Los Angeles

Do Cities Have Too Much Parking?

ACCESS Magazine 49

Minimum parking requirements create more parking than is needed. This in turn encourages more driving at a time when cities seek to reduce congestion and increase transit use, biking, and walking. After nearly a century of development under these requirements, parking now dominates our cities.

To counter the problem of excessive minimum parking requirements, academics and practitioners have advocated a new suite of parking policies, including reduced parking requirements and demand-based prices for on-street parking. These policies aim to better manage parking and reduce driving, but too much parking works against these goals by spreading the destinations and making the cost of driving artificially low. To more effectively address the issues caused by minimum parking requirements, planners and policymakers should focus not only on future development, but also on the existing parking oversupply.

Relatively little information exists, however, on the amount and location of parking in cities, limiting our understanding of how that parking contributes to land and automobile use patterns. To address this knowledge gap, we developed a case study to estimate where parking infrastructure exists in Los Angeles and how it has evolved over time.

(Note: this article focuses expands on the implications of our Journal of the American Planning Association publication Parking Infrastructure: A Constraint on or Opportunity for Urban Redevelopment? A Study of Los Angeles County Parking Supply and Growth)

First-Last Mile Environmental Life-cycle Assessment of Multimodal Transit in Los Angeles

Final Report

With potential for automobiles to cause increased air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions relative to other modes, there is concern that automobiles accessing or egressing public transportation may significantly increase human and environmental impacts from door-to-door transit trips. Yet little rigorous work has been developed that quantitatively assesses the effects of transit access or egress by automobiles. This research evaluates the life-cycle impacts of first and last mile trips on multimodal transit. A case study of transit and automobile travel in the greater Los Angeles region is developed. First and last mile automobile trips with transit were found to increase multimodal trip emissions, mitigating potential impact reductions from transit usage. In some cases, a multimodal transit trip with automobile access or egress may have higher emissions than a competing automobile trip. In the near-term, automobile access or egress in some Los Angeles transit systems may account for up to 66% of multimodal greenhouse gas trip emissions, and as much as 75% of multimodal air quality impacts. Fossil fuel energy generation and combustion, low vehicle occupancies, and longer trip distances contribute most to increased multimodal trip impacts. Spatial supply chain analysis indicates that life-cycle air quality impacts may occur largely locally (in Los Angeles) or largely remotely (elsewhere) depending on the propulsion method and location of upstream life-cycle processes. Reducing 10% of transit system greenhouse emissions requires a shift of 23% to 50% of automobile access or egress trips to a zero emissions mode.

Environmental and Economic Consequences of Permanent Roadway Infrastructure Commitment: City Road Network Life-cycle Assessment and Los Angeles County

ASCE Journal of Infrastructure Systems, 22(1), doi: 10.1061/(ASCE)IS.1943-555X.0000271.

The environmental impacts and economic costs associated with passenger transportation are the result of complex interactions between people, infrastructure, urban form and underlying activities. When it comes to roadway infrastructure, the ongoing resource commitments (which can be measured as embedded impacts) enables vehicle travel which is a dominant source of air emissions in regional inventories. The relationship between infrastructure and the environmental impacts it enables are not often considered dynamic. Furthermore, the environmental impacts of roadway infrastructure are typically assessed at a fine geospatial and temporal scale (i.e., a short distance of roadway over a short period of time) and there is generally poor knowledge of how the growth of a roadway network over time creates a need for long-term maintenance commitments that create environmental impacts and lock-in vehicle travel. A framework and operational life-cycle assessment (LCA) tool (City Road Network (CiRN) LCA) are developed to assess the extent to which roadway commitments result in ongoing and increasing environmental and economic impacts. Known for its extensive road network and automobile reliance, Los Angeles County is used as a case study to explore the relationship between historic infrastructure deployment decisions and the emergent behavior of vehicle travel. The results show that every kilogram of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) resulting from construction and maintenance has led to 47 kg of GHG emissions in fuel combustion. Similarly, every public dollar invested into the network has created $126-288 in private user spending. As states and regions grapple with financing the upkeep of aging infrastructure, a solid understanding of the relationship between upfront infrastructure capital costs, long-term maintenance costs, and associated long-term environmental effects are critical. In Los Angeles, the infrastructure that exists was largely deployed by 1987. Since then, maintenance costs are estimated to have exceeded city budgets despite minimal growth in infrastructure. The research demonstrates how infrastructure matures (i.e., its stages of growth towards completion), it becomes locked-in leading to transitions from a capital financing focus to foci on securing rehabilitation and maintenance costs, and the share of environmental impacts changing from being somewhat balanced between embedded infrastructure construction impacts and vehicle use to today where vehicle use creates impacts several orders of magnitude greater than those associated with rehabilitation..

