Arbor UpdateAnn Arbor Area Community News | ||
North Burns Park and Oxbridge seek residential parking districtsAnn Arbor is Overrated gets credit as the first comment on the new applications for residential parking permits by the North Burns Park and Oxbridge neighborhood associations. The districts would have a 2-hour limit on street parking between 8 am and 6 pm except for vehicles with resident permits. The Ann Arbor News says the neighborhood associations blame commuters and students for taking up parking: While each district varies, the new parking district would generally allow parking from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. for two hours without a permit and violators could be ticketed. Those with a permit and those parking after 6 p.m. would face no restrictions. Long-term parking by students, who leave their cars unused for weeks at a time while walking, biking, or bussing around town, is mentioned as a particular problem. « Previous Article Alternative Motorized Transportation Events Next Article McGovern takes issue with Prop A critics » | ||
Commuting brings thousands into Ann Arbor for 8 hours at a time, and they have no option except to drive. School brings thousands in for months at a time, and, unless they’re the provincial types whose parents live close enough to pick them up for Thanksgiving / Christmas / etc (like me), driving to Ann Arbor is the way to get here. (You can’t even get to the airport without knowing somebody who owns a car – or paying exorbitant cab fare.)
We have three options for addressing this. We can either eliminate the need for people to bring cars into Ann Arbor by making alternatives feasible, eliminate the need for people to bring cars into Ann Arbor by destroying the local economy and pushing the University out so that people no longer have a reason to come here, or accomodate the cars that people bring into town. The first option is best. The middle option is worst. The third option is the realist’s option – it’s at the very least what we need to do until we can move to the first option.
Complaints about students not noticing that their cars have been towed for a week at a time are misguided – a symptom of a regional problem is being treated as a problem the size of My Front Yard, and the solution to the My Front Yard problem does nothing to address the regional problem.
Some of the mechanics of the program are also suspect. The restricted hours are 8am-6pm – hours designed to prevent student storage parking and commuter parking. If the program were really designed to allow residents to find parking spots, the hours would be reversed – with parking beyond 2 hours restricted to residents from 4pm on, when neighborhood residents are coming home from work themselves and need to park their cars.
I recently called driveways a private appropriation of part of the public realm – they create off-street parking that only a few people can use by destroying on-street parking that anybody may use. The residential permit parking program is this kind of private appropriation on a grand scale. By reserving (public) on-street parking for a small group of people, the program prevents the most efficient use of existing parking – parking that is used by different people at different parts of the day – and requires the creation of more parking in order to satisfy the system-level demand. Each residential parking district creates a benefit for a small area of Ann Arbor while creating a cost for the entire community – hardly a good public policy.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to stop distracting myself and go work on finishing up that incomplete from my “Transportation and Land Use Planning” course. (If I changed the topic of my paper to residential parking districts, I’d be done by now. . . )
—Murph May. 24 '05 - 11:47AM #
As for the ‘private appropriation of part of the public realm’ comment—that’s nuts. Residents are using some of their property (which, of course, they have to buy and pay property tax on) for vehicle storage. A space lost on the street translates into 2-4 or more spaces (counting garage and driveway) for the resident, which vehicles, of course, are not taking up space on the street.
—mw May. 24 '05 - 12:51PM #
—ann arbor is overrated May. 24 '05 - 01:08PM #
There was a parking system like this in parts of my old neighborhood in San Francisco (Glen Park), but that was an area where driveways weren’t necessarily standard, and many of the existing driveways could only fit one car. Some apartment buildings had limited covered parking on the ground level, but I think being charged $50-100 per month for that wasn’t uncommon. In that situation, street parking was the bulk of available parking, especially if you didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg for it.
What are the neighborhoods in question like? If the huge driveways I typically see around town are standard, I hardly see the point.
—kelli May. 24 '05 - 01:09PM #
Well, they definitely weren’t owned by anybody who lived on the street. As for living in ‘the neighborhood’—it depends on how you define the neighborhood. There aren’t any rental units on any of the adjoining streets, either. But the Hill dorms are less than a ten minute walk away—are all those students ‘in the neighborhood’?
—mw May. 24 '05 - 01:42PM #
What about the idea of having a limited number of resident-only street parking spots (not a specific spot, but a shot at a ‘blue’ parking spot)? For a fee, of course – hey, we’re in a budget crisis!
—Lisa May. 24 '05 - 01:47PM #
—Scott T. May. 24 '05 - 02:16PM #
The border problem exists all of the time, even if it’s not boiled down to that extreme case, though. If I live just inside a permit district, and can’t find a space, no problem – I can just drive another block and get a space there. If you live just outside the permit district, and can’t find a space, too bad!
I also stand by my “appropriation of the public realm” comment. Are people required to buy curb cuts from the city? Since an on-street parking space benefits everybody within a block or three, but a curb cut benefits only the owner, shouldn’t the owner have to buy the parking spot they’re destroying from their neighbors? Yes, the curb cut is probably taking cars off the street and onto the driveway (as kelli notes, each curb cut around here can accomodate 4 or 5 cars), but it does so in a very prisoners’ dilemma sort of way. I guarantee my parking spot by barring everybody else from it, and they respond in kind.
—Murph May. 24 '05 - 03:17PM #
—Murph May. 24 '05 - 03:20PM #
I have to start by echoing my post on AAIO: I thought that we have been told that we have too many parking spots? Where did that argument go? If you buy the arguments made by some here on Arbor Update, there should be many, many monthly parking spaces available to students and homeowners at a reasonable rate a few blocks to the west.
And why hasn’t the AA News been smart enough to be able to tie in the greenway story with this discussion of a lack of parking spaces?
My answer to both of these questions is that I believe that residents wish to merely make it difficult for students/staff/other users to park in their area, while making it so they have no problems at all. AAIO is right…they won’t come to the conclusion that a parking garage is needed if they can simply take care of their own needs with some bass-ackwards legislation. Maybe I’m just being cynical. I hope I’m wrong, but…..
As to Murph’s suggestion that we change the hours that you cannot park….the cost for policing this would be exorbitant…..much in the same way that while it makes much more sense to handle road construction late at night in certain areas, the OT will kill you.
...and I am in total agreement with Murph about the curb cuts. The curb cuts takes a publicly shared space and gives sole use to a property owner. If he’s wrong, then we should be able to park in front of some poor guy’s driveway if we chose to….
My solution to this dilemma would be to build a few city owned parking garages. UMich keeps growing in leaps and bounds….how many more staffing positions have been created in the past ten years?! How many new buildings have been put in? How many parking garages do you remember UMich building? We need to cash in on this trend. Generate money from a city owned lot, and encourage students/staff/homeowners/renters to put their cars in a monthly parking spot and keep them there. This will also help new commuters to work and play downtown.
—todd May. 25 '05 - 07:04AM #
I’ve been in contact with the public services office at the city. They have some data on file that I feel makes a good case for the argument that residential parking permit (RPP) areas are used by residents to clear outsiders (students and commuters) out even though the residents do not need the parking for themselves.
In order to qualify for a RPP area, the petitioner must be an association of 16 or more block faces (see Murph’s definition above) with signatures of 60% of households in the requested area. Harvard Place and Ridgeway don’t qualify by size but were permitted an exception.
Public service has data on file showing the number of residences and number of permits issued for each area:
Harvard Place (2004-05)
Addresses: 18
60% of households required for program: 12
Permits issued: 2
Ridgeway (2004-05)
Addresses: 23
60% of households required for program: 13.8
Permits issued: 4
North Central (2004-05)
Addresses: 159
60% of households required for program: 95.4
Permits issued: 77
Old West Side (2003-04)
Addresses: 305
60% of households required for program: 183
Permits issued: 130
First I should mention that the number of addresses is old information and may not be accurate. I would give it a 15% margin of error.
Secondly, the data is all that Public services provided. The analysis is all mine. So inaccuracies and misuse and conjecture are all mine as well.
This suggests to me that lots of people sign a petition to implement a RPP program in their association and then never apply for a permit. Out of 304 people required to sign a petition only 213 paid for a permit, at best. It is possible that some of the 213 permits were for multiple vehicles owned by a single household. So, at best about 60% of the people who requested the program don’t use it.
People park in these residential areas because it is free and because it is close enough to work or home to be convenient at the price. The RPP program removes this parking option which in turn increases the parking demand downtown and in adjacent neighborhoods. It further limits the amount of available parking in the city without providing a parking benefit to residents.
