Someday, when fleets of self-driving cars efficiently cater to the mobility demands of city residents, Denver planners may be able to drop requirements for off-street parking in most housing developments. But that future has not yet arrived.
And until it does, a surge of development without off-street parking threatens to mire some neighborhoods in congestion.
Thatap why we support a proposal that passed out of a Denver City Council committee last week that would impose a seven-month moratorium on certain developments that currently can be built without off-street parking. The time-out would give planners an opportunity to propose changes to the rules.
Developers must still include off-street parking in many housing projects, of course. However, as The Denver Postap Jon Murray in a recent article, a parking exemption for “a range of mixed-use zoning districts” was written into the 2010 rezoning of the city. And while an exemption makes sense for certain developments in increasingly dense downtown neighborhoods where residents can forgo a car without much inconvenience, the same exemption in other neighborhoods is likely to trigger problems.
After all, not all tenants of housing projects that lack parking are going to go without a car. And yet those with vehicles will have to park them somewhere, adding to competition for what already often is a limited number of nearby spaces. This jockeying for parking will only add to congestion.
Those who study urban congestion are well aware of the phenomenon.
“A surprising amount of traffic isn’t caused by people who are on their way somewhere,” UCLA urban-planning professor Donald Shoup a few years ago in Access magazine. “Rather it is caused by people who have already arrived. Our streets are congested, in part, by people who have gotten where they want to be but are cruising around looking for a place to park.”
Denver Councilman Jolon Clark is worried about the potential effect of parking-free projects on old South Pearl Street, “where all of a sudden, it could be row after row of 16 units with no parking” in place of the current single-family homes or shops.
“That is something that will dramatically change the feel of that community,” Clark predicted.
Developers note that off-street parking adds to housing costs, which is undoubtedly true. But unless they can guarantee that none of their tenants in parking-free units will own cars — and there’s no way they can — they’ll end up shifting the cost of parking from the project to the public at large.
At the very least Denver needs to reassess whether the present rules make sense. Those involved in the rezoning of 2010 could not have anticipated the size of the recent development boom — a boom with no end in sight. An exemption that may have seemed of minor importance has taken on unexpected significance, and a moratorium will give the city breathing room while it figures out what to do.
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