Category: Uncategorized

I’m just back from almost two weeks in Italy (bless those Frequent Flyer miles). While I was gone, there’s been more fractiousness over mass transit in Charlotte, including a lot of talk by some antediluvian county commissioners about forcing a do-over vote on the half-cent sales tax for transit.

Like a lot of folks, they think the light rail (and bus and streetcar) mass transit system Charlotte is building will be a waste of money. They’re wrong. Obviously, the transit system should be built as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. Like many people, I have some concerns about that.

Just as obviously, if there are major problems with a contractor – such as Parsons Transportation – that are costing millions, Charlotte Area Transit System leaders and the city manager should be more open about it, earlier on. Their behavior smacks of secretiveness.

But many of the transit critics seem oblivious to this: The system isn’t being built for 2010, or 2015 or even 2025. It’s being built for 2050 and 2100 and beyond – for the future, when Charlotte traffic will be as horrendous as Milan’s and Rome’s.

We had one experience that shows clearly why rail is the better option for as many transit corridors as we can afford it on:

We flew into Milan and had train reservations from Milan to Florence. Unlike Rome, in Milan there’s no rail service from the international airport at Malpensa, about 30 miles out, to the central train station. There is, however, a bus for just 5 Euros.

Problem is, we made the trip at rush hour – 7:30 a.m. As the autostrada traffic ground to a halt over and over, I began to fear we’d miss our 10 a.m. train. The trip took almost 2 hours. In light traffic (our return journey last Saturday afternoon) the trip took only half as long.

Unlike bus transit, rail isn’t slowed by heavy traffic. The journey is reliable and predictable.

Fast forward to Rome, last Friday. As happens in Italy, a strike had been called – this time for the city’s bus and Metro system. All day, until buses began to run again about 6 p.m., the streets were at a standstill. As tourists just walking around, we weren’t inconvenienced. It was even easier to cross the street: Just tread your your way between stopped cars. But for people trying to work or run businesses, it was a nightmare.

To resort to a cliche, Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will Charlotte be. If growth continues, even more slowly than today, this place will be huge someday. Without reliable, workable options to private auto travel, it will grind to a stop, as Rome did on Friday. The most cost-effective way to build a rail transit system is to do it before the place grows as dense and expensive as, say, Rome. The later you wait, the harder and more costly it is.

That final lesson is proved by the problems Rome has had for decades trying to build and expand its subway system, which is far less extensive than in cities such as Paris, London, New York and Boston. The trouble is that in a 2,500-year-old city, they can’t dig tunnels without bumping into archaeological treasures and ancient ruins.

In Charlotte we don’t have that excuse. Yet.

Got an e-mail from John Kemp of Matthews, who usually disagrees with much of what I write. For instance, he liked the Urbies in Saturday’s Observer, but only if all the icons were reversed! Anyway, he poses this proposal for uptown Charlotte. What do you think? My thoughts are below:

Somebody around here just “doesn’t get it,” and it may be me. We need to quit “spreading ourselves around” and concentrate our efforts on a huge center-city park. Central Park is an unbelievable attraction for NYC, Boston Common is for Boston, as is Golden Gate Park in San Francisco where we lived.

We could put all of our “stuff” in the park: Discovery Place, the African American Museum [Afro-American Cultural Center], the main library, the Mint Museum, the Aquatic Center, bike paths, walking & jogging trails, $10 million dollar soccer complexes (and not in Matthews), baseball & softball fields, a zoo & aquarium, an amphitheatre, a large (shallow) lake with a big spraying fountain for wading & splashing and paddling around, horse stables, pertinent monuments and sculptures, etc.

Locals could then visit three or four “attractions” daily, and visitors could see most of them in one weekend. You would only park one time and be shuttled around by free buses. Attendance at these “attractions” would dramatically increase. Security would be much simpler.

Of course this would probably take a minimum of 500 acres which may be impossible to get very close to Trade/Tryon. (I am uncertain as to what you mean when you refer to the part of downtown “best suited” for a baseball stadium), but I think the concept should be explored. A “snaking” tract is just as good, if not better. You do not have to have a square or rectangle.

“Too expensive and not worth it?” Believe me, fiscally I make Reagan look liberal. A center city park is not an “expense,” it is a magnet.

