NOTES FROM BIG BEN … We in UK do Shoup, an BY PETER GUEST J
VH and I were at the Philippine parking confer- ence in Manila recently, and he gave them a pres- entation on all things Shoup. After JVH came off the stage, I mentioned
to him that he should not forget that although Professor Shoup’s stuff is quite radical to you guys out there, to us Brits it’s “been there, done that and got theT-shirt.”
JVH,with his normal tact andwit, snarled
words to the effect that I was talking through my hat. But in a subsequent Q&A session, he did have the good grace to recognize that there may be something in what I said. To demon- strate thatmy hat knows a thing or two, here is a brief resumé ofwhatwe in theUKhave been doing for the past 60 years. So here goes, the
potted history of parking in the UK, fromthe London perspective: Post-1945 London was a bomb
site, and no onewas thinking about cars or parking.You travelled using buses, trams, trolleys and the tube.A few rich people had cars. Into the 1950s, the city began to renew itself, people started to buy and use cars, and the roads became more congested. In 1959, the first six- penny meters were installed to ensure that street parking turned over and peo- ple did not stay too long in key places. In the 1960s, the London County
Council finally realized that new build- ings generated parking demand, and set rules to ensure that every new building provided sufficient parking on-site to accommodate the traffic it generated and place no further demands on the streets for parking. This was graphical- ly described as “each building should eat its own smoke.” Now, although it’s too long ago to
know what basis was used to determine the amount of traffic and hence parking demand that each building would gener- ate, it can be seen that we were heading toward an ITE type “predict and provide”minimumparking requirement. The result was, with the benefit of hindsight, very pre-
dictable. Developers built buildings with lots of parking, and because they had free parking, people used carsmore and the roads clogged up and traffic ground to a standstill. Into the 1970s, the Greater London Development Plan
(GLDP) set the basis for strategic planning of London, which is pretty much in use today. Before the GLDP, the council had published plans to try to build their way out of the problem. “Predict and provide” had led to a plan for a programof
radial and orbital expressways that would have cut through the historic city’s fabric, giving up everything to achieve more road space. Historic buildings, parks and houses would have all gone to build the new roads, and if as a result of the new scheme you had an elevated six-lane expressway 30 feet from your bedroom window, rejoice –this was the benefit of the brave new world we all want. We stepped back from the brink. The GLDP set new
standards for parking provisions that were maximums, not minimums. Any new build in any parts of London where there was reasonable public transport access simply did not get parking, or very little. In the city center, for example, a new building would get one space for each 1,000 square meter of floor space,maximum. Now, we still have the Shoup problem that levels of
activity are very weakly related to floor space areas, but we do not have a situation where a developer is required to build large amounts of parking or, indeed, any parking if it doesn’t
40 DECEMBER 2009 • PARKING TODAY •
www.parkingtoday.com
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