In addition, it is an expensive service which appears to be heavily subsidized by tax payers. More on that in my next post…
I think that Beverly at Public Services is getting a few calls on this stuff. She was really kind when I called. In an effort to save her sanity, I’d be happy to pass on everything she told me so that others don’t have to ask the same questions again.
—Scott TenBrink May. 25 '05 - 07:45AM #
But the owner, by having the curb cut (and associated driveway and garage), is implicityly agreeing to store his own vehicles on his property which vehicles would otherwise be on the street taking up considerably more space than the curb cut. And the owner is, in fact, paying for the services that the city provides (paved street in front of the house, water and sewer lines under it, and curb cut) via property taxes. A house with curb-cut, driveway and garage is worth more than one without—and that is reflected in the tax bill.
—mw May. 25 '05 - 08:22AM #
—Dale May. 25 '05 - 09:01AM #
—ann arbor is overrated May. 25 '05 - 09:02AM #
My husband is one of those ‘annoying’ commuters who park in the western neighborhoods and walks the rest of the way to work. We cannot afford a monthly pass in the parking structures – that’s $105/month, or $1260 a year – even assuming that we could get through the waiting list to pay for one. His boss refuses to pay for a GoPass either. He is one of the many workers in the service industry on Main Street. Sometimes when the weather is nice, he walks to/from work, but as we all know that only works for maybe 3 months out of the year, and we live just far enough away that it’s a fairly long walk (3 miles each way).
And so he parks on the street. I think the OWS system is very fair: it allows commuters/students to park on one side of the street one day, the other side the next. Whatever side the commuters can’t park on is used by residents with residential permits (it’s usually empty, but that’s another story).
Until we have a better alternative for commuters, they will need to park SOMEWHERE. More structures isn’t the answer, but neither is outlawing parking on the street.
—KGS May. 25 '05 - 10:02AM #
Nope, you’re not alone KGS. It’s called a sense of entitlement, and it’s supposed to apply to people who are my age….so there you go.
I will say, though, that I disagree about the need for parking garages. I’m starting to realize that I am all alone on this issue. We’ve had UMich and the town grow quite a bit in the last decade. We have chosen to make living downtown very difficult, so now we have a ton of commuters. To say that we have had a zero net gain of cars and parking needs is pretty silly in my opinion.
Every piece of anecdotal information about a need for more parking has been dismissed, so I really am at a loss as to how to rephrase my position that we need more parking in this town.
Do I know that cars aren’t sustainable solution? Yes. But we chose to make Ann Arbor less sustainable quite a while ago, so acting surprised that commuters and residents need cars is a bit two-faced if you ask me.
—todd May. 25 '05 - 10:25AM #
Again, any lies, fibs or gross misrepresentations in the following should be attributed to the author alone. I’d be happy to provide the original document on request.
D-18 in the May 16 packet for City Council is a resolution to approve fee adjustments for Public Services. It covers a lot of stuff, but at the very end gives costs associated with the residential parking permit (RPP) program. The start-up cost of a new area containing 16 block faces is listed as $12,424. Public Services requested that the association requesting the new RPP area pay $5,480 of this cost. Council removed this from the approved amendment.
One should note that the cost of 16 block faces assumes that every block face requires signage and trimming, which is not always the case. Therefore this cost may be adjusted down. The signs are on a ten year depreciation schedule. For simplicity I’ll assume that no maintenance is required within that time period. $12,000 will cover the physical infrastructure of the program for ten years.
Council did approve a change in the annual RPP fee from $25 up to $40. This fee will now cover about one third of the cost to issue the permit, which is $126. Council also approved the new fee for replacing the physical RPP (the sticker that goes on the car) to cover the full $26 cost.
As an example of the economics of RPP programs we can look back to the data for the Old West Side in my previous post and see that 130 permits were issued. This year (until July 1), residents pay $25 per permit. So OWS kicked in $3,250 in 2005 so far. They may pay for a few replacement permits as well, but those are a wash anyway. It’s not completely clear to me where this money goes, but I’m guessing that it ends up in the general fund.
The OWS has an RPP area of 42 block faces currently (they are adding a couple more soon). If a block face costs approximately $775/block face ($12,424/16 block faces) for ten years, then the maintenance cost per year of a block face is about $78. I don’t know if every block face in the OWS requires the full maintenance cost. There may be some blocks that don’t have parking on them. For an estimate I’ll say that 35 of the 42 block faces registered require $50 of attention per year (well below the $78 calculated above). So the maintenance cost for RPP in the Old West Side is $1750.
Now we should add in the cost of $126/permit estimated by Public Services. 130 permits run up a bill of $16,380. Ouch!
One thing we have not considered is the infamous visitor permit! Every household that participates in the RPP program (ie they buy a RPP) gets one visitor permit for free. Some households in the OWS have more than one vehicle registered in the program, but they still only get one visitor permit. In 2004 there were 104 visitor permits issued, suggesting that there were probably only 104 households that registered 130 vehicles in the program. That would reduce the participation rate figured in my previous post, but I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt.
Anyway, these passes also have some value. It is difficult to say what that value is exactly, but the whole idea of having visitor passes has been discontinued specifically because those who obtain them have begun to realize that value by selling them to commuters and students. This is not to say that everyone does this. However, I know of a couple cases personally and the city sites abuses of the system as a reason to discontinue visitor permits. Even if there was no abuse, it is easy to see the value of a permanent parking spot close to downtown. I’ll mark it at the bargain price of $25/year, the same under-valued price that OWS residents paid for their resident permit. So 104 of those are worth $2,600. This is not a cost to the city. There is no cost breakdown for this item since it is not a fee, but it is probably the minimal value of the pass to the residents.
Finally there is the additional cost of enforcement. I have not been able to obtain this information from public services yet. I believe that they patrol the area twice each day. I’m going to leave the actual cost out for now, but I bet it is bigger than the sum of all other costs. I’ll include it here once I have the info.
So, not counting the value of visitor permits or the cost of enforcing RPP policy, the OWS pays $3,250 a service that costs the city $18,130 to provide. My understanding is that this money comes from the general fund. By my calculations, in 2004 a little less than 85% of the Old West Side RPP program was subsidized by tax payers.
Despite the pointed-ness of this post, I’m not yet taking a position on RPP programs. Yet. City parking systems cannot be judged on their success or profitability as a stand-alone venture. The entire system should be assessed as one entity. Before eliminating these restrictions we should consider their impact on other parking facilities. The parking decisions made in town also impact the surrounding neighborhoods and maybe the city has an obligation to protect those areas from a parking flood.
Yet this analysis does support Todd’s comments. It is more difficult to complain about the subsidy of a parking structure that provides compact provision of parking downtown when you are receiving a hefty subsidy yourself for a program that actually reduces parking availability.
I’ve got a bit more info to pass on, but I’m trying to keep posts reasonable in size, so more is still to come…
—Scott TenBrink May. 25 '05 - 10:53AM #
I’m sticking to my “appropriation of the public realm,” guns, and, if a neighborhood association is going to take something that I’ve paid for through taxes, should I be charged again for the privilege of giving it to them? I think not.
—Murph. May. 25 '05 - 11:19AM #
On a tangent, I wonder what CTN would say if I recorded the city meetings from cable, encoded them as mpegs and posted them to the web for viewing… If I could secure the “rights” in the public domain or similar, I could even post them to archive.org or similar free video hosting-type service. Hmmm…
—Scott T. May. 25 '05 - 01:18PM #
we need them downtown, where the city should build them, and we need them around campus, where umich should build them.
in addition, we need to make it more expensive and more inconvenient for commuters and students to park on the street than to park in a satellite lot, of which there are many, and take a bus the rest of the way.
i don’t want to rip on KGS, but an AATA pass is $37.50/mo. if you look at the total cost of owning a car, six miles a day costs that much or more.
—peter honeyman May. 25 '05 - 06:01PM #
Parking has always been an issue in down town Ann Arbor. There will never be enough of it. The city makes big buck from the U-M Students parking fines. They put extra ticket writers on close to the end of the school year to catch up with the students that have more then 4 unpaid tickets. The city budget is also dependent on money coming in from the parking tickets which is a shame because every time the parking fees or parking tickets go up the ones that suffer from it is all the businesses. With rents going up as well, these are a couple of the big reasons why many local business have moved out of the downtown.
