Watch the video of Parking 101: Transportation Enhancement Districts and Beyond, a special roundtable co-hosted by MPC and the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
c*(f+nv)=t(m-p)
- The parking equilibrium equation presented by Prof. Donald Shoup,
Department of Urban Planning, University of California, Los Angeles
At a June 5 roundtable co-hosted
by the Metropolitan Planning Council and Chicago Architecture Foundation, a
panel of experts described the challenges of solving this equation for their
communities. Dr. Rachel Weinberger, professor at PennDesign at the
University
of
Pennsylvania
and former
private industry expert, Ald. Margaret Laurino (39
th
Ward), and Ald.
Toni Preckwinkle (4
th
Ward) discussed practical ways to create great
neighborhood retail centers by managing parking demand.
More and more successful cities
and towns have given up on trying to accommodate more demand for driving by
building more highways, widening streets, and increasing parking supply. They’ve
learned that building more room for driving just fills up with even more cars,
which leaves the city or town back at square one. So they’re taking a different
tack and developing ways to manage demand for driving while still increasing the
number of people shopping in their retail districts. After all, though the
transportation engineering industry does not require or even encourage keeping
statistics on this, most successful urban retail districts already have a solid
base of people walking, biking, taking cabs, and taking the train or bus to the
area. And their desire to shop at the retail district more often is directly
impacted by the quality of their experience. You don’t need an equation to
figure out that sidewalks that have been slashed with curb cuts and parking lots
to accommodate more parking decreases foot traffic.
Dr. Weinberger kicked off the
event by dispelling many of the myths about parking demand. She noted that
communities have been lamenting the perceived parking shortage since the early
20
th
Century. Dr. Weinberger, who has worked on a variety of parking
management projects for the public and private sector, emphasized that
communities that focus solely on increasing parking will likely fail to act in
the best interest of promoting local economic development and quality of life.
Communities that focus on maximizing access, however – whether it be in the form
of people walking, taking the bus, biking, driving, taking the train, or
arriving by cab – are likely to create the foot traffic that boosts local sales
and makes the shopping area lively and inviting. Maximizing access requires
prioritizing the most efficient travel options, like walking, over the most
destructive, and then managing demand for those options that are most likely to
have a negative impact on the shopping area and actively increasing options that
will have a positive impact.
Ald. Laurino and
Ald. Preckwinkle, both of whom have been leaders in considering the implementation
of Transportation Enhancement Districts
in
Chicago, discussed the practical local
challenges of managing parking demand while boosting overall access to the
shopping area. Transportation Enhancement Districts (TEDs) maximize parking
availability by setting the price of on-street parking to a level that ensures
there is always a space available, and then returning the additional revenue
from the meters to the local community to use for improving access to the
district.
After their remarks, the
panelists had a lively discussion with the audience about the impact of looming
transit service cuts and other practical issues on the feasibility of
implementing Transportation Enhancement Districts and other parking management
tools in the
Chicago
region.
Watch the video of Parking
101
, courtesy of CAN-TV.
Learn more about Transportation
Enhancement Districts
.
View a diagram of the cycle of car-oriented
development
.
View a diagram of the cycle of people-oriented
development
.
This
roundtable was generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts.