Parking Spaces/Community Places
Parking policies and requirements can strongly influence a community’s built and natural environments and can be leveraged to promote smarter growth.
Parking Spaces/Community Places (pdf) (2006) describes approaches that can help communities explore new, flexible parking policies that can encourage growth and balance parking needs with other goals.
This guide:
- Discusses the demand for and costs of parking.
- Demonstrates the significance of parking decisions in development patterns.
- Illustrates the environmental, financial, and social impacts of parking policies.
- Describes strategies for balancing parking with other community goals.
- Provides case studies of places that are successfully using these strategies to solve specific parking problems.
Many communities are reevaluating parking policies as part of a broader process of revisiting their goals for growth. Typical parking regulations and codes require a set amount of parking for a given square footage or number of units. These regulations commonly assume that all trips will be by private automobile. This assumption ignores a neighborhood's individual mix of uses, access to transit, walkability, and context within the region and can force businesses to provide unneeded parking, wasting space and money while harming the environment.
The report includes a case study on the SAFECO Corporation that illustrates how parking policies can save money, improve the environment, and meet broader community goals. SAFECO offers employees a choice between transit, vanpool, and parking benefits. As a result, SAFECO’s 1,700 employees drive about 1.2 million fewer miles annually than the Seattle region commuting average, saving about 28 tons of carbon monoxide.
SAFECO also reduced the amount of ground that required paving by 100,000 square feet, leading to less runoff in this rainy region. The company saves an estimated $230,000 per year after accounting for the cost of incentives and savings from reduced parking construction.