I’ll end with a joke that I heard a little while ago. It goes like this: “The one thing that people living in Ann Arbor hate more then urban sprawl is density in the down town.”
Bob Dascola
—Bob Dascola May. 25 '05 - 06:24PM #
> Parking has always been an issue
> in down town Ann Arbor. There
> will never be enough of it.
you make that claim seriously? prove it.
show me the parking data that demonstrates that you can never have enough parking. i’d settle for seeing current utilization patterns (vacancy vs time of day) for existing structures. i’d even settle for just seeing data showing when lots are full, and when they arent.
claiming there can never be enough parking is baseless, and doesn’t really get us any further towards understanding how to develop downtown sensibly.
bob
—bob kuehne May. 25 '05 - 07:02PM #
—Murph May. 25 '05 - 08:16PM #
Hold on—it costs $126 to issue a permit?!? And $26 to send a replacement sticker?!? WTF? How can it possibly cost anything remotely close to that? Just how many hours of clerical labor are involved in filling in a few boxes on a form and dropping a packet in a mailbox?
—mw May. 26 '05 - 04:06AM #
My previous posts (and Todd’s) highlight the complexity of measuring parking in Ann Arbor in that the Old West Side is generally considered to oppose new parking structures because there is no need for them, yet receive a healthy subsidy to clear non-residents out of their neighborhood because they could not find a parking spot in front of their house.
Collecting more accurate data on available parking would certainly help in improving the efficiency of the DDA parking facilities. It is my understanding 1) that the equipment that is used at most structures is not capable of collecting that information currently (however upgrades at some lots do collect that data) and 2) that the physical check that the DDA does a few times each year is a common practice with other parking systems. The parking provider in Madison uses a similarly occasional physical count. Of course, as mentioned numerous times in other posts, there is a cost to the collection, analysis and storage of this information.
Assuming that completely accurate data on the available capacity in every structure, lot, and metered space were available to us, I doubt that there would be any more agreement between businesses, visitors, commuters, residents, and students as to whether there is enough parking in Ann Arbor. And this does nothing to address the impact of downtown parking policy on residential areas where it is even more difficult to determine parking capacity.
Anthony Downs makes an argument in his book, Still Stuck in Traffic, that traffic congestion is not going away and cannot be reduced without a negative impact on the economic vitality of an area. He says that congestion is a sign of success similar to a restaurant where it is difficult to get reservations or a movie with a long line for tickets. At the end of a lecture I saw he said congestion is here to stay so get used to it and find a good radio station to listen to on your continually lengthening commute to work. I think he would argue the same about parking. And so he may agree with Bob D’s comment that the parking issue will never be resolved.
ps- How do I get apostrophes to show up correctly here?
—Scott TenBrink May. 26 '05 - 05:09AM #
Try walking the Main St area at 7, 8, 9pm on a nice Thursday or Friday evening, and see how many parking spaces you can find. Listen to people talking on their cell phones as they walk down the street, and count how often they say, “Yeah, I’m in Ann Arbor for the evening!” or something similar. Ann Arbor isn’t just used by Ann Arborites, either during work hours or at night, and there is utterly no way for them to get here except by driving. This is why US-23 is packed several hours a day, and why queues of cars form on Ashley waiting for the “FULL” sign on the Kline’s Lot to flick off and let one of them in. (No, really. Spend five hours wandering Main St. on a Friday night watching cars. It’s very interesting, from an anthropological / planning point of view.)
Scott – I don’t know about apostrophes. Are you composing comments somewhere else and cut/pasting? Do they show up correctly in preview?
—Murph May. 26 '05 - 05:27AM #
nonetheless, i will prove it! :-)
proposition: we don’t have enough parking in downtown ann arbor today.
proposition: we won’t have enough parking in downtown ann arbor tomorrow.
by induction on the passing days, i conclude that we will never have enough parking in downtown ann arbor.
Q.E.D.
(ever! heh.)
—peter honeyman May. 26 '05 - 05:47AM #
Bob D – I appreciate your offer. I knew that the GoPass was cheap but didn’t realize just how cheap. I’ll ask my husband to talk to the owner again and see if she’ll pay for them. Maybe she will.
Much as I appreciate y’all trying to solve my little problem, it doesn’t address the larger issues. There are a lot of people who work downtown – in the restaurants, serving coffee, selling books, etc – that earn minimum wage or a bit more than that. They are often forced to live at the edges of the city or in Ypsi (which means an hour+ bus ride, sometimes), or out in the ‘burbs away from public transit because housing is too expensive here. We can have all the structured parking we want, but they cost money to build so the parking isn’t free. How do people earning below the average wage in A2 afford a parking pass? especially assuming that their bosses won’t shell out $100/month for them to have one? I don’t see any alternative other than to park on the street, and with neighbors increasingly kicking the commuters out, I can’t help but think that most businesses other than restaurants will eventually leave the downtown.
—KGS May. 26 '05 - 05:59AM #
Mw’s post gives me a chance to correct a couple things that I got wrong in my earlier posts.
The $126 price tag for a permit includes:
1/10th of depreciation costs- $7.30
Customer service (what mw snidely calls checking boxes and dropping mail)- $12.42
Enforcement- $92.76
Accounting- $13.92
I initially assumed that enforcement was a separate cost, but it is included here. I also assumed that depreciation was not included, which it is. I need to adjust my subsidy claims down a couple notches. It is probably best to say that the new $40 fee will cover about 40% of the cost of the program and will not contribute to the initial $12,000 cost.
The numbers here are based on 281 permits sold in three of the RPP areas in 2004. Note that while the old west side purchased 130 passes in 2004, they have only purchased 88 in 2005. As the number of permits drops, the cost per permit will go up. If the price of the permit does not rise to compensate, then the subsidy of the program will.
—Scott TenBrink May. 26 '05 - 06:07AM #
my beef with bob ds statement (and your defense of it, peter) is that there’s a lot of this discussion that is grounded in nothing more than intuition. i don’t believe we’re better off running this city based on common knowledge, rather than facts. i’d humbly suggest gathering usage facts, studying how other cities have addressed parking conflicts, and then implement some decisions. but just building parking on the basis that “everybody knows” is complete hubris.
bob
—bob kuehne May. 26 '05 - 06:19AM #
You gotta stop proving all of my points.
1. You live in the old west side, and therefore have access to parking.
2. You don’t care if we have more taxes ($400 per year for parking “no worries”, right?).
Therefore, you don’t care if the working class who could walk downtown are priced out of living near the city center.
3.You aren’t interested in real world stories from local business owners who tell you that there isn’t enough parking. You won’t listen to Bob Dascola whose family has been in business for, what, 75 years? His encounters with decades of long time business owners who are leaving in droves don’t count. It’s not “intuition” when it’s your business that is leaving.
4. You, as I mentioned above, have completely ignored the article in question that has another set of homeowners a few blocks away who are telling you that there isn’t enough parking. Are you dismissing their perspective, too?
5. You are directly benefitting from the parking policy that pushes unwanted parkers out of your neighborhood. If, as you say, there is plenty of parking, I’d suggest you put in a call to your neighborhood assoc. and demand that they change the parking policy for your neighborhood. I’m sure you’ll be warmly received.
....and, again, this is coming from a business owner who is lucky enought to have plenty of access to parking.
Come on Bob. Take the opposite position for a change! :)
—todd May. 26 '05 - 07:08AM #
Really, Scott? Any clear evidence of this? Sounds like a huge opportunity if it’s true.
Anecdotally, my wife’s employees take the bus or get dropped off, especially on weekends and busy evenings. Parking for customers is always a concern and regularly examined.
“At the same time visitors feel there is not enough parking if they cannot park in front of the crowded Main St. restaurant that they have reservations for.”
That’s an exaggeration that doesn’t fit in well with your otherwise objective analysis.
The ‘feeling’ that there’s insufficient parking is a result of repeated visits after 5pm on Friday or Saturday during which the Kline’s lot, Brown block lot, 1st & Washington structure, and 1st & William lot are perpetually full; there’s no on-street parking available within a four-plus-block radius; and there’s a line to get into the Washington and William structures. There may be spots available on the top floor or two in each of those structures, but an extra 15 minutes or more out of their evening is a cost, perhaps even a barrier. There aren’t many folks that really expect to find a spot within a block—two, even—of where they’re going at those times. (A friend of mine calls it “parkma” when it happens, a play on “karma”—he must have done something to deserve such a gift from the universe.)
