Tag Archives: Portland

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 tradeoffs – on-street and off-street

Requiring developers to build off-street parking is expensive.  That’s the key takeaway from a City of Portland study on the impacts of parking requirements on housing affordability. (This study was linked to in a previous post)  To illustrate the point, the city looks at a hypothetical development and considers a number of different scenarios for providing parking to the building.  The results show the trade-offs involved.  The method of providing parking not only adds to the cost, but also limits the ability of a building to fully utilize a site.

For example, providing parking via an off-street surface lot is rather cheap to build, but has a high opportunity cost – that land used for parking cannot also be used for housing. The study keeps the land area and the zoning envelope constant: that is, the off-street parking must be provided on-site, and you can’t get a variance for extra building height.  The trade-offs for this hypothetical development, then, are between cost (and the rent you’d have to charge to get a return on your investment) and in utilization of the site.

Assumed cost per parking spaces are as follows:

Surface $3,000
Podium/Structured (above ground) $20,000
Underground $55,000
Internal (Tuck Under or Sandwich) $20,000
Mechanical $45,000

Apply those options to a hypothetical development site, and you can see the trade-offs emerge.  In every case, requiring parking means fewer units can be developed, and each of those units is more expensive to provide.

Requiring parking makes all of the apartments more expensive, but for different reasons.  The surface parking is cheap, but the real reason the  rent is high is due to the opportunity cost – the surface parking option only allows for the development of 30 units instead of a hypothetical max of 50.

Underground parking is also substantially more expensive in terms of rent, but also in terms of construction costs – the rent increase isn’t that much higher than the surface option (in spite of the $50k per space cost differential) due to the fact that underground parking allows for substantial utilization of the site.   Even underground parking does not allow for full utilization, as the ramps to the garage take up space that could be used for housing in the no-parking scenario.

Requiring developers to add parking in all of these cases jacks up the rent they must charge to make these developments pencil out.  The underground parking example is a 60-plus percent increase in the monthly rent – and it’s a dollar figure that probably ensures that a developer couldn’t just rent out unused parking spaces and break-even on the proposition.  Instead, that cost gets passed through to the renter – both the cost of the space, as well as the opportunity cost of not building more housing.

The other thing to remember from this is that all of those options for how to park a building might not be allowed.  Tuck-under parking might make sense (get a few spaces at a reasonable cost), but if the zoning code requires more than 0.25 spaces per unit (as it does in Downtown Brooklyn), that method would not be allowed by the zoning code.  Podium parking is also reasonable, but that means you’re devoting the entire first floor to parking – meaning you can’t use it for housing units or retail or any of the other ground-floor uses that make for vibrant streetscapes.

Framing the issue. One other page on Portland’s website does a nice job of framing the issue of zoning code reform for on-site parking requirements.  Instead of talk about reducing on-site parking requirements, we’re talking about places where parking is allowed, but not required.  Soldiers on the automotive side of the “war on cars” (a phrase worthy of the scare quotes) will frequently frame this as removing parking.  This kind of language is both more accurate about potential changes and less inflammatory in skirmishes of this “war.”

More on-street parking isn’t always a problem. One of the fears of these parking-free developments is that not all of those residents will be car-free.  The Portland study shows this to be true – but it also shows that this isn’t really a problem.  Even at the peak utilization of on-street spaces surrounding these new parking-free buildings, 25% of the spaces are still available (page 2 of this document), meaning that there shouldn’t be a problem for residents in finding an on-street space.

Even if on-street parking isn’t actually a problem yet in Portland (no matter how it is perceived), that can always change.  When demand for that parking exceeds the supply, then you turn to parking management.

Managing on-street parking.  If we’ve established that off-street parking requirements increase the cost of housing, and we know that not all residents of a parking-less building will also be car-less, then management of scarce on-street parking will be critical. The Portland Transport blog points to a proposal in Portland that has a nice structure.

