Category Archives: Parking

Chapel Hill News Asks Wrong Questions on Carrboro Parking

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Roberson St Lot by Flickr User Rubyji

Roberson St Lot by Flickr User Rubyji

In Sunday’s (3/24/2013) Chapel Hill News, the second left-hand editorial expressed concern over parking management for Shelton Station and the recent purchase of the Roberson Street lot by the town. The paper suggests that by buying parking in one part of downtown while considering ways to reduce the demand for parking at Shelton Station in another part of downtown, the Aldermen are acting at cross purposes by pursuing both initiatives.

Is Carrboro Talking Out of Both Sides of Its Mouth on Parking?

This editorial lacks context in a few places, and it is worth unpacking them one at a time.

Carrboro’s thoughtful development has made it one of the Triangle’s most livable and entertaining towns.

But the town can’t have it both ways.

Let’s start here.  The town is not having anything “both ways.” As the piece goes on, it seems to portray the issue as if asking Shelton Station’s developers to reduce the amount of proposed parking to be NEWLY BUILT onsite is somehow a REDUCTION in parking downtown while the Town purchasing parking that ALREADY EXISTS and is being used today is an EXPANSION of parking. To clear things up, Shelton Station will definitely add some amount of parking to downtown; how much has yet to be determined.  The purchase of the Roberson St lot does not add a single parking space to downtown.  It moves the control of the property’s destiny from the private sector to the public sector.

Is Shelton Station Significantly Out of Step with Town Parking Requirements, and Is That a Problem?  Or an Opportunity?

The editorial goes on:

As proposed, Shelton Station would have 170 parking spaces – fewer than the town requires.

This is partially true- the town has base-level requirements for various uses, and within certain parts of town, mostly close to downtown, developers can take reductions in parking based on the assumptions that some uses will share parking.  The developers have arrived at the 170 spaces listed above by accurately applying the shared parking reduction formulas of the town to the base parking requirements.

However, this only matters if the parking requirements make any sense, and in the United States, generally, they don’t. What’s wrong with parking requirements, particularly those from the Institute for Transportation Engineers (ITE), which the Town of Carrboro uses? Fortunately, Donald Shoup, the pre-eminent expert on parking in the US, and perhaps the world, has done the heavy lifting for us.

From Shoup’s landmark paper, “The Trouble With Minimum Parking Requirements”:

Where do minimum parking requirements come from? No one knows. The “bible” of land use planning, F. Stuart Chapin’s Urban Land Use Planning, does not mention parking requirements in any of its four editions.1 The leading textbooks on urban transportation planning also do not mention parking requirements. This silence suggests that planning academics have not seriously considered or even noticed the topic. This academic neglect has not prevented practicing planners from setting parking requirements for every conceivable land use. Fig. 1 shows a small selection of the myriad land uses for which planners have set specific parking requirements.

Without training or research, urban planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for bingo parlors, junkyards, pet cemeteries, rifle ranges, slaughterhouses, and every other land use. Richard Willson (1996) surveyed planning directors in 144 cities to learn how they set parking requirements. The two most frequently cited methods were “survey nearby cities” and “consult Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) handbooks”. Both strategies cause serious problems.

Shoup goes on to point out that the “survey other cities” approach often leads to the repetition of mistakes of other communities.  Carrboro is particularly susceptible to making this type of mistake because very few towns Carrboro’s size possess a level of transit service or cycling usage anything like ours.

Carrboro does, however, use on the handbooks of the Institute of Transportation Engineers in its analysis of how much parking certain uses require in town.  All of the italicized quote below is Shoup’s commentary except for the section in blue, which is a direct quote from the ITE Parking Generation manual:

To base parking requirements on more objective data, planners consult Parking Generation, published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. For each land use, this publication reports the “parking generation rate”, defined as the peak parking occupancy observed in surveys by transportation engineers.

A vast majority of the data… is derived from suburban developments with little or no significant transit ridership… The ideal site for obtaining reliable parking generation data would… contain ample, convenient parking facilities for the exclusive use of the traffic generated by the site… The objective of the survey is to count the number of vehicles parked at the time of peak parking demand (Institute of Transportation Engineers, 1987a, vii±xv, bold added by Shoup).

