Earlier this month, parking reform icon Donald Shoup passed away. Donald Shoup was a professor emeritus at UCLA’s urban planning department. He was the author of the transformative book The High Cost of Free Parking, which brought attention to the many ways that free parking harms the economy of a city. This free parking often stemmed from zoning codes, where mandatory minimums were set that required many or all new developments to have a certain minimum of parking spaces.
At the time of publishing, minimum parking mandates were much more common. The minimum parking required in these mandates were often arbitrary or based in pseudoscience. One of the best examples in the linked piece is San Jose’s requirement for bowling alleys: each lane must have seven parking spots. Why? It is not really specified, of course, but a lot of zoning codes basically assume that every resident in their city is driving individually to every place they go on a daily basis. This results in a land-use pattern where parking lots are often bigger than the buildings they are meant to serve.
Shoup writes extensively about how free parking, underpriced parking, and parking mandates can harm a city. When pricing is low despite high demand, drivers will end up circling the same block over and over looking for street parking, creating more pollution. Parking minimums also make development more expensive, as valuable urban land has to be utilized to store cars rather than people; one underground parking spot in a city can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The mandates and increased costs also make it to where those who do not drive effectively subsidize those who do via parking. The non-driver will have to pay higher rent to offset the costs of parking at their apartment, or may have to pay more in taxes to cover the funding gap caused by underpriced parking. There is much more information in Shoup’s book; he also gave a talk in Louisville for CNU in 2019 that is worth checking out.
The excess of parking that forms as a result of mandates can affect people’s health as well. Surface lots are one of the primary contributors to the urban heat island effect. Urban heat islands have been shown to increase mortality and exacerbate extreme heat events, which will become more common as global temperatures warm. These same lots also have a tendency to worsen flooding, which will also become more common with climate change. Excess parking has also been shown to incentivize driving, which increases greenhouse gas emissions that you may end up breathing in.
In Louisville’s case, we no longer have parking requirements in downtown and urban neighborhood center districts. Downtown’s form district encompasses the central business district, LOUMED, and parts of Russell, NuLu, Limerick, and Butchertown. The urban neighborhood center districts don’t exist yet, they are supposed to be added as new districts in the form code at some point, and would likely encompass portions of downtown-adjacent neighborhoods such as NuLu, Phoenix Hill, Portland, Butchertown, and so on. There are a variety of exceptions and waivers you can use to get around parking requirements, but everywhere outside of downtown still has parking requirements in Louisville.
It is also pretty rare for Louisville to have the on-street parking problems that are common in cities like New York, where overcrowding is caused by low prices. Parking requirements and urban renewal have created large swathes of surface parking that are common across the entire county. Given this, what neighborhoods in Louisville have the most off-street parking? What neighborhoods have the most area dedicated to cars generally (parking + roads)? The app below utilizes parking and road data to answer these questions based on neighborhood boundaries from the Kentucky State Data Center. The percentages are actually low-end numbers as they do not include parking structures, which may up the percentage numbers of urban neighborhoods slightly.
For mobile viewing, open the map in a separate window.
There is not a separate app for it, but I thought it would be interesting to look at the percentage of area dedicated to parking based off form district. The requirements for parking vary depending on the form district, so that would presumably manifest here. Below is a table of % parking by form district.
The form districts with the most parking go hand-in-hand with many of the neighborhoods that have the most parking. Suburban neighborhoods with large commercial corridors tend to be the most parking-intensive, as many of these areas have commercial strips where parking area exceeds building area. These areas tend to be suburban marketplace corridors, regional centers, town centers, etc. Despite the general trend, some urban neighborhoods such as SoBro are filled with parking. SoBro has more parking relative to its size than commercialized suburban areas such as Saint Matthews. Downtown itself also ranks at 16th out of 148 neighborhoods, despite recent changes to its form code, although it will take a long time to address the wide array of surface lots.
Despite the high presence of parking in Louisville, there are signs we are generally moving in the right direction. Some developments are starting to take place on some of these underutilized surface lots such as Motorworks Apartment on Broadway. Louisville’s tree canopy is growing, which will help to curb the urban heat island. The city is also on a long path to reform its parking requirements, starting with downtown and areas within the urban service district.
Donald Shoup has a lot of recommended reforms related to parking, but three of the big ones would be to appropriately price metered on-street parking so that there are about one or two spots open per block face, spend parking revenue to improve metered streets, and to remove off-street parking requirements. A full list of his suggested reforms and changes can be found here. Louisville rarely has the problem of block faces being filled up, so Shoup might’ve recommend some kind of demand based pricing. PARC already functions as a sort of development engine, so you could argue they are fulfilling the second listed reform to some extent. Off-street parking requirements are being lessened in Louisville, but we have not yet committed fully as has been done in cities like Lexington. As the moratorium on changes to the land development code comes to a close this year, maybe we will see more of Shoup’s suggestions implemented.
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