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Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town
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I've been standing in this Staten Island parking lot for fifteen minutes, and two dudes named Sebastian have already tried to sell me painkillers. I said no, but the way this video is going, I might just take them up on it. You see, it's not a coincidence that this parking lot looks identical to almost every other parking lot in America. It's because there's a sneaky little law in almost every city in the United States that forces private businesses and residences to build way more parking than they actually need. And when I say way more parking than they actually need, I mean way more parking than they actually -- that's a dog -- need! There are so many parking spaces in America that we literally can't even count them all. The best estimate puts it at around 1 billion spaces, which is four spots for every car in America. And that number of empty spaces is only getting larger, because any new construction or renovation in almost any city in America is being held hostage by a bunch of archaic laws from the 1950s called Minimum Parking Requirements. Which is a big reason why every city in America is starting to look like this. [otamatone plays "My Heart Will Go On"] And look, I'm aware you didn't have "watch a punishingly long video about parking" on your agenda today, but what parking law lacks in excitement, it makes up for in being so blunt force head trauma stupid that once you learn about it, you won't be able to unsee the damage the parked car has done to the land of the free. And you know, if I'm doing a video about cars and parking, I'm calling in my guy Jason from the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes. [Jason] Oh hey, Rollie. Did you know that when they were making the latest SimCity game, they plan to accurately model real American cities, but when they realized how much space is devoted to parking and how ugly that would make the game look, they decided to make the parking lots way smaller than they are in real life? Wow, I did not know that until I read it in the script for this video. Thanks, Jason from Not Just Bikes. He's going to help me get through this hellscape that is parking in America, but maybe there's actually something we can do to fix it, maybe? Hi, I'm Rollie Williams, a guy with pretty good balance, a climate science and policy degree, and right now I'm about a mile away from three of Staten Island's finest eyebrow threading salons, and this is a video about how parking laws are strangling America. Welcome to Climate Town. [funky intro music] Okay, parking was a very different game before every man, woman, and child in the United States got behind the wheel of a car. You remember this kid? [laughs] We do love to drive. But back in the 1900s, there were like 80 cars on the road, and they were all owned by rich dicks. They just stopped driving whenever they felt like it, and that was the parking spot. As for the poors, well, they'd have to go around, as God intended. Then in 1913, Henry Ford smashed the subscribe button on the assembly line and by the 1920s, cars were f*cking everywhere. And these aren't modern cars, these are the first draft of a mass-produced car being driven on streets with very few established traffic laws by a bunch of drunken businessmen with a maximum of seven years driving experience. Understandably, it was a full nightmare for cities, and nothing made that more obvious than the thousands of cars parked all William-nilliam on the sides of streets and sidewalks. Fun fact, the term "parking" itself used to refer to streets having a delightful grassy park on the side. These parks were the street's parking, like a house's siding, or a jacket's lining, or a river's white water rafting. See, parking used to refer to grass, and then people parked their cars there, and then Look at me, look at me, I'm the parking now. [Jason] Now, obviously, having cars piled everywhere was bad for business, and American cities were desperate to find some place to put a never-ending stream of automobiles. So, they called in the big daddy William Phelps Eno, the father of traffic safety. He's the guy credited for inventing such traffic classics as stop signs, traffic circles, and even pedestrian islands. So, you can thank him when you're standing in the middle of an eight-lane stroad safely protected from high-speed traffic by a small concrete curb. So in the 1920s, Eno was tasked with solving the parking crisis in cities, and he proposed a pretty practical solution: park and rides. See, William Phelps Eno came to the conclusion that devoting the most valuable real estate in the world to the parked car was an absolutely insane thing to do. Why on Earth should wealthy car owners be entitled to unlimited free use of taxpayer-subsidized land to store their personal property? A car parked downtown clogs delivery lanes, it congests traffic, it impedes pedestrians. So obviously, no to that. It made way more sense to have designated parking lots on the outskirts of town, and then a robust system of public transportation to ferry people into city centers. [vintage video voiceover] Many city planners believe that