That thing called “Parking”
[This is a compilation of six (6) articles I wrote in “The Freeman” between October 29, 2019 to January 7, 2020, on the topic of car parking]
Parking — an unknown quantity
(published in The Freeman on October 29, 2019)
There’s an interesting piece of news that cropped up over the weekend, about the Cebu City Council wanting to “monitor off-street pay parking.” I say, it’s about time. But it should not just be to monitor and implement that particular 2006 ordinance, but rather to review and update it as well. 2006 is already 16 years ago, and prices have already gone up by more than 50% since then. Maybe, the august body can also review whether the prescribed fees are still relevant, or even if these are justifiable at all!
I believe there is a need for such review in order to make the ordinance up-to-date as well as to ascertain whether it’s good or proper policy. On one hand, while the law tries to protect the consumer — in this case, the car owner or car driver, wouldn’t it be a case of selective protection, or even class legislation. True, it applies to all types of vehicles but more than 90% of those parking in off-street parking spaces are private cars. And it has no bearing at all to the 80% of citizens who do not own cars.
Of course, there are establishments that offer, “free” off-street parking — the department stores and the malls, for example, but even many of them collect parking fees, too. They have to do this because the construction of parking facilities costs a huge amount of money, making parking a form of economic goods, the cost of which needs to be recovered. If building owners can’t recover their investments for parking from fees, they’ll recover it somewhere else! There is no such thing as free parking — it has equivalent costs. And if off-street parking providers want to recover their investment, they should be allowed to do so without unreasonable restrictions. Otherwise, they will recover it somewhere else!
And who shoulders these parking investment costs? Those who don’t park at all! I have penned an opinion piece about this online at Medium.com, with the title “Why free parking is anti-poor …” and boy, did I get a lot of questions from friends. You can read the whole article here. But the cost and who pays is just a small part of it. Parking is a whole lot of a social issue that affects our lives, especially because we are complaining about a “traffic crisis.” Mayor Enrique Peñalosa of Bogota, Colombia, summed it all in his statement:
“The only way to solve traffic jams is to restrict car use. And the most obvious way of restricting car use is restricting parking.” (Enrique Peñalosa)
Parking needs to be thoroughly discussed — we’re just at the tip of the iceberg here. Think of this — “Cars are parked 95% of the time!” Many of us don’t know that, do we? Or how about this — “There is about four times the number of parking spaces as there are the number of registered cars in a city, but probably more than that.” We need to study these numbers carefully if we want to have a better parking policy.
Private cars are parked 90% of the time!
(published in the Freeman on November 5, 2019)
We always take it for granted that parking is a necessity. We often forget “for whom” it is necessary; that more than four out of five Filipinos don’t own cars, and to whom parking is irrelevant. But even for those benefited, almost nobody thinks what a waste parking is to our economy. We are always concerned about traffic congestion and the stress it does to our daily lives. And we shout figures of the “billions of pesos” we lose due to traffic.
The main cause of traffic congestion are cars on the ‘limited’ road space. The “economic loss” due to traffic is measured in wasted economic productivity of each person lost while stuck in traffic. Thus, those “billions” we speak of, do not necessarily disappear if we solve the “traffic” problem, traffic solutions only alleviate traffic, not eliminate them. No matter how much roads and traffic infrastructure we build, there will always be travel time, albeit on a reduced magnitude, so there will still be billions lost to traffic. We’d be lucky if we decrease it by 10% and it will readily return over time as people, the economy, and trips increase. The better solution is public mass transportation.
That’s for the one hour you spend on traffic in going to work, and the other hour returning home, if we assume that. So, where’s your car in the remaining 22 hours? Of course, parked! Whether you’re at home, in the workplace or somewhere else, for as long as you’re not on the road, the car is parked! So, what’s 22 hours out of 24? That’s 91.67%! If you daily ride to work is less than two hours total, it means your car is parked even more! On a weekday, probably more on weekends. Studies suggests this figure is 92% of the time and typically about 96% of the time. And occupying sizable space which does not produce any economic value at all. The problem is, nobody is calculating the “billions of pesos” our economy is losing per day from idle unproductive parking space.
The irony is, we try to protect parking. We even try to suppress its worth by making it free, or passing laws to make it cheap. Our private cars are used only 5% of the time, the remaining 95% of which it locks humongous space from unproductive use. This is the unsung beauty of public transportation. Not only is it cheaper, more efficient, more inclusive, less carbon-emitting, it frees economic space for productive use! And that’s not insignificant, it’s a lot! Much more than you can think of.
Number of parking spaces outnumber number of cars
(published in the Freeman on November 12, 2019)
Cars occupy parking spaces, whether at home or work or anywhere else, 95% of the time. That translates to a lot of unproductive space! What is the extent of the space wasted?
Let’s do some mental calisthenics before we look at some previous major findings. First, a car requires at least two parking spaces — at home and at work. But that presupposes that you only go from home to work and back and nowhere else! We all know that’s not true. We go to malls and markets, we visit other people, we go to the movies, dine, run errands, do other official activities, buy medicine, visit your girlfriend or boyfriend, and a whole lot of other activities. If you do this by car, you need a parking space. In each!