The proposal would divide part of the city into essentially three kinds of areas:

  • Commercial areas: all on-street parking is metered.  Anyone may park, but all must pay.
  • Residential areas: residents (with permits) are prioritized, non-residents can park for free, but must obey time limits (similar to DC”s current RPP framework).
  • Bordering areas: on streets adjacent to commercial areas, all spaces are metered but those with residential permits do not need to pay the meters.

Now, the devil is always in the details for things like permit zone sizes, cost of the permits, meter rates, etc.  However, the basic structure does a nice job of shifting the emphasis on what kind of parking should be prioritized in certain areas.

Beyond management. One benefit of allowing more parking-free development would be to increase density in the area, thereby supporting more transit service and key destinations within walking distance.  The more parking-free units there are, the easier it gets for residents to live car-free.  Each of these represents a bit of the virtuous cycle.

Choice architecture and zoning

Parallel parking on-street. CC image from Eyton Z.

Following up on the previous post, two pieces showing the limits of the zoning code in structuring choice architectures in urban environments:

Parking. Zoning code provisions that require adding off-street parking seriously distort both the urban fabric as well as the decision-making of individuals using those buildings – and thus those parking spaces (some previous thoughts on this here and here).  Portland has eliminated minimum parking requirements under certain circumstances (and has had this regulation on the books for many years – only recently have both developers and financiers been on the same page about parking-free development).  Of course, a parking-free development is nothing new – huge swaths of our cities built before the imposition of such codes function just fine without the ‘benefit’ of such codes guiding their maturation.

The most recent news about these parking-free developments in Portland is that those living in the parking-free apartments are not car-free themselves:

But a city of Portland study released this week suggests that no-car households are the exception, not the rule, even in apartments that don’t provide parking. And those vehicles have to go somewhere.

…

But it also found that 73 percent of 116 apartment households surveyed have cars, and two-thirds park on the street. Only 36 percent use a car for a daily commute, meaning the rest store their cars on the street for much of the week.

Point being, rescinding parking requirements from zoning codes alone is not enough to change behavior.  That doesn’t mean that changing parking requirements isn’t a good idea – it is. As the quote above also notes, very few of these residents use their cars for a daily commute.  However, there is a limit to what zoning can do.  Parking requirements in the zoning code are a crude form of parking management; rescinding those rules likely warrants better parking management programs.

Portland appears stuck in between market equilibria here: people complain about more parkers on the the street, but those people are only parking there because it’s cheap and available.  Likewise, off-street spaces are available for rent, but many are unwilling to pay the price to do so:

But developers can’t count on tenants to pick up the tab, particularly when there is street parking easily available nearby.

“The market is the market,” Menashe said. “If the guy down the street has no parking and he’s able to get $800 a unit, that’s probably all we can get, too.”

Great news for the city, and for consumers who value market-rate affordability in their apartments.  This suggests that a) the old requirement for parking was indeed too high, and b) moving some of those cars to the street hasn’t put too much strain on on-street parking.

Nonetheless, the lesson is that zoning can only do so much.  Zoning is a blunt instrument, it can regulate form well.  To the extent that use and form are tied together, it can regulate use.  But you can’t dictate behavior with a zoning code – and trying to do so will likely bring unintended consequences.

The excellent Portland Transport blog takes note of these findings and asks: what policies would get you to go car-lite or car-free?  Options within this realm – things like charging for on-street parking permits, encouraging car-sharing services, enabling additional dense development to thus provide more ‘stuff’ within a walkable distance, thereby reducing the need for car ownership, etc.  Those kinds of policies are the ones to build into the choice architecture to reduce car use and ownership, and also to reduce the tension from good policy changes like the removal of minimum parking requirements.

