STEVE JOBS: “And we’ve come up with a design that
puts 12,000 people in one building”
Four months before he died in 2011, Steve Jobs made his final public appearance pitching
Apple’s new campus, which opened this year.
Central to his vision was turning existing parking lots into a green landscape.
STEVE JOBS “The overall feeling of the place is gonna
be a zillion times better than it is now, with all the asphalt.
so we’d like to plant a lot of trees including some apricot orchards…”
But Jobs didn’t mention that the new parking structure on campus would have had more floor
space than the office building.
That’s because it wasn’t Apple’s plan.
The decision came from the city of Cupertino, which demanded 11,000 parking spots for the
campus.
But Cupertino is hardly unique.
It’s estimated that in America there are 8 parking spots for every car, covering up
to 30% of our cities, and collectively taking up about as much space as the state of West
Virginia.
The more parking we have, the more we’re able to drive.
The rules that manage our parking needs not only influence the way we move around but
also shape our urban landscapes.
DONALD SHOUP: If you look at pictures of the American cities around 1920 and 1930, all
of the curbs are just completely filled with parked cars.
And they couldn’t use prices to manage demand because the parking meter wasn’t even invented
until 1935.
This is Donald Shoup.
An Urban planning professor at UCLA, whose speciality is parking.
As cars filled cities in the early 20th century, two inventions came to dominate parking management
throughout the United States.
The first was the parking meter.
DONALD SHOUP: The way the meter manufacturers popularized parking meters was they offered
them free to cities and they kept the revenue until the meter was paid for in about 6 months
– and then the city got all the revenue.
They offered to install them on one side of the street only, so people could see how it
worked on one side, and how it worked on the other.
Around the same time the parking meter was invented, cities invented the idea of off
street parking requirements.
Off street parking requirement, also known as mandatory parking minimums, are the second
invention.
And though you may not be aware of it them, most of the parking lots you’re used to
exist because of these rules in the background.
SHOUP: look at any place from the air, any suburban place from the air – you see an
awful lot of land taken up for parking.
And most people don’t know why.
It’s our policy that we require our cities to be built with a lot of parking.
With the suburbanization after World War II, off-street parking requirements became popular
with city governments.
They forced developers to include a parking for their new buildings, which created a huge
supply of parking lots at no cost to the city.
SHOUP: Off street parking requirements really spread throughout the United States faster
than really any other urban planning invention.
And they arose partly because of the lack of management of on-street parking.
If you can’t manage the on street parking properly, you need off street parking requirements
or everybody will say “how did you let this building be built when there’s not enough
parking.”
A typical requirement looks like this:
For every 1000 square feet of new building, there has to be a set number of parking spots
which varies by land use.
SHOUP: You have to have parking spaces per something.
It could be a number of spaces per bassinet in a hospital, or per holes in a golf course,
or per thousand gallons of water in a swimming pool.
One of the oddest ones is for a funeral home, because that’s sort of – parking spaces
per what?
An average parking spot requires about 330 square feet, which includes car storage and
empty space for the access aisles.
That means If a policy requires 3 spots per thousand feet, the parking lot needs to be
the size of the building.
And many parking requirements need more spots, a restaurant may need 10 spots per thousand
square feet, making the parking lot over three times larger than the restaurant.
SHOUP: Planners don’t have any training in how to set them, and there’s really no
way to say how much parking every building needs, so there’s a pseudoscience that has
grown up, like blood letting, which was a major form of medical treatment for a couple
thousand years, and that’s just like parking requirements today.
Building parking is expensive especially when it involves a large construction project.
SHOUP: We pay for the free parking that we demand in every role that we have in life
other than as a driver.
As a tax payer, as a resident, as a shopper.
And just because you pay nothing for parking at the parking lot of the grocery store doesn’t
mean the cost goes away.
It’s still there.
It’s just that the driver isn’t paying for it.
Developers who don't comply with parking requirements pay tens of thousands of dollars for every
spot that they don't include.
A lot of times, these costs prohibit new development.
SHOUP: This is the most valuable land on earth.
Land is expensive for housing but its free for parking.
And you wonder why we have a problem?
Parking requirements often result in more parking space than building space, so they
lower density of cities, pushing buildings further apart from each other, making it harder
to walk and encouraging more driving.
Many of the dense cities that we love like Paris, Washington DC or Amsterdam or New York
wouldn’t look like this with parking requirements.
These arbitrary rules continue to shape the growth of our cities, and increase traffic
congestion.
But the excessive amount of land dedicated to parking spaces is able to be repurposed.
SHOUP: We have a terrific opportunity to convert underused parking lots into housing to parking
for people who want to live.
The upside is that we have a lot of benefits to reap from changing our policies.
SHOUP: To boil an 800-page book into three bullet points, I have three basic recommendations.
Remove off-street parking requirements.
Charge the right price for on-street parking, by which I mean the lowest price the city can charge
and still have one or two open spaces on every block.
So nobody can say there's a shortage of parking.
In order to reach that price you have to vary it by location and time of day.
But once you've done that, and make it politically popular you can spend the revenue on public
services on the metered streets.
Well I'm worn out.