Transit-oriented development plan prompts parking discussions

Parking has been at the center of discussions around the equitable transit-oriented development policy plan, a document City Council plans to vote on this week that will guide future housing and land use policies around Project Connect stations. 

Elected officials and community leaders who spoke last Thursday at a special joint meeting on eTODs at the Mobility Committee and Housing and Planning Committee put particular emphasis on changing parking requirements around transit stations. 

“There was a lot of really strong, passionate discourse about how we can’t have (transit-oriented developments) with just tons of parking everywhere,” said João Paulo Connolly, a member of the Project Connect Community Advisory Committee. 

Connolly said that eliminating parking minimums is “an absolute baseline must.” He urged Council to go a step further by adopting maximum parking requirements near stations.

“We know based on experiments in the city and everywhere in the country that a site with no parking minimums is still a site with way too much parking” for any kind of transit-oriented development, he said.

By making developers build as little parking as possible near transit stations, such policies would mean people are more likely to ditch their cars for trains or buses, Connolly and others argued.

In line with these views, the eTOD policy plan proposes three tiers of parking reductions near transit stations: eliminating minimum parking requirements, establishing parking maximums, and counting parking in calculations of floor area ratio, or FAR, a measure of density. 

Currently, developers must provide a minimum number of parking spaces per bedroom or square foot of retail or office space in most parts of the city. 

Council Member Chito Vela signaled that advocates may find support on Council for the parking polices outlined in the plan. 

“If there’s one place that we can be really aggressive, where I feel like there might be universal support on Council, would be going really strong on parking (policies) within the TODs,” Vela said. 

But not everyone was on board with the third-tier parking policy: counting parking towards FAR. According to city staffers, some stakeholders said the policy could prevent some projects from obtaining financing. In response, staffers recommend against adopting the policy.

Warner Cook, of the Housing and Planning Department, said a city car sharing program could help people who live or work in eTOD areas but still need a car for some trips. 

Among the general public, opinions on whether to eliminate minimum parking requirements are split roughly in half, according to the February Notley/Monitor poll.

Parking policies are just one set of proposed tools in the eTOD plan. Others include new or expanded density bonus programs, which allow developers to build more height and density in exchange for community benefits like affordable housing, preservation of existing affordable housing, and incentives for small businesses within transit-oriented developments, among dozens more. 

Council’s vote on Thursday would initiate a process to choose which policies to adopt, rather than immediately putting any into city code. It will be at least a year before any policies come back to Council for final adoption, according to Cook.

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