There are many other important factors then simply the emissions of a car. As Matt points out these vehicles still take up space, meaning more pavement instead of natural foliage. Also, parking means more construction for garages and the like, which also causes environmental degredation.

Also keep in mind that people have realized the detrimental effects of cars before the environmental movement really took off. Read some Lewis Mumford or Jane Jacobs who wrote about the problem with cars in the early 60’s. Car culture promotes unhealthy citizens, more dangerous neighborhoods (from car accidents and fewer eyes on the street) and in general a less coherent community indentity, which means neighborhoods lack the ability to effectively vocalize their needs and wants.

Required parking spaces are directly relevant to the transit service in the neighborhood. Frequent transit that goes to useful places (not just express buses to/from downtown, but to local business/services) allows you to remove or reduce parking requirements. Infrequent transit service requires a higher parking requirement.

This incentivizes all monied parties involved to both build on transit routes and create more transit routes.

On a slightly different note, what if the next billion we put into alt energy creates a workable, affordable ZEV? There is essentially no important environmental impact to such a vehicle, removing that argument from the conversation about parking spaces and mass transit.

Where will we park all those things?

Just an interesting question I was posed from a scientist I know who believes we’re very close to such a breakthrough…

I also like the potential of this relaxation of parking requirements in SF neighborhoods. Promoting affordability in both the rental market and ownership market, increasing population densities, and promoting car light living in Seattle’s many SF neighborhoods. Wow, all with just one, albeit controversial, action.

Right now, the main impediment to converting a garage to a mother-in-law apartment is the off-street parking requirement (the city requires one off-street space for the apartment and one for the house, IIRC). If we could relax the off-street requirement, we’d probably get a decent amount of affordable housing (while the payments could help homeowners pay increasingly unaffordable mortgages). As Tony points out, most SF neighborhoods have plenty of parking available (and I suspect the folks living in converted garages are less likely to own cars than the population at large). This seems like a no-brainer. Is there really that much parking fear out there?

Anyway, I like the centralized parking idea above, but garages are expensive to build and tacking on true cost may take rents past equilibrium. Now we are back to incentives or abatement or something, and here we are again subsidizing the automobile.

It seems bizarre to me, as dan alluded to that we have removed parking requirements in the one place where parking is actually already scarce: the urban centers. In reality, it seems like the most obvious place to remove parking requirements would be single family zones. The density is so low in SF zones that there’s usually enough street frontage for each house to park two cars on the street. SF zones are the one place where you actually don’t need any off-street parking. Same principle applies as above: take the $40,000 you would have spent adding on a two-car garage and get an extra 800 square feet of house, or just lop it off and pocket the difference. Initially, developers will still build with parking out of habit, but over time the market will adapt once you get these counterproductive policies out of the way.

Of course, if I had my way, I’d push the market along, but in the absence of good policy, no policy is better than bad policy.

This means that if a project costs $25 million, then it needs to generate about $2.5 million in revenue per year, or about $100,000 per month ($25 million / 10 yrs / 12 months per year).

Now let’s take this math down to the individual parking space level. If the cost of a single underground parking space is $40,000 as Dan suggests, then that parking space must command $333 per month, every month in order to pay for itself.

Joshua is right, developers and property managers don’t look at costs, they look at market rents. If the market is only willing to tolerate a $75 premium for a parking space, then the decision to bundle the parking space amounts to a $258 net loss per month. This presents a huge arbitrage opportunity. If people only value parking at $75, the developer could drop the price by $75, not include the parking and still rent the space, but by doing so, the developer would save $333 dollars per month. Thus they could earn supernormal profits of $258 per month per apartment.

If this were true, and I suspect it is, then eventually, some developer is going to figure it out and start making a killing on no-parking apartments and condos. Once a few demonstration projects happen, others will follow.

Joshua’s analysis leaves out the issue of a downward sloping demand curve. The market may only commands a premium of $75 per space AT A PARKING RATIO OF 1:1. That is, you have to cut the rate to $75 if you want everyone to buy one. The $75 represents the premium placed on parking by the marginal user, i.e. the person who values parking the very least in the building. Push the price to $80 and that one guy won’t buy it, but everyone else will. Push the price to $400, and I’m guessing that at least half the people in the building won’t buy, but the other half will. Thus, if you put a $400 premium on the space, people will pay and you will sell all the spaces if you build half as many spaces. The more scarce the resource, the higher the price.

It costs what it costs, and any time you have a price that diverges from the true cost, you’re burning money.

If supply were better matched to demand, you would have a win-win situation, the cost savings would go to the developers who make higher profits in the short run, but then the surplus would be transferred to consumers in the long run as competition drives down prices.

Now that government interference in the form of parking requirements has been removed, I suspect that the decoupling will happen slowly over time via market forces. I suggested that we mandate the decoupling simply to accelerate the process and avoid the construction of more and more inefficiently over-parked buildings while the market slowly comes around.