Restaurants. Writing at Greater Greater Washington, Herb Caudill calls for the removal of a zoning restriction on restaurants in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of DC. The rule is a part of an overlay zoning district and limits restaurants from occupying more than 25% of the linear storefront footage in the area.  The goal is to require a diversity of retail uses in the area. The effect, however, has been for a lot of longstanding vacancies as well as some rather odd tenants (such as a vacuum cleaner repair shop).

Here again, zoning can only do so much.  Once you step outside the physical purview of what zoning is good at regulating, all bets are off. Zoning can require that buildings provide retail space, for example – but exactly what type of retail is a lot harder to regulate.  Leaving aside the wisdom of even trying to regulate such a thing (rather than allowing the market some flexibility to operate), the goal of diverse retail uses is probably better met with other types of policies than changes to the zoning code.

More on parking requirements and impacts to the city

Portland parking meter. CC image from Ian Broyles

Several tangentially related articles on parking over the past few weeks: 

In a previous post on zoning and unintended consequences, I linked to an Oregon Public Broadcasting piece on zero-parking development in Portland, OR – taking advantage of a clause in the zoning code that removes the requirement to provide off-site parking in developments around high-frequency transit corridors.  The key word is in removing the requirement, as the developers are free to provide on-site parking if they wish, but are no longer required to do so.  And may have decided to forgo off-street parking entirely.

Portland’s Willamette Week followed with a feature piece on the same issue a month later. Unfortunately, the writer frames the rule as letting developers off the hook for something they ought to pay for, like they were building bathrooms without toilets:

The Portland City Council more than a decade ago created this exemption—a huge financial benefit to developers—to increase density and discourage people from owning and driving cars.

If there’s a single fragment in the zoning code that encapsulates the ambition of city planners and the ethos of Portland, this may be it.

But the policy has its costs, and nearby residents such as Gold-Markel are paying for it.

Throughout the article, the ‘problems’ of this policy are presented in terms of spillover parking – that is, the residents of the new parking-less developments did not get rid of their cars entirely, and now park them on the street.  One obvious solution would be to manage parking on the street via pricing, permits, and many other available tools – rather than the blunt instrument of parking space requirements in the zoning code.  The zoning code works best when roughly governing broad land use and built form.  It is not a particularly strong management tool.  Nothing is mentioned about the cost to residents and to the city as a whole of requiring this expensive construction.

Along the same lines in DC (which does have some residential parking management programs in place), a local ANC recently signed off on a parking-free development near a metro station – but only in exchange for the promise that residents of the new building would not be allowed to get Residential Parking Permits for their vehicles.  On the one hand, the existence of a management program ought to help mitigate the impacts of such construction; on the other, the fact that the DC project had to negotiate to build without parking in the first place opens the door to “excessive localism” in Matt Yglesias’ terms.

Back in Portland:

Hales tells WW that when the city was rewriting the zoning code in 2000 to eliminate the parking requirement, he never thought developers would actually build apartments without parking.

“We were trying to get developers to put in one [parking] spot instead of two,” he says. “I certainly wasn’t smart enough to anticipate that banks would finance projects with no parking whatsoever.”

The simple fact is that parking doesn’t always pay.  Often, the economic case for it is quite weak if it isn’t seen as an absolute requirement (in either the legal sense or in terms of feasibility).  Another interesting (but very different case) is Yankee Stadium, where several large new parking garages adjacent to the new ballpark have defaulted on their bonds thanks to low utilization.

This situation is different from a run-of-the-mill zoning case, but it dramatically shows the cost  (and the lack of a return) in building too much parking.  With that kind of cost in providing parking when demand is low, it’s no wonder that one of the developers in the OPB piece made the claim that “Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment.”

In a more quantitative analysis of parking reforms, the Atlantic Cities looks to London:

In an upcoming issue of Urban Studies, researchers Zhan Guo and Shuai Ren of the Rudin Centre for Transport Policy and Management at NYU consider two core questions when it comes to London’s reform. First, does the parking minimum truly create more parking than people want? Second, is a parking maximum necessary to promote sustainable transport, or will the market alone take care of it?

