Mobility Trends: Car-free Developments?

Parking reform can bring density, affordability, and walkability to cities. Jamestown is evaluating shifting regulatory dynamics, consumer behaviors, and development precedents to better understand the opportunity for car-free and parking-reduced projects. This post will be updated as we refine our insights in the space.

Macro Trends changing Parking Demand:

• Ridesharing poised to reduce parking demand – One 2019 study concludes that 26.4% of riders “would have driven and needed a parking space if the ride-hailing services did not exist.”

• Demand for walkability reduces importance of car ownership – 63% of LPC residents cite walkability as a top factor in apartment search.

• Micromobility on rise – alternative such as electric scooters, electric bikes, cycling, and mopeds continue to grow in popularity; bike sales rose 63% in June, 2020. Micromobility is also being used for longer trips: average trip distances have grown 26 percent since the start of the pandemic, with rides in some cities, such as Detroit, increasing by up to 60 percent.

• Affordable housing demand – reducing parking minimums is a major lever for affordable housing development, which accelerates interest and adoption by municipalities.

• Precedents – Culdesac has gained hype in Tempe for its approved car-free development in an area known for sprawl; they have sights on doing 10,000-unit developments across the US next; Grubb in Charlotte was recently approved as well.

• TBD: Autonomous vehicle adoption stalls as electric vehicle demand accelerates – the timeline for widespread autonomous vehicle use remains unclear, as 48% of Americans believe AVs are “unsafe” as of 2020.

Tracking Policy Reform:

The dynamic Google Map tracks policy progress by city. Green = minimums removed in at least one neighborhood. Blue = progress made on removal. Orange = considering removal. Click into the Map to see details by city. We will do our own investigations into evolving policies in particular regions of interest.

Some notable policy reform highlights:

• Richmond City created two new zoning districts in 2017, both of which are aimed at creating Transit-Oriented Development character and have significantly lower parking minimums than the previous norm.

• Nashville eliminated all parking minimums on multimodal corridors in spring 2020.

• San Antonio eliminated parking minimums for infill developments.

• Santa Barbara made changes in 2020 to its housing policy to allow parking to be leased separately from housing, reducing parking requirements to max of one on-site space per unit and increased the maximum building height in the area from 45 to 48 feet.

• Berkeley has been in discussions to remove parking minimums, and the city staff report presented two possible scenarios for maximums: either set them at the current minimums or at 0.5 parking spaces per unit, which would be in line with the average rates of DMV registrations found by the study. The city has embraced alternative, tech-enabled solutions.

• Tacoma, WA has a "Reduced Parking area" that encompasses most of the downtown core area, and effectively requires zero parking. Also all of the mixed use centers (which makes up the majority of all the new development in town) has low/no required parking.

Ridesharing on track to reduce parking needs:

Some speculated that COVID would reduce demand for ridesharing; however, a look at Uber spend in Southeast cities shows demand rebounding to pre-COVID rates:

Micromobility also projected to rebound and continue growth post-COVID:

A look at growth trends for parking (e.g. Colonial Parking), rideshare (Lyft), and scooters/bikes (Lyft micromobility) shows how micromobility is rebounding at a faster clip than other forms of mobility.

Parking Technology:

The landscape of parking technology solutions to support more dynamic uses of space has expanded in recent years. Some examples include:

• AirGarage: AirGarage is a modern, tech-enabled parking operator, that uses data to anticipate optimal pricing, alternative space uses, and patterns of behavior. They manage long and short-term parking and partner with surrounding lots to allow for parking owners to increase density without adding space through “dark lots”.

• Reef Technologies: Reef operates a modern parking system while striving to find the highest/best use of space through conversion of underutilized parking areas into ghost kitchens, microfulfillment hubs, medical clinics and more. Owners engage in a revenue share.

• SpotHero: SpotHero allows users to find and reserve hourly, daily, or monthly parking spots through a mobile app. For real estate owners, you can unlock additional revenue by listing underutilized spaces on the app, or you can connect your residents with surrounding lots through SpotHero.

What about self-driving cars?

In 2015, many predicted we would have widespread adoption of self-driving cars on the road by 2020. In 2020, the outlook looks much different. The jury is out on exactly when self-driving cars will become mainstream, and what the impact will be, with conflicting views such as:

• Currently, only 9% of the US population claims they would be an early-adopter of self-driving cars, and >50% say they would never adopt

• Some experts anticipate self-driving cars would have no material impact to overall car ownership, as people still may have a preference to own their car vs. accessing a shared driverless vehicle

• Parking impact remains unclear: dark lots could be used to house driverless cars away from immediate proximity to one’s home or place of work, reducing parking constraints even if ownership rates are high

Who is making the most progress? Google’s sister company Waymo is the clear leader. Waymo just announced 20 million miles driven overall, most of those not in California. In 2018, Waymo drove 1.2 million miles in California, with 0.09 disengagements every 1,000 miles. Coming in second is General Motors’ Cruise, with about half a million miles and 0.19 disengagements per 1,000 miles. (Cruise argues that since it tests its cars on San Francisco’s difficult streets, these numbers are even more impressive than they look.)