Not in Montgomery County, MD Are Parking Minimums a Political Third Rail? By Thomas Brown


Aclear consensus has emerged among city planners that removing minimum parking requirements is one of the


most effective ways to promote healthier, more active and eco- nomically vibrant downtowns. Despite this, the broad elimination of parking requirements


continues to be a political third rail or practical impossibility in many places. Where minimum requirements trigger investments in public parking or other public investments (via “in lieu fees” or similar), broad removal may have even more barriers and few- er local cheerleaders. Montgomery County, MD, a national pioneer in parking


management district implementation, may soon define a new parking management-based alternative that can deliver essential parking-reform benefits where a Shoupian, pure-market approach is not an option. Further, by increasing the cost of excessive and inefficient


supplies, while rewarding parking-lean projects and shared facil- ities, this new zoning tool is designed to transform the county’s Parking Lot Districts (PLDs) of Bethesda, Montgomery Hills, Sil- ver Spring and Wheaton into Parking Benefit Districts (PBDs) in which parking demand directly catalyzes funding for walking, cycling and transit improvements.


Background In 2009, a report by the Montgomery County Council’s Office


of Legislative Oversight found that the county’s parking policies needed to better align with other county policies that promote “travel by modes other than the single-occupant auto.” In response, the county Department of Transportation, Divi-


sion of Parking Management (MCDOT) and the Maryland- National Capital Park and Planning Commission commissioned Nelson\Nygaard to assess the county’s Parking Lot District pro- gram and develop revised parking requirement options for these urban centers.


The PLD Program Montgomery County’s program is perhaps the longest-


standing one of its kind in the U.S.. In its four existing PLDs, all created between 1947 and 1951, the county provides more than 20,000 public parking spaces, funded to a significant extent by a tax on properties whose developers opted to provide less than the code-required amount of parking. The program began shortly afterWorldWar II, out of an anticipation that certain areas of the then-largely rural county would begin urbanizing. Its establishing code identifies two purposes for the program: 1. To build, manage and provide public parking to encour-


age economic development. 2. To manage parking in a way that encourages the use of


other modes of transportation. As MCDOT Project Manager Rick Siebert noted: “The coun-


ty understood that its quality-of-life objectives would be met by managing the supply of parking, not just building more and more garages. Eventually, you end up with a ton of garages but can’t get down the street.” Particularly valuable to the success of PLDs such as Bethes-


da and Silver Spring has been the reduced physical parking foot- print, promoting a walkable, park-once urbanism in which the


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appeal of strolling between local destinations reduces the need for redundant parking supplies. Studies indicate that these types of shared-parking environ-


ments can reduce parking demand by half or more, mostly by shifting local trips away from driving modes.


Benefits Beyond Parking A detailed review of the program’s financial performance


revealed significant funding contributions to transportation demand management, civic improvement and transit programs. Taken together, this redirection of parking-generated revenue to local non-parking benefits, amounts to a high-level Parking Bene- fit District along the lines of Old Pasadena, CA, and Boulder, CO. These investments, however, lacked strategic coordination


—all were essentially non-voluntary inter-fund transfers out of the PLD fund, minimizing opportunities to coordinate invest- ments to reduce parking supply expansions by improving alter- native transportation and vice versa. Coordinating these programs under a restructured PLD pro-


gram became the first major recommendation of the study, com- plemented by supporting strategies and actions culled from a broad set of case studies, including: a. Re-branding the coordinated program as Parking Benefit


Districts (PBDs). b. Performance-based pricing of on-street parking. c. Aformalized, performance-based supply-expansion poli-


cy (don’t expand until user-fee revenue can cover the full cost). d. Restructuring the “in lieu of parking” tax as a parking ben-


efits charge, adjusted based on the level of benefit or burden a project is deemed to confer upon the district. e. Aformalized, performance-based supply-expansion poli-


cy (don’t expand until user-fee revenue can cover the full cost). f. Expanding the new program into emerging urban centers


across the Montgomery County. g. Establishing the capacity for the program to manage on- street parking in non-PBD areas.


PBD Requirements Assuming a re-designed and expansionary program, we at


Nelson\Nygaard set out to establish a set of appropriate revised parking standards for the county’s PBD areas. Restructuring the tax to protect program revenues from lower requirements greatly expanded the list of viable options. For a number of reasons, however, completely eliminating


minimum parking requirements was never viewed as a viable option for these areas: Ingrained habits: Developers, long-accustomed to the coun-


ty providing public parking to support ground-floor uses, were deemed likely to continue to supply parking solely for their upper-floor tenants. This situation was felt to put the economic viability of ground-floor uses, particularly important to vibrant sidewalks and pedestrian-oriented urbanism, at risk. Limited capacity for new county facilities: The original


PLDs were established when land values were much lower. In fact, many property owners donated land for parking facilities to the county. Partly a result of the program’s successes, the real


Continued on Page 20 Parking Today www.parkingtoday.com


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