really good public transportation is the only way to keep our cities from being choked to death by the automobile. It seems like a pretty great plan, as long as the auto industry doesn't completely take over the American psyche while colluding with the oil industry to have front companies buy up bus and streetcar lines only to shut them down to clear the road for cars, so that cars become the only method of transportation. And as all of that did happen, parking went from a regular tight bummer to a f*cking crisis. In 1947, New York City Police Commissioner Arthur Wallander stated, This was the police commissioner of a city that just had a race riot, saying that parking was one of their core problems. Automobiles had America by the balls, and a whole generation of politicians and public officials decided to make parking and cars their whole deal. [vintage video voiceover] County, city, and state tax money is matching federal funds to pave the way. [another voice] Pittsburgh is digging a four-million-dollar hole in the heart of the city to provide underground storage for thousands of cars. [another voice] A forward-looking city is conscious of the automobile; it is responding by providing adequate, well-located parking facilities. But it turns out all this incentivizing car ownership had the unintended consequence of more people buying cars. As millions of new cars were added to the streets every year, cities quickly realized that their current system was not going to work. In small towns and suburbs, the situation is the same: all snarled up. Every day it gets worse shopping. It's not just a matter of getting through the congestion; it's impossible to find a place to park. [distorted, slowed repetition] It's impossible to find a place to park. And to quote Michael Caine, "In their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand." Is that pretty close? [off camera] Uhhh, yeah, the accent i-is... I told you to blow the bloody doors off! [off camera] ...yeah, uhh.. That man was Mr. Minimum Parking Law. See, instead of cities building all the parking spaces, they could just make the private sector do it. And at first, it seemed like a pretty slick little solution. See, American entrepreneurs, developers, and small business owners want to build shops, or residences, or whatever an amazing city superstore is, so why not have them each tack on parking onto their establishments and solve the parking crisis once and for all? Cities would still have to manage their meters and on-street parking, but if we could make parking lots the responsibility of store owners and developers, surely we can fix this problem with no repercussions. [Jason] These minimum parking requirements seemed like the perfect cure for the parking problem, and they spread through America like [in Canadian accent] the smoke from Canadian wildfires, eh. In 1946, about 17% of cities had parking requirements in their zoning ordinances, but by 1951, that number had shot up to around 71% of cities. And if you're dyslexic, that might not seem like a big deal, but trust me, it's a huge jump. And if you find yourself wondering exactly how many parking spots an aspiring malt shop owner has to build before they're allowed to open their business, you're asking the right questions. What were minimum parking requirements based on? Let's go to the board. [bell dings] Oh no, bullsh*t!?!? You gotta be joking me! You gotta be kidding me! I'm ruined! I thought it was based on something good. I need a win, baby, I need one win! Oh noooo-- like that, yeah. The minimum parking requirements that each city readily adopted left the actual number of spaces up to city planners and town committees. The typical instruction they were given was to have enough parking for maximum possible building usage rather than normal usage, which would ensure that small businesses and private developers would be forced to buy and pave land that would go to waste anytime the maximum conceivable number of people were not at the store. And how did the committees determine the maximum occupancy? Well, they had two main methods: number one, they'd guess, but number two, they'd ask a neighboring town, who almost certainly also just guessed. Not surprisingly, this led to a lot of inconsistent and nonsensical minimum parking laws. Like Detroit's one space per hundred square feet in a beauty shop, but one space per 150 square feet in a courthouse, but also one space per two hundred square feet in a bank. There were also parking laws based on physical items in the establishment, like one space per pool table in a pool hall or one space per tumbling apparatus at a tumbling center. Some cities required a minimum of one space per 10 nuns in a nunnery and an absolutely diabolical one parking space for each employee and employer at a bowling alley, plus five spaces for each lane. [vintage video voiceover] Everyone can enjoy the rich satisfactions that bowling offers. 