On the first question, Guo and Ren returned a pretty definitive yes. They examined parking supply at 216 residential developments in London approved from 1997 to 2000, when the parking minimum was in effect, and then roughly 8,250 developments approved from 2004 to 2010, after the minimum was removed and the maximum imposed. Before parking reform, developers created 94 percent of the required minimum; after it, they created just 52 percent of the old minimum.

Those parking spaces that were formerly required obviously were not free to build.  As for parking maximums (that is, a requirement that a development not build more than a given amount of off-street parking):

Onto question number two: the effectiveness of the new maximums. Since the purpose of London’s parking reform was to promote alternative transportation, the researchers looked at how parking supply fluctuated in areas with high density and transit access after 2004. What they found is that that the actual parking supplied was higher in Central London, where density and access are greatest, compared to adjacent outer areas.

Guo and Ren call this finding “unexpected.” They suspect that local authorities may want to keep a high maximum (and therefore allow more spaces) to avoid a parking spillover onto already crowded streets in Central London. Another explanation is that the market simply wants more spaces there: people who can afford to live downtown are willing to pay a premium for parking.

I can’t see much problem in allowing parking to be built where the market is willing to bear the cost of construction and operation.  Likewise, a developer of a non-residential property could easily see value in providing a great deal of parking as a draw to their development.

None of this changes the fact that a robust system for managing on-street spaces will likely be needed in any case.   Such a program in Portland could easily soothe the concerns of nearby residents (though many of their concerns seem to be about the very existence of the newer, dense development in the first place); and a more market-responsive system in DC (hypothesis: most of DC’s RPP stickers are far too cheap relative to the demand for on-street spaces) might have avoided some of the negotiations in Tenleytown.

Parking requirements and unintended consequences

Surface parking in Minneapolis. CC image from Zach K.

Writing in MinnPost, Marlys Harris asks why (seemingly) nothing is getting done in Minneapolis. She comes up with three broad reasons: a negative attitude towards new development, economic justifications that don’t pencil out for new projects, and the impact of zoning and land use regulations – often unintended impacts or perverse outcomes. While all three are certainly factors, the real interesting implication is the interplay between them: as an example, regulations that dictate long and uncertain processes, enabling those opposed to new development to organize in opposition, thereby adding time and cost to a building project to the point where it’s no longer feasible.

In the comments, Max Musicant offers an example of these chain reactions on the regulatory side:

[T]he zoning code is very often in conflict with how multi-story buildings are actually built – which also drives the almost constant demand for variances. If one wants to build a multi-story building, you are required to provide an elevator. If you need an elevator, you need to build 4-6 stories to spread out the cost. If you are building that high, you will likely be required to build parking on-site. If you have to build parking on-site in an urban location, it will have to be underground – which is very expensive. All of this can be avoided only if 1) you build one story suburban style or 2) your price points are affordable only to the wealthy.

The parking requirements are particularly onerous. Oregon Public Broadcasting took note of parking-less apartment building projects in Portland back in August. New buildings are going up without off-street parking, taking advantage of a change in the zoning code that allows exemptions from parking requirements under certain conditions. While the article’s narrative focuses on the kinds of people who would live without a car or without a designated parking space, this cultural focus is misplaced – as Max Musicant noted later in his comment, these kind of walk-up apartment buildings without off-street parking were commonly constructed in American cities in the not-so-distant past.

The real takeaway from the OPB piece isn’t about the behavior of the tenants, but of the impact on the bottom line of the builders:

One of those developers is Dave Mullens with the Urban Development Group. He opened the Irvington Garden in a close-in Northeast Portland neighborhood last year. It’s 50 units with no parking places.

“The cost of parking would make building this type of project on this location unaffordable,” Mullens says.

Mullens calls the difference “tremendous.”

“Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment. Or, the difference between apartments and condos,” he says.