—Steve Bean May. 26 '05 - 07:10AM #
Peter, why on earth would we want UMich to build parking garages? You don’t want the revenue?
—todd May. 26 '05 - 07:11AM #
My main gripe with RPP programs is this. The most effective way to utilize the program from the neighborhood’s perspective is to apply for the RPP and then have no one buy a permit. There is currently no requirement that anyone participate so it would cost nothing and others cannot park long-term in your neighborhood.
If we raise the permit cost to $400, that is exactly what would happen. The cost of maitenance would continue while revenue would evaporate.
Similarly if we charge $2,200/year for structure parking a large majority of commuters would give up their permit. Assuming that same price increase was implemented for hourly lot and structure parking, that demand would drop drastically as well. The result would be a less profitable parking facility with the same costs associated.
Then we still have to deal with the question of where all these parkers priced out of the structure would go. Which brings me to Steve’s point.
Steve,
I really thought I could sneak that egregious comment about parking right in front of restaurants by. It is a credit to this forum that the attempt failed miserably.
As to my remarks on the business community’s action toward reducing employee street parking, I should have been more specific. I fully support the go!pass program and feel that it is a valuable effort by the DDA to offer other option for commuters to get to work without driving. In fact I help run the program right now. The value to cost ratio for participation in this program is currently so huge that it seems like absolute lunacy for any business downtown not to participate even if only to look good.
I was thinking of the pricing and timing of on street parking. Currently the cheapest way to park downtown for an extended period of time is to park at a meter, get a ticket, and pay it within 24 hours. You do run the risk of a second, more expensive ticket, but the risk is low enough for the behavior to pay off.
If you work in the evening (as a waiter or bartender) street parking is a real bargain. Arrive downtown at 4pm and snag a prime street spot before the dinner rush. The meter isn’t enforced after 6pm so small change will pay for a full evening of parking. It’s much cheaper than a structure.
The DDA is aware of this and spoke of changing the timing, fees, and fines for metered, on-street parking to encourage long term parkers to go to the structures. However there is concern like Bob D. that greater parking fees and fines will impact the customer base. No action has been taken yet as far as I know.
So when Bob K raises the cost of parking to cover costs, everyone heads for the cheap street parking and stays there all day and all night.
Currently on-street meters cost little to maintain and make a lot of money. They help cover the deficit of parking structures which are expensive and less convenient.(Todd, this is why UofM should build there own structures. To the best of my knowledge all structures in downtown areas have to be subsidized to function)
As a whole, the parking system does come out in the black. The goal, according to the DDA, is to provide inexpensive, long-term parking for residents and commuters in structures that are subsidized by more expensive, more convenient on-street metered parking paid for by visitors. For this to work, I think some changes in pricing and timing need to be implemented.
—Scott TenBrink May. 26 '05 - 08:31AM #
We in SE Michigan lost sight many years ago that motor vehicle use is a privilege, an expensive privilege, and a privilege that is typically subsidized at the public expense. No one has to live in sprawl and commute to Ann Arbor. They make the choice to live in sprawl and they should pay the prices for their decision. The residents of Ann Arbor are under no obligation to make living in sprawl and cross-commuting cheap and convenient. People who choose to live far from work should expect to pay for gas, insurance, the costs of their automobile, a significant time cost in traffic and congestion, and significant market rate costs for parking their car when they get there.
Do we prevent housing in Ann Arbor? Yes and no. Residents have expressed opposition to 10+ story high-rises. No one is preventing developers from building 4 story buildings downtown with ground-floor retail and underground parking. Developers would rather build one and two story sprawl developments, and with the strange assumption that Ann Arbor residents will provide them with a smooth commute on subsidized roads and subsidized parking, people choose to live in sprawl. They always have the option of living in Ann Arbor in a smaller unit for the same price, and giving up the second car and the long commute. They always have the option of living and working on bus routes for our excellent transit system. They always have the option of bicycling or walking to work at almost no cost.
Frankly, I think every neighborhood should have a parking permit system. Every downtown residence should receive a single tradable permit for parking in a downtown structure. Residents should be allowed to sell their permits to the highest bidder. Everyone seems to forget that the streets in almost every neighborhood in Ann Arbor were first built by a developer who also built the houses, then deeded the street to the city. So nearly every home owner paid for that road to be built in the first place when they bought their house. The developers pass those costs on to the purchasers. The residents have paid a road repair millage most years on top of other millages to maintain that road. Non-residents didn’t pay for any of that. Since non-resident weight and gas taxes go primarily to maintaining major and minor arterial streets, they have the right to use those roads and a right to expect that they are properly maintained, but no right to expect they aren’t congested. Beyond that, they shouldn’t expect handouts of free parking on residential streets.
—Ken Clark May. 26 '05 - 08:42AM #
Whoa. So you’re saying that a properly operated and maintained parking structure will not make money? Now that land is so damn expensive, you may have me on that one.
But, still, are you sure? I have to say that I find that hard to believe. Do you mean privately owned garages, or public owned and privately managed parking garages? And I’m not talking about our old garages where someone at the city woke up and said “ummmm, we forgot to maintain these garages for the last 20 years.”
—todd May. 26 '05 - 08:44AM #
See your copy of the Observer for more details. Maybe this deserves it’s own thread?
—Scott TenBrink May. 26 '05 - 09:37AM #
(1) People of low income can’t live in Ann Arbor very easily. It is nigh impossible to find single family housing that a couple making the average income can afford. The apartment rates are pushed up and up by students, who pay the price to be close to campus. So where do they go? Ypsilanti, Manchester, Chelsea, Milan, anywhere they can afford a house and attain the American Dream – and get a commute as a consequence.
(2) For the majority of the population, a car is a necessity, not a privilege. We need it to get to work, buy groceries, go to the doctor, or visit friends and family who don’t live next door. Until there is mass transit throughout SE Michigan, it will be necessary to have a car.
(3) Not everyone can afford to buy a house near where they work. An example: a friend of mine works for the County at a health center in the OWS. He and his wife earn a total, maybe, of $70K a year. There is no possible way they could buy a house in the OWS on their income. They ended up in the far side of Ypsi, where, if they took the bus, it would mean a commute of 1-1/2 hours.
Yes a great many people choose to live in sprawl and choose the lifestyle that makes parking, road congestion, etc. so much worse. But please remember that there is also a population who has no other choice, too.
—KGS May. 26 '05 - 09:40AM #
only you could derive “you’re proving my points” from me asking for data to back up a fact-free assertion-fest. let’s discuss:
>1. You live in the old west side, and
> therefore have access to parking.
well, speak of the obvious – i didn’t buy my house thinking “hot damn, think of this parking spot”. also, any person who wants to can park absolutely_free on one side of all OWS streets, any day, all day. got it? free. if we’re pricing people out at that rate, well, frankly, they’ve got to get a better accountant.
> 2. You don’t care if we have more taxes ($400 per year for parking
> “no worries�, right?).
> Therefore, you don’t care if the working class
> who could walk downtown are
> priced out of living near the city center.
therefore i don’t care? wtf, man – read what i say for a change. additionally, i fail to see how your ‘alt.pave.the.earth’ mentality assures affordability -for parking, for housing, for freaking anything.
here’s what i wrote, in simpler words: stop the subsidies – no parking subsidies for residents, no parking subsidies (structures included) for businesses.
> 3.You aren’t interested in real world
> stories from local business owners who
> tell you that there isn’t enough parking. > You won’t listen to Bob Dascola whose
> family has been in business for, what,
> 75 years? His encounters with decades
> of long time business owners who are
> leaving in droves don’t count. It’s not
> “intuition� when it’s your business that
> is leaving.
show me the data, don’t just tell me stories. i’m trying to ground things in facts, not baseless assertions. if you want to tell stories, let’s all sit around a campfire somewhere, and scare eachother senseless with our stories of poor businesspeople who can’t run a business because of parking lots. but how about some facts, about these businesses that are ‘leaving in droves’. name them. show me why they left. it it because of parking? really, show me the books, show me their customers that left because they couldn’t park. i’m not assuming one way or the other, or presuming, as you are. facts, man, not anecdotes.
so, if bob dascola’s business suffers from parking, and he’s leaving, as you assert, explain it to me slowly. these customers he’s not getting come into the store (after parking where?) and say ‘man, i’d buy something, but i can’t park anywhere, just wanted to share that. seeya’.
