Although my real point wasn’t confined to Houston but is even more apt in older cities or new cities trying to emulate old cities. Once land becomes too expensive to be wasted car parks or single level dwellings then you start looking at tens of thousands of dollars in contruction costs to build something that most of your customers don’t want or need. Need possibly being more important than want when price differential enter into the purchasing equation.

Transportation engineers set things like parking stalls per use, and other things here.”

ITE go out and measure parking usage at various locations, which reflect the land use type. So they may, for example, measure the parking levels at an office site, at a certain time of day, for their office parking dataset. Then they draw a graph, where hopefully there is a linear relationship between parking levels and floor area/number employees, etc.

Local authorities, who have to decide on the number of parking spaces often then set their standards equal to the observed levels of parking in the ITE manual. Transport planners also sometimes use the numbers uncritically.

This is expensive, and fewer car parking spaces could be specified. The problem really starts when the local authority adds in extra parking just in case. Extra parking induces traffic, which induces extra parking, and when ITE observe this, it ratchets up the parking one more level.

Huge? Land around houston’s pretty cheap. And even with the rise in the cost of asphalt parking’s pretty cheap to build and maintain.

Transportation engineers set things like parking stalls per use, and other things here.

DS

How did the planners or regulators arrive at this figure of 1.25? Survey apartment dwellers or simply divide the number cars in Houston by the number of bedrooms. The latter method would result in family car ownership being applied to singles and couples. Or was the number suggested by suburban proprty developers?

The cost of that parking will be much higher than in a subdivision if inner urban land is more expensive or a basement carpark has to be constructed. That parking requirement is a big disincentive to inner urban renewal. Providing a surfeit of parking also means that those apartment owners who chose not to own a car or multiple cars cannot profit by leasing their spare parking space to a neighbour with two cars.

To the Antiplanner: According to the Wikipedia article, light rail in the US costs between $15 and $100 million per track mile, with the average excluding the extreme outlier Seattle being $35 million per track mile. That means $60 million wouldn’t “barely get you one mile,” but rather would almost get you two miles. The article also says that some have been built for less than $20 million per track mile, which would make it cheaper than some highway projects cost per lane mile.

No doubt rail is highly subsidized. (Then again, it’s also sabotaged from the start by zoning laws which reduced density. This is good for a car [high density is incompatible with roads], but bad for mass transit. Same could be said for the entire mortgage industry, which has traditionally been subsidized by the government and which has traditionally promoted low-density development.) But those figures are easy to quantify and the Antiplanner (and many others) have told us about them many times. I wasn’t suggesting that this was false, merely that there are many costs inherent in roads that are not calculated, and indeed are not calculable. Another big one is the value of the land itself, which is a bigger concern for roads than for rail considering roads take up much more space than does rail.

Also, to the Antiplanner: do any of those per track mile/per lane mile include the price of the land beneath it? It would seem to me that if you were building a road/track through populated land (as one is wont to do with transportation), the value of the land would be higher than the labor and materials required to construct it. Eminent domain and the threat of eminent domain would seem to make putting a fair market value on the land an impossible task.