How is reducing the amount of parking that developers are allowed to build for new developments a strong arm tactic? Taking people’s cars at gunpoint would be a strong arm tactic. Parking reduction for new developments would cause a very gradual increase in parking scarcity, and parking rates would climb slowly relative to the do-nothing status quo, likely on the scale of a couple extra percent per year.
Buses aren’t as bad as you all think. @TedF since you live in Cary like me, something to watch out for is that transfers from GoCary routes to GoTriangle 300 at the train station somehow seem to get scheduled for an extra 30 minutes on Google maps. The GoCary buses arrive at :27 or :57 and the 300 departs at :30 and :00. It’s just a 3 minute scheduled connection but timekeeping on GoCary is solid and the connection is pretty reliable, at least inbound. But somehow Google won’t allow for it. So maybe take a half hour off of whatever Google Maps is telling you.
That said, I also believe it is a logical fallacy to believe that “Buses aren’t a good option for me therefore nobody will ride them and parking rates should not go up.” There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands of people working downtown who live in an apartment or house right next to a bus stop, with a quick, direct ride downtown, who drive nonetheless, because it is most familiar, easiest, and cheap. Tighten the market a bit and those are the sort of people who drop out of the parking market first; meanwhile everybody else pays a few extra percent each year.
Riding transit to work if you work downtown is considered “normal” all over the country and world - even including middle class office workers riding mere buses. It is wrong to think that Raleighites are such spoiled snowflakes that we can’t adapt to the same paradigm that the rest of the world lives by. Downtowns are cool places to work, and Raleigh is no exception. Taking transit or paying to park is the price you pay.
Having people who work in the suburbs use transit is a much harder nut to crack, but downtown? If we are serious about making transit work, it’s gotta start here.
I used the GoRaleigh Plan A Trip to get those numbers. Most people in Cary would probably have a similar if not longer commute. I live less than 2 miles from downtown Cary. If they were to establish the commuter train then I think that would be a lot better for most of us. I live 12 miles from Downtown Raleigh and anything over an hour is absolutely unacceptable. If they build the BRT’s and the commuter train I think a lot of what you want will just happen naturally.
@dtraleigh
I truly do love all the discussion in regards to vehicles/driving/parking (seriously), but can we put in into a different thread? Please and thank you!
My neighbor (in Oakwood) drives to their job at the state because the parking is dirt cheap (ie: subsidized). Even though we live right next to the #10 that goes right past their office and would take them less than a minute ride on the bus. It would be nice to have 15 min headways but 30min ones aren’t that bad. Which is still related to this project because we’ve been discussing the sizable parking subsidy, but I can move over to a different thread if someone can point one out.
Go Raleigh trip planner has the same issue of adding 30 bogus minutes when transfering between GoCary and GoTriangle at Cary Station.
I live near bond park which IIRC is pretty close to you. When I take the bus downtown, I have a pleasant 10 minute walk through the park to the nearest stop at the senior center, and once I’m on the bus it’s about 45 minutes to downtown.
Cars are the status quo and as natural as it gets for Raleigh. The issue is that you have to provide something that’s a better choice for the greatest number of people in order to change that. It’s what makes a shift to transit difficult.
Our development patterns don’t accommodate transit. I live ITB and it’s a 15 minute drive, a 30 minute bike ride, or a 1.5 hour bus ride to get to work.
evan.j.bost has it right. The natural progression is to try and reduce car dependency over time as development and density becomes more intense. The way you encourage that is with a well planned BRT and progressive zoning to encourage density.
We’re not ready to limit parking here. You can take away the standards and let developers build what they need rather than what the city requires. If you take away their parking you’re going to have a slow building or limit yourself to the people who have a great transit connection to that building. Which then limits you to the homes that have a stop on that line, and limits your kids to the schools serving the people living close to that line, etc.
Once there’s a critical mass of transit users and you see parking being unused, you can start thinking about reducing parking. Ideally that would come from the development community in the form of transit oriented development rather than a government regulation.
I disagree. Robust use of the existing bus system would be a strong indicator to the feds that our region will ride a commuter rail or BRT system. Conversely if nobody rides buses here, why would they expect anybody to ride a rail system?
Waiting around for manna from heaven like a federally funded fixed guideway transit system, or for denser development to happen (hint: it’s already happening) is the perfect way to get absolutely nowhere.
DTR may have been fragile back in 2002 but it isn’t anymore. It’s the strongest it’s ever been. The national environment favoring urban locations shows no signs of abating, and the region continues to grow by leaps and bounds. So, stop being scared that “we aren’t ready” - That’s BS. We have a bus system. It works. Let’s leverage it as much as we can. Plenty of people who live close enough to bike or walk today are driving. Let’s get them to rethink it. People who continue to drive are already paying for parking, they will just have to pay a bit more.