The ITE summarizes the survey results and reports the average peak parking occupancy observed at each land use as the parking generation rate for that land use. Half of the 101 reported parking generation rates are based on four or fewer surveys of parking occupancy, and 22% of the parking generation rates are based on a single survey. Because parking is free for 99% of all automobile trips in the United States, parking must be free at most of the ITE survey sites. Parking generation rates therefore typically measure the peak demand for parking observed in a few surveys conducted at suburban sites that o€versample free parking and lack public transit. Urban planners who use these parking generation rates to set minimum parking requirements are making a big mistake.

So what does a page out of the ITE Parking Generation handbook look like? Anybody familiar with statistics and regression analysis who has not seen ITE parking math before is in for a treat. Check out this scatterplot- click to enlarge:

ITE Parking Manual

This is a recommended equation for calculating parking for a fast food restaurant in the ITE Parking Generation Manual, based on the thousands of square feet of leasable space in a restaurant.  It has a R-squared value of 0.038. Put another way, the ITE gives urban planners a chart and equation to forecast the peak demand for parking at a certain type of restaurant in which they admit that over 96% of the variables that explain variation in peak parking demand are not captured by the chart or the equation. I’m ignoring the fact that they have 18 observations and that my grad school faculty said never to conduct regression analysis with less than 30 data points.

The bottom line is that with these equations and 3-decimal point numbers, the ITE manuals look like highly scientific documents, when in fact they are at best alchemy conjured to replicate conditions for single-use buildings that contain all their parking on one site, in places where that is a wise strategy because land is not terribly valuable.  They contain a value judgment that everyday parking should be sized to meet peak demand, which is the philosophy that brings us massive fields of parking for Thanksgiving Day shoppers that sit mostly empty 315+ days per year outside big box stores. These types of analyses were never meant to work in downtowns, and even as a first step prior to shared parking reductions like that which has been contemplated in the Shelton Station application, we should put limited stock in them.

Anyone seeking an informative and entertaining read on the folly of minimum parking requirements should read Dr. Shoup’s entire paper here (PDF 324k). It’s not a long read and there are many graphics. The first 7 pages lay out most of the problems quite well.

Returning to the Chapel Hill News editorial, the piece concludes:

The aldermen may be right to relax the parking requirements for Shelton Station. But if they’re wrong those cars are going to have to park somewhere. Before the project comes back, they may want to figure out just how much parking downtown really needs.

This is not necessarily true.  Those cars might not have to park somewhere.  What the CH News staff is missing here is that downtown attracts PEOPLE first, and also, as a secondary derived consequence of attracting PEOPLE, also attracts VEHICLES, which include:

  • BIKES
  • BUSES
  • FOOTWEAR
  • SCOOTERS
  • WAGONS
  • STROLLERS
  • and yes, CARS

 

Travel behavior surveys from around the country and the UNC campus show that most people, when living in a community that provides transportation choices, use several different modes in any given week.  You might drive to work but walk to the Farmers’ Market on Saturdays.  You might take the bus to UNC for work but drive to the movies with friends.  (you might consider taking the bus home from the movies if it ran later, too)

The key point is that people are reasonably smart and if they want to come to downtown Carrboro, and we give them choices, and encourage them to make choices that keep the downtown less congested and allow more access for others to do the same, then many of them will figure out other ways to get downtown than get in a car.  This already happens thousands of times a day, every day- in downtown Carrboro. Some of them will still drive, and that’s fine as long as we don’t do things that makes downtown less vibrant to ensure they have a perpetual supply of free spaces.

If We Shouldn’t Trust ITE Manuals or Other Communities’ Unscientific Standards, How Should We Evaluate What the “Right” Amount of Parking is for Development, Particularly Downtown?

First, we should realize that there is no bureau of Parking Weights and Measures coming to sue us/yell at us/etc if we make unorthodox choices.  We’re on our own, and that’s good.

Second, we should discuss parking policy through the prism of our goals. Vision 2020 aims to double commercial space downtown.  Space for parking competes directly with that goal, which is why we need to focus on providing ACCESS to downtown rather than parking.  I wrote a column on Orangepolitics on this subject five years ago that I think still applies well today. Access will require improving our environmentally friendly mode access to downtown, and probably involves eventually putting a market price on parking downtown.

Third, we should conduct research on how people get to businesses in downtown Carrboro. What the exact percentage is, I’m not sure- but the percentage of people arriving at Weaver Street Market to shop on foot, by bike, and by bus is surely very, very, different than your standard grocery store.

