Advice for Cities & Towns on Green Transport

I sometimes get asked for the quick hits that a local government can undertake that is within their jurisdiction. Here is what I send them:

1. Parking maximums for buildings (all kinds) rather than parking minimums. If the developer is ready to build without parking, their ear is closest to the market, let them do so. This will reduce the cost of housing by as much as 25%, increasing affordable housing within the city. Every parking space built is a magnet for a car, which will then be driving on city streets, increasing our congestion problems. Yes, I know all about residents desire to protect the existing free on-street parking for themselves. See number 2 below.

2. Make residential parking permit rates much higher, and consider monthly fees rather than annual ones. This will make more parking available for those residents that need to park, by getting off the road cars that are rarely used (this is why we need this to happen monthly, so there is incentive to get rid of your car quickly when you no longer use it often.) In northern climates, it is easy to see the enormous number of vehicles that are little used by walking down a street one week after a snowfall and seeing the number of cars that haven't moved in a week.

3. Charge residents for curb cuts just like on-street parking. Their individual curb cut is removing a space available for others on the street. Curb cuts shouldn't be free for residents or businesses.

4. Give a rebate to residents who don't own cars -- they cost the city less money! less demand for ploughing, road maintenance, police and traffic enforcement, reduced emissions, etc.

5. Do bicycle traffic education for every middle school student (and in driver's ed).

6. Offer $200 rebate to kids on their 16th birthday, good only toward a bike purchase (and registration with the local police).

7. Improve bike and pedestrian connections everywhere. Start with routes to school, around the public library, and convenience/food stores.

8. Paint bicycle lanes on as many oversized roads as you can simply by giving the minimum width to cars (usually 10 ft) and allocate remaining space to bikes. Stop your lines short of the intersections and just do the straight-aways. This lets you get 80% of the job done quickly and cheaply, without fiddling with the complex part.

9. Require that businesses that offer parking to employees to "register their commutes" so that there is a database for potential commute ridematching. You can't require agreeing to share a ride, but you can require registration.

10. Consider building municipal parking lots, and make parking in those lots cheaper for residents than on-street parking permits. [This makes parking less convenient, and people will be more likely to leave their house to bike, walk, or T for short errands rather than hop in their car.]

11. Remove on-street parking for every space created in municipal lots. Do better things with those spaces -- bus priority lanes, bike lanes, wider sidewalks.

12. Consider making play streets in some neighborhoods, by closing them to through traffic with wooden barriers (that are signed with relevant times) during afterschool hours. In New York City I saw this in practice with neighbors opening and closing the street.

13. Consider closing scenic roadways on Sundays when there is reduced traffic (and alternate routes) and making them accessible only to people and non-motorized vehicles.

Thirteen is purportedly an unlucky number. Please add your low cost ideas to the comments.

Robin

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Car Sharing Advice for Cities

(this post was originally written in 2006 for ecoplan.org)
How can and should a government support the development of Car Sharing Organizations (CSOs)? As I write this, I note that many things revolve around the major cost items of running the business.



1. Car insurance. Insurance is very difficult to obtain in this nascent industry since the insurers have no experience with the risk basis, and it is a major cost to the CSO. It took years of accumulating data to finally get our insurance rates down in line with reality. If the government (city? state?) could establish some kind of pool for just the catastrophic incidents, this is an important way in which insurance risk can be tiered, making insurance affordable.

2. Parking. Parking ranks right up there as one of the largest variable costs. CSOs compete with individual's costs of maintaining and parking their own vehicles. If private parking is available on-street (cheaply), this makes the CSO service relatively more expensive than owning your own car and parking it on-street for free or close to free. Likewise, the convenience of on-street parking can make car-sharing (or private ownership) that much more (less) appealing than the alternative parked deep in large garages. This can swing both ways in supporting or creating an additional hurdle depending on where (and price) of the residential housing stock.

My best advice here is: Offer up some parking spaces (municipal lots or on-street) for one year agreements to whichever car-sharing company wishes to bid on them. In the early years, you will likely have only one company bidding, and their bid will be close to zero $/month. As the business gets more established, and as competition enters the market, the value for specific parking spaces to specific companies will rise: the city will enjoy the additional revenue, and more than one company can compete in specific locations (especially if you can offer up more than one space in a location). This seems like the most fair way to both nurture a budding industry, as well as accommodate success and competition.

3. Marketing. This is very very dear to both starting and existing companies. The city has lots of resources to get the word out to residents at very low cost. Providing this ability, whether the area has one or many competing companies is critical, and keeps the costs of providing the service down. For example, on bus, subway adverts, or information mailed out to residents that renew vehicle registrations, etc. Again, please make sure to offer this service if there is only one company, and quickly accommodate the addition of other competitors as they arise.

4. Taxing, Zoning, Plating, Parking Permits. Zipcar operates in many cities, counties, and states across the US and now Canada (Toronto). Obstacles have included: residentially zoned neighborhoods where the inclusion of a car-share parking space could be construed as "business" and thus not allowable; a business tax applied on each and every parking location as if it were a separate "business establishment"; per transaction taxes meant for car rental that make the economics of hourly rental impossible (i.e. $10/rental tax ... if you rent for just a few hours that makes it economically unreasonable); are these vehicles plated commercial or residential? In Boston, commercial plates pay a higher rate at the toll booths, and get to park in loading zones. We would like to pay residential rates at the tolls and not be allowed to parking in loading zones... In any event, you can imagine how these can cause issues, some of which are easier to resolve than others.

5. Geographic carve-outs. If my memory from 3 years ago serves me, London offered up its support for carsharing on a borough by borough basis (?). I think this is problematic because, like most businesses, carsharing does best when it can scale. Also, users very much stand to gain from competition (improved quality of service) and a large network (i.e. a member can pick up a car from both work or home, without having to join two companies). Again, this is an easy issue to correct going forward."

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