My thoughts: I agree with Kemp that putting a lot of interesting attractions in one park would make a much more alluring park. For instance, the Tuilleries park in Paris contains a small amusement park with rides, as well as pay-by-the-minute trampolines and pony rides for kids, in addition to its well-known formal walking paths and outdoor cafes.

The Luxembourg gardens have not only trees and flowering shrubs and grass, but a fruit-tree orchard, puppet shows and the famous pond where kids can rent toy sailboats they push with sticks.

Having a lot of attractions close by helps all the attractions – just ask the stores that locate in shopping malls.

BUT uptown needs more than one park. That’s to give people who live and work there access to non-pavement areas relatively near where they live and work. They don’t have to be fancy, but if you’re choosing to live in a condo or apartment uptown, you’re giving up your lawn and garden – usually willingly. That doesn’t mean you should have to give up kiddie playgrounds, flower gardens and places to picnic, fly kites, throw Frisbees, play catch, sit in the sun, read a book in a quiet outdoors spot, and so on.

Also, uptown needs lots of zones that hold something of interest. Every neighborhood needs a variety of things going on: Residences, stores, workplaces, and so on. Too much clustering of similar uses turns into single-use zoning, which doesn’t work in urban neighborhoods. So I wouldn’t put everything into that great park.

The other problem that Kemp recognizes is finding space in what we think of as “uptown.” Remember, Central Park was anything but central when it was planned. It was at the fringe of the city.

I guess the city of Charlotte has conquered the problem of illegal real estate signs in rights of way all over town, because it’s now free to try to clamp down on sandwich board signs on uptown sidewalks.

A memo to the mayor and City Council, sent Wednesday, says the Charlotte Department of Transportation next week will send a letter to uptown businesses warning them about putting A-frame signs in the public right-of-way – that is, the sidewalk.

“The number of these [illegal] signs has risen dramatically in the past 12-24 months, especially A-frames (sic) type signs,” the memo says.

Why is CDOT bothering? Because, the memo says, the signs “have become obstructions to safe pedestrian movement within the Central Business District. … Efforts to gain voluntary compliance in the past have shown limited and temporary results.”

Here’s the problem: The city says it wants to encourage more retail uptown. That’s a good goal. Folks who live and work uptown clamor for more.

But did you realize there’s already 1 million square feet of retail uptown? That’s the size of a regional shopping mall. The reason you didn’t know it is that uptown retail is mostly hidden. It’s in Founders Hall, or up in Overstreet Mall, or deep inside the Ivey’s building. The only way those retailers can attract the attention of people on the sidewalk to their very existence is to put out signs. For many of them, those signs are survival.

(Here, I’ll spare you the lengthy rant about the incredible cluelessness for 20 years in which city zoning laws, architects, developers and banking CEOs allowed and promoted the idea of locating uptown’s shops far, far from the city sidewalks, and not putting any good retail display space on the sidewalks.)

If the city wants to help encourage more retail business uptown, it should be doing its best to help existing retailers survive. Because retail begets retail. And that means they need those signs.

No, they shouldn’t block the sidewalks. Yes, there does appear to be something of a sign war going on, which needs to be reined in. And yes, the signs are legal if they’re not on the public sidewalks.

But a more useful city response would be to work with the restaurateurs and retailers to figure out how they can flag customers, without so much sidewalk clutter.

One last note: In the photo sent with the memo, posted above, the signs aren’t crowding pedestrians off the sidewalk at all.

Every September I award “Urbies” in a column about the winners/losers in the growth and urban life scene in this region. This year’s column is planned for Saturday.

Know of some places, events, news developments or people who need praise? Or a (symbolic) piece of possum roadkill? Put your thoughts below. By Wednesday. And sorry, the only prize is public honor and glory. We have no budget for statuettes.

A note of caution: This ain’t a democracy. I get to exercise autocratic authority on what my opinion is. But other people’s ideas and opinions are always a help, and lots of people know lots of things I don’t. If you have something you’d like to suggest and you think I might – seriously – want to follow up with you, shoot me an e-mail at mnewsom@charlotteobserver.com so I can contact you. Thanks in advance to all.

Here’s a link to my 2004 Urbies column, so you can see what I’m talking about. Another note of caution: It’s MUCH better when you read it in the newspaper-on-paper, because, you see, I have this great little dead possum illustration that runs with it. It’s a visual thing …

Want to know what Charlotte is like? Charlotte is the kind of place where city bureaucrats are talking about how to come up with a strategic plan to add “grittiness” to part of uptown. Imagine Beale Street, they say.

