Parking lots as polluters

We know driving creates pollution: ozone, other toxic tailpipe emissions such as particulates, contaminated water that runs off streets, the heat island effect of the asphalted street and highway network, etc. etc. But until now, few people had studied the polluting effect of parking lots.

But Eric Jaffe, in The Infrastructurist, writes about new work from researchers at University of California at Berkeley that looks at energy and emissions related to America’s vast parking infrastructure. The researchers write,

“The environmental effects of parking are not just from encouraging the use of the automobile over public transit or walking and biking (thus favoring the often more energy-intensive and polluting mode), but also from the material and process requirements in direct, indirect, and supply chain activities related to building and maintaining the infrastructure.”

There’s no national inventory of how many parking spaces, lots, decks are out there – one academic who’s studied parking compares it to the “dark matter” in the universe – but the researchers point to such things as the heat island effect, where pavement raises summer temperatures which requires more energy for air-conditioning, etc. They calculated that when parking spots are taken into account, an average car’s per-mile carbon emissions go up as much as 10 percent.

And as long as we’re trashing parking places (which even die-hard environmentalists probably wish they could find as they circle, circle, circle the lot on the Saturday before Christmas) check out “Six Reasons Free Parking Is the Dumbest Thing You Didn’t Know You Were Subsidizing,” by Christopher Mims in grist.org. The point is not that we shouldn’t have parking, but that we should all be a lot more aware of the costs of building and providing it. Maybe we’d be more conservative in how we spend that money – if we realized we were spending it.

And for a parking-related footnote, here’s a way Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools might bring in a bit more revenue so CMS won’t have to cut a whopping $100 million from the budget and lay off 1,500 people including hundreds of teachers:

Charge high school students more money to park their cars. If CMS provides buses to the schools (which it does, except to magnet high schools) then families that opt to let kids drive can pay for the privilege. Wake County Schools charge $170 and they’re raising the fee. CMS charges $25. Ahem.

Each parking space adds $2,500 to the cost of a high school, a CMS architect told me a few years ago. Yes, staffers need parking spaces, and some students probably do, too. But a lot of that money could be better spent.

Parking lots as polluters

We know driving creates pollution: ozone, other toxic tailpipe emissions such as particulates, contaminated water that runs off streets, the heat island effect of the asphalted street and highway network, etc. etc. But until now, few people had studied the polluting effect of parking lots.

But Eric Jaffe, in The Infrastructurist, writes about new work from researchers at University of California at Berkeley that looks at energy and emissions related to America’s vast parking infrastructure. The researchers write,

“The environmental effects of parking are not just from encouraging the use of the automobile over public transit or walking and biking (thus favoring the often more energy-intensive and polluting mode), but also from the material and process requirements in direct, indirect, and supply chain activities related to building and maintaining the infrastructure.”

There’s no national inventory of how many parking spaces, lots, decks are out there – one academic who’s studied parking compares it to the “dark matter” in the universe – but the researchers point to such things as the heat island effect, where pavement raises summer temperatures which requires more energy for air-conditioning, etc. They calculated that when parking spots are taken into account, an average car’s per-mile carbon emissions go up as much as 10 percent.

And as long as we’re trashing parking places (which even die-hard environmentalists probably wish they could find as they circle, circle, circle the lot on the Saturday before Christmas) check out “Six Reasons Free Parking Is the Dumbest Thing You Didn’t Know You Were Subsidizing,” by Christopher Mims in grist.org. The point is not that we shouldn’t have parking, but that we should all be a lot more aware of the costs of building and providing it. Maybe we’d be more conservative in how we spend that money – if we realized we were spending it.

And for a parking-related footnote, here’s a way Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools might bring in a bit more revenue so CMS won’t have to cut a whopping $100 million from the budget and lay off 1,500 people including hundreds of teachers:

Charge high school students more money to park their cars. If CMS provides buses to the schools (which it does, except to magnet high schools) then families that opt to let kids drive can pay for the privilege. Wake County Schools charge $170 and they’re raising the fee. CMS charges $25. Ahem.

Each parking space adds $2,500 to the cost of a high school, a CMS architect told me a few years ago. Yes, staffers need parking spaces, and some students probably do, too. But a lot of that money could be better spent.

REBIC’s long list of ‘No’s’

Several months back I had coffee with the affable Andy Munn, policy director for the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition, aka REBIC, the most influential local real estate and development lobbying group. I got the idea that the group, which in the past has had (my words here, not his) a “Just Say No” reputation among local government staffers and environmental and planning activists, might be trying to change its image a bit.

Fast forward to Monday night’s City Council meeting (“Foxx: Be flexible with developers”), where REBIC members were out in force. Mayor Anthony Foxx had put onto the agenda a staff presentation about a cluster of new measures that REBIC doesn’t like:
– the proposed (not yet adopted) stronger tree ordinance.
– the Urban Street Design Guidelines policy (not yet adopted into ordinances and thus, not required of developers, either)
– the post-construction controls ordinance (the only one developers currently must actually follow). Many big guns were in attendance: Bill Daleure of Crosland Inc., Ned Curran of the Bissell Companies, as well as Charlotte Chamber honcho Bob Morgan.

As the Observer editorial board opined this morning (“Don’t let ‘flexible’ morph into ‘gutting’ “) just building cheap isn’t always smart. When you add in the future costs to taxpayers to retrofit and expand your street network/restore polluted streams/mitigate flooding — i.e. millions of dollars — it makes the estimated increment of $1,900 to $2,900 to the cost of new housing (spread over a 30-year mortgage) seem a bit less of a problem.

That said, a city that didn’t look seriously at the combined effects of its regulations on the costs of building would be irresponsible. The point is to look at the big picture and make intelligent choices, as best you can. Further, I hear developers of all types, not just the REBIC types, complain about bureaucratic nightmares dealing with multiple government agencies on complicated plans and technical issues. So complaints about lack of flexibility and/or inconsistencies resonate with me.

But here’s a problem: Even when REBIC has legitimate points it’s virtually impossible to sort them out from the cloud of anti-everything rhetoric it’s been floating for something like 30 years.

I recall a famous scene when then-REBIC executive director Mark Cramer spoke at a City Council debate in 1998 over whether to require developers to build more sidewalks in new subdivisions. Of course REBIC opposed it, because it would force developers to spend more money on subdivisions. (Though I must say I doubt they had to shrink their profit margins.) Cramer, after listening to pleas for good sidewalks on behalf of children, the elderly and people in wheelchairs, noted that sidewalks are good things. But, he added: “You can have too much of a good thing.”

I think REBIC and its close relative, the Chamber’s land use committee, would have more credibility in many of its complaints if it hadn’t, over the years, fought virtually every environmental and growth-management measure proposed by local governments, dating to before the term Smart Growth was even invented.

It’s a long list. It includes: the city bicycle plan, the floodplain ordinance, the stream buffer ordinance, watershed ordinances, the aforementioned sidewalk requirements, a county farmland preservation measure, a pilot project in Huntersville to preserve rural land and efforts a few decades ago to channel the overdevelopment in South Charlotte into other areas by limiting where new sewer lines are built. (That last is a classic planning technique being used all over the country – but not in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Developer John Crosland Jr. simply got state government to give him permits for private sewer plants and kept on building subdivisions.)

Quite an impressive list of opposition, I’d say. And to be fair I will note that anyone is free to lobby any elected official on anything. When environmental regulations and planning initiatives are gutted or stalled for years, and when city staff is ordered to “compromise with developers” over already-compromised proposals – a tradition staffers hired from other metro areas have told me privately they’re shocked to hear here – it’s elected officials who do that, not REBIC.