In other words, these kinds of regulations have severe costs. Taking Mullens’s price figure at face value, it’s not hard to see how removing a requirement like this would help market rate development target demand at lower price points. Likewise, it’s not hard to see how seemingly narrowly-focused and well-intentioned regulations can have much broader consequences when layered with other constraints.

Of course, these points are all on the micro scale of an individual project, but the macro scale also matters. The regulations have to allow the market to increase supply in order to meet demand – otherwise bad things happen. In the Washington Business Journal, Montgomery and Fairfax counties in metropolitan DC are concerned about housing becoming unaffordable even for those with six figure incomes.

It’s not until the end that simply relaxing zoning requirements to a) increase supply, or b) lower the cost of development (see the parking requirement discussion) is mentioned. The article does not mention option c), all of the above.  Since there would still be a need for deeply affordable dwelling units, relaxing or eliminating parking requirements would be a good place to start in striking the balance between good, well-intentioned, and effective regulations and an efficient marketplace for new development.

Agglomeration, continued

Nike Agglomeration crop

More items of note on agglomeration:

From City Journal, the “Seven Pillars of Agglomeration.”

  1. Economies of scale in production
  2. Economies of scale in trade and transportation
  3. Falling transportation and communication costs
  4. Proximity with other firms in the same industry
  5. Advantages of diversity
  6. The quest for the center (of the industry)
  7. Buzz and bright lights

And, from The New Republic‘s Avenue blog, a visualization of those principles in action, looking at the athletic and outerwear industry in Portland, OR – from Pendleton (1889) to Nike (1978).

But the A&O cluster is also an interesting case study in cluster morphology and dynamics. Check out this cool genealogy map developed by sometime Metro Program author Heike Mayer of the University of Bern, for example. Meyer’s info-graphic shows well how the A&O cluster has grown over time and now epitomizes the frequent structure of highly dynamic clusters, which often find a small number of large foundation firms (in this case Nike, Adidas, and Columbia Sportswear) surrounded by a cloud of scores of smaller, more entrepreneurial firms. In Portland, hundreds of these small and sometimes tiny firms are now proliferating–driving growth, developing their own niches, and providing services to the bigs and larger new firms.

The accompanying infographic (full size image – PDF file) shows this phenomenon in action, and through time.  As noted, building on these existing clusters, taking advantage of these agglomerations is the smart approach to economic development:

All together, it’s a great example of how the best sort of economic development eschews chasing after firm relocations and other silver bullets and instead concentrates on “organic” growth that arises from local distinctiveness.

Agglomeration is about letting cities be cities.

Assorted Portland tidbits

Portland Aerial Tram - image from joseph readdy on flickr

Portland Aerial Tram - image from joseph readdy on flickr

Ah, Portland.  Metropolis of planning, bicycling, and all things creative.  A couple of things have piled up in my open tabs or in my reader.

Portland hasn’t seen huge shifts in mode share (as noted here previously – hat tip to Jarrett Walker here and here), despite large investments in light rail, streetcars, and even an aerial tram.

Picture perfect? Aaron Renn penned an op-ed piece for the Oregonian, providing a little perspective about Portland’s image as the perfect planning city.  Renn doesn’t question Portland’s overall quality, just if the reputation is deserved or not – if the praise matches the performance.

Renn follows his op-ed with a blog post, delving deeper into the stats, comparing hip and cool Portland to the decidedly less cool Indianapolis.

I note as a positive that Portland was clearly ahead of other similar sized cities in understanding the importance of density, transit, bike lanes, etc. But more importantly, that the “Portland model” had a wide influence in America. Perhaps Portland has had a greater influence on America’s urban environments than any other city its relative size in history. That’s an amazing accomplishment if you think about it. And what’s more, that influence has been a good thing.Naturally, they don’t need me to just tell them “It’s all good”. So on the areas for development side I noted their underperforming economy. It’s not so much that Portland is particularly suffering in this recession, though it is, or that it is a failure in an absolute sense, which it is not. No, rather I look at it like diving. There are two aspects: execution and degree of difficulty. Portland has very low degree of difficulty, so we would expect it to perform much better.

