Is there room in the American psyche for a rational parking policy? A few years ago, suggesting that not providing unlimited free parking for as.... Is there room in the American psyche for a rational parking policy?

A few years ago, suggesting that not providing unlimited free parking for as many cars as physically possible in a development would have been seen as a heresy meriting the social equivalent of burning at the stake.

But nowadays, thanks to the analytical work of Donald Shoup and others, we see how parking is a major contributor to the drain that unquestioned support of private driving imposes on the public purse (not to mention the health of both individuals and communities) both directly and by encouraging the extremely expensive and highly-socialized habit of driving everywhere for everything.

But since in America all values are reduced to dollars, let's talk about costs...or rather, let's listen to my colleague Josef Bray-Ali, do so:

Until recently, I worked in real estate development, doing everything from property acquisition and permit filing to management and sales.

One of the biggest hurdles our small company always faced was paying for the construction of mandated, and usually unnecessary, automobile parking.

Car parking requirements forced us to shrink everything--the ground-floor commercial was squeezed into a 400-square-foot space; the building had to have an extra story just so we could stuff a bunch of cars underneath. The cost on paper shot up, meaning that our four one-bedroom apartments turned into four studio condominiums--and once you subdivide a property into condos, you have to go through a whole bunch of planning hoops, bumping up costs even more.

This easy $200,000 construction project turned into a super-risky $1.2 million, four-story fiasco.

Bray-Ali goes on to itemize the burdens that mandating excess parking lays onto both private businesses and communities, and points out that instead of a minimum parking requirement, there should be a maximum parking cap--and that parking space should be shifted to more efficient modes, such as bicycles.

Not as wacky as it seems, once you manage to dissociate driving from the delusion of social status associated with cars: studies show that cyclists cost far less to accommodate with roads and parking yet generally spend more per capita than customers who have arrived by car--and of course you can accommodate twelve cyclists in a space that typically parks one driver's car.

In other words, accommodating cyclists is good for business.

It's also almost impossible under present development rules that mandate building only for cars.

Continues Bray-Ali:

In 2009, I stumbled upon LAMC Sections 12.21-A.4(c) and 12.21-A.16. These sections allow for something quite unique--they authorize a building owner to swap out some of the required car parking spaces for covered bicycle parking.

You can fit 12 bikes in one car parking space--12 customers where only one fit before! (In city after city, when you build it, they do come.) So, swapping car for bike parking could drastically reduce the footprint of a project; small projects like the one we gave up on in (bike-friendly) Eagle Rock would blossom.

But, there are catches....

Read Bray-Ali's entire article in the Los Angeles Business Journal: Putting Parking in Its Place.