Not having been involved in the Palo Alto fiasco, I am reluctant to suggest that there was an easy solution, but it is likely that a properly managed parking pass proposal might have turned the tide. What was certainly missing, among all the parking policy, was a parking plan, and such a comprehensive plan is ultimately what every “over-parked” pla

“Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few.”45

Abolishing the off-street parking requirement is one of the three cornerstones of Shoup’s theory, because it would allow the market to determine how much parking is needed. He notes that “removing off-street parking requirements will not eliminate off-street parking, but will instead stimulate an active commercial market for it.”37 This would bring

most American cities do not need more affordable housing in their downtowns. Most American cities have too much affordable housing downtown. Or, more accurately, too much of their downtown housing is affordable, since everyone but the poor was able to join the suburban exodus. The typical midsized American city center now contains a few market-rate

Portland’s system was instituted hand in hand with a commitment to “a host of other strategies and policies, including higher density, neighborhood-based urban design, elimination of minimum parking requirements, and basically the whole list of things that add up to walkability,” says Hales. “You can’t just drop in a streetcar.”

The conventional wisdom used to be that creating a strong economy came first, and that increased population and a higher quality of life would follow. The converse now seems more likely: creating a higher quality of life is the first step to attracting new residents and jobs.

Walkability is both an end and a means, as well as a measure. While the physical and social rewards of walking are many, walkability is perhaps most useful as it contributes to urban vitality and most meaningful as an indicator of that vitality.

He subsequently conducted similar studies in New York and Los Angeles, and found the data tracking along almost identical curves. In each case, increasing density from two units per acre to twenty units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from twenty to two hundred.22 To students of urban form, these outcomes are not that su

If parking is “free” or underpriced in so much of the United States, who is actually paying for it? The answer is: we all are, whether we use it or not. Shoup puts it this way: Initially, the developer pays for the required parking, but soon the tenants do, and then their customers, and so on, until the price of parking has diffused everywhere in t