Interestingly, in July I visited Beale Street – the downtown Memphis street filled with blues bars, many in ragged old buildings. I’m pretty sure Beale Street didn’t arise because of a strategic plan for “placemaking.” It came about because it was a part of Memphis nobody else wanted, real estate was cheap and being the Northern End of the Mississippi, as Memphis likes to say of itself, some blues musicians happened to be handy.

At 6 p.m. Thursday Sept. 21 in the Government Center, (probably room 267), there’s to be a public meeting to talk about “placemaking” along Brevard Street between the to-be-built NASCAR Hall of Fame and the already built Bobcats Arena.

The idea is that the street could blossom with bars, cafes, restaurants and other attractions.

As the Jetsons’ dog used to say: Rotsa ruck.

For one thing, Brevard is a one-way street and so wide it looks to have the engineered standards of a freeway. More important, it’s hard to do “gritty” in new buildings, and not just for ambience reasons. New buildings are more expensive. So if you’re a bar, leasing space in a new building is more expensive. Thus you have to charge more for your drinks – hard to do in a competitive environment – or go for the high-end, luxury clientele who can afford to pay for pricey food with higher mark ups. In other words, the glamour gang, not the gritty gang.

The part of uptown that’s already “gritty” – sort of – are the bars along College Street, where – duh! – some old buildings were upfitted into bars a decade or more ago.

Another difficulty is that Brevard Street holds several Large Monoculture Buildings: The windowless hindquarters of the convention center. A bland Southern Bell office building. The modernist-suburban-style United Way Building. The side of the Transportation Center (a.k.a. bus depot).

A lot of the street just goes past surface parking lots – where new buildings presumably would go.

A few buildings have promise, though: Part of the United Way complex includes the building once home to the McCrorey YMCA, which served the black neighborhood that was blasted to oblivion by urban renewal. A couple of old buildings on the south side of East Trade Street survived the arena-led destruction. The Grace AME Zion Church building, whose congregation moved to the ’burbs, has been sold to the Historic Landmarks Commission which will protect it, then renovate and resell it. The historic storefronts at Third and Brevard are almost all that remains of the black, Brooklyn neighborhood.

Here’s my contribution to the goal of “grittiness” on Brevard Street: Move the Coffee Cup restaurant – yep, the historic little soul food restaurant that’s to be demolished by Beazer Homes – to one of those Brevard Street parking lots. Now that would add grittiness.

After my Saturday column about the probable demise of the Coffee Cup restaurant (“It’s just an old building sitting on pricey dirt”), I got this semi-rant from reader Ed Stone. I’m posting it with his permission.

What do you think? Is Stone on target? Is Charlotte’s destiny to become a characterless Atlanta wannabe?

(I have to disagree with his smear of vanilla, in the fourth paragraph, as though it is soulless and lacking in character. But that’s a topic for another day.)

It is the mission of our City Council and the Charlotte Center City Partners to turn Charlotte into Atlanta. As rapidly as possible, with minimal, insincere lip service to what is viewed as the commerce-blocking detritus of the past. Once you accept that perspective, you will have far fewer surprises and be better prepared to navigate the changes.

Just as council put a few million bucks into restoring a trolley so as to pretend some little link to history, just hang on and you’ll see them spend a few million to get some of today’s buses running routes and reconstructing a micro-dairy farm near Selwyn. With dollars, we can build some simulated-genuine-fake-old new stuff to look substantial.

Charlotte’s motto, in action, is “to seem, rather than to be.” We’ve torn down what we were, now we are bulldozing what we are. The goal is to be just another installation of a “chain” city, as cookie-cut as the next McDonald’s burger joint.

Cities are following the model of airports, and we’ll not see much difference among them, as our airports and cities are being rebuilt to function as standardized, vanilla, soulless, high-density conduits for passers-through and cash.

The Coffee Cup’s land tax value issue is just an egregious example of what every Mecklenburg homeowner is facing. Time to cash in, and let Chi Chi’s, Sak’s, Wal-Mart, Johnson and Wales, light rail, Bobcats, Panthers, baseball, a “stroll district.” NASCAR, NoDa, “South End” and the “no cul-de sac” ordinance, et al, have it. Tear-downs and high-density condos. Maximize the tax value per square foot. Oppose the “growth agenda” of council and you’re a pro-unemployment Luddite.

