The disappearing parking lot. The end of mobility?

By Russell W. Snyder

Spoiler Alert: If your business model includes parking lot construction or maintenance, this story doesn’t have a happy ending.

You can find them in every town and city across California, from the swankiest beachfront or resort locales to the grittiest neighborhoods or industrial parks. It’s a silent sentinel that awaits your arrival, secures one of your most valuable assets, and helps speed you on your way. The parking lot is always a welcome sight when you need to find one, a source of anger and frustration when you can’t, and a commonplace feature that is everywhere all at once, and yet not at all. It’s never the destination, but rather the next-to-last stop on the journey. It’s an afterthought, like the chirp of your keyless remote as you walk away from your parked car, and almost never remembered (unless you forget where you parked).

The lowly parking lot may be the Rodney Dangerfield of mobility. No one will argue that striped expanses of asphalt are the best use for pricy California real estate. But it’s also integral to the efficient movement of people, goods and services. After all, you have to stop sometime. And that makes it a cherished part of the quality of life of our cities and towns, neighborhoods and the connecting points of our rural expanses. But these days, the parking lot is taking on a new role: villain. A growing number of environmentalists, bureaucrats, politicians, community activists and others have parking lots in the crosshairs, with bold declarations that they need to be greatly reduced or in some cases eliminated in favor of walking, biking and taking transit – deemed by the woke illuminati the preferred option for getting around. And this trend has troubling implications for the asphalt pavement industry in California. Projects will vanish, and so will the profits and jobs that go with them.

This trend is also happening largely out of view. Unlike the high-stakes battles over tailpipe emissions, Electric Vehicles, and the overall demonization of the fossil fuel industry, the war against the parking lot is a rear-guard action that gets scant attention. It’s not a nuclear bomb, but death by 1,000 cuts.

By some estimates, there are about 2 billion parking spots in the United States, or about seven for every car. And like the average car, most parking spots sit unused for a good part of the day. In some cities, 10 percent of land mass is devoted to parking for shopping centers, office space and apartment complexes. The widespread availability of parking has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the automobile as the primary mode of transportation in the 20th century, largely driven by businesses who wanted to make sure they accommodated all those potential customers. The California Air Resources Board conducted a study in 2019 and found that for non-residential construction, an average of at least one parking space is installed for every 275 square feet of non-residential building floor space in California, but there are many exceptions to the guideline. CARB estimated that between 1.4 million and 1.7 million new non-residential parking spaces may be constructed from 2021-24.

And building parking isn’t cheap. The average cost of a building a surface parking lot in a low-cost area, depending on amenities, runs about $8,000 to $10,000 per space. Those ubiquitous lots are generally asphalt. The cost for a mid-rise parking structure skyrockets from there, to around $25,000 to $30,000 per space. Parking structures in urban areas and may feature basements can cost upwards of $60,000 to $100,000 per space in premium downtown locations in

San Francisco and Los Angeles, parking experts say.

In the case of surface asphalt parking lots, they are changing as well. The push to manage stormwater runoff has led to the development of water-filtering porous asphalt pavement parking lots, with prominent examples popping up around the state, including at a Kaiser Medical Center parking lot in Fairfield and a Disney property in Anaheim. Adding solar power to parking lots is also becoming more common, greatly adding to the cost of surface lots.

Parking is the ultimate local issue, and local zoning codes emerged in the middle part of the last century to ensure that housing and businesses devoted enough space to accommodate vehicle travel. Generally these are represented as ratios – say one parking spot for 350 or 400 square feet of office space.

In California, with sky-high housing prices, and a short supply, environmentalists, city planners and politicians are taking aim at parking lots, blaming them for blight, climate change, Urban Heat Island effect, obesity and a host of other maladies. This trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when office towers emptied, and inner-city parking spaces were commandeered by restaurants and homeless encampments. Meanwhile, the constant drumbeat of climate change has pushed a new aggressiveness on the part of environmentalists into every corner of daily life. It’s the war against the car on multiple fronts, with flagging transit ridership and other mobility options constantly put forward as the solution. Increasingly, reducing or eliminating vehicular parking is now considered part of the climate solution. And little is standing in the way.

The City and County of San Francisco was one of the first major metropolitan areas in California to cut back on the amount of parking required for developments. In 2018 the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance eliminating parking minimums citywide, and it was signed into law later that year by Mayor London Breed. San Jose followed suit in late 2022, abolishing minimum parking space requirements at new housing developments. It was the first major parking policy change for the city since 1965. Under the old standard, a new single-family home required two covered parking spots, and restaurants were required to provide one spot for every 40 square-feet or 2.5 dining-room seats, which ever was greater.

The campaign to do the same is underway in Los Angeles, being led by groups such as Streets for All and the Parking Reform Network. And the refrain is always the same: more walking, more biking, and more transit use. The trend to eliminate parking minimums is also spreading across the country, with 15 cities taking such action in 2022 alone.

“Sure, our ancestors in Los Angeles drove across town in 20 minutes and parked for free on both ends,” wrote Michael Schneider, founder of Streets for All, in an op-ed earlier this year in the Los Angeles Times arguing for the abolishment of parking minimums. “That doesn’t make doing so a right now or in the future. We can solve the crises of climate change, homelessness and housing affordability. Conquering our insatiable demand for ‘enough’ parking is a great first step toward all three.”

At the statewide policy level, the California State Transportation Agency released a 47-page tome in 2021, the “Climate Action Plan for Transportation Infrastructure,” or CAPTI, which is a blueprint for getting people out of their cars, or certainly making it more difficult to use them. New capacity-increasing construction is frowned upon, and transit and High-Speed Rail is elevated. Parking hardly gets a mention, and when it does (on Page 32) it is to reference a desire for “reduced parking requirements for residential development.”

CalAPA opposed the CAPTI plan as unrealistic and unworkable. Still, it is clear that parking minimums are the latest skirmish in the war against the car, and they are coming to a community near you.

Taylor Kim, AIA, an associate principal with Watry Design, Inc., a San Jose-based engineering and architectural firm that specializes in parking planning and design, agrees that the trend for cities, particularly in urban areas, to rethink historic assumptions about parking is happening with increasing frequency.

“A lot of cities are reconsidering parking minimums and regulations, and being more flexible, which we think is a benefit for everyone,” Kim says. “We are seeing more cities, particularly the larger cities, that are starting to look at parking differently than they have in the past, being more flexible, letting projects propose how much parking they want to build. They are more willing to accept it. There is a move away from the more traditional approach, where if you build a building, for example, you need to provide three parking spaces for every 1,000 square-feet regardless of the location.” Much of her firm’s work is on the West Coast but they have projects as far west as Hawaii and as far east as Pennsylvania. They specialize in parking structures but also advises on surface lot construction or parking structure infrastructure, which is generally asphalt. She has observed that suburban, exurban or rural areas, which have limited transit options and are much more dependent on vehicular traffic, appear to be slower to embrace this trend.

The idea of trimming parking minimums has been knocking around the statehouse in [ Continued on page 12 ]