Fourth, we need to recognize that the fragmented parking landscape of downtown with many owners, all trying to reserve parking for their own customers, contributes to congestion and air pollution when people drive from lot A across the street to lot B to avoid triggering a towing policy, even though the individual moving their car across the street is the mutual customer of two downtown businesses.

When Dan Burden visited in 2001, he recommended that we figure out how to get more shared parking arrangements in downtown.  With the exception of Fitch Lumber allowing Weaver Street Market customers to park there for Thursday night and Sunday morning events, I don’t think this has really happened in any tangible way in downtown.

Back to Shelton Station

This last point is where unbundling parking comes in, and remains a key variable for Shelton Station. Technology has improved a lot over the last ten years and may offer us an opportunity to create “virtually shared” parking in town.  If Shelton Station is approved with the 170 spaces that the shared parking portions of the Town parking rules allow, or even some lower number of spaces, then if there is a carsharing vehicle onsite, renting apartments with unbundled parking will maximize the chance of the Shelton Station lot having capacity because lower-car ownership households will have an incentive to rent there that is not present elsewhere in town.

If after unbundling, Shelton Station developers find they have seven empty spaces pretty much all the time, then it would be great if they could put those seven spaces into a “shared parking pool” for downtown.  We could call the system, you guessed it — “CarrPark.”

These spaces would have a special sign letting people know that while most of the Shelton Station property was reserved for residents and businesses on site, that these seven spaces could be used by anyone WILLING TO PAY the market rate for that parking space at that time of day and day of the week.  Surely at some times of the week, that price would likely be zero, but at others, there would be a per-hour charge that would be adjusted by time of day to make sure that Shelton Station’s shared spaces were priced to be 85% full and 15% empty all the time.

Why would any developer do this?  Easy- they could keep any revenue from the spaces after the costs of registering those seven spaces in the CarrPark system were accounted for. Over time, a network of CarrPark parking spaces would be created downtown, on both public and private lots.  The town could put its public lots into the CarrPark system and build the computerized backend, which would include sensors that share real-time information on whether or not a parking space is empty. Visitors to downtown could check a real-time information app before they drove into town to see which lots had the most availability, and what their price per hour is.

This approach would allow incremental changes, one parking space at a time, to yield genuinely shared parking in downtown Carrboro across multiple public and private lots, without necessitating complicated land swaps among parking space owners.

While an electronic shared parking “CarrPark” system is obviously a longer-term idea to discuss for the community, the key point for projects like Shelton Station which will reach the Aldermen’s table soon is this — there are a lot of parking innovation tools we could deploy to make downtown Carrboro even more lovely for pedestrians while making it a lot more convenient to park downtown.

All of them are likely to work better if Shelton Station rents apartments and parking spaces to residents separately in an Unbundled fashion.

The other stuff can come later; but this is a great time to try Unbundling. I hope we can see this happen through a condition in the use permit for the site, or some other appropriate mechanism the town can come up with.

 

Carrboro Should Require Developer to Unbundle Parking, and Then Approve Shelton Station

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Shelton Station

Shelton Station

Over a year ago, I wrote a piece in our wonderful community newspaper emeritus, the Carrboro Citizen, supporting the Shelton Station project which will come before the Board of Aldermen Thursday night.

Some key benefits of the project include:

  • The presence of another 125 to 170 residents so close to downtown will boost local business activity, in addition to generating construction jobs in the short term.
  • Shelton Station and the residents of its 96 apartments will create a considerably smaller carbon footprint than if those same units were built on the edge of town. Why? Carrboro – and particularly downtown – is built to encourage the most environmentally friendly travel behavior in the state.
  • If Carrboro does not want to become a town where only the wealthy can afford to live, then the town must approve more housing. That housing should be developed on Carrboro’s terms, in accordance with Carrboro’s values and priorities. As Shelton Station developer Ken Reiter has proposed pursuing green features in the building design, providing covered bicycle parking and renting 10 percent of the units to be affordable to workers at 60 percent of the median income, there is evidence that Reiter has thought carefully about ways to reflect Carrboro values in Shelton Station’s design.

All of the fundamental dynamics that led me to write that op-ed remain in place today, and I would encourage everyone to read it again here.

But prior to saying “Yes,” I hope that the Aldermen can ask the applicant to take one specific action that will introduce more transparency in their rental pricing, encourage more environmentally friendly travel onsite by residents, and direct parking towards turnover spaces that support local business instead of long-term vehicle storage: require the UNBUNDLING of Shelton Station’s parking.