Every extra parking space we build today, is an extra car on the streets of downtown and an extra person who will be driving instead of using transit, biking, or walking - forever. It’s not going to be easier to cut the ratios later. Just do it.
I will tell you what I have been guilty of. If I want to spend $10 or so for a meal I will avoid going to a place where I have to pay another couple of dollars to park. I absolutely hate to pay to park. It makes me avoid places rather than adopt a new way to get there. I may or may not be speaking for a majority of the population.
I have conflicted thoughts on this comment. I agree the paying a 20% tax on your meal for parking is ridiculous. However, at the same time, I feel like no meal I had costed $10, and usually if am going downtown I’m with my family or on a date night. Rarely would I be going downtown alone unless it’s for work which has parking. I feel like paying for parking isn’t a big deal if you meal is 25 or more… Counterpart to my own argument is this is going to cause higher and higher cost of living and food increase downtown making the wealth gap blah blah blah… I tend to only eat nicer meals downtown for the reason you are saying… conflicted thoughts for sure
Another random thought is even when I get free parking for work… it’s such a pain in the ass to park that I have used the bus just because it’s stressful to drive in traffic and parking adds like 5-15 minutes depending on the garage craziness going on. If there was dedicated bus lanes, electric buses, etc I would do it more and more. The main reason I don’t use the bus more is when it takes double the time, I am willing to lose 15-20 minutes because I make that back in parking the damn car! Sometimes I have to park like 6-7 stories high which is 5 minutes up and 5 minutes down without other cars in my way.
I have completely let go of angst over parking fees when I drive downtown. Given a choice of driving a few blocks and cruising for free parking, and heading for a $10 parking deck I will choose the parking deck every time. Because, what’s 10 bucks? Free parking is not free, anyway. Its cost is just externalized and paid in some other way.
If I worked downtown I would ride the bus most of the time. If I needed to drive on a particular day for some reason, I would just pay the fee. Not gonna let that stuff rent space in my brain.
I don’t think we’re ready for rail and I can understand why the federal government doesn’t think our region warrants funding for rail.
I just don’t think it’s effective for Cities and Towns to have ordinances that prohibit parking. We’re not there yet. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a business fail or a site rejected because they provide too much parking. I have seen numerous sites passed on, and businesses fail for lack of adequate parking. Many of these were on prime bus and pedestrian routes.
If you create an unfriendly business environment in order to promote transit before its time, you’re going to be less competitive and slow the type of density that actually benefits from transit.
I think the strategy should be to provide the BRT and allow developers to set their own parking ratios if they’re in proximity to the stops. If a couple condo or apartment buildings start popping up around the stations, the trend is going to be more units and less parking in order to maximize profit. The incentive is already there to reduce parking. You don’t have to legislate it.
I’m not afraid of transit, I’m just being real about it. I personally think that autonomous electric vehicles are the future. You could pay a monthly service fee and a car would be there whenever you need it, connected to a satellite AI controlled street grid that flows like clockwork. Door to door personal transit, without carrying groceries 1/4 mile from the nearest stop, or waiting in the cold rain for a bus that’s late. With AEV’s you wouldn’t need buses, light rail, or parking downtown. And it would probably be much safer to bike and walk to work. There is the potential for suburban cities like Raleigh to end up with a system that makes buses obsolete through better technology rather than forced regulation. It’s going to get here eventually regardless of how much you spend on transit or regulate parking. When it does get here some of those decks will be parking and charging for the AEV fleets, people will be turning their garages into home theaters, and driveways can become a part of your lawn.
I am not an expert but I am not so bullish on the future of autonomous vehicles.
A satellite controlled street grid that flows like clockwork sounds like a dystopian hellscape where people have been written out of the equation because they are disruptive to algorithmic optimization of traffic flow. Some AV boosters are already calling for things like fences and gates at crosswalks in an attempt to make these “unpredictable” actors behave more predictably. Imagine for example a world where you have to reserve a slot on your phone to walk across the street. Wall-E comes to mind.
And hand waving away things like traffic jams with stuff like satellite driven optimization ignores the geometric fact that a single occupancy AV takes up as much space on the road and creates just as much traffic (or more because of deadheading and circulation when unoccupied.) Achieving measurably better than single occupancy while maintaining door to door service is difficult because the diversions to pick up other passengers along the way significantly harms the time effectivenes, so it will continue to be mostly SOVs. So, I seriously doubt that AVs will increase the capacity of our transportation systems by much. Practical headway with human operators are around 2 seconds; can AVs even get that down to 1 second with 100% reliability? Remember these are life-critical systems.
You know what would be revolutionary? Automated buses running on fixed routes and frequent schedules.
