If you feel strong, the wind may be at your back.

If you feel weak, it may be in your face.

Notice the wind,

and don’t be too confident or too timid.

A few months ago I learned about the book The High Cost of Free Parking, by UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup. The book was published by the American Planning Association in 2005. Shoup’s ideas seem to be slowly percolating into the national and global consciousness, as evidenced by recent coverage of them on NPR, in Time magazine, and elsewhere.

I recently checked the book out from a local college library and my wife and I read it - or I should say my remarkable wife read it while I read parts of it. It’s an extremely well-researched book, quite scholarly and somewhat repetitive, but readable nonetheless. This is an important book that will likely have a lasting impact on our planet.

My wife and I made the following list of main ideas from the book in order to make them more accessible:

• Minimum off-street parking requirements have fostered sprawl and skewed transportation choices toward automobiles and have made urban areas less pedestrian-friendly.

• The cost of parking has been hidden in the prices for other goods and services.

• Free parking (or below-market-price parking) increases traffic because people drive more and spend more time cruising looking for parking spots.

• Don’t have off-street parking requirements. Let the market decide how much parking to provide.

• In congested areas where parking is tight, charge for parking and let market forces work. This frees up parking spots for the people who value them most, reduces cruising traffic, and generates revenue for a neighborhood or city. “You can’t manage parking if you can’t charge for it,” Shoup says in the Time article. Shoup recommends a price that will leave about 15 percent of parking spaces open and 85 percent of them occupied.

• Create Parking Benefit Districts with market-priced curbside parking. Revenue will go to improvements in that district or neighborhood, which will help to overcome political opposition to charging for parking.

• The barriers to implementing these changes are political rather than technological.

The first chapter of the book is available online.

I just learned of this September 4 New York Times article about New York City, “To Ease a City’s Traffic, Shifting from 4 Wheels to 2.” I’m impressed that the Big Apple is going so far as to make make provisions for bicycle parking, including zoning changes requiring indoor bike parking in large commercial buildings.

Below are some excerpts. The full article includes comments by some drivers and residents who aren’t so enamored of the changes:

Read the rest of this entry »

It was a strange summer for news here in Northfield, Minnesota, most of which brought unwelcome notoriety to this quiet college town. Here’s a quick overview:

• Early this summer, the Northfield police chief held a press conference announcing that there was a significant heroin problem among Northfield youth. He claimed that 150 to 250 youth were heroin users and that many of them were addicts who were contributing to a rapidly rising crime rate. These numbers were later questioned, as were the chief’s publicity methods. The chief later took a leave of absence for medical reasons and before doing so made it known that the city administrator was being investigated on some financial matters.
• Our mayor was the subject of regional press coverage regarding alleged improprieties involving city decision-making on a property owned by his family.
• Last week, the city thought it had approved a road project on a 4-3 vote, only to learn that approval required a 6-vote supermajority. Now they need to revisit their vote.

That last item doesn’t sound all that sensational, but it’s an issue that I’ve been involved in through my role as chair of our Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation. It was strange to learn that no one had considered the need for the supermajority.

Those bullet points don’t capture all the alarm and drama that has surrounded these events. For that check out our local news sites: the Northfield News, Northfield.org, and Locally Grown Northfield.