What Is Parking Unbundling?

Unbundling of parking means that a household at Shelton Station, instead of renting an apartment and automatically getting assigned a certain number of parking spaces for their use, rents an apartment at one price, and a number of parking spaces of their choosing at a separate price.  For example, imagine a scenario where all parking spaces for residents at Shelton Station rented for $40/month.  This means that if the building owner would charge a $740/month rent with 1-bedroom apartment rent and parking rent bundled, then the Unbundled pricing approach would rent the same apartment for $700 and then, IF the renter wanted to park their car onsite, they would pay another $40/month specifically for the opportunity to do so.

Now, you may be thinking, “what’s the point?  Most people renting apartments own a car and will desire to park it on site, so why go through this extra step to charge them the exact same price?”

This is a good and relevant question. And the answer is that if you live in a place with very high levels of access, and price residential parking, the evidence indicates that two-car households will “shed cars” and become one-car households, and while less common, some one-car households will also shed cars and become ZERO-car households, particularly if car-sharing is available.

Let’s continue our example: we’ve established that the monthly rental per space is $40 at our hypothetical building.  Now a couple decides to move in, and receives the pricing schema for their two-bedroom apartment and two parking spaces.  They start paying $1130/month to the landlord, but after only 1 month there, they realize that one of them commutes to work by transit, the other drives to work, and at night or on weekends, they walk everywhere or drive together in one car.  They further realize that they are basically paying $500/year for one of their two cars to gather dust.  They decide to sell it, which puts some money in their pocket, which they use to get a carshare membership to give them more flexibility.  Their monthly rent drops from $1130 to $1090 the next month, and they are now a one-car household. The purple circle in the figure below shows the outcome of this move.

Unbundled Parking Example

Unbundled Parking Example, With 2BR, 2-car household shedding one car upon move-in

 

What Are the Benefits of Unbundling Parking?

First, Shelton Station has expressed an interest in bringing Car-Sharing to Carrboro at their site, and unbundling parking helps make car-sharing more successful, which should benefit the developer by lowering the amount of monthly subsidy that may be needed to get car-sharing started onsite. Having a successful pilot experience with carsharing in Carrboro would be a great outcome for both Shelton Station residents and the town. Transportation Planning consultants Nelson/Nygaard conducted a study of buildings with both carsharing and parking unbundling and found the following:

Unbundling parking can help create demand for carsharing, while carsharing can help compensate for having to pay for parking in residents’ minds. In contrast, free and abundant parking reduces the demand for carsharing. As the findings show, households with both unbundled parking and carsharing available in the building have significantly lower vehicle ownership rates compared to households in buildings with neither (0.76 vehicles per household and 1.03 vehicles per household, respectively). Households in buildings with both unbundled parking and carsharing are also more likely to be carshare members than those with neither. Statistically significant differences were also found between carshare members and non-carshare members.

The average vehicle ownership for households with carshare memberships is 0.47 vehicles per household compared to 1.22 vehicles per non-carshare member household. Carshare members are also more likely to take non-auto modes to work and use transit; 83% of survey respondents with carshare memberships use non-auto modes to commute to work compared to 70% of persons without carshare memberships, and 43% of carshare members take transit compared to 23% for respondents without carshare memberships.

Second, it allows people to be rewarded for doing the right thing.  There are two-driver, one-car households throughout Carrboro, and every apartment complex they rent from puts the price of two parking spaces in their rent, even though they would not use that amount of resources.  An unbundled parking situation at Shelton Station would attract households like this who would jump at the chance to get a slightly lower rent than they would otherwise for only having one car instead of two.  The $40 extra per month in their pocket is likely to be re-circulated at businesses they could walk to from the building.

If a development with unbundled parking is successful at getting residents to shed cars, then that allows room in their lot for them to have more spaces available for business patrons onsite, or perhaps even to develop their site further in the future if additional land for development exists.

One other key to success is that the developer should be free to rent parking spaces to non-residents if the unbundling creates spare parking capacity for them. How would this work for Shelton Station?  A quick visit to Carr Mill Mall’s shopping center will find the “No Park and Ride/No Park and Bike/No Park and Walk” signs. It is likely that some people would pay by the day, week, or month to park and ride the F bus to campus.  This is not as compelling a use as a parking space turning over several times during daylight hours for a business, but a mostly daylight park-and-rider is still going to occupy much less time in a parking space than a resident who never uses their car because everything is a short walk away.