Quite a shame, as we are throwing away the single claim to competitive advantage and distinctiveness we could have as a city, in favor of being an Atlanta Jr. lookalike-wanna-be.

The world is not clamoring for another Atlanta, as far as I know.

The e-mail asked me:

“Is there any way you can find out why the city allowed the new Bojangles at 3rd and Independence to be placed in a typical suburban form? Here is a prominent corner between two high-profile projects, Elizabeth Avenue/CPCC and Pappas’ [Pappas Properties] Metropolitan and what do our planners allow? Suburban schlock. The store is pushed as far back from the corner as possible, meanwhile, the new store at Highland Creek will be urban (pulled to the corner with parking in the back). What do you think about this? Can you find out why what happened has happened?”

Full disclosure: I’ve been a Bojangles fan since they were founded in Charlotte in the 1970s. One night fellow copy editor Hank Durkin (who bailed out years ago, for Microsoft) took me to this fast-food joint at South Tryon and West Boulevard, and I’ve loved it ever since. (That original Bo’s, btw, was demolished and is now a parking lot for the newer Bo’s next door.)

But say it ain’t so, Bo. Your new spot at Third and Independence is essentially a huge parking lot, with a building distantly visible far away, behind the asphalt. It’s about as “urban” as the Costco on Tyvola. The rest of the area is shaping up so much more nicely, with the new CPCC buildings, the offices farther down Third with ground-floor retail, and the aforementioned Pappas project at the old Midtown Square. Too bad Bojangles dumped such inappropriate development at the corner.

My correspondent also sent a link to a discussion forum at urbanplanet.org, devoted to the ugly new Bojangles. Someone in there reports that Bojangles wanted to do a more urban design and “planning” wouldn’t let them. That didn’t ring true. I checked with Keith MacVean, land development program manager at the city-county planning staff.

The villain is the old B-2 zoning at the site. It allows suburban schlock – or as MacVean called it “highway commercial.” It does NOT, require it. Bojangles could have pulled the building up to within 20 feet of the Independence right of way, he said. The company didn’t. Because no rezoning was requested, the company didn’t even need to talk to the city planners, who would likely have tried to negotiate a more appropriate design.

There’s an upside, though, MacVean said. “I think they took down a billboard.”

With schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and around the region open, seems like a good time to toss out some information about school traffic and school parking.

Why does morning traffic get so much worse when schools open? It isn’t just the buses. CMS’ 1,200 buses are only a drop in the bucket, traffic-wise, even if they do stop on the streets. For example, the city’s Transportation Department list of 2006 traffic counts shows that on Monday May 15, the average daily traffic, midblock on Fairview Road, west of Barclay Downs Drive, was 38,800.

What makes traffic get so much worse are the thousands of parents driving their kids to school.

I know this is a complicated issue. I’m not saying no parents should drive kids to school. Sometimes bus schedules are just too early/inconvenient/weird. Most of the CMS buses serve several schools – to use buses and drivers cost-efficiently – which means they have to start early. If you want one bus per school, be prepared to cough up more tax money. And yes, teens will whine relentlessly about how they need – need! – a car to drive to school instead of taking the bus which is for geeky freshmen, and so on.

But consider the following factoids I extracted from the folks at CMS who design new schools. When CMS buys land for schools, and has to design them, here’s what they’re required to supply:

High schools: Student parking for 350 cars. Staff parking for 170-200 cars. Visitor parking, 35 cars. The bus lot has to hold 40 buses.

It costs $4,000 to build one automobile (non-bus) parking space, in labor, asphalt, etc. That figure doesn’t include the land costs. So let’s see, figuring space for 200 staff cars, auto parking at a new CMS high school costs $2.34 million to build. That doesn’t include the cost of school bus parking, or land. Student parking alone is $1.4 million.

Let’s talk land. Figure a 9-by-18-foot student parking space, and you get 56,700 square feet for student parking. Figuring roughly $60,000-an-acre land costs (CMS director of architecture Tony Ansaldo cautions that’s a blunt estimate, and that each site is different, etc., etc.), and 43,560 square feet per acre, that’s $46,080 in land cost alone, for a 350-car student parking lot.