At any rate, I do agree that getting rid of parking minimums letting developers/lenders set their ratios is a decent phase 0.
I don’t think turning today’s minimums into tomorrow’s maximums is would be much of a parking reduction. Most developments are currently built with something very close to the minimum.
But it doesn’t have to be single occupant AEV’s. You mention automated buses but I still have a quarter mile walk to the bus stop. With AEV’s it can do solo rides at one rate, double, triple or quad occupancy at another. You can have transit vans and any size vehicle that can get down a residential street. They can use the existing infrastructure, don’t need special lanes, don’t need bus stops, aren’t on a set route, and can pick up the next rider close to where they drop someone off leading to more productive trips.
I think once the first AEVs are legal for full autonomy you’ll see an exponential increase in efficiency as the systems will learn from the millions of miles that are driven. From my point of view it’s more utopia than dystopia. Don’t have to go to the gas station, no oil changes, no car payments or insurance, taxes paid by the taxi companies, no emissions from the vehicles. When it happens and nobody is paying for parking those parking lots and decks will be torn down and redeveloped. City owned deck lots could become parks.
It’s going to be a steady progression and take time, but that’s my guess at what traffic will look like in 2050. You’ll have to have a special license to drive an ICE vehicle, and the only reason to drive it will be for recreation. You’ll also be able to hop in the robo taxi down to Union Station, hop on the high speed rail, and be in DC for brunch. At least that’s what I’m hoping for by the time I’m too old to drive myself.
I’ve been paying for suburbanites since 1996. That’s when I bought my first urban condo downtown.
Without acceleration of tax rates, suburban single family development isn’t financially viable over the long run and depends on denser commercial and residential development to subsidize it.
To deny the infrastructure required to support the sort of development that will hopefully keep suburban infrastructure operational at reasonable rates is probably shortsighted. If providing that infrastructure means raising parking fees, or creating demand for transit use by limiting an ever increasing supply of parking, then that’s something that needs to be considered.
In the end, we could be like Singapore, which requires car owners to pay tens of thousands of dollars to obtain certificates every ten years to even buy a car.
Many of us are just looking for some balance.
Door to door service is a major efficiency killer regardless of whether your vehicles are automated or driven by operators. A vehicle that meanders through slow neighborhood streets to pick up 2 or 3 more people, and then meanders through slow downtown streets to drop them each off at the door of their destination, will wind up taking longer than it would have for each of those people to have walked that quarter mile (five minutes) to a major road, so the vehicle could pick them up without having to meander.
Couple of thoughts to points raised in this thread:
The claim that the suburban nature of this area is what made it so desirable seems totally unfounded. This area is desirable because of the ratio of its cost of living to earning potential, cluster of talent, universities, and jobs, and a host of other factors that would exist irrespective of the dominant form of our development. The fact that the Triangle is mostly suburbs is simply a consequence of the era in which most of our growth occurred (post-war). That’s literally all there is to it. We’d be just as desirable if we had a more established urban core.
In my eyes, the issue of parking convenience needs to be tackled first, and I don’t agree that increasing public transit efficiency will do much until parking is addressed. I live and work in Durham, a 25 minute walk to my office, or a 12-minute bus ride that literally stops right outside my apartment (so… basically as good as it gets in terms of transit convenience). Two of my coworkers who live in the same building drive to work. Why? Our subsidized parking pass makes it more attractive than being at the mercy of a free, 15-minute frequency bus. Also: if you’re willing to walk a bit, it’s possible to avoid paying for monthly parking altogether and just snag free street parking. It’s not just about the people driving in from the suburbs – we need to remember that there are people who live very close to downtown, in areas that are already adequately served by transit that are simply choosing not to use it because driving is too convenient.
You mention cost of living as a dominant factor, while ignoring that historically that is coded for suburbia and/or developable land. The era in which we became desirable isn’t a separate issue, it’s the whole kit and caboodle.
The reason urban development is more expensive today is because after the post-war shift to suburban development models, homes in urban walkable neighborhoods become a limited commodity that are now in high demand as cities regain popularity. Urban development became expensive because we stopped building it.
Cost is due to supply-and-demand. The supply was simply higher in the suburbs. Back in the 60s, all those reports done on the plight of urban housing found it was cheaper by a factor of over 4 to build new in suburbs rather than to attempt urban renewals. Price of land was the main driver of cost. Somewhere in the 1980s suburbia began to be bigger than urban and rural combined and likewise the cost began shifting somewhat. Though I’d assume any parity in square footage pricing seen in the late 90s was due to the different markets being reached by the housing stock. The middle class likely always had it easier in the suburbs.
So maybe take a half hour off of whatever Google Maps is telling you.