Giving the developer an opening to earn revenue because they have adopted a progressive parking policy is also another way to help them support their fledgling carshare initiative, which I expect neighbors of Shelton Station would also be able to take advantage of as a neighborhood amenity.

In Closing: Purchase of 201 S Greensboro Lot and Future Steps on Downtown Parking

There’s a lot to like about the Shelton Station project.  There may be some arguing about whether or not the developer and the staff have agreed to the “right” number of parking spaces.  This is largely a red herring because parking generation standards are usually a pseudoscience at best unless you are working with detailed, local datasets.  The town ordinance rightly gives parking reductions for certain uses in downtown areas, and has reduced the proposed parking for the Shelton Station site from somewhere around 220 to something closer to 170 spaces.  I still think this is too much parking, but I think getting the policy implementation of carsharing and unbundling on the same site is too big an opportunity for us to miss if it can be achieved, and is more important than shrinking the 170 spaces at Shelton Station further at this time.

Roberson St Lot by Flickr User Rubyji

Roberson St Lot by Flickr User Rubyji

News this week broke that the town purchased the parking lot it has been leasing across from Glass Half Full, just south of Open Eye Cafe, gaining control of 90-odd parking spaces.  I was encouraged to hear that members of the board think this could be even a future location for a library as well as other uses and public parking.

Still, it is critical that everyone understand that there is no strategy based on providing more and more free parking in downtown Carrboro in perpetuity that does not end in the town destroying the pedestrian-first atmosphere of downtown, create nightmare traffic jams that choke downtown business and put an upper lid on our prosperity, or lead to aggressive towing that nobody wants to deal with. This does not even address the fiscal cost of buying and maintaining the parking spaces.

Eventually, we’re going to need market-priced parking in downtown to sustain vibrancy, and it will ideally be managed via some system where individual spaces that are not reserved for any one establishment can rent themselves to a broader pool of users via a smartphone app or streetside kiosk.  We’re not there yet, but we will be there sooner than many people think.

Unbundling parking removes the least productive type of parking (long-term residential storage) from downtown and helps support local business by providing more turnover spaces for their customers. It will help keep parking pricing for everyone else at bay further off, and will allow us to introduce a new tool in the access-to-downtown toolbox.

Let’s look into getting an unbundled parking condition on this project, and then move it forward for approval Thursday night.

Time to Use Car-Sharing and Parking Unbundling to Bring More Stuff People Like and Less Pavement, Traffic and Pollution to Downtown Carrboro

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Car Parked on Sidewalk, Beijing. Courtesy Flickr User roberutsu

Car Parked on Sidewalk, Beijing. Photo by Flickr User roberutsu

When it comes to creating vibrant urban neighborhoods in the US, with a few exceptions,  there is always a tension between providing space for people and space for cars.

The recent proliferation of car sharing services such as ZipCar and WeCar in the US, and even locally on the UNC campus –  holds promise to address this tension, but we have yet to employ car-sharing to address both community mobility and economic development goals in Carrboro.

The proposed project at Shelton Station is an ideal place for the Town of Carrboro to support and encourage parking innovations including car sharing and parking unbundling, and the time to start is now.  Before getting into why we should do this, let’s review what our options are for downtown land.



Development Choices for Urban Land Downtown

Land supply in urban locations is fixed, and we can use it for a few things:

  • Residences
  • Businesses
  • Circulation for People
  • Circulation for Motor Vehicles
  • Storage for Motor Vehicles

What do each of the above add to downtown’s vibrancy?  Well, people like to be around other people, and a base of residents provides not only a core set of customers for downtown businesses, but also a natural layer of surveillance in terms of security by people who are there each day and notice when something strange is going on. Their homes generate property taxes for the community based on their value.  Put another way, when you want to increase the size of a local living economy, it helps to have more locals.

Businesses provide attractions and commerce, as well as paying both proprerty taxes and sales taxes to the town.  They provide jobs for locals and those who come to our community to work.

Sidewalks provide space for people to move around among homes, businesses, recreation, and transportation choices, and allow people to access the neighborhood on foot.

Streets provide the same access for bicycles, buses, and cars that the sidewalks provide to pedestrians.