10 big fat pins just asking for it. I've been bowling with four people before. It sucks, okay? No one remembers whose turn it is, everyone uses nicknames, and you're like, "Whose ball, man? Is that Corey? Is that Grace?" It's terrible. The only one they got right was adult entertainment. You want that nice and spaced out; there's no carpooling involved. It was a cornucopia of guesswork, brimming at the wicker with speculation and conjecture, and no one was even keeping track of it. The Planning Advisory Service even admits, "the underlying assumptions used in drafting parking requirements are unknown." [Jason] Believe it or not, this wasn't some kind of shadowy cabal of pro-parking lobbyists; it was city council members with approximately zero parking expertise taking their best shot at ensuring that their city would always have enough parking. Eventually, a group called the Institute of Transportation Engineers decided to try to standardize the minimum parking numbers with some cold, hard science. Now, the ITE was no stranger to the car game. They formed in 1930 with a goal of reducing the absolute bonanza of car crashes and traffic that the United States was experiencing, and they were ready to bring their engineering and science to the minimum parking game. [Rollie] Unfortunately, the Institute of Transportation Engineers soon discovered that minimum parking requirements were a bunch of bullsh*t, and you just know I got some fun examples, so let's get right into it. To the edit ba--to the edit bay! Now, I did earmark my entire props budget on getting my eyebrows threaded later on, so I couldn't afford an actual copy of ITE's Parking Generation Manual, but they will graciously sell it to city planners for the rock-bottom price of $495 for non-members, and the screaming deal of $345 for members. And at that price, you'd be an idiot not to buy one. I mean, this thing must have so much good parking science in it. Man, I really want one. Curse these big, bushy eyebrows! Luckily, a couple of completely anonymous friends sent me some absolutely gorgeous PDFs of actual graphs from "Parking Generation", so let's take a look here. The ITE surveyed a series of fast-food restaurants, measured the square footage of the restaurants, and found that each one thousand square feet of restaurant needed exactly 3.55 or 15.92 parking spaces, or somewhere in the middle, or possibly some other number completely. Yeah, here's the graph. Here's the trend line and the R-squared value is .038. And if we go back in time to when you were in math class, you might remember that an R-squared value of .038 means the square footage of the store is about 3.8% responsible for why that particular number of cars is parked there. The remaining 96% of the responsibility is probably something else entirely. The ITE acknowledges that square footage is a horsesh*t way to determine parking requirements. It's simply not a useful variable. They even admit it right on the graph: Oh my god, he admit it! And "used carefully" is doing some heavy lifting here. It should say, "Caution, do not use this," but you can't really sell a book that says "all the information in this book is bullsh*t and we know it", so "used carefully" was going to have to suffice. And despite knowing that their information was useless as a predictive tool, they had the audacity to include the exact precise average of 9.95 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet, which is a lot like saying, "We have no idea when humans first gained consciousness, but we think it might have been at 9:51 AM on a Thursday in the year 300,006 BC." But maybe city planners did use caution? I mean, obviously, they didn't just take the graph at face value, round up, and then force a ton of fast-food restaurants all around the country to build 10 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of restaurant, right? And it just goes on like that. An analysis of over a hundred other ITE parking graphs revealed that about half of them are based on just four or fewer data points, and about a quarter were based on a single data point. Let's take a look at the ITE graph of sporting goods stores, like Dick's Sporting Goods. Remember when "Dick" was a guy's name and that was it? Dick's Sporting Goods remembers. Here's the graph of parked vehicles versus number of employees. The line of best fit should be here, not here. And if we're going by just the information we're given in this graph of number of employees versus parked vehicles, as the number of employees goes up, parked vehicles goes down, which means according to their own data, with enough employees, you'd have a negative number of parked cars. Which means a logical interpretation of this graph is that you could solve parking everywhere forever by having sufficiently overstaffed sporting goods stores in every city in America. And since that's not really something the ITE can sell, they made up this line, which I think is what you get when you add up all the parked vehicles and you divide by all the employees, which is, uh, not how f*cking statistics works! [Jason] So effectively, American city governments tried to get everyone to build the maximum possible amount of parking using the time-tested method of pulling data out of their *sses. And those non-scientific guesses became the bedrock of US parking legislation. But when the Institute of Transportation Engineers tried to back up those guesses with science, they poked and prodded the numbers until they could prove that we needed maximum parking everywhere, which was then turned into literal laws requiring it. I did not