Time-based Life-cycle Assessment for Environmental Policymaking: Greenhouse Gas Reduction Goals and Public Transit

Transportation Research Part D, 43, pp. 49-58, doi: 10.1016/j.trd.2015.12.003.

As decision-makers increasingly embrace life-cycle assessment (LCA) and target transportation services for regional environmental goals, it becomes imperative that outcomes from changes to complex systems are accurately communicated. California’s greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction policies have created interest in better understanding how public transit systems reduce emissions. An LCA is developed of the Los Angeles Expo line and a competing car trip that includes vehicle, infrastructure, and energy production processes, in addition to propulsion. Energy use, GHG emissions, and the potential for photochemical smog formation and respiratory impacts are assessed. When results are normalized per passenger kilometer traveled (PKT), life-cycle processes increase impacts by up to 83% for energy use and GHG emissions, and up to 690% for smog and respiratory impact potentials. However, the use of a non-time-based PKT normalization obfuscates a decision-maker’s ability to understand whether the deployment of a transit system reduces emissions below a future year policy target (e.g., 80% of 1990 emissions by 2050). The year-by-year marginal effects of the decision to deploy the Expo line are developed including reduction in automobile travel. The time-based marginal results provide clearer explanations for how environmental effects in a region change and the critical life-cycle processes that should be targeted to achieve policy targets. The line can be expected to breakeven on GHG emissions within two decades but its ability meet long-run policy targets is most sensitive to infrastructure construction emissions, mode shifting, a changing electricity mix, and improving automobile fuel economy.

Parking Infrastructure: A Constraint on or Opportunity for Urban Redevelopment? A Study of Los Angeles County Parking Supply and Growth

Journal of the American Planning Association, 2015, 81(4), pp. 268-286, doi: 10.1080/01944363.2015.1092879.

Many cities have adopted minimum parking requirements but we have relatively poor information about how parking infrastructure has grown. We estimate how parking has grown in Los Angeles County from 1900 to 2010 and how parking infrastructure evolves, affects urban form, and relates to changes in automobile travel, using building and roadway growth models. We find that since 1975 the ratio of residential offstreet parking spaces to automobiles in Los Angeles County is close to 1.0 and the greatest density of parking spaces is in the urban core while most new growth in parking occurs outside of the core. 14% of incorporated land in Los Angeles County is committed to parking. Uncertainty in our space inventory is attributed to our building growth model, onstreet space length, and the assumption that parking spaces were created as per the requirements.

The continued use of minimum parking requirements is likely to encourage automobile use at a time when metropolitan areas are actively seeking to manage congestion and increase transit use, biking, and walking. Widely discussed ways to reform parking policies may be less than effective if planners do not consider the remaining incentives to auto use created by the existing parking infrastructure. Planners should encourage the conversion of existing parking facilities to alternative uses.

Policymaking Should Consider the Time-dependent Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Transit-oriented Smart Growth

Transportation Research Record, 2502, pp. 53-61, doi: 10.3141/2502-07.

Cities are increasingly developing greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation plans and reduction targets based on a growing body of knowledge about climate change risks, and changes to passenger transportation are often at the center of these efforts. Yet little information exists for characterizing how quickly or slowly GHG emissions reductions will accrue given changes in urban form around transit, and whether benefits will accrue quickly enough to meet policy year targets (such as reaching 20% of 1990 GHG emissions levels by 2050). Even more complicated is when cities focus on achieving GHG reductions through integrated transportation and land use planning, as changes in emissions can occur across many sectors (such as transportation, building energy use, and electricity generation). Using the Los Angeles Expo line, a framework is developed to assess how financing schemes change the rate of redevelopment and resulting life-cycle GHG emissions from travel and building energy use. The framework leverages an integrated transportation and land use life-cycle assessment model that captures upfront construction of new development near transit and the long-term changes in household energy use for travel and buildings. The results show that for the same amount of development around the Expo line it is possible to either meet (if aggressive redevelopment happens early) or not meet (if redevelopment starts decades out) state GHG goals by 2050. The time-based approach reveals how specific redevelopment schedules are needed for a city to reduce GHG emissions at a rate that meets future targets.

Cost-effectiveness of Reductions in Greenhouse Gas Emissions from High-speed Rail and Urban Transportation Projects in California

Transportation Research Part D, 40, pp. 104-113, doi: 10.1016/j.trd.2015.08.008.