And auto storage?  It provides the lowest per-square foot values of any use on the town’s most valuable land. It prevents business expansion even when it goes unused. It prevents more residential construction that could add more residents, consumer purchasing power, and tax base. It attracts the most carbon-intensive and polluting types of tripmaking to the area. When individual businesses all try to provide their own parking separately, and when the Town requires this to be done, it creates duplication of a resource that is often idle or unused.

Successful Man / Unsuccessful Man by Andy Singer

Successful Man / Unsuccessful Man by Andy Singer

To be fair, auto storage also provides the occasional opportunity for a food truck to set up shop, and of course also provides motorists a place to store their vehicle temporarily while shopping, or dining.

But at the end of the day, if you have a limited number of “A Streets” and critical corners in your urban grid, every expansion of parking in downtown Carrboro is a foregone opportunity to add more of the top three items in the list above, which add the most value.

Despite the impression of some who seem to believe that the cartoon to the right is true and only motorists come downtown with wallets and pocketbooks, there are plenty of people who get to downtown Carrboro ready to spend money without using a car, and this is one of Carrboro’s strategic advantages compared to other towns of our size and even much larger communities. We ignore this advantage at our economic peril.

 

Nothing Robs More Value From Downtown Than Residential Automobile Storage

When we think about the value added by residential, business, and people spaces, and the foregone opportunity to have more of these uses when parking is created, there are still great differences in how much value parking can take off the table for downtown.

At the top end of the value continuum for parking is the market-priced parking space.  Parking with a price encourages the user to rent the parking space for as long as they need it to conduct their business in a local shop or have lunch with friends, and VERY IMPORTANTLY, then turn the space over to someone else for a new transaction opportunity for a local business.

Over the long term, led by the research of Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, optimal market-priced parking has generally come to be considered as charging whichever price per hour, between zero and X dollars, that keeps a group of parking spaces 85% occupied and 15% empty. The price of parking changes throughout the day as needed to reach this goal.

The next-best situation is having some level of constant parking pricing that promotes turnover of spaces.  This is less desirable than market pricing because at times the constant price will be too low to prevent all parking from being filled, and at other times it will be too high and discourage use of the spaces.

The most common situation, which is close to the worst, is having free parking that is reserved to specific stores or uses.  This creates extra traffic when people drive across the street to park for free somewhere else because a merchant fears losing the opportunity for turnover, and employs the threat of towing rather than pricing to move people along.

The worst situation is a space that sits occupied for hours on end and does not turn over, which is generally what you get with residential parking.

Shelton Station

Shelton Station

Downtown Carrboro And Shelton Station

So how do we align the incentives at Shelton Station to get the type of parking usage that avoids the problems American Tobacco residents are about to experience?

We ask the developer to set up their lease practices to encourage that behavior.

First, just as Southern Village developer D.R. Bryan included a Weaver Street Market membership with every apartment to help that store succeed, we should ask the developer of Shelton Station to pay for the membership fee of every resident in a car-sharing program.  This puts the variable cost of car-sharing use, generally at $8-$10/hour, directly on the driver.

Second, we should encourage the developer to sign an agreement with a car-share vendor that has a guaranteed dollar value per month to the vendor, because these allow the car-share sponsor (in this case the developer) to keep revenues from car usage above and beyond that dollar amount.  There are two benefits to this:

  1. It helps the developer recoup the cost of its investment in the memberships
  2. Since it creates a revenue stream for the developer, it encourages them to promote car-share to residents in internal marketing, etc.

Next, we should help the developer un-bundle parking rental from apartment rental. This means that instead of having a $740 apartment rent, a tenant is charged $700 for the apartment and $40 for one parking space or $80 for two parking spaces.  Bicycle parking should be both covered, and free, and there should be enough bicycle parking for every apartment unit to have a bicycle parked there at all times.

In taking these steps, the Town will make it easier for the developer to offer no more parking than necessary to residents, which will limit the use of parking for its most value-destroying purpose, residential parking.

Better still, proactively managing the parking supply like this may even allow for a greater amount of commercial development on the site by converting dormant, residential-parking-storage spaces into ones available for customers coming and going from the site.

We want to help current and future residents of Carrboro have increasingly sustainable travel choices.  If we are successful, and attract many new residents to downtown living and bolster our primary job center and commercial core with more workers and customers, we will have done something good.  If they are mostly walking or biking to those opportunities, we will have done something even better.  But if they are walking and biking to these opportunities AND not leaving a car sitting for days at a time in a space that could be used by a potential business customer for a downtown merchant, we’ve knocked it out of the park.

