Parking

Portland is undergoing a bit of a building boom. According to local planners, about 40 apartment projects have come online in the last year and a half. Here's the best part: More than half of those apartment projects have no parking -- for cars anyway.

Parking reformers, this is one you're going to want to bookmark.

The "most defacing scar from the 1960's Urban Renewal era" -- that's how local advocates describe the Route 34 Expressway through downtown New Haven. Just about a year and a half ago, this small New England city won a TIGER grant to heal that scar. But another disfiguration may be growing in its place.

Parking spaces keep getting more costly.

There are plenty of hidden costs to auto-oriented development: increased levels of air and water pollution, safety risks posed to pedestrians and cyclists. But as Strong Towns Blog points out, some costs are hardly hidden at all.

“That strip mall just got rezoned for high rise buildings.” “These auto dealerships are going to disappear.”

Flashback to Europe, sixty years ago. Only still emerging from the ruin of total war, the continent was in the midst of a nearly unprecedented reconstruction. Over the next decade, however, industry finally was able to turn toward consumer products, from stockings to refrigerators and, of course, the automobile. Italians owned only 342,000 cars in 1950, but ten years later that number had increased to two million, according to historian Tony Judt. In France, the number of cars tripled over the decade.

Streetsblog is pleased to present the third episode in UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup's ongoing inquiry into whether the Cato Institute's free market principles extend to the realm of parking policy. Read Shoup's previous replies to Cato senior fellow Randal O'Toole here and here.