**Self-organized urban planning and parking

Can the principles of self-organizing systems be imported into urban planning?

Could it apply to such a mundane topic as parking?

Self-organizing systems are understood to consist of lower-level component parts that interact to produce  system-wide order.

Self-organization is a process where some form of overall order or coordination arises out of the local interactions between smaller component parts of an initially disordered system.

One point of interest is how simple rules or limited stimuli and input at the local level produce the complex behavior of the whole system.

A classic example of this would be the simple reactions of fish within a school. As a body, they move with dazzling dexterity and apparent coordination.

In this podcast on urban parking policy, the UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup makes a bold statement: NO FREE PARKING!

SHOUP: Everybody likes free parking, including me, probably you. But just because the driver doesn’t pay for it doesn’t mean that the cost goes away. If you don’t pay for parking your car, somebody else has to pay for it. And that somebody is everybody. We pay for free parking in the prices of the goods we buy at places where the parking is free. And we pay for parking as residents when we get free parking with our housing. We pay for it as taxpayers. Increasingly, I think we’re paying for it in terms of the environmental harm that it causes.

This would seem to be a classic case of the tragedy of the commons, where the desires of each individual undermines communal resources.  

The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource.

This is also a story of mass gambling addiction. The most powerful form of reinforcement is intermittent, the variable ratio schedule found in the use slot machines and participation in lotteries. In a sense, we are all addicted to the idea of finding that free parking space in the perfect location -- which we have found on occasion (gloriously).

Shoup suggested three solutions:  finding the lowest parking price that leaves one or two vacant spaces on each block – around 85% parking space occupancy, returning meter revenue to the neighborhood that generates it, and removing off-street parking requirements when a building’s land-use changes.

Here part of the famous op-ed by the urban planner Donald Shoup, in which he argues that much of traffic congestion is caused by drivers looking for parking spaces. He made very detailed observations about traffic patterns caused by free street parking.

Several studies have found that cruising for curb parking generates about 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts. In a recent survey conducted by Bruce Schaller in the SoHo district in Manhattan, 28 percent of drivers interviewed while they were stopped at traffic lights said they were searching for curb parking. A similar study conducted by Transportation Alternatives in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn found that 45 percent of drivers were cruising.

When my students and I studied cruising for parking in a 15-block business district in Los Angeles, we found the average cruising time was 3.3 minutes, and the average cruising distance half a mile (about 2.5 times around the block). This may not sound like much, but with 470 parking meters in the district, and a turnover rate for curb parking of 17 cars per space per day, 8,000 cars park at the curb each weekday. Even a small amount of cruising time for each car adds up to a lot of traffic.

Over the course of a year, the search for curb parking in this 15-block district created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in the United States.

Ultimately, because the cost of street parking is artificially low, drivers are incentivized to cruise around looking for a free space. This creates traffic congestion.

What causes this astonishing waste? As is often the case, the prices are wrong. A national study of downtown parking found that the average price of curb parking is only 20 percent that of parking in a garage, giving drivers a strong incentive to cruise.

Underpriced curb spaces are like rent-controlled apartments: hard to find and, once you do, crazy to give up. This increases the time costs (and therefore the congestion and pollution costs) of cruising.

 Some places are already doing something about this.

To prevent shortages, some cities have begun to adjust their meter rates (using trial and error) to produce about an 85 percent occupancy rate for curb parking. The prices vary by location and the time of day. Drivers can usually find a vacant curb space near their destination, and the search time is zero. Cities can adjust the price of curb parking in response to demand to keep roughly one out of every eight spaces vacant throughout the day. Right-priced curb parking can eliminate cruising.

 Finding the right price for parking can be tricky.

The balance between the varying demand for parking and the fixed supply of curb spaces is the Goldilocks Principle of parking prices: the price is too high if too many spaces are vacant, and too low if no spaces are vacant. But when only a few spaces are vacant, the price is just right, and everyone will see that curb parking is both well used and readily available.

But finding the right price has financial benefits for the city.

Beyond the transportation and environmental benefits, performance-based prices for curb parking can yield ample revenue. If the city uses a share of this money for added public services on the metered streets, residents and local merchants will be more willing to support charging the right price for curb parking. These funds can be used to clean and maintain sidewalks, plant trees, improve lighting, remove graffiti, bury utility wires and provide other public improvements. Returning the meter revenue generated by a district to the district can persuade residents, merchants and property owners to support right-priced curb parking.

Shoup is argues that each street should typically have one or two parking spaces available, and that parking prices should be adjusted for the locale and the time of day to achieve that.

The typical street has about ten spaces. Hence, an 85% occupancy rate is Shoup's norm.

Redwood City, Calif., for example, sets its downtown meter rates to achieve an 85 percent occupancy rate for curb parking (the rates vary by location and time of day, depending on demand). Because the city returns the revenue to pay for added public services in the metered district, the downtown area will receive an estimated $1 million a year for increased police protection and cleaner sidewalks.

In a nutshell, that is a kind of principle of self-organization, a simple, non-arbitrary rule that transforms the entire dynamics of a system.

(Here is Shoup's classic paper, "The High Cost of Free Parking", which explains his theories in detail.)

But ending free street parking is just one strategy of Shoup's agenda, which is anti-automobile.

The other strategy is ending the requirement that homes and businesses have their own private parking.

Because cities with fewer cars will need fewer parking spaces, city planners can abandon their most expensive zoning regulation: off-street parking requirements. Requiring all new buildings to provide ample off-street parking spreads the city over a larger area, reduces density and makes cars the default way to travel. Parking requirements also undermine public transit and make life harder for people who are too poor to own a car.

These parking requirements have a cascade of unintended negative effects.

I argue in “The High Cost of Free Parking” that minimum parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion and carbon emissions, pollute the air and water, encourage sprawl, raise housing costs, exclude poor people, degrade urban design, reduce walkability and damage the economy. To my knowledge, no city planner has argued that parking requirements do not have these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown that parking requirements have these effects and more. We are poisoning our cities with too much parking.

 The rich tend to get richer, and the poor, poorer. Thing like mandatory off-street parking tend to benefit the affluent.

City planners cannot do much to counter the inequality of wealth in the United States, but they can help to reform parking requirements that place heavy burdens on minorities and the poor. Removing minimum parking requirements may be the cheapest and simplest way to achieve a more just society, and will produce a cascade of benefits for cities, the economy and the environment. Best of all, cities don’t need to wait until cars disappear before they remove their unwise parking requirements. They can remove their parking requirements now.

 Now, back to self-organizing systems. What we see with Shoup's theories is the replacement of one rule (mandatory off-street private parking) with another rule (no free on-street parking).

The rules of the system are as minimalist as possible. But changing these few rules changes the dynamic of the system.