October 2008 Archives

Transportation drives development, and parking drives the cost of development. There are several obstacles to reducing parking in dense urban cores; the biggest are political. Politicians are afraid to be seen as double-taxing voters if they charge more for on-street parking which was paid for by taxes, and drivers definitely want free or cheap on-street parking. Business owners are also convinced that their livelihoods depend upon cheap parking and drive-by traffic; they typically belong to powerful political interests such as the Chamber of Commerce or Downtown Association. It is the same in any city, in any developed country where the automobile was wholeheartedly adopted. In London, congestion pricing was adopted for the City borough in 2003. It was so successful that they were preparing to extend it to the next ring of boroughs in 2005. Kensington was one of the areas about to receive congestion pricing; listening to the merchants you would have thought it was a deliberate attempt to drive them out of business.

It's true that many people drive to shop, or did, in London. I spent a pre-congestion pricing Saturday in 2002 watching people jockeying for street parking in the narrow streets of the Southwark neighborhood around Borough Market. It was insanity. I observed a shopper on a bicycle knocked over by a car, fortunately unhurt.



That was in a city with plenty of public transport options, and very walkable besides. Here, even in one of our most walkable neighborhoods, Pike Place Market, the Merchants Association wants to keep plenty of free street parking. Shoppers can't be expected to carry their loads, or to be so uncool as to use a collapsible cart. That's for poor people, old people. Yet parking should be free, or cheap - it's a right. People circle around and around the market looking for a free space. It's fine with them that pedestrians are in the way; it gives them an excuse to slow down and wait for a space to open up, while they burn gas and churn tailpipe exhaust.
 
The Market Garage is underpriced, too, and therefore is always full, from early in the morning on. Now the market needs funds for basic maintenance and repairs, and is asking for a tax levy on the November ballot. I fully support the market, absolutely, completely, whatever it takes. I support the merchants, the good ones; they're the ones who make the whole thing work. Good independent merchants are essential, are a key to what the market is about and to its attractions. I do think that funds could be raised by raising parking rates, though. Parking should not be free - and taking away parking in a pedestrian area does not hurt businesses, even improves businesses, as has been seen elsewhere.

Louise Grassov of Gehl Architects, from Copenhagen, gave a presentation at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard last Thursday (she was also on a panel at the UW on Monday but I missed it). In Copenhagen, 35% of people commute to work by bike, 30% by car and 30% by transit (5% walk). In a place where everyone already has a bicycle and there are lots of bicycle "tracks", it is admittedly easier to get people out of their cars. Even in Copenhagen, however, there was an outcry over making the first pedestrian street in the 1970s. Merchants made the same arguments they do everywhere else. They didn't remove cars all at once; they did it by stealth - took away a few parking spaces here, there, gradually. Now the merchants love it. There are so many more people in the city, using the public space, going to the shops - if you make space for people, there will be people. If you make bike facilities, there will be more bikes. We already proved it with cars - the more space you make for cars, the more cars there will be. Cars don't shop; people do - so do you want more cars, or more people? Pike Place is packed with people much of the time. We really don't need the cars there in the way.

I finally had a chance to skim through The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup. It's a real eye-opener. It's something that urbanists and urban dwellers just know from experience, that too much parking destroys the form and life of a city - but to see facts and numbers applied really punches it home. Shoup makes the case that parking is heavily subsidized, even more so than roads. He cites a study by Mark Delucchi at the University of California at Davis showing that drivers only pay between 1% and 4% of the actual costs of parking, through taxes and direct costs. A parking space costs more than most cars. The costs of parking are nearly equal to the national defense budget (pre-Iraq).

 

The truth is, of course, that "free" parking is not free. The costs are carried over into what we pay for housing, retail goods, restaurant meals, movies at the cinema. The expectation of free parking is bundled into most new development - only in major urban centers does the equation change. Free parking is one of the reasons for unavailability of affordable housing. The costs of parking go further than the price of land and construction - there are social and environmental costs as well. People who count cars, or actually follow them on bicycles to see where they are going, have determined that about 30% of traffic on city streets is people circling around looking for free or cheap street parking. That's a lot of extra hydrocarbon emissions. A large supply of free or underpriced parking also affects transportation choices in a false, imbalanced way. If parking is free, why pay taxes for other transportation systems?



More space is allotted for cars than for people, as cars physically take up more room. We build more sheltered parking for cars than we build shelter for people. Each car typically has an average of three parking spaces waiting for it, somewhere. Most parking spaces are empty the majority of the time. For decades the centers of our cities were eroded for parking lots, until finally there wasn't enough urban fabric or uses left for more people to have any reason to come and park. Our zoning codes have off-street parking requirements based on peak periods. In combination with high parking requirements, we zone for low densities to keep traffic volumes down. In a meeting of a residential neighborhood association, you might hear these two complaints in the same sentence - "not enough parking" and "too much traffic". Can we not see the relation between those two things?

But the complaint is the same in commercial and business centers. A quote from Shoup, quoted in turn from a report on a European conference: "Business representatives see urban transport as suffering from severe problems, in particular a lack of parking space, congestion, air pollution, and the inadequacy of public transport". Is there a causal chain in there, or not? More on merchants and parking later.