If you want to learn more about Car Sharing, this video from Streetfilms is also worth your time.

The Wrong Place for a Suburban Drugstore

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This is going to be a longer post. But I think it’s worth reading as I’m going to cover a whole bunch of issues that the proposed CVS at the corner of North Greensboro and West Weaver streets raises.

The Project Proposal

Before the Carrboro Board of Aldermen for their consideration on Tuesday night is a proposal to build a free-standing CVS drugstore at the corner of N Greensboro and Weaver Streets (public Hearing B1 on the Agenda).  The project’s principal flaw is not its corporate ownership, nor its architectural features or design- but its site plan that takes a corner lot facing two of our most important streets in a limited urban street grid, and places most of that land into a suburban parking format, thereby significantly destroying the value-creation properties of that land in the long term.

The rest of this post explores this flaw in detail.

UPDATE 11:45 pm on 2/25/2013: Per a request via Twitter, I have marked up the site plan for the proposed CVS to help illustrate points discussed in the rest of this post. Click to embiggen.

CVS Siteplan Markup

CVS Siteplan Markup

Notes on the site plan markup:

  • Red indicates where Carrboro “A Streets” are fronted with parking rather than urban buildings that embrace the pedestrian and the sidewalk.
  • Orange indicates where Carrboro “B Streets” are fronted with parking rather than urban buildings
  • Purple indicates where a Carrboro B Street, in this case, Center St, is fronted by a “pocket park” that may or may not be supportive of defensible space principles for urban public spaces

Original post continues below.

Carrboro Has Only Five Critical “A” Streets

When you look at a map of Carrboro, and focus on downtown, one of the things you’ll notice is that we have a pretty limited street network to work with.  Other communities like Asheville and Durham have large downtown street grids, many blocks deep in multiple directions, but Carrboro does not.

In urban retail districts, some retail analysts talk about “A” streets and “B” streets, with the “A” streets being home to most of the retail and key walkable urban facilities, while the “B” streets have fewer consumer-oriented businesses, more business-to-business workplaces, more residential development, and less activity overall. This is not to say that “B” streets are lesser places than “A” streets, but to clarify the different roles that streets play in an urban neighborhood.

Carrboro’s “A” Streets are:

  • Main St
  • Weaver St
  • Greensboro St
  • Jones Ferry Rd
  • Rosemary St

 

Carrboro "A" Streets - Downtown

Carrboro “A” Streets – Downtown

There are some other streets that have the potential to one day fulfill “A” street functions that are clearly not such streets today, but I think it’s hard to argue with this list.

Building a thriving local economy in Carrboro for the long term will require careful stewardship of a high-quality ***URBAN*** public realm along these streets, and of how they relate and connect to other streets and public spaces around them.

The CVS project greets several street frontages with parking rather than buildings.  This is a suburban practice, and this site is not a suburban location. The animated GIF below by David Sucher gets it right.  Please watch it change a few times. We should not be fronting West Weaver Street with parking spaces, nor North Greensboro Street.

Urbanism Starts with the Location of the Parking Lot by David Sucher, Author of City Comforts

Urbanism Starts with the Location of the Parking Lot by David Sucher, Author of City Comforts

 

CVS knows how to do this.  I’ve seen them do it in other cities, in old buildings and new buildings.  The examples below I believe are in Boston Brookline, MA and the DC area, respectively.

 

CVS Goes Urban - Old Building

CVS Goes Urban – Old Building

 

 

CVS Goes Urban - New Building

CVS Goes Urban – New Building

 

This Corner is Too Important to Get Wrong, and this Project is Too Small

In 2010, the town of Chapel Hill asked former Raleigh Urban Design Center guru Dan Douglas and his firm, Kling Stubbins- to take a look at their downtown and help them identify strategic redevelopment opportunities going forward.  Like Carrboro, Chapel Hill’s downtown is mostly an East-West affair that is only two streets deep.

One of the most interesting findings of the Kling Stubbins report is that corner properties on Franklin Street command the highest property values per square foot. This is the local real estate market telling the community these corners were the most important locations in downtown Chapel Hill, or at least the best ones on which to locate a business.