Here are stats for middle and elementary schools:

Middle: Staff parking, 138 cars. Visitor parking, 50 cars. Bus lot, 25 buses. Cost of parking (again, not including bus parking or land): $752,000.

Elementary: Staff/visitor parking, 125 cars. Cost of parking (not including bus space or land), $500,000.

Here’s something else driving up school-building costs. Schools have to build plenty of on-site “stacking” – a technical term that means driveway space to allow cars to line up one behind the other, as in car pool lines. The city of Charlotte doesn’t want any of those cars out on city streets, even small neighborhood streets. And in many cases CMS would want the stacking space regardless of CDOT requirements, for safety reasons.

High school stacking: 1,170 lineal feet, typically 12-foot-wide lanes, for 14,040 square feet of “stacking” – a hair shy of a third of an acre, and roughly $20,000 in land costs. (This doesn’t count paving cost.)

Middle schools: 2,003 lineal feet, totalling 24,036 square feet, or .55 of an acre, with estimated land cost of $33,100.

Elementary schools: 1,323 lineal feet, totalling 15,876 square feet, or .36 acre, land cost $21,600.

High schools have less, because more kids drive themselves. And park.

Obviously it’s not a good idea to let schools’ dropoff and pickup traffic clog busy streets, such as thoroughfares. But this IS a city, after all. We have a large and growing city bus system. Plus CMS runs its own public transit system, the school buses. It’s time to look closely at how much we’re spending to let students park and let parents sit in long carpool lines, at schools that are already paying to provide transportation.

Finally, consider this: If it’s a question of building a neighborhood school close enough to a neighborhood so kids can easily walk, and letting some cars back up on a neighborhood street for 15 minutes twice a day, or else building on a site big enough to accommodate more than a third of a mile of driveway on site (2,003 feet is .38 mile — and remember, it takes up to half an acre more land), that’s a no-brainer.

Eastover Elementary was built in 1935 on a tight site smack in the middle of a neighborhood. I hear cars do stack up on Cherokee Road when school opens and lets out. Guess what? Neighborhood drivers may be annoyed now and again, but Eastover doesn’t seem to be hurting from it. It’s one of the city’s most desirable places to live.

Schools and transportation folks need to rethink how much parking and driveway space they’re having to build.

With schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and around the region open, seems like a good time to toss out some information about school traffic and school parking.

Why does morning traffic get so much worse when schools open? It isn’t just the buses. CMS’ 1,200 buses are only a drop in the bucket, traffic-wise, even if they do stop on the streets. For example, the city’s Transportation Department list of 2006 traffic counts shows that on Monday May 15, the average daily traffic, midblock on Fairview Road, west of Barclay Downs Drive, was 38,800.

What makes traffic get so much worse are the thousands of parents driving their kids to school.

I know this is a complicated issue. I’m not saying no parents should drive kids to school. Sometimes bus schedules are just too early/inconvenient/weird. Most of the CMS buses serve several schools – to use buses and drivers cost-efficiently – which means they have to start early. If you want one bus per school, be prepared to cough up more tax money. And yes, teens will whine relentlessly about how they need – need! – a car to drive to school instead of taking the bus which is for geeky freshmen, and so on.

But consider the following factoids I extracted from the folks at CMS who design new schools. When CMS buys land for schools, and has to design them, here’s what they’re required to supply:

High schools: Student parking for 350 cars. Staff parking for 170-200 cars. Visitor parking, 35 cars. The bus lot has to hold 40 buses.

It costs $4,000 to build one automobile (non-bus) parking space, in labor, asphalt, etc. That figure doesn’t include the land costs. So let’s see, figuring space for 200 staff cars, auto parking at a new CMS high school costs $2.34 million to build. That doesn’t include the cost of school bus parking, or land. Student parking alone is $1.4 million.

Let’s talk land. Figure a 9-by-18-foot student parking space, and you get 56,700 square feet for student parking. Figuring roughly $60,000-an-acre land costs (CMS director of architecture Tony Ansaldo cautions that’s a blunt estimate, and that each site is different, etc., etc.), and 43,560 square feet per acre, that’s $46,080 in land cost alone, for a 350-car student parking lot.

Here are stats for middle and elementary schools:

Middle: Staff parking, 138 cars. Visitor parking, 50 cars. Bus lot, 25 buses. Cost of parking (again, not including bus parking or land): $752,000.