Pike Place Market, 100 years old last year, has many ghosts, and many stories about them. It seems to be as accepting of ghosts as it is of any other kind of stranger. Sometimes I feel like a market ghost, or seem to be perceived as one. I tend to dress in somewhat Victorian fashion, to go with a somewhat Victorian figure, and am usually dressed all in black. On the day the grand old master of the market buskers Jim Hinde died I came to the market in my usual garb, and encountered a saddened Emery Carl, another famous busker, who seemed to approve of my mourning attire (I have never actually spoken to him). I had not yet heard the news. Another time I showed up in the same garb as Mayor Nickels was beginning his speech in support of a proposition for a tax levy for Market improvements, and he stared as if he thought I was a ghost. I could be making this up.




Last Monday night I attended a Friends of the Market board meeting and rally in support of the Market levy, which is on the November ballot. Paul Dorpat gave a truly fascinating lecture and slideshow on the history of the Market. I was interested to learn that neither he nor Paul Dunn, president of Friends of the Market, although they have been here a long time, are Seattle natives - more strangers captured by the Market. Peter Steinbrueck was there, who is not only a native but practically has his DNA interwoven with the Market. Ellen, director of the Pike Market Child Care, which my granddaughter attended for two happy months, was there, as was Rose of Rose's Chocolates who is also serving her second term on the Market Historical Commission; and many other supporters.

The Market's history is as fascinating as any urban history. Seattle is a young city, not too burdened by history, as are some of the European cities. Sometimes the past can overwhelm the future. Venice, for example, survived for centuries by building anew on top of the old - as the old buildings sank in the marsh of the lagoon, the residents built a new city with the old city as the foundation. As Venice reached its height, it became too beloved, too precious, too expensive to keep following that practice. Now the city is sinking, and it is difficult to imagine how it might survive rising sea levels. London has an enormous amount of history to preserve, but they get creative about it. Some listed structures can be taken apart and stored until they can be reused elsewhere, such as the glass and wrought iron train sheds and the flower hall from old Covent Garden.



Seattle is young, fairly well preserved, and has a lot worth preserving. Some things were regrettably lost before that was figured out. Now developers get creative about building something new while keeping the best of the old - sort of like the old adage for the bride at her wedding. The Cristalla has a residential hi-rise in blue glass above a beautiful white terra cotta facade of the former Crystal Pool natatorium. Paul Allen of Vulcan will take this old Pacific Ford (?) dealership, move it six feet for the Mercer rebuild, and build a larger building behind the showroom.

    

There is also adaptive reuse. The Coliseum Theater, which holds its downtown corner in the most emphatically beautiful way, is now a retail store. Real Networks is in the old can factory by the waterfront. The old cannery is now the Port of Seattle headquarters. There are other examples, and more being planned, if any plans make it through the current financial crisis.



There are always the ones you wish someone would get creative with - the buildings that don't quite rate protection yet have qualities you would like to keep in place. This building has been modified over the years, enough to allow it to be torn down, along with its neighbors, which have already been vacated. The replacement will be one of those utterly massive things that are almost dictated by current zoning - an entire bread loaf block with two huge towers rising at either end - practically a single massive block with a small gap down the middle. If there are casualties of this crisis, not that anyone would wish it, of course - this plan might deserve to die. Perhaps it can be reincarnated under a revised code. (Update 10/26/08: This project is officially dead. The ground floor space in the buildings that were to be demolished is still vacant and graffiti prone, except for the Icon Grill, which is going strong.)

City planners have in past decades earned a negative reputation for social engineering, partly as a result of the worst offenses of the urban renewal era. There should be some evidence-based reasoning behind the design and planning of cities, however. I like to walk in cities, to live and work in cities, and I know what like about cities. My likes and dislikes are an individual matter; other individuals may share some or all of them, or not. Yet as a practitioner of architecture and urban design, I will produce spaces that others will inhabit. My biases will inevitably influence the spaces I produce, which in turn will impact some or even a great many other lives, perhaps for a very long time. There is a real sense of responsibility attached to the design of spatial environments for human inhabitation. This raises an important question for the design practitioner: how do the design choices of the designer impact the multiple users or inhabitants of the designed environment? The question arising from that one is: how can such impacts be determined and evaluated? Sometimes quantitative measures are needed in order to produce qualitative results, i.e. positive quality of life in a designed urban environment.

I once undertook a brief study to try and satisfy myself that there is even any need for such a thing as "urban design", which is of fairly recent nomenclature, as I am idealistic enough to hope to do work that has meaning and purpose. Does the design of the environment have impact, one way or another? I did a study of opportunistic crime, burglary, theft, vandalism, etc. because the data were easily gathered and manipulated. I found enough to show some causation between spatial form and a social behavior, albeit a negative one.

One simple but strong factor is block size. A high average block area, meaning fewer cross streets, is related to higher incidence of opportunistic crime. So is a discontinuous street grid, or a self-looping street grid.