Are Parking Minimums a Political Third Rail? from Page 18
estate markets in emerging districts offer no such opportunities, limiting the feasibility of constructing significant county facilities. Promoting privately provided, shared parking: The county
wanted to move away from building large stand-alone structures toward an emphasis on public parking within dispersed, private mixed-use facilities.
A New Alternative This greatly reduced our firm’s options for meaningful
reform. Simply reducing requirements and adding maximums requires the same guessing games at the heart of conventional approaches — still emphasizing precision at the expense of accuracy as Professor Shoup might say. Besides, going too low would raise the same objections as eliminating requirements would, while not going low enough would diminish the bene- fits of reform. The coordination of existing programs under the new PBD
program and the proposed Parking Benefit Charge (PBC), how- ever, provided a unique opportunity to take a new approach: combining minimum and maximum standards based on the demonstrated efficiencies of today’s PLDs with options to build outside the resulting “standard” range by either increasing on- site efficiencies, directly funding multi-modal or demand-man- agement benefits, or paying an elevated PBC. Providing this flexibility, which makes excess parking more
expensive rather than prohibiting it, makes it possible to set the maximum standard at a level that would otherwise be considered
aggressively—and perhaps counter-productively—low. This is particularly important in Montgomery County, where planners explicitly recognize the connection between parking accommo- dation and the region’s epic congestion battles. By expanding the county’s capacity to directly offset
unwanted impacts, increased PBC rates can serve as more than mere disincentives for over- or under-parking new projects. Strategically directing private contributions toward programs designed to expand public parking, fund transit, support non- driving modes or improve the pedestrian realm, the PBC is designed, rather, as the heart of a financial “ecosystem” keeping multi-modal investments in balance and aligned with public poli- cies and the evolving needs and opportunities within Mont- gomery County’s urban centers. For decades, conventional parking requirements have devas-
tated traditional urban centers across the country, eroding his- toric urban virtues with poor imitations of suburban conven- ience. While eliminating parking requirements remains the opti- mal model of reform in most places, the framework developed for Montgomery County’s Parking Lot Districts may prove a needed alternative where this is not a viable option, and perhaps a preferable alternative in some places where it is. In either case, by expanding options for meaningful reform,
it has significant potential to make reform more common, ulti- mately putting more distance between our future cities and the mistakes of the past.
Thomas Brown, Senior Planner with Nelson\Nygaard, can be reached at
tbrown@nelsonnygaard.com.
PT
Affinity Partner E 20
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