Okay, in many of these, the parking is shared — meaning, it’s for the public, for everybody, who comes and goes at different times. The parking space doesn’t have your name on it. Still, these spaces get to be provided and when they are, they’re there for 24 hours, used or not. Malls, for example have lots, but these are empty until they open at 10 a.m. And they usually don’t get full until late in the afternoon when people go there after work. Most are used only on working hours or when stores are open, empty the rest of the time. That’s why building and parking codes stipulate “minimums,” estimated to serve the possible maximum demand, but which is not needed most of the time. Meaning empty.
Parking spaces maybe categorized as on-street, home, surface, or structure, the last three required by codes. Unfortunately, I have not yet encountered any study which approximates how many parking spaces a city has — not in the Philippines. But it’s constantly growing! — every time a new building is constructed, “parking minimums” are added. Maybe our cities should start counting. They do in the US, with startling results! Using structured assumptions based on parking minimums, pay-parking and design manuals, it was estimates that there are at least 3.4 parking spaces per registered vehicle in the US, rising to 4 in cities. If all other unspecified spaces are included, this figure rises to 8 to 10, considered the upper limit. Since we have more “illegal parking” in the Philippines, we can conclude we have between 4 to 8 parking spaces per registered car.
If we have 500,000 cars, we probably have 2 million to 4 million parking spaces in Cebu. And by the looks of it, that’s not even enough because everybody’s complaining about parking! And don’t we ever forget — this problem is the concern of only less than 20% of our people, and not of the majority.
Talk about democracy and equality.
Parking Minimums
(published in the Freeman on November 19, 2019)
But how did we come to construct all these parking spaces? The answer is in the phrase “parking minimums.” When you apply for a locational clearance and a building permit, the first requirement that is asked is if you have sufficient parking. But how do we know how much is enough parking? Easy enough — the National Building Code (NBC), and the Zoning Ordinance and/or the Parking Ordinance (the latter usually included in the former) specifies these. Ask anybody who has ever applied for building permits in City Hall.
But where did these figures came from? Strangely enough, we don’t know. Almost always these are universal figures, customized to fit local situations. We copy from other cities and countries who probably copy from other cities and countries, and who most probably copied from the US or the UK, where most standards in the West originated. Same with our NBC. So, we require so many parking spaces depending on the use of the building or floor — residential, commercial, hospital, restaurant, factory, etc.
The problem is, it’s too general. Take for example schools — it requires so many parking spaces as number of classrooms. Or it may be the number of students. Or area of the floor or building. A hospital will be pegged on the number of beds; hotels half a space for each guestroom, not including the other areas, for example. Fairly straightforward. And rigid. It doesn’t take into account the peculiarities of each individual situation.
For example, without naming schools in Cebu, you will find some with empty parking spaces, while other are fully packed with a lot of cars parked outside, oftentimes illegally. And the reason is simply — some schools are for the rich and others cater to the less-privileged. But they are required the same standard of parking requirement. Same as hospitals, there are some where the rich go, all of them by car, often in more than one. But public hospitals cater to the poor who don’t have cars! But these building have the same parking requirements.
And since we always require new buildings with minimum parking slots, the inventory of parking spaces always increases as the city grows, regardless of whether the number of cars increase. Which they always do, too, due to the utter lack of car ownership regulations in the Philippines. And so, both the car, and its parking spaces, are racing against each other on which will grow faster! And you complain about parking?
Parking Minimums — where did these come from?
(published in the Freeman on November 26, 2019)
“Parking minimums,” are demanded from all building owners or property developers before a “permit” is given for them to start. These requirements are usually enshrined in state building codes and city zoning ordinances, in our case, the National Building Code of the Philippines. This is always a point of contention between “permiters” and “permitees,” and oftentimes a source of corruption. Of course, as we have stated in previous articles, parking spaces cost a lot and takes a major portion of the total cost of a building or development, which owners and developers hate as these eat up their profits.
Parking minimums started not without any sense. As automobiles started running at the start of the last century, they needed to park, too. In fact, as we have stated in our previous write-ups, these cars are parked 95% of the time. Where should they park? Aha! Both the homeowner and the places and buildings where they go should provide them. Otherwise, they will just park on the streets. Which will eventually result in traffic congestion. So, cities in the US and Europe came up with “minimum requirements” for parking.
Engineers and architects are too familiar with these ultimatums: For office, residential and recreational buildings: At least one parking slot for every 100 square meters of Gross Floor Area (GFA). Restaurants: At least 3.3 parking slots for every 100 square meters of GFA. Buildings for educational use: One parking slot for every three classrooms. For hospitals: One parking slot for every 12 beds. The list is long but quite similar among countries and cities; sometimes general, other times very detailed. It’s always based on something — area, persons, rooms, beds, etc. One use we have not come across though — funeral homes — how do we define the minimum? The number of caskets? Or maybe the number of rooms used for wakes.
It all seems very logical but at a closer look, may not be. For example, one parking slot for every 12 hospital beds — does it mean only one patient for every 12 gets there by car? Maybe so if we assume most of them were carried by ambulance. But what about the visitors? We assume only one of every 12 visitors go there by car? That does not include the doctors and other hospital personnel who might or might not go there by car — there are the people who park the whole of eight hours. Same goes for schools.