> 4. You, as I mentioned above, have
> completely ignored the article in
>question that has another set of
> homeowners a few blocks away who are
> telling you that there isn’t enough
> parking. Are you dismissing their perspective, too?
read what the article says, stop reading into things. the only perspective i’m dismissing is that where people just assert truth. read the article, i repeat – they’re saying not that there’s not enough parking, but they object to students leaving cars for weeks at the time, and want a parking for short-term periods only, as a neighborhood permit allows. speaking of parking, and driving, you could back a truck through your logic holes.
> 5. You are directly benefitting from the
> parking policy that pushes unwanted
> parkers out of your neighborhood. If, as
> you say, there is plenty of parking, I’d
> suggest you put in a call to your
> neighborhood assoc. and demand that
> they change the parking policy for your
>neighborhood. I’m sure you’ll be warmly received.
hot damn, man, read. what. i. wrote. i didn’t say there’s plenty of parking everywhere. i asked for the data about downtown parking. show me the data. where’s the data? data. data. data. i’m missing out on how to be clearer.
let’s try to make decisions based on facts, not anecdotes, rumor, innuendo, or just intuition.
sheesh. herding cats.
—bob kuehne May. 26 '05 - 09:46AM #
—js May. 26 '05 - 09:53AM #
that was snarky. i apologize.
let’s actually get the core of the issues, and not just wag our fingers at each other saying ‘no you’re dumberer’. again, sorry.
—bob kuehne May. 26 '05 - 09:59AM #
Some of your arguments are simply preoposterous on the very face of them:
“There is no lack of parking in the downtown, or anywhere in Ann Arbor. In fact, a DDA-commissioned study performed by UM (see http://www.wbwc.org/articles/UM-AnnArborParkingStudy.pdf) found that we have significantly more parking than peer communities.”
There is, in fact, a lack of parking right around Main St. However, there is often NOT a lack of parking a few blocks from Main St. A perfect example is the structure at Washington and 4th. Over the past 4 months, I’ve been down near or in that structure on multiple Friday and Saturday nights. It has never been full. It’s often less than halfway full. Why it’s overlooked in the grand scheme of the Main St. parking issue, I have no idea. However, to simply deny that there is a parking problem based on a study of the overall area (your statement) and anecdotal evidence of one structure (mine) is not a very logical way to proceed.
” There is an absolute unwillingness on the part of business interests in Ann Arbor to charge market rates for parking.”
As Todd has repeatedly mentioned, part of the problem with doing so is the fact that the strip malls around town and Briarwood don’t charge for parking. When one can park for free and have a greater assurance of finding a space immediately, as opposed to circling the block for a few minutes or waiting in a block-long line of cars (and we Americans are certainly wedded to our conveniences), it becomes obvious where many of the casual shoppers and diners will go.
“We in SE Michigan lost sight many years ago that motor vehicle use is a privilege, an expensive privilege, and a privilege that is typically subsidized at the public expense.”
Granted, and I share your implied long-term thinking. However, I also recognize that many people/business owners will either not respond or be unable to respond to long-term solutions. They will stop coming here as a matter of course or go out of business, respectively. Consquently, we need to find a short-term solution that melds decently with a long-term one.
“No one has to live in sprawl and commute to Ann Arbor. They make the choice to live in sprawl and they should pay the prices for their decision.”
I don’t know what reasoning this statement is coming from but it’s profoundly insulting to the many people who DO have to live on the fringes of town or in less expensive communities and yet still must come to Ann Arbor to work. I find it inordinately politically disturbing that many of those activists whom I’ve known for many years are now in Ypsilanti (and doing good work out there) because they can no longer afford to live here. The idea that someone would CHOOSE to undertake a commute and absorb the associated costs (in both money and time) is absolutely fallacious. And if the residents of Ann Arbor are interested in keeping their downtown from becoming subsumed in chain merchants and akin to vast stretches of soulless Oakland County, they are, in fact, obligated to do something about it. I won’t speak for you, but I certainly don’t want that.
“No one is preventing developers from building 4 story buildings downtown with ground-floor retail and underground parking.”
Well, yes, they often are, as the professed outrage of various neighborhood groups to ANY development that detracts from their personal image of Ann Arbor-as-Tecumseh has so often won out over wise use of the land. 4 stories are insufficient. 8 or 9 would be far better. Underground parking is a quandary in and of itself. While it may protect the skyline from unsightly parking structures, it is hideously expensive to build. I’m no ally of the developers, as many of them can afford to build sounder structures than they do if they’re willing to cut into their profit margins. But the latter sentiment has branded me a business heretic in more than one forum (which I wear proudly, thank you.) But this is, of course, the root of the problem: affordable housing. Clearing that hurdle would start the snowball rolling in the direction I think most of us on this particular forum want for many issues. But it’s a big hurdle and, again, we have to consider short-term and long-term approaches.
“They always have the option of living in Ann Arbor in a smaller unit for the same price, and giving up the second car and the long commute. They always have the option of living and working on bus routes for our excellent transit system. They always have the option of bicycling or walking to work at almost no cost.”
Again, you talk about these options as if they’re a given; as if anyone can take advantage of them with almost no effort. Think again. Property values are still too high for many downtown workers to live within bicycling and/or walking distance. As good as AATA is, it’s not nearly comprehensive enough for a growing municipality of this size. And, working for a property management company and knowing what I know about rental rates, your assertion about the tradeoffs involving second cars and smaller units in terms of affordability is flat-out wrong.
And your argument about paying the costs of the deeded streets and highest bidders and so forth is, quite honestly, an “I’ve got mine” argument of the highest order. Those costs have long since been paid and ceding parking rights to only those able to pay for them is an exclusionary tactic which is already in play by the lack of genuinely affordable housing in our city. We certainly don’t need to make it worse.
In the end, any plan should keep in mind what kind of community we want the city to be; not just how advantageous the situation can be made for those of us who can actually afford to live here.
—Marc R. May. 26 '05 - 10:02AM #
Fantastic post Marc!
—todd May. 26 '05 - 10:22AM #
Well I guess I misinterpreted what you said. I have to admit I smiled at the herding cats metaphor. Got a visual.
And no apology needed about snarkyness Bob. I think that we get where the other is coming from just fine. It’s not like I was being perfectly polite either….I had it coming.
I have stated before that I like many of your ideas on parking.
What I am asking you to do to reverse your thinking. Start with the position that we don’t have enough parking rather than the other way around. Now try and prove this point mathematically. It’s difficult, to say the least.
I get that your point is that we need more data, and on its face I agree with the proposition (and I have told you this before). My point is that you cannot/should not dismiss anecdotal evidence that tell you that a lack of parking has an effect on local businesses and residents.
Permit parking will reinforce an outsider’s perspective that Ann Arbor has no parking. It is designed to benefit locals to the detriment of commuters/shoppers. This tact has serious consequences, and the main thrust of my argument is that I’m not at all sure if residents fully understand that.
So I guess that I ask what data do you need? How about if I assume that the number of street parking spots has remained constant for the last 20 years. I will then look at the increase in commuters over the last 20 years, and then add in the increase of UMich students, staff, and ancillary services. Now how big of a disparity would you need to see in order to come to the conclusion that we need more parking?
Last point. Do you think that the average Wash. County resident thinks that parking in Ann Arbor is difficult or impossible?
—todd May. 26 '05 - 10:41AM #
First, I wouldn’t call that a diatribe. My diatribes are much worse than that. By law in Michigan, driving an automobile is a privilege.
As far as your friends, sorry, but you’re talking to the wrong person. My family of four earns the same as your friends, and we live quite comfortably in a house we own, within city limits, with only one car. We drive the car less than 7k miles per year. If we wanted to, we could ditch the car and rent for long trips. Driving is so subsidized, however, that it’s cheaper for us to keep the car.
I get to my doctor’s appointments on bike, we buy half our groceries by bike, we walk and bike to farmer’s market, we walk the kids to school, and I bike to work. My wife biked to work when she worked at the University. She’s taking several years off work to be with the kids. We had one car then as well. The car is only a necessity if you build your life around the choice to make it a necessity. That is still a choice, the car is still a privilege.
If you reread my post, I did say living on a transit line was a reasonable option. Essentially all of Ypsilanti is on AATA lines, Arrowwood and our other co-ops are on transit lines, and much of the nearby surrounding areas are on transit lines. Again, choosing to avoid these options is a choice.
