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People versus Parking

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By Brian Ulaszewski

 | Monday, 09 January 2012 03:43

9:30am | A few years ago my automobile was towed to the municipal yard for impound after I had received a series of street-sweeping-related parking tickets. From then on, except for rare occasions when I had to drive to a meeting, I left my car at the office, since I had been walking to work most of time, anyway.

While sitting at my desk one day I received a call from the parking management for the office building where I work. After confirming the license plate number, make, and model of my car they asked me, “You do know that you are not allowed to park your car overnight in the structure?” “Why not?” I inquired. “The garage is empty every night. How about I stop parking overnight when it starts impacting your capacity?” My office pays monthly rent to store our cars in the garage; I saw little difference in parking overnight versus during work hours, especially so when it was empty. After continuing the battle between logic and their rules, they said that a supervisor would call back. Though the supervisor never called, it became my entrance into the war on parking.

This campaign is not against parking itself, but the relentless zombie horde of inflexible parking regulations dictating one-size-fits-all solutions and the culture of convenience, where a parking stall must be in front of every desired destination. To this day the unstoppable combination of the two has wasted resources, erased built history, and caused the loss of vibrancy in residential neighborhoods and commercial districts. According to a 2007 Federal Department of Transportation study, there are over 250 million registered private automobiles in the United States, but studies by various academics and government agencies estimate that there are as many as 2 billion parking stalls in the United States.

A recent New York Times article estimated that up to a third of American cities are paved for parking lots. During a lecture about parking in downtown commercial districts, Ventura’s City Manager Rick Cole poignantly stated that, “With such a surplus of available parking, a car will never go homeless.” The struggle is for smarter parking guidelines and our collective willingness to walk a block or two from our car to our destination. Together these provide greater flexibility to create places for people, not cars.

The article goes onto describe a familiar history, as Pensacola, Florida, tore down its urban fabric of historic structures in the downtown to create convenient parking lots in an effort to compete with shopping malls emerging in the suburbs. Instead, the vast empty fields of parking sucked the remaining life from the downtown — just as it has in Long Beach. Today, one must walk past blocks of near empty parking lots and structures between the core of Downtown Long Beach and surrounding neighborhoods.

Following the lead of communities like Portland, San Diego, and Seattle, Long Beach seeks to recapture these asphalt deserts for people with the adoption of the Downtown Plan. Current zoning standards have resulted in large developments whose core design principle was most often based around parking provisions. Walking along Seaside Way past thousands of empty parking stalls in the Aqua Towers, Harbor View apartments, and Pike makes one wonder how much nicer the experience would have been if priorities were slightly different.

The new zoning documents revise parking standards to provide greater flexibility for infill development and adaptive reuse of existing structures, making smaller, context-sensitive projects much more feasible. Instead of seeing blocks of parking garages like those on First Street, new development would be required to line the sidewalk with positive uses like shops, lobbies, and residential stoops. Despite the limitations of any zoning document (as I wrote about here), there could be a significant rebalancing of priorities to create a more vibrant downtown.

Long Beach is also engaging an insurgent campaign against the vast amounts of public domain used for storing cars. Community organizations, individuals, and even the mischievous city staffer participate in the global, one-day event Park(ing) Day, as temporary parks were installed across the city in parking stalls. This past year saw a dozen mini-parks established across the city with book fares, outdoor dining, concerts, and public outreach occupying spaces once meant only for cars.

Some of these are becoming more permanent as Long Beach experiments with the parklet phenomenon, as three temporary sidewalk plazas are being built along Fourth Street in Retro Row and the East Village. Local favorite restaurants Berlin Cafe , Number Nine Noodles, and Lola’s Mexican Cuisine will construct wooden decks that expand their outdoor dining without impeding pedestrian traffic on these narrow sidewalks. While losing fewer than a half-dozen (total) of their most convenient parking stalls, the business-owners and local associations have deemed the benefit to their respective business and overall pedestrian experience well worth the trade.

Not all are zero-sum equations of parking versus people, as is evident from the new affordable-housing development Pine Crest in Central Long Beach. This partnership between the City of Long Beach and Jamboree Housing Company combines three multi-family properties to create a single community, rehabilitating the existing structures and improving the overall site. Removing existing driveways, converting an existing apartment back into a garage (a previously illegal unit conversion), and better use of land will net more parking for the neighborhood, while increasing available open space for new residents ten-fold.

The march towards balancing the priorities of parking and people will require flexibility from our regulation and culture. People are willing to walk a few blocks on Second Street in Belmont Shore from car to destination(s), while ever more of us are willing to ride our bikes or public transit. Despite the commercial district having far fewer parking stalls than required by zoning code, the Belmont Shore area is successful because of the experience. Instead of walking past parking lots, shoppers and diners stroll past shops and sidewalk dining filled with people.

Whether it’s through regulations like the Downtown Plan or insurgent action like Park(ing) Day and parklets, the tide can be turned so that we are parking smarter and creating more vibrant places.