Renn’s takeaway is that policy can only do so much.  That’s true, to some extent – policy sets the rules in place, and the dynamics of the city have to do the rest.  There are also factors well beyond any city’s (or any region’s) control.

Like any data set, it’s wise to look at the limitations of the data.

Putting the emphasis back on Portland’s transportation policies, Jarrett Walker looks at car ownership rates in cities across the US – and Portland doesn’t even crack the top 50.  (DC checks in at #4, with a 36.93% of households owning no cars – jurisdictions 1, 2, and 3 are all in Metropolitan NYC).  Walker identifies three criteria that correlate with high rates of non-auto households – age of the city’s fabric (with an anecdotal correlation to density and design), poverty, and presence of major universities.

So here’s the question:  How long will it take for a city that lacks age, poverty, or dominant universities to achieve the kind of low car ownership that these 50 demonstrate?  How soon, for example, will a city be able to create a combination of density, design, and mixture of uses that yields the same performance as an old city that naturally has those features?

Portland is probably the most promising such city in the US, and it’s not on the list.  Only 14% of households there don’t have a car, so it’s probably well down in the second 50.  Like many cities, Portland has been doing everything it can to build a dense mixed-use urban environment.  It’s the sort of city that convinces the Safeway supermarket chain to rebuild their store with townhouses and residential towers on top.  But while people are moving into the inner city, they don’t seem to be selling their cars when they do, nor do they seem to be going to work by transit.

For me, the takeaway from this is the long lag time and staying power of transportation infrastructure.  Even as older cities, built around walking and transit, have decayed, they remain more car-less than their fellow cities built with the car, to say nothing of cities built for the car.

I recall attending a lecture in grad school (and I cannot for the life of me remember who exactly gave it), noting the staying power of our street networks and other infrastructure patterns.  In short, land use changes on a big, extensive scale take a long time to happen.  Walker continues:

How much are zero-car households constrained by overly abundant residential parking?  It’s still hard to sell a modern tower unit without a parking space included, even though there are many such units in pre-car cities like Manhattan and San Francisco, and many are quite desirable.  What would it take to replicate that desirability in new inner cities like Portland’s?  Couldn’t it be done at least in the name of affordable housing?

All good questions to ask, even if only asked rhetorically.

Finally, some pretty pictures. Free Association Design has some great planning graphics from Portland.  Fun stuff to look at.

Portland's public realm. Image from the City of Portland

Portland's public realm. Image from the City of Portland

Portland's zoning code, graphically depicted w/ height limits and mixed uses (red shading).

Portland's zoning code, graphically depicted w/ height limits and mixed uses (red shading).

Good stuff.

Links – bad day for the Midwest

Soldier Field, US v. Honduras World Cup Qualifier, summer 2009. CC image from flickr

Soldier Field, US v. Honduras World Cup Qualifier, summer 2009. CC image from flickr

The US has narrowed their list of potential host cities for the US Soccer Federation’s bid to host either the 2018 or 2022 World Cup – and shockingly, that list does not include the Windy City.

The final cities are Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Denver, East Rutherford, N.J., Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, Tampa, Fla., and Washington.

“With Chicago, I think there was some Olympic fatigue,” Gulati said, referring to that city’s unsuccessful bid to host the Summer Games in 2016. “And in this group, Soldier Field was one of the smallest stadiums.”

Good news for DC – both FedEx Field and M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore made this cut, which almost assures the region of hosting some World Cup games should the US win the right to host. This list of 18 cities will be trimmed to a final list of 12 stadiums.