JS – I’m sorry, but you’ve missed the point. We will not be able to convince developers to develop in Ann Arbor while they have the option of building in the suburbs far more cheaply. As long as people think they can buy in sprawl and commute into Ann Arbor on the cheap, developers will build in townships. There are three large properties off Nixon Road in Ann Arbor I know of that are waiting for someone to buy them and start building. They are on an AATA bus line, well within walking distance to schools, well within walking/biking/transit distance to the Traver Village Kroger, other stores, and Pfizer. I don’t see developers falling over themselves to build there, in large part because land in the townships is dirt cheap and SOV commuting into AA is so subsidized.
This may be difficult to understand, but if you want more housing in Ann Arbor, one good way to get there is allow peak hour congestion to happen and take away automobile subsidies. This is one of the profound lessons we have failed to grasp in SE Michigan. Free parking in residential neighborhoods is one of those subsidies.
—Ken Clark May. 26 '05 - 10:44AM #
I would direct both you and Steve, however, to the work of Anthony Downs at the Brookings Institution and John Pucher at the Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research for general data on parking demand, and parking subsidies. (I’ll save you a little time, Steve: 0-subsidy parking is only feasible if it happens at the state level. Otherwise, you’re just pushing businesses out of the DDA, into the Townships, across the County line, whatever. Downtown Ann Arbor has a strong pull, but not infinitely strong.
—Murph. May. 26 '05 - 10:45AM #
I’d also suggest that you might consider showing up at the next DDA Board meeting or two (first Wednesdays, noon, Kerrytown Concert House) if the topic of on-street parking interests you.
Beyond that, I will say “no comment”, because I don’t want to say anything that will cause people to change their behavior and throw off my data-collection mid-study.
—Murph. May. 26 '05 - 10:48AM #
Ken, personal question, I suppose. What year did you buy your house?
—todd May. 26 '05 - 10:58AM #
The factors under consideration are many: location, day of week, time of day, ownership of parking, place of residence (in several senses), time cost, financial cost, business climate, downtown vitality, trip purpose, social equity, and more. To echo Scott TenBrink’s comment, it’s to the credit of this forum (you all) that we’ve touched on all those factors. An effort on all our parts to avoid blanket statements and overstatements would help us move towards consensus rather diverging away from it. (And I do believe that consensus on this is possible. It just won’t be on a single point or even several, but on a larger slate of components.)
—Steve Bean May. 26 '05 - 11:07AM #
Surely you recognize the rediculousness of many of your points? There is a lack of parking on Main Street but ample parking a few blocks away? You must see that this is a pricing problem, right? We provide a commons resource, underprice it in one location and overprice it nearby, and you are suprised that one location is heavily used and the other is largely empty. Don’t they teach basic economics anymore?
People who choose to base their lives on one of our most expensive transportation modes have made a choice. I can’t help it that they may be insulted that people call that a choice. The fact remains that cars are tremendously expensive and people could afford much more expensive housing if they didn’t choose to spend much of their income on an auto-dependent lifestyle. Have you never heard of Location Efficient Mortgages?
I don’t know what planet you’re living on, but people seem to be constantly making the choice between living in one place with better schools but a smaller house, or living in another location with poorer schools and a larger house. You act as if there are no choices of places to live, places to work, or places to raise children. You sound as though you believe it is impossible for people to walk, bike, or take a bus anywhere. You don’t really believe these are impossible do you? There are at least 20% of Ann Arbor residents (not including any students or other people in group housing) who would beg to differ.
I guess that we only really agree on your last statement. We need to decide whether this community should be like every other car-dependent community in Michigan and be gutted in a few decades, or like the successful communities that have decided there are limits to automobile subsidies.
—Ken Clark May. 26 '05 - 11:11AM #
—Steve Bean May. 26 '05 - 11:32AM #
“Ken, personal question, I suppose. What year did you buy your house?”
1994, and affordable housing was considered a problem then. Interest rates were higher, and lenders were not as free with their loans as they are now. My sister in law recently bought a shared two-flat in Chicago for not quite twice what our house goes for and on lower income than we have.
Our neighbor just bought into our neighborhood, in a house more expensive than mine would supposedly be, with slightly lower income than we have. They have two kids and wanted to be in AA schools.
—Ken Clark May. 26 '05 - 11:34AM #
By law in Michigan, driving an automobile is a privilege.
Frankly I don’t care what the law says. To the majority of the population outside Ann Arbor, a car is a necessity, and given their living situations they’re probably right. The question is, how can we improve Ann Arbor in terms of working, parking, and housing, to make a car less necessary or not necessary at all?
You have 10 years of inflation on your side as far as housing goes. I can tell you from personal experience, trying to find a house in Ann Arbor while making less than $70K a year is a very hard thing to do, at least in the last couple of years. And the friends I was describing are a family of 3, thank you very much.
My lifestyle is much the same as yours, except substitute ‘bike’ for ‘bus’ or walking. However, I have a number of friends in Ypsi Township, Manchester, Lodi, and Ypsi that aren’t near the bus lines. So what do we do then, not associate with them because we can’t reach them without a car, or visit only when I can catch a bus home? that just doesn’t make any sense.
I chose my home because it is on a transit line. My point is simply this: not EVERYONE can afford to buy a home in Ann Arbor, or on a transit line, or take transit to their place of work. Saying that they are bad people for driving to work really misses the point.
BTW, have you looked at the Ypsi AATA map and its schedule? it doesn’t cover much of Ypsilanti, really, and there is still the very basic problem: I can take the bus from Ypsi to Ann Arbor and it will take an hour just to go from transit center to transit center, or I can drive my car and it takes 20 minutes. You can guess which one people do, time and time again. That’s a problem that needs to be fixed.
—KGS May. 26 '05 - 11:38AM #
—ann arbor is overrated May. 26 '05 - 11:39AM #
—ann arbor is overrated May. 26 '05 - 11:40AM #
Not everyone can afford a home, period. So what? You’ll find plenty of 3-person families on GSI salaries living in family housing on North Campus (or similar apartments elsewhere). I find your definitions of “can afford”, “need”, etc., make a lot of odd assumptions.
“Saying that they are bad people for driving to work really misses the point.”
They’re not bad people. They’re good people who are making sensible choices based on the bad economic incentives they’ve been handed. We’d like to modify those incentives so it’s easier for them to make better choices.
—Bruce Fields May. 26 '05 - 11:49AM #
What do you think that house is worth today? If you had to buy it again today, do you think that you would qualify for a loan with your stated household income of less than $70K per year?
—todd May. 26 '05 - 11:52AM #
Ah, well that’s different—not a cost of issuing a permit at all, but a cost of operating the system.
However, what about the revenue generated by towing? It would seem to me that it would make sense not to patrol routinely but rather to respond to resident complaints—a high percentage of which would result in towed cars, which generates revenue (and the city gets a healthy cut, doesn’t it?)
—mw May. 26 '05 - 11:56AM #
—ann arbor is overrated May. 26 '05 - 11:59AM #
—tom May. 26 '05 - 12:05PM #
People can’t bike or walk to the bus? Americans have somehow taken up the notion that walking more than five minutes or biking more than a mile are physically impossible things. Is there anywhere else in the world where human beings believe that? Are you saying that there are no housing opportunities within a two-mile bike ride of AATA’s bus system? People are so addicted to the convenience of automobiles that anything else seems inconceivable.
As to your friends in various far-flung locations, they chose to live there. They must have known they lived far away when they made those choices, right? Didn’t they stop to think that there were possibilities that their commuting costs and time would skyrocket in the future? What will your friends do when gas prices reach $3, $4, or $5 a gallon, expect someone to lower the prices for them? I think we have to assume that people are smart and think things through. If they chose to live far away, they were accepting the risks that their commute might become untenable at some point.
I think the rest of you are missing another point. You act as though use of an automobile is the only possible choice in life. Since this is one of our most expensive transportation options, you are implicitly dooming low-income people to a life of poverty with this approach. If they have to have a car to live, they will likely never be able to buy a house and build equity, the best way we know of in our society for most people to get ahead in life. Are you really saying that it’s better to keep subsidizing their car use, keeping them trapped in this expensive addiction, than to force them to realize the costs and switch to something they can afford? That sounds like a page straight out of the auto industry’s script.
