Parking Minimums

Can cities rethink decades worth of parking doctrine?

MSNBC has a story about how a number of U.S. cities are reconsidering the idea that every building must have a minimum number of parking spaces attached to it.

From the story: "D.C. is now considering scrapping those requirements — part of a growing national trend. Officials hope that offering the freedom to forgo parking will lead to denser, more walkable, transit-friendly development.

Opponents say making parking more scarce will only make the city less hospitable. Commuters like Randy Michael of Catharpin, Va., complain they are already forced to circle for hours in some neighborhoods."

The story opens anecdotally: Jeff Speck and his family don't have a car, don't want one, and had to fight DC zoning regulations for nine months to build their house without one.

(I'm not sure Jeff Speck is an everyman, tho. He was the director of design for the National Endowment of the Arts and collaborated on Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream with Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. He also spoke here earlier this year.)

But he does make a good point when he says this: "Half the great buildings in America's great cities would not be legal to build today under current land use codes. Every house on my block is illegal by current standards, particularly parking standards."

That's one of the reasons OPD was redoing the unified development code, to not hamper an area like Broad Avenue with suburban-like zoning.

But getting back to parking, I remember talking to Henry Turley (who, full disclosure, is one of the Flyer's ownership group) once about parking affects retail development. National retailers mandate a certain number of spaces; you want those retailers, you have to give them their parking lots. (And how often do you see a full parking lot unless it's near Christmas?)

A parking lot. Just in case you've never seen one before.

And not to go all Doug Farr on you again, but he did mention last week that he thought cities would be wise to exchange parking minimums for parking maximums.

Of course, the caveat is that it doesn't work without good transit.

Main Street Mall For All?

Even if vehicular traffic doesn't return to the Main Street Mall, Center City Commission president Jeff Sanford says the controversial idea might result in some improvements to the mall.

"We've been saying for several years that the maintenance on the mall has been lacking. In fact, we determined that the metal infrastructure hasn't been painted in 15 years ... and the trolleys are 15 years old," Sanford says.

The Center City Commission (CCC) held a meeting earlier this week to solicit public input for its controversial idea of returning vehicular traffic to the north end of Main Street. CCC staff members are expected to present a recommendation to the CCC's traffic and transportation committee in mid-August. That committee will then take a recommendation to the CCC's main board.

Main Street Now

But even then, nothing would be a done deal.

"If the CCC board agrees that any kind of change on Main Street would be good for downtown, they would communicate that to the city," says CCC president Jeff Sanford. "It's the city of Memphis that has the authority to make any and all decisions about the public right-of-way."

In addition to the public meeting, the CCC has met with representatives from the fire department, the police department, MATA, and the city engineer's office to discuss the idea. The CCC also held a separate meeting with Main Street property owners.

"We've had three highly respected consultants in Memphis recently, all of of whom, independent of one another, suggested that we should consider putting cars back on Main Street," Sanford says. "However, the public's opinion, the local opinion, is just as important to this discussion as is the consultants opinions and the experience of other cities."

One of the consultant's, Jeff Speck, said he thought it would only cost about $50,000 to remove a few curbs and add a few teaser parking spaces, but that the lane sizes were just right to control the speed of vehicular traffic.

"We don't drive the speed marked. We drive the speed we feel safe," Speck said. "If you're a teenage boy, you drive the speed you feel dangerous."

There were once about 200 downtown, outdoor malls in America, but there are now fewer than 30.

Main Street 1906

"In the end, I think the ultimate question we will try to answer is, if we knew then what we know now, would we have designed and constructed this mall in the same way? Not wanting to leap ahead of the staff's opinion, I would say the answer is probably no," Sanford says. "But that definition of no could be a lot of things."

Urban Forestry

Here in Memphis, we do a lot of planning. Urban planner Jeff Speck even mentioned it in his recent talk at CBU. You have plenty of plans, he said, now you just need to implement some of them.

Just for a little perspective, I thought it might be fun to look at the History Channel's winning entries for their City of the Future contest. The regional winners are cities you might expect — Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco — but what's interesting is how the participants looked both to the past and to the future in designing their entries.

And that the designs were for the year 2108.

Atlanta won the overall competition with its "The City in the Forest" entry. It was explained thusly:

"The city maintains over 1,900 miles of pipes to collect, combine with wastewater, treat and pipe storm water downstream. Climate change, growth, and sprawling impervious surfaces continue to degrade this outmoded, costly system. ... In the City of the Future, stormwater resurfaces to flow naturally across the land. Freed from use, existing underground systems act as aquifiers, preserving scarce water for long term use.

This simple shift underground, in turn, transforms the landscape above. The rigidity of the urban grid yields to swaths of green and waterscapes. Settlements cluster along ridges and water catchments, participating in a sustainable, living system. Corridors of open spaces spread to link communities in an organic form and fully reclaim The City in the Forest."