However, the exclusion of Chicago is baffling.  Chicago regularly hosts US World Cup qualifiers, Gold Cup matches, is home to an MLS team, and hosted many matches the last time the US hosted this event in 1994. Renovated Soldier Field is indeed small in terms of capacity, but this is Chicago we’re talking about here.

Only slightly less confusing is the exclusion of any stadia from the San Francisco Bay Area, but at least this can be explained by the poor quality of the extant stadiums in both SF and Oakland.  However, the San Francisco 49ers stand to get a new football stadium in the near future, certainly before 2022 rolls around.  Likewise, given Dan Snyder’s constantly rumored talks about wanting to build a new stadium for his micromanaged Redskins, DC could be looking at a new stadium, too.

Point being, 12 years is a long time from now.   Leaving off two of the US’s greatest cities from a bid that’s meant to showcase not just America’s stadiums and hosting abilities but the host cities as well is just inexplicable.

(advice to the USSF folks – it’s 106 miles to Chicago.  Hit it.)

Picture of Detroit Industry mural. CC image from flickr

Picture of 'Detroit Industry' mural. CC image from flickr

Detroit is another city that hosted World Cup matches in 1994, but was left of this bid’s list.  That obviously isn’t the focus of Detroit’s current issues.  Mammoth directs our attention to a piece by Bruce Katz on re-industrializing Detroit.  Katz looks to international precedents (Turin, Bilbao), addresses the need to Detroit to shrink and shift – even with re-development and re-industrialization, and the huge impact this might have on the shape of the city.

Obligatory DC connection:

Detroit has to change physically because it simply cannot sustain its current form. It was built for two million people, not the 900,000 that live there today. Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston could all fit within Detroit’s 139-square-mile boundary, and there would still be 20 square miles to spare. Even more than its European counterparts, which had much less severe population losses, Detroit will have to become a different kind of city, one that challenges our idea of what a city is supposed to look like, and what happens within its boundaries. The new Detroit might be a patchwork of newly dense neighborhoods, large and small urban gardens, art installations, and old factories transformed into adventure parks. The new Detroit could have a park, much like Washington’s Rock Creek Park, centered around a creek on its western edge, and a system of canals from the eastern corner of the city to Belle Isle in the south. The city has already started on the restoration of the Detroit River waterfront, largely bankrolled by private philanthropy. The city has created a new “land bank,” which can take control of vacant and derelict properties and start the process of clearing land, remediating environmental contamination, and figuring out what to do next with the parcel, whether that’s making it into a small park, deeding it to a neighbor to create a well-tended yard, or assembling large tracts of land for redevelopment or permanent green space.

Also from mammoth, Rob Holmes takes a peek at the massive scale of some new solar infrastructure, linking to this post on the sprawling SEGS facility in California – conveniently located next to the world’s largest boron mine for scale comparisons.

Similarly, the scale comparisons remind me of a video recently shared with me about mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia.  The video comes from Yale University’s Environment360. the 20 minute video is extraordinarily well shot and edited, and well worth a watch.  Given DC’s proximity to Appalachia and our (relative) reliance on coal power in this region, it’s definitely of interest to those of us in the Mid Atlantic region.

At a bare minimum, the images in the video alone are worth a watch.

When I think of tools for urban living, GMC trucks aren’t the first thing that come to my mind.  I guess using that kind of comparison is like saying a jackhammer is a tool for hanging picture frames around the house.

Portland hasn’t seen big shifts in travel modes recently, as Jarrett Walker notes.  However, Jarrett and a few of his trusty commenters seem to have a bead on to the potential cause – relatively cheap parking.

In other recent work we’ve been doing, we’ve repeatedly seen that parking price is the most powerful locally-controlled lever for shifting people out of single-occupant cars, in the absence of more direct congestion charges.  Increases in parking costs drive big shifts to transit or other options.

In my experience working on various transportation demand management programs, this is absolutely true.  Since TDM programs do not usually have the scope to implement congestion pricing, parking pricing is the single biggest contributor to mode shifts.