Future of Transportation: Cities with Choices—and Less Parking

The one-size-fits-all, car-centric city is becoming a thing of the past, as evidenced by changes in Houston, Oklahoma City, and Charlotte, North Carolina, said panelists at the ULI Spring Meeting in Houston. More and more, transportation leaders treat transportation infrastructure as a real estate asset.

Cities still have cars, of course, but not every transportation decision is based on moving them as fast as possible. Innovations are popping up in surprising ways. City after city is figuring out how to make even small transportation improvements pay off big for economic development.

Yet, despite all the exciting changes, parking for those cars remains “the most difficult part to get right,” Danny Pleasant, director of the Charlotte Department of Transportation, said at the ULI Spring Meeting in Houston. Two linked sessions at the meeting tracked the speed of transportation changes in U.S. cities, including the thorny issue of parking.

Innovations discussed included the following:

• Imagine leaving your apartment in the morning and heading for your building’s transit lounge, where you sip coffee while keeping an eye on the big digital countdown display that tracks your train’s arrival, just steps outside. Buildings near Charlotte’s light-rail stations already provide this amenity, Pleasant said.
• Imagine shoppers for apartments and office space inquiring whether your development is certified as being served by high-frequency bus service. Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County is designing a pilot program to provide such endorsement, according to Kurt Luhrsen, Metro’s vice president of service planning and transit system reimagining.
• Imagine a popular radio program during which a young couple talks about the ins and outs of living car-free and “car-lite” in your city. In Oklahoma City, such a program, Carless in OKC, airs on the local NPR station, said Ian Carlton, executive director of the Institute for Quality Communities at the University of Oklahoma.

For Charlotte, being a city of choices means light rail and streetcar lines, 176 miles (283 km) of bikeways, and $5 million in funding from a November 2014 bond referendum to start a 26-mile (42 km) cross-city pedestrian and bicycle trail. Even street design has payoffs. Pleasant sees Charlotte’s streets as community living rooms serving the city’s growing market for walkable urbanism. Streets need to be part of the land development package, he said.

The city redesigned Charlotte’s four-lane East Boulevard as a two-lane street with bike lanes and improved streetscape. Almost immediately, real estate activity began flowering in this historic area: infill development took off and retail sales rose. For places seeing growing momentum for walkable urbanism, such street investments “will be like a magic wand that speeds up the transformation,” Pleasant said.

For Houston, transportation choices include a commuter bus network that carries 35,000 workers a day, as well as second and third light-rail lines about to open downtown.

Houston is also about to transform its bus network, which still funnels riders along the 1920s streetcar network into downtown, bypassing other destinations. By consolidating service, Metro can afford to increase high-frequency service from 14 routes to 22 operating every day.

According to Luhrsen, developers who specialize in infill development see the potential to use access to the high-frequency routes as a selling point. This led to the idea for the certification program. The city is also looking at adapting its light-rail development zones, which allow increased density, to apply to land development along the high-frequency bus network.

Bicycling is also catching on in Houston, thanks to the extensive—and extraordinarily popular—bayou trail network. At one of the transit stations in the “energy corridor” west of downtown, cycling had risen 400 to 500 percent, Luhrsen reported.

For cities in Oklahoma, transportation choices build first on walking and bicycling. “Look for places with the good bones” to meet the growing market for walkable communities, Carlton advised. This means a mix of uses and interconnected streets, such as those on a grid. Good sidewalks and bike lanes are the next steps, he said.

Even in Oklahoma, developers want to avoid being required to provide unneeded parking, Carlton continued. With bicycling increasing and Uber thriving in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, recognition is spreading that the demand for parking is dropping. Pleasant and Luhrsen agreed that parking regulations and design, especially in suburban areas, have a long way to go before they become state of the art.

Kurt Buecheler, senior vice president at parking technology firm Streetline Inc., and Paul Wessel, executive director of the Green Parking Council (GPC), discussed the Silicon Valley–style disruptions underway in parking and previewed what the “state of the art” may look like when it finally arrives.

The biggest change is the spread of sensors that can detect if a parking spot is empty and share that knowledge instantly with both parking managers and users. Cities and parking managers will combine the sensors with computer algorithms that assign variable prices to all public and private parking, Buecheler said, allowing parking spaces to be managed like airline seats. The optimized use of spaces will lead to drastically less need for an overabundance of free parking.

The parking industry needs to transform itself, said Wessel. The Green Parking Council wants the parking industry to see itself as “access managers” and create high-quality places where transportation choices—including cars, bicycles, and buses—connect to land development. The GPC’s Green Garage Certification standard lists 48 elements that make parking garages more sustainable.

Both sessions closed by touching on the biggest potential disruptor of all—autonomous vehicles. Whether self-driving vehicles will lead to more driving or less driving—or more or less sprawl—is not yet clear, but all the session speakers agreed that self-driving cars will reduce the need for parking. Wessel pointed to car sharing and its impact on parking: “Uber feels like an autonomous vehicle, except there is a driver.”

Randy Rowe, chairman of Green Courte Partners LLC and the Parking Spot, warned that parking facilities trapped in mixed-use projects, located underground, or wrapped by buildings, may struggle as the demand for parking drops. Freestanding parking facilities that can be redeveloped on their own will fare much better.

In response to an audience question—how to stop unnecessarily paving land or building expensive garages that will be half empty—Rowe delivered a message that applies to the other transportation innovations as well: ULI needs to focus on engaging public officials in more conversations about why codes need to change.