Perhaps not coincidentally, there's been a lot of talk lately about cities and trees lately. You can't beat the impact — they improve air quality, make pedestrians feel safer, catch rainwater, help regulate temperature, and, oh, increase property values. What's not to like?

Accordingly, cities are trying to increase their tree canopy. New York city kicked off a 23-year, one-million tree initiative last fall. Boston and D.C. are also trying to add to their canopy. Speck said we weren't doing that great (planting trees was one of his moderate suggestions for making Memphis better) but we all know parts of the city that have beautiful canopies. It's just not citywide.

(We also have old-growth forest being clear cut, but you can go here for more about that.)

One thing we might remember is that, like all our little plans, trees take time to grow. If we want to see a change 20 years from now, we need to start now.

Designer's Dozen

I really enjoyed city planner Jeff Speck's presentation at Christian Brothers University last week entitled The City Livable: Modest Suggestions for Making Memphis Great.

Unlike most plans or strategies — say the mayor's three-prong plan to improve the Memphis City Schools, with separate initiatives under each prong — Speck's ideas were very simple and concrete. And, no offense to the mayor's plan, but that made them seem actually doable.

Below are the 12 things he suggested, with some of his reasoning below. (apologies if it's front loaded. At some point, Speck realized he could dim the lights and I hadn't thought to bring my light pen with me. Mostly because I don't have one.)

1. Design your city for humans, not cars

There's been a trend since the '60s to let highway engineering onto city streets, but the wider a street is, the faster drivers feel comfortable going. And the faster people drive on a road, the less pedestrians want to walk alongside it.

(Speck didn't mention this, but if traffic is going 40 mph or faster, pedestrians don't feel comfortable walking next to it. Not coincidentally, I don't think, if a pedestrian gets hit by a car going 40 mph or faster, most are not likely to survive.)

2. stop diminishing your economic advantage

As cities have all become the same, older buildings are a city's distinguishing factor. So to stand out, it would be good to maintain some of our historic buildings. For a comparison, Speck showed a bunch of pictures of older buildings we've torn down and what is there now, including an old movie theater and what's there now: Parking Can Be Fun on Union Avenue.

"Look," he said, "parking can be fun, but more fun than a movie theater?"

3. plant trees

If planted alongside streets, trees are a barrier between pedestrians and cars, which made pedestrians feel safer. Not to mention that they lower heating and cooling costs, absorb water run-off and drastically increase real estate values.

Other communities around the country have already realized all these thing and are really stepping up tree planting.

4. organize neighborhoods around schools around neighborhoods

Neighborhood schools are better for the community, better for transportation costs, better for students.

5. fix downtown first

Several years ago, Speck started hearing good things about Denver and LoDo (its lower downtown historic district) and went to check it out. When he got there, he realized it was only two blocks.

"Two blocks changed the reputation of Denver," he said. "Reputation is important."

Downtown is one neighborhood that belongs to everybody.

6. practice urban triage

Cities trying to be uniformly excellent are often uniformly mediocre.

"You have to pick your winners and your losers. It's not about letting trash gather or not fixing potholes," Speck said. "It's about what place is going to be for pedestrians."

7. fix the 3rd street promenot

"You have these two amazing anchors — AutoZone Park and Beale Street. Between them is a limited pedestrian zone," Speck said.

Limited is putting it mildly. The area from 3rd and Union to 3rd and Beale includes the backside of the Peabody Hotel and parking on both sides. Speck suggested adding some small retail in front of one of the parking garages and using it to pull people across.

8. fix the Main Street, South Main knuckle

Main Street's pretty vibrant. South Main is pretty vibrant. And then you have Main at Linden with the Chisca, MLGW, and a parking garage next to a parking lot. ("When you have surface parking next to a garage, that's bad planning," Speck said.)

9. you deserve just a little urban waterfront

Speck wasn't completely digging the Riverfront Development Corporation's plans for the Beale Street Landing.

"I like the design, but this is not urban. This is ... rural."

Although, now that I think about it, he might have said pastoral. Anyway, point is the same. That's a lot of passive green space.

"You need places to shop, sit, and have a beer and a meal up against the water," he said. "There's an opportunity on Beale to create something urban." Something like this.

10. build the missing monument

Speck suggested building a Martin Luther King monument on the plaza outside the National Civil Rights Museum.

"You would have no trouble funding a monument on that site if you can get it together."

11. stop the outer loop — it's not built yet

So, Speck isn't a fan of sprawl. It's not economical, it's not good for the environment, and ironically, it's not even good for drivers.

"It's actually worse for cars to build sprawl. They all have to go on one arterial road," he said. "We know the model is broken, yet we continue to build it."

And if he needed an example, he found I-269.

"I thought it was being built because of the congestion, but it's being built because the money is there," he said. After citing local air quality concerns, asthma rates, and retail cannibalism, he said, "There is no proper argument for building the outer loop. Period."

12. put cars back on Main Street

If you want to read more about this, go here.