Smart Growth America has a reality check on the standards for parking requirements at TOD sites. The study used 5 TOD sites, including in Redmond, WA. :
“Parking…is very expensive. That means you’re adding costs to a project potentially in the millions, given that structured parking spaces cost tens of thousands of dollars a piece. So, getting the level of parking right is really important. Too much can render projects unviable financially and it clearly can impact the affordability of whatever is built.
“…For a long time, it’s been observed that [old Institute of Transportation Engineers guidelines] required more parking than people generally think is needed for TOD. The new research…gives us more insight than we’ve had and more quantitative support for the notion that the parking that’s required for Transit Oriented Development is substantially less than has previously been thought…That is significant because as we see high demand for transit oriented development, and the supply having a hard time keeping up with it, one of the obstacles is this question of how much you have to sink into putting structured parking in those developments. And if we can make an adjustment on that, we might see significant increase in the supply and perhaps also the affordability of transit oriented development.”
—Chris Zimmerman, Vice President for Economic Development at Smart Growth America
Here are some highlights from the podcast they did about it…
1. “The developments are generating typically 50 percent or less of the [Institute of Transportation Engineers, ITE] estimated rate of vehicle trips…”
2. “You can see that the typical apartment according to ITE …requires between 1.4 spaces per unit and 2 spaces per unit, and these…are coming in much lower than that…The average supply number is just over 1 space supplied per dwelling unit and the demand is much less than that…”
3. “This shows the peak parking demand relative to the ITE guidelines…So, for all the commercial and all the residential, if you build to the ITE standards, you get a number of parking spaces required…The actual number filled at peak time is less than 50 percent of the ITE supply guideline, which means if you build to ITE, you’re oversupplying parking by over 100 percent…”
4. “It costs about $8 million to build and about $2 million is going unused. So, in these developments, even though they’re building a lot less parking than ITE suggests, they’re not using all of it…$2 million could be saved…maybe a portion of that by providing less parking. If you built to ITE standards, the parking would cost $14 million and $8 million of that would be unused. at the peak demand time.”
—Professor Reid Ewing of the University of Utah’s College of Architecture + Planning and the primary author of the research
The Pedestrian Chronicles 