Parking benefits

American Apparel is providing valet parking for workers, who complained of being late for shifts looking for parking, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. Does American Apparel also offer transit benefits? Or bike parking and showers?

The Art of the Parking Space

Another example of making art from the act of parking comes from Philadelphia and the Space Savers Project, which looks at the methods people use to save street parking in front of their houses.

Sixteen Books by Ruscha

At UC Irvine Libraries a special exhibit on Ed Ruscha books such as Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles. I wish I could go.

History of Parking

From the December Los Angeles magazine, an article with geek level of detail on the history of parking, “Between the Lines” by Dave Gardetta.  While partly a recap on Dr Shoup from UCLA, who made parking cool to study after years in the wilderness (though how many other academics are wandering in the wilderness with the potential to become popular) the article also provides an interesting history of downtown Los Angeles surface parking that would be interesting to compare to other employment centers in southern California or other centers developed elsewhere in the U.S. around the same time. 

This reminds me of a trip to downtown Los Angeles years ago before mobile phones were common.  I was searching the streets wondering why I could find no pay phones or post boxes.  It turns out that both are commonly located at the parking entrance to downtown office buildings, which makes sense since most people visit the buildings by car.

Also of note is the steep topography of downtown Los Angeles that can lead to building entrances on two, three, or four different floors from the street.  Even San Francisco known for being hilly built downtown on relatively flat land.  This too adds to the emphasis on approaching tall buildings from the underground garage.

Washington, DC to charge intercity busses to park on the street

More on intercity buses, which I mentioned last in October.   WAMU reports that D.C.-To-NYC Buses May Get More Expensive With New Regulations.  The District Department of Transportation (d.) will begin charging for curb space.  Still not waiting areas, restrooms, or other conveniences of stations, but perhaps enough to encourage bus operators to move to a station.

How Much Parking?

Three researchers at University of California, Berkeley, estimated the number of parking spaces in the United States as part of a study on the emission and energy impact of automobiles.  The study titled “Parking infrastructure: energy, emissions, and automobile life-cycle environmental accounting” by Mikhail Chester, Arpad Horvath and Samer Madanat in the journal Environmental Research Letters (Volume 5, Issue 3, July 2010) applied a range of five approaches.  The paper was reported in popular Environmental Research Web, which also is published by the Institute of Physics (a London-based international organization), and later Physics Central, which is published by American Physical Society.

The approach seems well suited for the purpose of the paper.  There must, however, be better methods if the aim is to consider how much space is conserved for vehicles.  Remote sensing technologies seem ripe for paved surfaces while sampling may prove both effective and engaging to people who have an interest in the topic.

The Politics of Parking

Jason Henderson from SFSU published an article “The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco” in Antipode (2009) that illustrates normative perspectives about transportation from progressives (equity and environment focused), neoliberals (market-based solutions) and neoconservitives (personal freedom and national identity).  For each of the groups, their politics reinforce continuation (and possible expansion) of the form that they prefer from the dense urban neighborhoods with strong public space to gentrified urban neighborhoods to more suburban neighborhoods and commercial spaces emphasizing private controlled space.  

Some qualities impacting urban form from private motor vehicles also is also true of large vehicle, major public transit systems including increased speeds and distances, larger than human scale and reduction of street fabric.

What happens to the progressive position if motor vehicles were cheap, ubiquitous and pollution free?  Would the social justice and environmental crowd become neoliberals?  

What if suburban job growth were widely accessible by large scale, high speed transit?  There would be less need for neoliberals to have daily access to motor vehicles but a continued impact to the daily life of urban neighborhoods that serve as bedroom communities to suburban job centers.