results of one of New York City’s rezonings, ten years later, with some detrimental effects on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn:

But the Planning Department lacked such foresight in 2003 when it rezoned the noisy avenue to take advantage of the demand for apartments spilling over Park Slope to the east and Boerum Hill and Gowanus to the west. Focused primarily on residential development, it didn’t require developers to incorporate ground-level commercial businesses into their plans, and allowed them to cut sidewalks along Fourth Avenue for entrances to ground-level garages.

Developers got the message. With the re-zoning coinciding with the real-estate boom, they put up more than a dozen apartment towers, many of them cheap looking and with no retail at the street level, effectively killing off the avenue’s vibrancy for blocks at a time.

The city finally got wise and passed another zoning change last year, correcting some of these mistakes.

The shortcomings on 4th Avenue show the tension between market urbanism and proscriptive/prescriptive urbanism (and both words probably apply) but it also shows the power of incentives and how development tends to follow the path of least resistance. But it’s not like this outcome is solely a product of the market.

Some of the architects responsible for middle-brow architecture along Fourth Avenue are surprisingly candid about the other cause: They pass the buck to the developers who hired them and the pressure they faced to cut costs at the expense of aesthetics.

“I try to do my best for my clients and try to get them as big a building as possible,” says Henry Radusky, a partner with Bricolage Architecture and Designs LLC, which has built nine buildings along Fourth Avenue in the last decade.

One of Mr. Radusky’s buildings was 586 President St., one of three buildings on the same two-block stretch of the avenue that contribute to its canyon of mediocrity look. Another is the Novo Park Slope, at Fourth Avenue and 5th Street, a pallid, prison-like structure with parking and a medical facility at ground level that towers menacingly over its next-door neighbors.

That parking, of course, is the product of prescriptive regulation. Market pressures might impact some design choices, but the relative impact of those decisions (compared against higher quality materials or prioritizing retail uses on the ground floor) likely pales in comparison to the cost and spatial needs of parking.

Back in San Francisco, Peter Cohen is looking for ways to mesh the market and prescriptive elements together:

Even housing advocates like Cohen concede a hard ideological approach loses hearts and minds. “I also understand that we have a changed disposition toward cities. How can you find a sweet spot between these two forces—how do you bring in this creative class, but also make sure that people who toiled in the weeds are not simply squeezed out? How can you sort it without just saying that the market will take care of everyone, when obviously it won’t?”