believe that this could possibly be true the first time I read about it. It's just that stupid to think that we overbuilt parking basically everywhere because of feelings. And overbuild parking we did. Virtually every municipality in the United States has had 75 years to develop under the toxic influence of minimum parking requirements, and you can see the problem from space. Not space in the classic sense, but high up. [vintage video voiceover] The automobile, that no one would think of giving up, is doing this to our central cities. In Los Angeles, nearly two-thirds of the downtown area is taken up by the automobile. Parking lots, garages, streets, and freeways. And town after town has expanded and sprawled under the metastasizing drum beat of parking over people, and it's easy to fixate on the parking part of parking space, but the space is the real killer. You build a restaurant in Houston, another restaurant's worth of land is permanently flattened. You build Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, an additional ten Dodger Stadiums' worth of perfectly good land is sacrificed for parking. Minimum parking guarantees sprawl, and it's easy to see why virtually every city in the United States keeps developing into the same stretches of low-to-the-ground boxy structures with minimal multi-story buildings and lots of blank spaces for parking. We get a lot of fast food restaurants, chain stores, and single-family housing, because they can accommodate parking laws by simply paving part of the surrounding property. The other kind of structures we keep making are expensive larger buildings, like luxury apartments, office buildings, hotels, that kind of thing. The parking requirement is costly. Developers have to build underground garages or huge parking structures, or buy the building across the street and knock it down for parking. [vintage video voiceover] Increasingly, we are seeing large-scale demolition as the first step in building modern cities. Here, for example is the tallest building in America to be demolished to start over. Surely we shall not demolish all our large buildings, but the lesson is clear: we live in a day of bold planning. They then pass that cost along to their tenants in the form of rent. Apartment developer Peyton Chung calls this the "Valley of High Parking Requirements," with these two kinds of developments on the sides and a missing middle of mixed-use, mid-rise buildings and low-cost apartments that can't afford to buy sufficient land and build the parking minimums. [Jason] And to be crystal clear here, parking is absolutely not free. That's like saying the bathroom is free in your hotel room. It may not be a line item on the bill, but you're paying for it whether you use the bathroom or just piss off of the balcony. When a store or developer is forced to buy twice the necessary land, that extra cost is just rolled into everything you buy. And the worst part is, if you don't drive, you're still paying for that disgusting sea of asphalt that you need to cross every time you go shopping. Plus, your city needs to extend every road, every pipe, and every wire that extra distance for a bunch of parking spots that stay empty almost all of the time. And that cost is f*ckin' high. Each individual parking space costs between eight thousand and eighty thousand dollars, depending on if it's just a paved surface or a multi-level or subterranean parking structure. The Walt Disney Concert Hall cost 274 million dollars to build, and a hundred million dollars of that was building the underground parking structure. That's not free; that's a hundred million dollars, and you bet your *ss concertgoers are paying for that in their ticket prices. The godfather of parking reform, Donald Shoup, whose actual website is shoupdog.com, is the man. We talked to him for this video; he's awesome. And he estimates that the cost of building a mall increases by sixty-seven percent if you build above-ground parking and by ninety-three percent if you build below-ground parking. It's also almost gotten to the point where you can't even build affordable housing. A Seattle-based study by the Sightline Institute found that the mandated parking increased the monthly rent by $246. Well, can I just have my $246 a month back and not own a car? I don't think so, Jack, because you live in America, the land of the free market, unless we're talking about parking, which is a cost the government forces its citizens to collectivize, for the good of the motherland. [rousing Soviet anthem] And not to put too fine a point on it, but making parking free is a textbook subsidy to car owners. Every time the government forces a business to build parking, that is the government incentivizing car ownership, and people who don't own cars are getting absolutely f*cked every time they have to pay extra for toothbrushes or rent to fulfill a subsidy that they do not benefit from. Hoooooo, almost died. And since wealthier people are more likely to own cars, this is a subsidy that the poor tends to pay to the rich. It's also a great example of big government overreach that continuously reinforces itself. [Jason] The worst part is that these parking requirements have and are actively preventing downtowns from being successful. Older buildings