—Ken Clark May. 26 '05 - 12:05PM #
—Dale May. 26 '05 - 12:08PM #
Hell, I’d love it if everybody biked to work or to transit no matter how difficult it was or how long it took. The reality is that taking on the ratio of debt to earnings to buy something reasonably walkable/bikeable to employment in Ann Arbor is immediately foolish (whereas consuming gas and buying into sprawl has more remote consequences).
In addition, the amount of time spent walking or biking or busing vs. driving, in many cases, is not worth it for anyone who, um, wants to spend time with their family or works a lot or…
A more reasonable strategy than asking “why doesn’t everyone just do what I can do?” is asking “given the entrenched attachment to automobiles and the difficulties of affording housing in Ann Arbor (I can’t believe you’re even arguing about that), how can we encourage and enable people to make better choices about (hundreds of things)?”
—Dale May. 26 '05 - 12:20PM #
“Clearly, you don’t find a car to be optional for you personally; you have one, even though you share it with your wife. Anyway, the people supporting these permits have primarily complained that their friends, contractors and high-school children with cars are having trouble finding spots on the street. Why can’t their friends park on the outskirts of town and take a bus?”
On the contrary, I wrote earlier “We drive the car less than 7k miles per year. If we wanted to, we could ditch the car and rent for long trips. Driving is so subsidized, however, that it’s cheaper for us to keep the car.” The car is heavily subsidized. If it weren’t we probably wouldn’t bother with it. The times we’ve been without it in the past weren’t particularly traumatic. If we got rid of it, which we have considered a number of times, we would have to rent a car for occasional trips to Ohio. Our trips to Chicago are already by train, and I work right next to Kroger, so buying the rest of our groceries in the bike trailer wouldn’t be particularly difficult. I often do that in the warmer months anyway, just to leave the car in the garage for another week.
I don’t see why their friends couldn’t park on the outskirts of town and take the bus. I suppose they and their friends would consider it inconvenient. Presumably your real question is why their friends, contractors, and children have a greater claim on the parking in their neighborhood than people who drive into Ann Arbor. I pointed out that the residents paid for the street in the first place, but Marc pooh-poohed that. I believe if we were to have lawyers look this up, we would find that non-arterial streets (and most arterials for that matter) belong to the City of Ann Arbor, not the State of Michigan, however, and ownership of the adjacent property carries some small weight.
My primary reason to feel that the residents and their associates have a greater claim is that the non-residents are generally doing far more damage to the environment and the community than are the residents. The residents are paying taxes to maintain those streets, including an extra road repair millage. Non-resident commutes are presumably imparting more external costs than the resident’s trips. However, I would have to say that a better alternative would be to remove the on-street parking altogether and narrow the streets. That would resolve the argument, though not necessarily to everyone’s liking, while reducing impervious surfaces, calming traffic, and making the community more pedestrian friendly at the same time.
—Ken Clark May. 26 '05 - 12:26PM #
“Surely you recognize the rediculousness of many of your points?”
No. I tend to avoid ridiculous statements unless I’m trying to make a joke. I haven’t made a joke yet on AU, to my knowledge.
” There is a lack of parking on Main Street but ample parking a few blocks away? ”
If you’ll slow down and read again, you’ll notice that I acknowledged the odd phenomonon of that structure in my experience, but also noted that my experience is anecdotal. The expanded implication that I perhaps should have expanded on has been made by several other posters here: You can’t expect that 20 years of increased population (residential and commuter) will be handled properly by 1985 levels of parking. And I wasn’t surprised by anything, so you can stop ascribing particular motivations and emotions to my statements anytime now.
“People who choose to base their lives on one of our most expensive transportation modes have made a choice.”
Poor assumption. That choice is often made for them. Have you ever filled out an application for a job that specifically asks if transportation is available? Welcome to their world. Have you ever lived in a situation where school hours interact too closely with work hours to make hour-long bus rides feasible? Welcome to their world. Have you ever worked three jobs and needed the flexible transportation necessary to remain in those jobs? Welcome… I can go on and on. It’s all well and good that you’ve made YOUR choice and, thankfully, had the economic means to do so. You have my respect for having done so. But you can’t reasonably suggest that others had or have your means, whether in 1994 or now. This is exactly the point I’m making about a combination of short-term solutions (to help them) and long-term solutions (to get closer to the vision that you have in mind.)
” I can’t help it that they may be insulted that people call that a choice.”
That’s fairly draconian. I could utter a racial slur and say that I can’t help it that some people are insulted by the fact that I call said slur a term of classification.
” The fact remains that cars are tremendously expensive and people could afford much more expensive housing if they didn’t choose to spend much of their income on an auto-dependent lifestyle.”
Chicken or the egg…?
“I don’t know what planet you’re living on,”
The Internet-enabled planet. Same as you.
” but people seem to be constantly making the choice between living in one place with better schools but a smaller house, or living in another location with poorer schools and a larger house.”
Heh. Those people are predominantly white and able to make that choice. I know quite a few who could do nothing but laugh in your face if you suggested that said option existed for them.
“I guess that we only really agree on your last statement.”
It’s always good to start somewhere.
” We need to decide whether this community should be like every other car-dependent community in Michigan and be gutted in a few decades, or like the successful communities that have decided there are limits to automobile subsidies.”
Which communities would those be? Examples?
—Marc R. May. 26 '05 - 12:37PM #
“Ken, another personal question that you don’t have to answer.
What do you think that house is worth today? If you had to buy it again today, do you think that you would qualify for a loan with your stated household income of less than $70K per year?”
I’m told this house would cost just over $200,000. I didn’t state that my income is less than $70k per year; I stated that it is about the same as the couple KGS was talking about, at around $70k per year. I have two answers to your question. First, I suspect I would look at the national housing bubble situation and wait a year or two, renting in Ann Arbor as we were before we bought the house.
If I didn’t think the housing market was headed for a cooling period, I would buy the house and I have no doubt I could find a lender to finance it. Yes, I would still buy the house and without any car payments (we only buy used cars), we could still afford it.
Can we get back on topic now?
—Ken Clark May. 26 '05 - 12:38PM #
Ken: while I think that you have an admirable vision of an end state, I’m with MarcR in thinking that your intermediate thinking is somewhat wishful. The choice of where to live is rarely so open as you describe it, and you sound like you’re in the luckiest segment of households; two adults, neither trying to balance work with school, multiple jobs across town from each other, or night shifts (which AATA does not serve). You want to live in a world where anybody can live a carfree lifestyle just by deciding to do so – it’s not that easy.
The transportation infrastructure is not set up to allow that choice to made easily, and there’s a limit as to how fast we can change things. Trying to do it in the manner of Henry VI (“First thing we do, let’s kill all the parking!”) will be an absolute windfall for those developers you sneer at in the Townships, as downtown will empty out. It has to be done at a higher level. The State? I don’t think Michigan is in a great position to be taking a hard line on automobiles right now. Much as I am a True Believer that sprawl is absolutely cancerous in the long-term toll it takes, chemo can only be so aggressive before it kills the patient, too.
—Murph May. 26 '05 - 01:13PM #
Getting back to the RPP topic, I feel as though ScottTB’s numbers are pretty damning for the current form of the program. If a program is going to recover so little of its costs (whether those be permit processing, patroling, whatever), there has to be a demonstrable public benefit from it. RPPs have a clear benefit to the residents of the district, but would seem to be only negative for everybody else: others are paying for the privilege of losing a parking option.
—Murph May. 26 '05 - 01:18PM #
In response to Ken re: Location Efficient Mortgages. LEM’s are AWESOME. Of course, according to a Sierra Club Web site on the topic:
“Location Efficient Mortgage services are available in the cities of Chicago and Seattle; Los Angeles County; and the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area.
”
So that doesn’t really apply to anyone in our neck of the woods. It’d be nice if someone could prod some lenders in to providing such a thing, but the prospective areas in which you could actually buy a residence that doesn’t require at least some access to an auto is pretty small for most people, IMO … and expensive.
And Ken said:
“I don’t see why their friends couldn’t park on the outskirts of town and take the bus. I suppose they and their friends would consider it inconvenient.”
If you’re commuting it’s inconvenient but totally possible. A lot (if not enough) people do it. If you’re coming in to town to visit, however, buses don’t run late enough and you can’t park your car legally for days at a time on the outskirts of the city. I looked into this in detail when I used to come visit friends in AA for a weekend, but the commuter lots were off-limits for overnight parking. Parking structures also forbid multi-day parking, so I would park on a neighborhood street for free.