If we look at corners in Carrboro, it stands to reason that corners where two or more “A” Streets meet will be rather important. Those corners are:

  1. E. Main / Rosemary
  2. E. Main / N Greensboro,
  3. E Weaver / E Main / Roberson
  4. W Main /  Jones Ferry Rd
  5. W. Weaver / N Greensboro

And that’s all. If these intersections are likely to produce our highest-value corners in our urban core, we should build a significant amount of stuff on them.  We should not leave them mostly as parking.  As a community, we should be aiming to create more public and private value on these corners. Any project on the properties proposed for development here should be much, much bigger in terms of total gross square footage built.

I will add that I expect there to be some other voices in the discussion saying this project should not be approved because it is “too big.” I preemptively reject the notion that it is possible to take the average of my “too small” comments next to those and suggest that the amount of square footage is somehow “just right.”

It is quite possible to conceive of a mix of uses for this corner dominated by office and housing, with a modest amount of retail – that would add significant square footage to downtown (beyond what CVS is proposing) while not adding as many trips to this corner as a 24-hour drugstore.  Any residents living in this location will have a tremendous ability to substitute car trips with walking, bicycle and transit trips, and office-generated trips would be very susceptible to being diverted to the same three environmentally friendly modes.

The sketch plans created for these parcels from the 2001 “Crossroads Conversation” conducted by The Village Project show some concepts that are more representative of the types of buildings that belong on such an important corner in our town. The CVS proposal is not in the character of the type of project intensity that belongs on one of our biggest redevelopment opportunities on one of our top 5 intersections.

Crossroads Charette Design 1

Crossroads Charette Design 1

 

Crossroads Charette Design 2

Crossroads Charette Design 2

This Corner is Right In the Middle of Our Urban Grid and Walkable Core

Over the course of the past week on this blog, I’ve discussed what it means to be “urban” and my #InformalUrbanIndicators series of blog posts focused on several phenomena present in Carrboro’s downtown that indicate that our town, unlike so many others of its size, has a living, breathing, vibrant urban heart.

In documenting several of those #InformalUrbanIndicators, I made maps showing the parts of town covered by individual indicators if you created polygons from the most outlying instances of each indicator.  Below, in one map, you will find a combined overlay of my maps for Graffiti, Holiday Lighting Displays, Food Trucks, Outdoor Dining, and Yarn Bombing.

View Combined Coverages in a larger map

If any of these indicators alone is a signal to where people are most likely to walk, then any place where they overlap is surely an even more likely place people will walk.  As you can see, the proposed CVS project (using the blue marker) is in one of the most walking-friendly places in downtown.  This is inherently a bad place for a auto-oriented development project, with lots of parking fronting A Street sidewalks, not to mention other streets as well.

Why Too Much Parking Is a Really Big Deal

As David Sucher’s graphic above shows that urbanism begins with the placement of the parking lot, such a large amount of parking on this site has actively negative effects that go beyond the lost development opportunity that locking this land up as parking represents.

While I’ll elaborate more on this in another post, there is a finite limit to the amount of economic development that downtown Carrboro can support as long as it is predicated on being served by FREE parking.  Eventually, the town will reach a point where bringing people in to park for free will over-congest the streets during key shopping times and the hassle of getting downtown in your car to park for free will become a deterrent to economic growth. We are not quite bumping into that limit yet, but we will reach it sooner rather than later.

I personally question the necessity or wisdom of adding this much parking to any key site in downtown, when the town already has a significant amount of parking that could be managed more effectively, and a significant set of assets in transit, bicycle, and walking infrastructure that also provide access to downtown.

That said, if we are going to add this much parking, it should be in a deck, and it should be tied to a much larger building program that allows for shared parking across several uses.

So What Now?

Surely we as a community could have done more over the past ten years to plan for this site so that we would not get proposals like this. Alas, we did not, and we now have a proposal for a use and a site plan that attempts to suburbanize one of our critical urban crossroads in Carrboro. That being the case, I encourage the Board of Aldermen to vote against approving this project on Tuesday evening.

But voting to deny the construction of this project is only the first step that needs to be taken. If you visit the county website and use the ARIES real estate search tool, you will find that the land value for the corner in question is over $520,000 and the building value is only $130,334, on 0.33 acres.  This land valuation greatly exceeding the building value suggests that if CVS is turned down, it is only a matter of time before another proposal for this corner appears.

It’s important for the community to start planning for what we DO want to happen in locations like this one.