were grandfathered in, but if you wanted to renovate one of these downtown buildings for your avocado toast bar, you'd need to buy the building next to it and bulldoze it in order to meet the off-street parking requirements. This is why downtown in my hometown looks like this. This is insane, right? Like, legitimately insane. Literally bulldozing historic buildings to meet arbitrary parking minimums, and this is still preventing people from opening businesses in traditional walkable downtowns to this day. In the case of a bank in Sandpoint, Idaho, they were required to buy up nearby buildings, evict the tenants, and demolish everything to make enough surface parking spaces to legally operate. In Dallas, Texas, a couple wanted to open a hotel in the ailing downtown area, but fulfilling the parking requirement would have cost them two to three million dollars. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, a whole gaggle of downtown buildings sat vacant for decades because minimum parking laws made it too expensive for small business owners to move in. Parking laws are a boot, but not like a fun, cute boot that you might wear to the movies, they're a boot on the neck of cities and towns that have fallen on hard times and are just trying to revitalize themselves. They have the effect of driving would-be city dwellers to just say f*ck it and sprawl out to the burbs, where the cost of buying land for parking isn't prohibitively expensive. And we haven't even talked about the climate implications yet. My God, urban sprawl and minimum parking laws are crazy destructive to the environment. First of all, parking lots require a lot of asphalt and concrete. Those two substances are responsible for, like, ten percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. When you build parking lots, you have to displace something, and historically that something has been wildlife, including paving over tens of millions of acres of American wetlands and hundreds of millions of acres of other ecosystems. Parking also contributes to the urban heat island effect, which honestly should be its own video, but the TL;DR is that it ain't great for climate change. And speaking of urban areas, all that pavement prevents water from absorbing, which leads to floods and exacerbates the effects of storms and hurricanes. It also pollutes the ever-living sh*t out of our water, when dirty, dusty, heavy metal and pesticide-infused water runoff sluices off the pavement and into the lakes and rivers. And of course, parking creates more parking by pushing buildings further and further apart, making a short, tolerable walk into one that sucks and takes forever, and also about a million more environmental problems that I don't want to get into because we're already however long this video is, and honestly, I can't believe you're still watching. But thank you so much for sticking with it, because oooh, we finally got into the "what we can do about it" section of the video, and I'm extremely happy to say, this part is actually very promising. Now, you know my guy Donald Shoup has been calling out bad parking laws for decades, and it seems like people are finally starting to listen to him. Remember those vacant buildings in Fayetteville, Arkansas? Well, in 2015, Fayetteville became quite possibly the first city in the country to completely eliminate commercial parking minimums and let businesses decide how much parking they need. Really, they were probably the first, but I don't want to get sued by the residents of New Bicklesburg, Virginia, or whatever small town thinks they were the first, so I used the legal term "quite possibly" to protect myself. Try it out for yourself sometime. And you guessed it, without minimum parking laws in Fayetteville, a new restaurant opened up in a building that had been vacant for twenty years. Another restaurant opened up in a historic building that would have required forty-one new parking spaces. And once other towns heard about this, they followed suit. I'm talking about the King of Wings, the Drake of Lakes, just don't slip in Niagara Faaaaalls, Buffalo, New York! Coming in at 120,000 people, it's the Widow of the Whalers, Hartford, Connecticuuuuut! I really have to stop, because here's a map of all the cities and towns that have changed their minimum parking requirements in some way. That would take hours, days if I really got into it, but don't think I won't do it. You think I won't do it? Coming in at six foot eight, 450 million tons of raw steel, it's Pittsburgh, Pennsylvaaaaaaan-- Now, I will say that while there are a ton of great success stories, getting rid of parking minimums is just one step in a long road of reforming our ridiculously car-centric culture. It's going to take a lot of time to deworm our collective car brains, and that means some of the steps are probably going to feel a little anticlimactic. Which is a great word -- "anticlimactic". Firm. Sounds like what it means. Like brussels sprouts, that's exactly what those little f*ckers are. [Jason] So clearly, some cities are finally fixing their sh*t. If you're interested in learning more, I can strongly recommend Strong Towns, a non-profit organization that is committed to undoing the car-centric mistakes of the twentieth century and