City of Culver City cancels parking requirements
Posted on 01-02-2023 09:40 PM
City of Culver City cancels parking requirements
Culver City removes parking requirements
Alex Fisch, a Culver City Councilmember, wrote that he couldn't think of a single good reason to charge parking to everyone in society. Mandatory parking causes people to drive, prevents affordable housing from being built, and raises prices for everything.
Typically, cities require a minimum number of parking spaces for specific types of activities, such as a Culver City restaurant must have one parking space per 100 square feet, a residential building needs 25 spaces per apartment, etc.
Parking expert Don Shoup calls these requirements pseudoscientific. There was a long time ago a study done on the kind of parking some predominantly suburban restaurants had. Years ago, cities required excessive parking in all restaurants to meet that baseline. It is pointed out by Fisch that parking requirements across the nation are derived from . . . nothing. It is made up and passed on from city council to city council without any critical examination or reflection.
Is parking required for a downtown restaurant the same as for one in a suburban strip mall? Are 20-unit residential buildings across the street from light rail stations required to have the same amount of parking as suburban 20-unit buildings? Not necessarily. A parking plan should be based on the individual needs of each project, not one size fits all. Now Culver City does that.
The new policy does not mean Culver City's new housing and restaurants will not have parking. As for parking, developers will still have to include it in new developments; the city will just not require them to meet legal requirements. In its own words, the amendment eliminates minimum parking requirements while ensuring parking is still available.
Several years were needed to complete this reform, Fisch said.
The City Council first requested that an evidence-based parking reform be considered after reviving past council work that actually resulted in fees for parking. The policy ship slowly changed direction as many local climate, housing, and safe streets advocates organized and educated the public. Only a few people objected when the elimination of mandates was brought to city council, so perhaps they had just never heard of the issue academically or in the media.
3-2 was the final vote last night, with Mayor Daniel Lee, Councilmembers Yasmine-Imani McMorrin and Fisch voting in favor and Vice Mayor Albert Vera and Councilmember Goran Eriksson voting against.
It has been successfully abolished in hundreds of U.S. cities. It was announced in 2017 that Buffalo, New York, would be eliminating its parking mandate. This was also the case in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2021, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, also followed suit. As part of the club's expansion, Cambridge, Massachusetts, joined Culver City last night.
Sacramento, Berkeley, Emeryville, and Alameda all abolished their parking mandates. Businesses in transit-rich areas in San Diego were no longer required to Culver City park in business parking lots. The City of San Jose enacted a similar law, eliminating many of the parking requirements throughout the city. California recently passed A.B. 2097, which prohibits cities from requiring parking near quality transit as of January 1, 2023, under the leadership of Assembly member Laura Friedman.
It appears that Culver City is the first citywide to remove parking mandates in L.A. County. Downtowns in Lancaster, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica no longer require parking.
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