Repurposing the paving: The case of surplus residential parking in Davis, CA
Introduction
The small city of Davis, California (pop. 66,000) has a well-earned reputation as the bicycle capital of the United States (Buehler & Handy, 2008). Part of its success stems from extensive implementation of bicycle infrastructure: the city has over 50 miles of bicycle lanes and 50 miles of bicycle paths in its 10 mile2. But the city sees room for further improvement, with expansive policy goals and plans to further promote sustainable transportation, including the state-mandated Complete Streets element of its General Plan transportation element (City of Davis, 2010, Cox, 2010). We find in this paper that Davis' residential parking situation is particularly ripe for reform.
Despite its important influences on land use patterns and mode use, parking has flown under the radar in Davis and other cities throughout the US. Residential parking in small towns in particular has been overlooked by both local planners and parking scholars (Guo & Schloeter, 2013), who have traditionally focused on residential and commercial parking in higher-density urban areas (Cervero, Adkins, & Sullivan, 2010; D. C. Shoup, 2016). The parking requirements that engender the oversupply of residential parking are notoriously based on thin to non-existent evidence (Shoup, 1997, Shoup, 1999), suggesting that evidence-based analysis could encourage a hard reset of municipal parking policies.
In this descriptive case study, we systematically count the number of cars parked on residential streets in Davis at peak parking hours, offering refinements to existing methodologies as well as contributing to the underdeveloped literature on residential on-street parking utilization. After reviewing the parking literature, we provide background on the city, its policies and the state policies for complete streets. We then present the results of our on-street parking survey, demonstrating substantial underutilization of this resource even at peak parking demand by residents. We conclude with a discussion of how underutilized residential streets could be repurposed to simultaneously achieve transportation policy goals and address several related urban challenges that Davis and other cities in California and the US are currently facing.
Section snippets
Literature review
A sizeable portion of the literature on parking policy and practices has been authored by Donald Shoup, whose work has led to a focus on parking for residential and commercial uses in urban settings in the US (Marshall et al., 2008, Shoup, 2016, Smith, 2013, Weinberger and Karlin-Resnick, 2015) and internationally (Fan and Lam, 1997, Lau et al., 2005). Parking scholars have argued that minimum parking requirements exacerbate some of the most important contemporary civic challenges, including
Methodology
To study the utilization of on-street parking on residential streets, we selected a two-mile transect of low-volume local streets in Davis. This transect was chosen to include a gradient of construction dates, beginning with the oldest neighborhood built in the early 1900s near downtown Davis and the most recent built in the 1980s at Davis' northern-most city boundary. The transect begins in the Old North Davis neighborhood at 7th St, continues through the numbered streets to 12th St, then
Results
We find a wide variety in on-street parking utilization in our sample streets (Table 1). Within the Old North Davis neighborhood, which encompasses 7th through 12th streets, occupancy rates ranged from a low of one in seven to a high of just over half. Streets in the Covell Park neighborhood, which includes Baja Avenue through Lindo Place, were similarly varied, though with a lower maximum occupancy rate. In contrast, the four streets in the Northstar neighborhood (Tern Place through Merganser
Discussion
Several parking-related movements have emerged within the last decade. Probably the best known is the PARK(ing) Day movement, which protests the extensive public space used for car storage by converting a parking space into a park for the day. The event has its roots in San Francisco, but as of 2011 had expanded to 850 parks in 183 cities (Coombs, 2012) and helped usher in formal city adoption of the concept in the form of San Francisco's parklet program (Davidson, 2013). Other movements have
Conclusion
We find that the city of Davis has provided a vast oversupply of on-street parking in its residential neighborhoods. On average, and using a conservative estimate of available on-street parking, only two in seven on-street parking spots were occupied during peak parking hours, across 18 Davis streets and over 8 days of data collection. Newer, less accessible developments and larger households surprisingly were associated with lower rates of on-street parking, while the presence of apartment
Acknowledgements
Calvin would like to thank his newborn son, Koen, for providing the late-night inspiration to conduct this study as well as the impetus to conduct parking counts while simultaneously getting some exercise early in the morning and late in the evening. Jamey would like to thank his wife, Lauren, for her unwavering encouragement.
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