repairing North American cities. They've done a lot of great work on making cities more resilient and financially sustainable, and ditching parking minimums is a big part of their MO. They actually made a great video about Fayetteville here on the YouTubes. And on their website, they even have guides on best practices for eliminating parking minimums. Our friends at Climate Change Makers have put together a playbook that draws on the many successful strategies that other towns and cities have used to delete minimum parking requirements from their zoning. And if you want to be a part of getting your city to delete some of this weird, archaic government-overreach-meets-pseudoscience legislation that is currently turning your prime city real estate into undevelopable land, you can do that by clicking the link in the description. Honestly, it'll take you five minutes. You know what, don't even do it. Just click the link and see what there is to see, and then if you're there and you feel like doing it, more power to you. And if you really want to get crazy with it, you can drop by your local city council meeting where you can be the voice of reason in a room full of people who would really like to speak to your manager. But above all, whatever you do, just consider getting more educated about the climate crisis, because if we're not careful, we might find ourselves in the middle of a copyrighted song about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, which I would love to play for you underneath this sort of closing monologue right here, but obviously I can't. So I am singing it in my head right now. Man, that's a great song. Wish I could play it right now. Okay, you made it to the end. Thank you so much for watching, and thank you to Jason from Not Just Bikes. Go ahead and like and subscribe, and even leave a comment about what a nice guy Jason is. Now, I do have a special, super secret announcement coming up at the end of this video, but first, uh... ad! Oh yeah, here it is. Okay, let's just say you spent the last nine hours on blazing hot asphalt in the sun. You're sweating bullets, but suddenly you're struck by a fierce desire to learn. In the past, you would have been absolutely hosed, but not anymore, thanks to our sponsor, Brilliant. Brilliant offers thousands of lessons in a hot little app you can access from anywhere. And to answer your question, yes, even wherever you are right now, you can dive brain-first into the bright blue waters of advanced math, or programming, or statistics. And honestly, they got a ton of stuff on there, and they add new lessons every month, which seems like overkill to me, but it's their company. I go straight for the data science lessons; they come in really handy when some flim-flam artist is trying to slide some funky numbers past me. And to make it even better, we got a special link for you that gives you a thirty-day free trial to Brilliant, and the first two hundred subscribers get twenty percent off. Am I reading that right? Come on, Brilliant, come on. And that's the end of the ad. Thanks for sticking around this far. Feel free to like and subscribe to Climate Town if you like. If you really want to help us out, you can join our Patreon page where you get behind-the-scenes content, bonus features, cut tape, you know, all the stuff that wasn't good enough to be free. We also have a newsletter you can sign up for in the description. That's all the extra research and the interesting tidbits and stuff that didn't make the final draft. And if you're thinking, "I can't believe you cut stuff, this video is long as hell," we did cut stuff, okay? We did a lot of research, we read three books on this subject, and talked to like four experts. We got a lot of extra stuff, and you can find that extra stuff in the newsletter. And finally, the after-the-credits Marvel movie secret scene. I'm starting a podcast. "Oh, whaaat? A guy with a podcast?" yeah, everybody else has one. I've got one too. It's called "The Climate Denier's Playbook." You can get it on Spotify, Stitcher, Pocket, whatever you get your podcasts on. I'm co-hosting it with my friend Nicole Conlon, who is a writer on The Daily Show and also one of the writers here at Climate Town. Every episode, we look at a different piece of climate disinformation or misinformation. We look at the myth and where it came from, who benefits from it, and how you can spot it in the wild. It's a lot of fun, okay? I think you're really gonna like it. For real. But seriously, for real, it's really fun. So you can check it out, find it in the description of the video. That wa--that was bad. Finally, rhank you very much to Donald Shoup and Henry Grabar, two consummate experts in parking policy and two people who were incredibly helpful on making this episode. We got to talk to Donald Shoup a couple of times; he's awesome. I got their bios and their websites in the description. Check them out, buy their books, follow them, they're very interesting and smart people. Alright, that's actually the end. Thanks for watching. Now, if you don't mind, I have an appointment to get my eyebrows threaded for real. So, bye! I have not tried marijuana, I have never used it at any time. [outro music]
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