I think most of us engaging in this conversation agree (as Bruce stated) that adjusting for the true costs of parking and an auto-centricness is a good idea. But I agree with Murph that your scorched earth approach would have serious negative impacts and would likely counteract your stated goals.
Things I think we agree on:
* Better and more mass transit
* Storage parking on the outskirts of town
* Better support for biking/walking
* Development that supports pedestrian and mass transit oriented lifestyles cough*density*cough
So far, so good?
—Scott T. May. 26 '05 - 02:01PM #
Well, I for one can certainly agree with all four of your points…..and, of course, I come to the exact same cough-laden conclusion that you arrived at….
Ken,
Yes, we can get back to the topic now. In retrospect I shouldn’t have asked.
—todd May. 26 '05 - 02:43PM #
Pretty neat articles about you and your bike riding exploits in AAnews and Detroit FP.
—todd May. 26 '05 - 02:46PM #
Hey, guess what? You already make about double the real median household income. I guess that allows you to be enlightened in your views, Ken, about the choices that the rest of us schlubs should make. I guess I wouldn’t mind it so much if your posts didn’t come across with the rank condescention of I-got-mine bullshit. If, say, someone works on my side of town, and has to take a bus from say, here to Packard and Eisenhower, where the office parks are, do you know how long that takes? About two hours, Ken. Not including the 10 minute walk to the bus stop from my door (about a quarter mile). Which is, you know, real appealing in the winter. But yeah, it’s a choice.
Now, let’s think about someone making service economy wages. Far beyond your ken, Ken, I know, but just imagine yourself amungst the English for a moment. Is their time better served spending four hours a day on the bus, or buying a car? You, Ken, in your infinite compassion, have come up with a simple answer: make it harder for them to have a car. Don’t bother dealing with the fact that working class people often have to work odd shifts, I’m sure that never comes up in your enlightened world.
Y’know, I’m too bothered by your bullshit to even put in a truly coherent rebuttal. But I hope that you realize that being able to bike to work is a fucking privelege, when constrained by real life, if you’re not a bourgeois fucker who doesn’t have Ken Clarks trying to make their lives harder.
In other posts, you’ll find me all for changing structural barriers to non-motorized traffic, but I generally try to do it without punishing the poor, Ken. Maybe you should take your optional car to a fucking golf course and tell your khaki buddies about how you’re just trying to do what’s good for all of us, you prick.
—js May. 26 '05 - 04:48PM #
would someone please throw down a swastika or something so that we can invoke godwin’s law?
—peter honeyman May. 26 '05 - 06:27PM #
Actually, I care a bit more what you think, since you will be going out in the real world and influencing policy somewhere. You, but mostly others, put an awful lot of words in my mouth, and I’m interested in what you think about what I actually proposed: allowing tradeable permit parking in residential areas and market-based parking in the downtown.
This really doesn’t strike me as scorched-earth, as other people have claimed. Why does that seem so inappropriate?
—Ken Clark May. 26 '05 - 06:47PM #
—Dale May. 26 '05 - 07:11PM #
About the statement that I made last night about “Parking is always an issue”. For the past 35 years I have been working in the downtown. I’ve have talked to hundreds of people that visited my business over the years. Many of them have driven their car downtown. I have heard over and over again about how hard it was to find parking, it’s like a broken record. In the past 3 1/2 year while doing the appointment thing, I have had many people call me on the cell phone and cancel the appointment because they couldn’t find parking. Also, its very seasonal, by that I mean when the students are here(fall and winter terms) parking is very tight, but during the spring and summer terms it’s much easier, except when the Art Fair is on. I’m sure it’s much different down on Main Street and over in Kerry Town.
Before the DDA took over the parking in the downtown the parking garages were falling apart. Over on South U, the Forest Street garage was so bad( in the late 70’s) the city didn’t have the money to fix it up so they were planning on selling it to get rid of the problem. The South Association got together with the city officials and helped them see where the problem was. The city wasn’t putting any money aside to repair the garages, as it all went into the general fund and very little came back for repairs. After the DDA took over the parking few years ago the repair fund was started and is doing great to keep them clean, painted and also replaced too. Forest Street in one example and the other is 4th and Washington. The 1st and Washington one was built in the late 40’s and is the oldest one around. It is falling apart and needs to be replaced.
It would be interesting to see how it would play out if indeed all the downtown businesses were required to supply the go pass as Murph stated. The Mayors Downtown Marketing Taskforce meeting is next week. I have been attending this taskforce for 3 years now. I will bring up this subject(about the go-pass) for discussion. The group is made up of the directors of the business associations, the chamber, AATA, the shelter association, the convention center, Citizen advisory commission, the DDA, two city council members and the mayor.
Bob Dascola
—Bob Dascola May. 26 '05 - 07:54PM #
I think Ken’s focus is understandable and forgiveable. I likewise challenge anyone who lives as comfortably as I do, or moreso, to reduce their resource consumption and subsidy exploitation. Anyone have a problem with that? If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it.
—Steve Bean May. 26 '05 - 07:56PM #
Flippant is “Marked by disrespectful levity or casualness; pert.” Could you please go back over post 61 and explain where or how this was flippant? I’m not being facetious. I’ve often found that people who assume automobiles are the only form of transportation read things differently. I would like to see if that’s where this is coming from.
You wrote: “As I said, people face a number of pressures (including some of the commenters) and have not been able to make the choices you have. Acknowledging these forces (and shaping policy to work within them) only strengthens the policy. But I think you know that.”
How many people in SE Michigan do you think have honestly tried to find a house/job close enough to take bus/bike/walk to their job/house? Or having found a good job/house, have honestly tried to then find the other close to the former? I have no qualms with anyone who has really tried and been willing to make some sacrifices to consider living closer to work or working closer to home but couldn’t do it. I think you are all copping out to say that transportation and American car-dependent lifestyle is now a fixture of the landscape and impossible to change. I don’t think most people in SE Michigan give a second thought to putting work close to home or vice-versa. Their only questions are “is it a good job”, “is it a nice place to live”, “am I getting the biggest place I can afford”, and “is the commute longer than I’m willing to accept”, with the implicit assumption that the commute will be by car. If you disagree with this, YOU explain sprawl in SE Michigan.
We need to reduce climate change emissions by at least 60%, but every change to engine/drivetrain technology in the past has resulted in greater VMT and eventually no decrease in fuel use. Michigan is in the top five states in the country for obesity and public health authorities say people need more exercise. Transportation costs for the average family (largely automobile costs) are the second highest expense. None of these have to be this way, but people have to remove their blinders to see any solutions. Slowly removing automobile subsidies, like free parking in neighborhoods for cross-commuters, doesn’t seem like a bad step.
—Ken Clark May. 27 '05 - 04:02AM #
But unofficial location efficient mortgages are available everywhere. Don’t own (or need) a car and you won’t have the car payment counted against your monthly obligations by the mortgage company. Can’t get the mortgage company to see it that way? Then take out an interest-only mortgage but include principal payments in your monthly checks anyway.
My wife and I took out a ‘virtual’ Location Efficient Mortgage in 1992. Since then, we’ve spent more on the house but far less on cars and commuting (she walks or takes the bus to work; I used to bike, now I have a home office).
—mw May. 27 '05 - 04:10AM #
Ken—who said this? We would not be discussing this on arborupdate if we did not think that we could change this.
I term some of your comments flippant because (as in the first two paragraphs of #61) you disregard the forces and attitudes that influenced people’s decisions to live far from work and transit, as well as the forces that make the current transit inadequate. I don’t view people’s choice to live distant from work, etc., as just a dumb choice, but as the outcome of a long process that serves people well in some ways, poorly in others.
Also—I VEHEMENTLY disagree with your assertion that building equity in one’s home is the best way to get ahead in life. I submit that education is far superior. I don’t know if this is beside the point or if this is related to our disagreements. The case for home equity supports our current system, wherein most people are benefitting from sprawl. Reducing the subsidies of sprawl will cause DEPRECIATION of a large portion (if not a majority) of homes in the US (except maybe those owned by landlords and Ann Arbourites and their equivalents).
NOW, despite that contradiction, I think most of us are on the same side of this issue. Now that we have staked out our positions, hopefully we can move towards consensus.
—Dale May. 27 '05 - 05:30AM #