A trio of research papers have been added to the Research Center’s best practices database.

Today's Quote of the Day from Jeff Wood's newsletter "The Other Side of the Tracks" comes from a Mineta Transportation Institute research paper:

Norman Garrick discusses what happens when you start to change your infrastructure from being pedestrian supported to auto supported.  Case in point, the City of Hartford, which had at one point 15,000 parking spaces when it was a more walkable place.  Today, it has 45,000 parking spaces and less jobs that it did then. To see what that means in terms of city destruction, you only have to wait till the end of the discussion to see the destruction that has on a city's soul.  In plain terms, making way for automobility decreases the efficiency of cities.

(Note: This is another in our series of expert blogs on TOD highlighting work and research that experts and advocates are doing in the field. Alyssa Sherman researched residential parking policy as a student in San Jose State University’s Master of Urban Planning Program, and completed her Master’s Thesis on this topic in May of 2010.)

  New York City policymakers expect more than 9 million people will live in the city by 2030. Will zoning codes that require minimum off-street parking for new residential construction defeat the city's goal of improving traffic congestion and increasing affordable housing?

"Minimum Parking Requirements, Transit Proximity and Development in New York City," a report from the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban policy, combines a theoretical discussion of parking requirements in New York City with a quantitative analysis of how they relate to transit and development opportunity. The report was written by Simon McDonnell, Vicki Been and Josiah Madar.

The report finds per unit requirements are lower for the many lots near transit that, as of 2007, were underdeveloped and thus future projects will require relatively few new parking spaces. But the picture becomes less clear when…

 
A draft version of "A Tale of Two Eco-Suburbs in Freiburg, Germany: Parking Provision and Car Use" from the 2010 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting has been added to the Best Practices.

This paper by Andrea Broaddus of the University of California, Berkeley, Department of City and Regional Planning compares two “eco-suburbs” of Freiburg, Germany. Riselfeld and Vauban were created over the last 10 years. Both are transit-oriented developments designed as family-friendly live-work-play places, composed of mixed-use commercial and residential buildings meeting ecological best practice. Both suburbs have a similarly high density and are located are about 3 km from the city center with excellent transit and bicycling connections.

The only difference is the provision of automobile parking. Rieselfeld followed the German convention of one parking spot…

  [This is another in our series of expert blogs on TOD, highlighting work and research that experts are doing in the field.  Today's post is by  Robert Cervero, from the University of California Transportation Center and UC Berkeley.] Many apartment projects near urban rail stations, critics charge, are “over-parked” – more parking is provided than needed. This can drive up the cost of housing, consume valuable land near transit, and impose environmental costs such as water pollution from enlarged impervious surfaces.

Part of the blame for oversupply of parking in TODs (transit-oriented developments) could be the reliance on parking generation figures from the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). ITE standards assume that car ownership levels and parking demands are no different in traditional suburban settings than in neighborhoods that are served by rail transit. Yet some studies suggest that those drawn to living near urban rail stops do so for…

Excessive, inflexible parking requirements are counterproductive according to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute report "Parking Requirement Impacts on Housing Affordability." Todd Litman's January 2009 report itemizes multiple negative impacts on society in general and lower-income families in particular and outlines solutions created through flexibility and parking management.