3 ms·

It is highly misleading to point out that "In Des Moines, for example, there are 18 times as many parking spaces per acre as households". Well sure, commercial

by burfog 8y ago

It is highly misleading to point out that "In Des Moines, for example, there are 18 times as many parking spaces per acre as households". Well sure, commercial areas don't have households but they still need parking. Not even questioning the numbers, which might be carefully picked, I come to the opposite conclusion. To me, "In Seattle, the parking occupancy rate downtown is 64 percent." means that there is very little room for surges. Business is impacted when the availability of parking isn't 100% reliable.

ebikelaw 8y ago
Not really. Building your parking lot for peak demand has a very, very high opportunity cost. You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. It is also true that small businesses almost universally overestimate the fraction of their customers arriving by car. In Oakland they surveyed the merchants on a street, who estimated 90% of their customers came by car, which is quite impossible given the streetscape. Careful observation revealed it was the inverse: only 10% arrived by car. Also the people who arrived on foot spent the most and the people in the cars spent the least. Streetsblog has covered the topic of wastefully overprovisioning your parking capacity for peaks, as well as the topic of merchant perception of transportation mode. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste-of-half-empty-black-friday-parking-lots/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste...
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. Only if your customer demographic is very generic (customer locality), or your employees are young/desperate (employee locality); and sure, lots of businesses are like this, but how many? I personally think the opposite approach: undoing zoning restrictions on small and medium commercial operations mixed directly into residential areas, and vice versa; I think this lines up with the effect you note in your Oakland anecdote.
- burfog 8y ago
  You underestimate the loss. It isn't just that businesses lose customers when the parking is full. People don't want to drive there and then have to turn back, so many won't take the risk. The lots may only be 70% full, but the chance that they might be 100% full is enough to make people go elsewhere. Customers expect dependable service. It's the same with operating hours. If you make your hours completely random, with a decent chance of being closed when customers show up, nobody will bother to make the trip.
extralego 8y ago
Talk about gridlock! Literally and figuratively... I don’t think anyone is missing your point, but it sounds terribly short-sighted. For one, what’s good for business is commonly catastrophic to other systems. An effort to prioritize here is critical. For some reason, baby-boomers have an odd propensity for ignoring more systematic, hollistic concerns brought by the shift to dependency on automobiles. I think I can speak for most of my millenial peers when I say it seems maniacal. And I am getting sick of feeling guilty for blaming “baby-boomers”. You people just don’t know when enough is enough. Of course, you’re also responsible for gutting the safety nets and other civil structures that the victims of failed businesses rely on. Again, gridlock. Drop it already. At least you ahve a business.
- nmoaenm342nt 8y ago
  Wow, your prejudice is both shocking and disgusting.
microcolonel 8y ago
Also, the idea of comparing "parking spaces per acre" and "households per acre" is kinda silly in the first place. Des Moines households are generally larger than parking spaces. A typical parking space, plus its corresponding lane space in a lot, is about 15m². The average Des Moines apartment is about 67m², and the average household population in Iowa is ~2.4. So even ignoring non-rental housing, you can see how this comparison is kinda bogus, since (like-for-like) apartments are naturally at least five times larger than parking spaces (and non-rental housing is usually even larger), and somewhere between one and two parking spaces per household is easy to justify even if you're only looking at residential space: when it comes to commercial areas, parking charges and volumes are clearly set to ensure availability, so in order for fees to remain reasonable, considerably more parking than "makes sense" must be provisioned.
st26 8y ago
A business is also impacted when it doesn't have its very own stoplight to help people turn into the lot. Thus some cities wind up putting in stoplights every few hundred feet, in some areas. Congratulations, you've just created an unsolvable traffic light network, and magicked all-day gridlock out of thin air. This is a multivariate optimization problem. We need to consider the repercussions of heavily over-provisioning parking.

by burfog 8y ago

ebikelaw 8y ago

Not really. Building your parking lot for peak demand has a very, very high opportunity cost. You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. It is also true that small businesses almost universally overestimate the fraction of their customers arriving by car. In Oakland they surveyed the merchants on a street, who estimated 90% of their customers came by car, which is quite impossible given the streetscape. Careful observation revealed it was the inverse: only 10% arrived by car. Also the people who arrived on foot spent the most and the people in the cars spent the least. Streetsblog has covered the topic of wastefully overprovisioning your parking capacity for peaks, as well as the topic of merchant perception of transportation mode. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste-of-half-empty-black-friday-parking-lots/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste...

microcolonel 8y ago
> You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. Only if your customer demographic is very generic (customer locality), or your employees are young/desperate (employee locality); and sure, lots of businesses are like this, but how many? I personally think the opposite approach: undoing zoning restrictions on small and medium commercial operations mixed directly into residential areas, and vice versa; I think this lines up with the effect you note in your Oakland anecdote.
burfog 8y ago
You underestimate the loss. It isn't just that businesses lose customers when the parking is full. People don't want to drive there and then have to turn back, so many won't take the risk. The lots may only be 70% full, but the chance that they might be 100% full is enough to make people go elsewhere. Customers expect dependable service. It's the same with operating hours. If you make your hours completely random, with a decent chance of being closed when customers show up, nobody will bother to make the trip.

extralego 8y ago

Talk about gridlock! Literally and figuratively... I don’t think anyone is missing your point, but it sounds terribly short-sighted. For one, what’s good for business is commonly catastrophic to other systems. An effort to prioritize here is critical. For some reason, baby-boomers have an odd propensity for ignoring more systematic, hollistic concerns brought by the shift to dependency on automobiles. I think I can speak for most of my millenial peers when I say it seems maniacal. And I am getting sick of feeling guilty for blaming “baby-boomers”. You people just don’t know when enough is enough. Of course, you’re also responsible for gutting the safety nets and other civil structures that the victims of failed businesses rely on. Again, gridlock. Drop it already. At least you ahve a business.

nmoaenm342nt 8y ago
Wow, your prejudice is both shocking and disgusting.

microcolonel 8y ago

Also, the idea of comparing "parking spaces per acre" and "households per acre" is kinda silly in the first place. Des Moines households are generally larger than parking spaces. A typical parking space, plus its corresponding lane space in a lot, is about 15m². The average Des Moines apartment is about 67m², and the average household population in Iowa is ~2.4. So even ignoring non-rental housing, you can see how this comparison is kinda bogus, since (like-for-like) apartments are naturally at least five times larger than parking spaces (and non-rental housing is usually even larger), and somewhere between one and two parking spaces per household is easy to justify even if you're only looking at residential space: when it comes to commercial areas, parking charges and volumes are clearly set to ensure availability, so in order for fees to remain reasonable, considerably more parking than "makes sense" must be provisioned.

st26 8y ago

A business is also impacted when it doesn't have its very own stoplight to help people turn into the lot. Thus some cities wind up putting in stoplights every few hundred feet, in some areas. Congratulations, you've just created an unsolvable traffic light network, and magicked all-day gridlock out of thin air. This is a multivariate optimization problem. We need to consider the repercussions of heavily over-provisioning parking.