Parking Best parking regulations in the world?

[EsquireHare]

Parking spaces have become a luxury over the last few years due to the increase in the number of cars and vehicles. Mass transport system is not exactly a good alternative as driving one's own car is still more convenient especially in 3rd world countries.

Which places in the world do you think have the best parking regulations?

 

[Faust_Motel]

The ones that don't regulate parking at all (maybe beyond access for people with disabilities). Otherwise, the ones that charge closest to market price for the private use of such valuable public space.

 

[EsquireHare]

The ones that don't regulate parking at all (maybe beyond access for people with disabilities).

You mean places where establishments are allowed to reserve parking spaces for their customers?

 

[DVD]

Not much I can say on this topic. I live in the Phoenix metro so parking isn't really a problem. We just have parking meters and parking garages downtown. We're getting better at transit though with light rail expanding to actual serve the population that needs it.

 

[Dan]

The ones that don't regulate parking at all (maybe beyond access for people with disabilities). Otherwise, the ones that charge closest to market price for the private use of such valuable public space.

You can regulate parking without having minimum space requirements.

• Pavement / surface.
• Curbing / edging.
• Landscaping.
• Screening.
• Buffering.
• Parking space size.
• Drive aisle width.
• Entry/exit stacking length.
• Slope.
• Access management: limits on the number and width of curb cuts.
• Pedestrian walkways / connectivity.
• Stormwater management.
• Ease of access to loading areas, dumpster enclosures, and so on.
• Siting in relation to a principal building, lot lines, etc.
• Electric vehicle charging facilities or provisions for future chargers.
• Prohibit continuous curb cuts, configuration that requires backing out, tandem self-parking, etc.
• Prohibit parking on surfaces not built specifically for parking.

I'm not a fan of parking requirements with minimum space requirements, based on an overly granular list of uses. I think it's one reason why multi-tenant shopping centers have too much parking -- developers look at local zoning, find the commercial use that requires the most parking, and assume that for every tenant just to be on the safe side. If you must have minimum space requirements, keep the list of uses short and simple -- residential, office, retail, industrial/warehouse, school, place of worship and assembly.

 

[Faust_Motel]

You mean places where establishments are allowed to reserve parking spaces for their customers?

Two different things: there's how you regulate publicly-owned parking, like street parking and municipal lots. For that sort of parking, I'd say go the Donald Shoup way and market price it. But as a planner, a lot of "parking regulation" I deal with has to do with requiring a certain amount of parking for certain uses on new sites. I wouldn't recommend requiring a set amount of parking in most cases. The performance standards Dan lists are more than sufficient.

 

[EsquireHare]

^^I was thinking with the perspective of what will benefit the motorist the most. I feel like establishments here reserve parking spaces for their customers too much. Doesn't make sense to me since they could charge parking fees if they want to, ultimately benefiting them still...

 

[Faust_Motel]

To that end, not requiring minimum amount of parking for uses makes sense- in other words, encourage private lot owners to rent spaces out when their customers are not using them. The city around the corner from me does that, so a lot of office parking is available to shoppers on the weekends, for example. No reason to have a bank parking lot be empty on a Saturday night when the bank is closed and someone else needs (and is willing to pay for) the space.

I do have one situation in the place I work for where one tenant in a huge multiuse project got rights to reserve parking for their customers- in a really primo spot. That tenant is a movie theater, so those prime spots get used by theater-goers for usually at least 2 hours at a time (sometimes the owner has his employees park there for the duration of their 6-8 hour shifts, just to make sure nobody else gets to use the spaces). Those spaces could otherwise probably turn 4-8 retail shoppers in the time one movie-goer uses the space. Super inefficient.

 

[Planit]

In our area, we found that places were building much more parking than required. We found excessive unused parking/impervious land cover, & runoff. In that place we enacted a maximum parking number to be 1-5% of the minimum required, if a development want more than that, they had to make those spaces over the 105% permeable.

It's been 5 years since I left there and it still seems to working nicely.

 

[EsquireHare]

It appears to me that America has plenty of spaces! Is it the same with metropolitan cities such as LA, NY, SF?

Here in our city, parking spaces are few. :|

 

[Dan]

^^I was thinking with the perspective of what will benefit the motorist the most. I feel like establishments here reserve parking spaces for their customers too much. Doesn't make sense to me since they could charge parking fees if they want to, ultimately benefiting them still...

For on-street parking, check out The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup. You don't even need to buy the book; there's enough information online about the concepts in the book. Basically, on-street parking is a valuable public good, and in areas of high demand, it should be managed wisely. in busy neighborhoods, on-street parking rates should be high enough to leave 15% to 20% of space vacant. Rates should be lower further away from high demand locations, but still high enough to have some vacant spaces, so drivers don't add to traffic congestion by cruising for parking. Revenue from on-street parking should be directed to visible streetscape improvements, so parkng fees don't feel like a tax or money grab.

For off-street parking, zoning codes (outside of denser cities) in most of the US, Canada, and other countries with a lower density suburban built environment (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Iceland, etc.) require uses to have a certain minimum number of parking spaces, depending on some attribute like gross floor area, bedrooms in a house, number of seats in a restaurant, and so on. The requirements are usually based on worse-case scenarios, like Black Friday shopping. The rest of the year, the bulk of those parking spaces sit empty. The result: land not being put to its "highest and best use", less potential property tex revenue for municipalities, increased urban sprawl (and other associated costs, like the cost of building and maintaining roads, water and storm/sanitary sewer infrastructure), from consuming more land, increased stormwater runoff (and even more space consumed by utilitarian on-site "stormwater management practices" like retention and detention ponds), and increased urban heat island effect. There's also a fear of spillover parking from uses and buildings that don't have enough parking to meet demand. Planners in North America have been reconsidering the idea of minimum parking requirements over the past couple of decades.

 

[PlannerInTheMitten]

You can regulate parking without having minimum space requirements.

• Pavement / surface.
• Curbing / edging.
• Landscaping.
• Screening.
• Buffering.
• Parking space size.
• Drive aisle width.
• Entry/exit stacking length.
• Slope.
• Access management: limits on the number and width of curb cuts.
• Pedestrian walkways / connectivity.
• Stormwater management.
• Ease of access to loading areas, dumpster enclosures, and so on.
• Siting in relation to a principal building, lot lines, etc.
• Electric vehicle charging facilities or provisions for future chargers.
• Prohibit continuous curb cuts, configuration that requires backing out, tandem self-parking, etc.
• Prohibit parking on surfaces not built specifically for parking.

I'm not a fan of parking requirements with minimum space requirements, based on an overly granular list of uses. I think it's one reason why multi-tenant shopping centers have too much parking -- developers look at local zoning, find the commercial use that requires the most parking, and assume that for every tenant just to be on the safe side. If you must have minimum space requirements, keep the list of uses short and simple -- residential, office, retail, industrial/warehouse, school, place of worship and assembly.

Do you have any example communities that you might be able to share that have the parking minimums based on zoning districts or very broad use categories rather than specific land uses or type of business?