So, it seems like Oakland is building even more parking. Why? Whyyyyyy?????? We are still trying to understand what is the rationality of this decision.
“It costs roughly $50,000 to construct a single space in a structured garage”*
This makes no sense! Absolutely no sense if you are building in downtown Oakland where most of the people have good public transportation.
“For most people, the reason they want to live in Uptown is because they don’t own a car,” said Jean Long, GreenTRIP planner with TransForm. “They are thinking, ‘I can take BART to San Francisco for work. I can walk to restaurants and bars.’ You want to encourage pedestrian activity and biking. But when you build parking, you induce driving.”
*You can read the whole situation in this piece, which is really good:
But it is not only about how costly parking is, but also how it competes for land with housing. The housing problem in the Bay Area is well known but we still encourage the use of land for parking instead of apartments!
As Donald Shoup (expert in parking) mentions:
“The market fails to provide many things at a price everyone can afford. For instance, it fails to provide affordable housing for many families. Advocates for affordable housing usually find themselves in an uphill battle, but without a second thought cities have imposed requirements to ensure affordable parking. Rather than charge fair-market prices for on-street parking, cities insist on ample off-street parking for every land use. As a result, most of us drive almost everywhere we go.”
This is also explained by Alan Durning:
“Expressed as stalls per apartment, the waste of space may not seem egregious: a fraction of a parking space. What’s the big deal? Each space is expensive, […], so the cost of housing rises and the supply shrinks.”
“…for example, the Right Size Parking (RSP) project [PDF] visited more than 200 buildings and found one parked car per occupied dwelling, on average. It also found an extra 0.4 empty stalls per occupied housing unit: almost one-third of parking was idle.” Alan Durning
“The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Michael Kimmelman
Our Startup Fleck is a parking app, that help Drivers find, book and pay for their parking spaces, looking to save time and effort on the burden of parking in high demand parking area. In the process to achieve that we help homeowners make money out of empty driveways, embrace technology and become more efficient. You can check more here www.fleckparking.com
Now, back to the article:
Afshar and city officials said the large amount of parking in the project was necessary to accommodate drivers who want to live in and visit Uptown. But transportation activists and experts argue that the number of parking spaces is excessive for a downtown urban center and that the financial resources and land that the project intends to use for parking should instead be used for community benefits or to make housing more affordable. Critics also argued that if Oakland wants to promote alternative modes of transit, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and achieve its climate change blueprint, city officials need to deliberately limit the supply of parking in areas where driving is no longer necessary.
Conclusion: More Housing , Less Parking.
How do we go out with more housing that will necessarily bring more cars and people? Well, we make a better use of the UNUSED parking. We SHARE our parking and become part of the ECONOMY. Rent your space, when you are not using it, and reduce the construction of parking, making housing more affordable.
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We are providing parking for those that commute to Berkeley and want to book a space in advance so they don’t have to worry about parking.
You can book in our website www.fleckparking.com or you can download the app: iPhone & Android