Elementary: Staff/visitor parking, 125 cars. Cost of parking (not including bus space or land), $500,000.

Here’s something else driving up school-building costs. Schools have to build plenty of on-site “stacking” – a technical term that means driveway space to allow cars to line up one behind the other, as in car pool lines. The city of Charlotte doesn’t want any of those cars out on city streets, even small neighborhood streets. And in many cases CMS would want the stacking space regardless of CDOT requirements, for safety reasons.

High school stacking: 1,170 lineal feet, typically 12-foot-wide lanes, for 14,040 square feet of “stacking” – a hair shy of a third of an acre, and roughly $20,000 in land costs. (This doesn’t count paving cost.)

Middle schools: 2,003 lineal feet, totalling 24,036 square feet, or .55 of an acre, with estimated land cost of $33,100.

Elementary schools: 1,323 lineal feet, totalling 15,876 square feet, or .36 acre, land cost $21,600.

High schools have less, because more kids drive themselves. And park.

Obviously it’s not a good idea to let schools’ dropoff and pickup traffic clog busy streets, such as thoroughfares. But this IS a city, after all. We have a large and growing city bus system. Plus CMS runs its own public transit system, the school buses. It’s time to look closely at how much we’re spending to let students park and let parents sit in long carpool lines, at schools that are already paying to provide transportation.

Finally, consider this: If it’s a question of building a neighborhood school close enough to a neighborhood so kids can easily walk, and letting some cars back up on a neighborhood street for 15 minutes twice a day, or else building on a site big enough to accommodate more than a third of a mile of driveway on site (2,003 feet is .38 mile — and remember, it takes up to half an acre more land), that’s a no-brainer.

Eastover Elementary was built in 1935 on a tight site smack in the middle of a neighborhood. I hear cars do stack up on Cherokee Road when school opens and lets out. Guess what? Neighborhood drivers may be annoyed now and again, but Eastover doesn’t seem to be hurting from it. It’s one of the city’s most desirable places to live.

Schools and transportation folks need to rethink how much parking and driveway space they’re having to build.

Amid the back-and-forth about uptown parking (see comments at my previous post) I’m surprised no one pointed out the truth about free parking. It’s not free.

“Anyone who owns an office building knows parking is never free,” is how David Feehan put it. Feehan, president of the International Downtown Association, was the moderator at Monday’s parking workshop, sponsored by Charlotte Center City Partners and the City of Charlotte.

The cost of “free” parking is hidden in what you buy, in your rent, even your paycheck. Think about it. Let’s say I want to build a store. I buy 10 acres in a place where the going rate is $10,000 an acre, paying $100,000 for land. (I’m using easy numbers, not realistic ones.) I put the store building on five acres, and set aside the rest for “free” parking. I’ll be making income from store sales with half my land, but not the other half.

So when I figure out how much to charge, part of what I have to figure in – in addition to my competitors’ prices – is the $50,000 I paid for the land under the parking lot, as well as the cost to pave it and resurface it now and again, and taxes and insurance, etc. etc. Yet that land isn’t producing any income for me.

Of course, other store owners have to do the same thing. So everyone’s absorbing the cost of their parking lots. (Ditto office developers or condo tower developers. What they paid for the land they’re using for parking gets built into the price at which they sell the project, or else the lease rates if they lease it.)

But if I could build my store and not need that parking lot (say, if I could offer my customers beam-me-in-Scottie transportation, for free), I could offer my goods for less. Or pay my workers more. Or both.

Obviously, with most people driving most places, you have to offer parking if you’re a store, office building, apartments and so on. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. Just pointing out it isn’t really “free.” The main reason you pay more uptown is that uptown land costs more, because it’s in high demand. If restaurants offer “free” parking, they just raise the prices for the fettucine alfredo. If governments offer free parking at government buildings, it’s paid for through taxes.

A UCLA professor of urban planning, Donald Shoup, has studied parking and written a book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” in which he estimates Americans in 2002 paid $127 billion to $374 billion a year in subsidized parking. Here’s a link to an NPR interview with him from 2005.

He thinks too many cities and towns require developers to build excessive parking, and that many stores choose to build too much, trying to accommodate all the shoppers on the Saturday before Christmas, so the lot is half-filled most days of the year.

I think he’s right. But of course, most people would rather not have to see (and openly pay) the cost of their not-so-free parking.