Maybe somebody can, but we have tried our best to look for previous studies upon which these “parking minimums” were based, but couldn’t find any. Maybe you could. In all probability, we have these because we copied from somebody else, assuming somewhere back there, perfectly good research was made. But today, more and more cities are abandoning parking minimums already. Most of them are in the US, San Francisco is one of the latest that did. They’re the first ones to realize and act on it because they’re the first who became a car-centric society in the first place.
Eliminating Parking Minimums
(published on The Freeman on December 3, 2019)
It is not yet widely known, especially in Philippine cities, and I doubt if there is already a city in the country which is seriously reviewing the concept of Parking Minimums. But in the United States, surprisingly, or maybe it is simply inevitable, many of their cities had already done so, and some already dismissed, or at least rationalized, their parking minimums. We wrote last week that San Francisco is one of the latest that did, last December 2018. Austin, Texas, is eyeing this year to end their parking minimums.
Buffalo, New York, was the first major city in the US to completely remove outdated minimum parking requirements. Berlin already did that in the 1990’s. Surprisingly, Auckland has also eliminated most of its minimum parking requirements, even if it’s supposed to be a car-centric city, too (both New Zealand and Australia are, running after the US). Not to be outdone, Mexico City initiated city-wide reforms, which not only eliminated parking minimums but turned them into maximums instead. Not only that but they offer a financial incentive in the form of a fee, to encourage developers to build less than what the maximums allowed.
What’s wrong with parking minimums? The most visible would be that they fill our cities with empty, useless space. Even if we reason that they do provide space for our cars, that’s something we could have done without is we took public transport. Or walk or bike. And that’s space imposed, set aside to park cars at times we are not using them, which is 95% of the time. Ayala Mall has four floors with three basements full of cars. In many buildings where there are no basements, the land area around it used for parking is oftentimes larger than the footprint of the building itself. Every three square meters of space devoted to economic production require around one square meter of parking pursuant to our existing building code.
Parking minimums also hinder homeowners, renters, developers, and business owners from further productivity. How many small businesses have extra space which could have been used for more sales but can’t because they cannot have parking needed? Furthermore, these deplete the city of financial productivity and prosperity. When land or floor space is used for parking, there is a foregone tax involved because parking is not taxed as much, and they could have fetched far more productivity in business revenues if not used to park cars, and which is commensurate to increases in business taxes.
A lot of cities elsewhere are seriously evaluating their “parking minimums” policies. But going beyond that, many of them are studying replacing them with “parking maximums” instead. That’s a revolutionary idea, but city after city are studying these now (not in the Philippines, though). Progressive cities in the world are rethinking these pre-set ideas about parking. After all, how many times has anyone, even here, thought about going somewhere but decided not to because “there is no parking there!” Aha! So, it does influence trip generation!
The fear of abolishing Parking Minimums
(published on The Freeman on January 7, 2020)
To this date, most countries in the world have parking minimums in their building codes and most cities will also have the same in their zoning ordinances. People accept the idea intuitively, simply because the lifestyle and societal norms we have in this 21st century presumes that cars are a necessary part of life. This has permeated human consciousness to a point that even non-car owners believe the thought, even if they constitute more than 80% of the population and parking is a non-issue to them.
We have written about parking minimums in the last few months, and there is a worldwide movement and advocacy to remove them which is gaining ground. In fact, quite a number of cities have already done so, notably (and surprisingly) in the US where the practice is assumed to have originated although countries in the west have similar codes. In the US, parking minimums emerged at the height of the “American Dream” decades there when everyone’s goal was to have a comfortable house in the suburbs, among neighbors similarly-situated as to economic status, the scene you often see in Hollywood movies. The low-density, far-from-the-center residences forced the need for cars.
The questions often asked by those who fear the taking away of parking minimums is the possibility of a shortage of on-site parking and the succeeding problems that may ensue. That is somewhat valid, of course, but it fails to capture the realities we already stated before that parking minimums were crafted on full-need assumptions and were standardized across land and floor uses which are widely varied, resulting in wasted space. The use and need of parking are very dependent on specific cases and this often sends developers and residents grumbling over unnecessary regulated space. Eliminating parking minimums does not mean eliminating parking. It means making developer and residents make the determination on whether or not they need parking and how much parking space they need. For some, they may need more than what was required under previously-coded parking minimums. But for many, they may not need any space at all and thus, can opt not to have/build one. This also takes care of the diversity of need among and within various land and floor uses.
Removing parking minimums can also result to redistribution of parking provisions over a larger area instead of on a per-building basis, and will encourage area-wide parking lots and buildings, which is more efficient. But advocates really zero in on the best positive desired result, which is to reduce parking demand, and ultimately, reduce car use. Former Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa often says, “The only way to solve the traffic jams is to restrict car use, and the most obvious way of restricting car use is restricting parking.” Doing away with parking minimums may not fully achieve that, but it is a first step of reducing unnecessary parking space, and will free up space for economic use as well. Not to mention having a more livable space.