As California establishes its greenhouse gas emissions cap-and-trade program and considers options for using the new revenues produced under the program, the public and decision-makers have access to tenuous information on the relative cost-effectiveness of passenger transportation investment options. Towards closing this knowledge gap, the cost-effectiveness of greenhouse gas reductions forecast from High-Speed Rail are compared with those estimated from recent urban transportation projects (specifically light rail, bus rapid transit, and a bicycling/pedestrian pathway) in California. Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions are joined with full cost accounting to better understand the benefits of cap-and-trade investments. Results are largely dependent on the economic cost allocation method used. Considering only public subsidy for capital, none of the projects appear to be a cost-effective means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (i.e., relative to the current price of greenhouse gas emissions in California’s cap-and-trade program at $11.50 per tonne). However, after adjusting for the change in private costs users incur when switching from the counterfactual mode (automobile or aircraft) to the mode enabled by the project, all investments appear to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a net savings to the public. Policy and decision-makers who consider only the capital cost of new transportation projects can be expected to incorrectly assess alternatives and indirect benefits (i.e., how travelers adapt to the new mass transit alternative) should be included in decision-making processes.

This manuscript builds on our UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies report Cost-Effectiveness of Reductions in Greenhouse Gas Emissions from California High-Speed Rail and Urban Transportation Projects.

Transit-oriented smart growth can reduce life-cycle environmental impacts and household costs in Los Angeles

Transport Policy, 2014, 35, pp.21-30, doi: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2014.05.004.

The environmental and economic assessment of neighborhood-scale transit-oriented urban form changes should include initial construction impacts through long-term use to fully understand the benefits and costs of smart growth policies. The long-term impacts of moving people closer to transit require the coupling of behavioral forecasting with environmental assessment. Using new light rail and bus rapid transit in Los Angeles, California as a case study, a life-cycle environmental and economic assessment is developed to assess the potential range of impacts resulting from mixed-use infill development. An integrated transportation and land use life-cycle assessment framework is developed to estimate energy consumption, air emissions, and economic (public, developer, and user) costs. Residential and commercial buildings, automobile travel, and transit operation changes are included and a 60-year forecast is developed that compares transit-oriented growth against growth in areas without close access to high-capacity transit service. The results show that commercial developments create the greatest potential for impact reductions followed by residential commute shifts to transit, both of which may be effected by access to high-capacity transit, reduced parking requirements, and developer incentives. Greenhouse gas emission reductions up to 470 Gg CO2-equivalents per year can be achieved with potential costs savings for TOD users. The potential for respiratory impacts (PM10-equivalents) and smog formation can be reduced by 28–35%. The shift from business-as-usual growth to transit-oriented development can decrease user costs by $3100 per household per year over the building lifetime, despite higher rental costs within the mixed-use development.

Infrastructure and Automobile Shifts: Positioning Transit to Reduce Life-cycle Environmental Impacts for Urban Sustainability Goals

Environmental Research Letters, 2013, 8(1), 015041, doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/015041.

Public transportation systems are often part of strategies to reduce urban environmental impacts from passenger transportation yet comprehensive energy and environmental life-cycle measures, including upfront infrastructure effects and indirect and supply chain processes, are rarely considered. Using the new bus rapid transit and light rail lines in Los Angeles, near-term and long-term life-cycle impact assessments are developed, including reduced automobile travel. Energy consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases and criteria pollutants are assessed, as well the potential for smog and respiratory impacts. Results show that life-cycle infrastructure, vehicle, and energy production components significantly increase the footprint of each mode (by 48-100% for energy and greenhouse gases, and up to 6200% for environmental impacts), and emerging technologies and renewable electricity standards will significantly reduce impacts. Life-cycle results are identified as either local (in Los Angeles) or remote and show how the decision to build and operate a transit system in a city produces environmental impacts far outside of geopolitical boundaries. Ensuring shifts of between 20-30% of transit riders from automobiles will result in passenger transportation greenhouse gas reductions for the city, and the larger the shift the quicker the payback, which should be considered for time-specific environmental goals.

Figures:
» Figure 1: Life-cycle per Passenger Mile Traveled Results for Average Occupancy Vehicles
» Figure 2: Environmental Impact Schedules and Resulting Paybacks
» Figure 3: Transit Energy and Environmental Payback Speed with Automobile Shifts
» Figure 4: Life-cycle Door-to-door Greenhouse Gas Comparison

Media Coverage and Related Documents:
» Environmental Research Web: Public-transit systems improve urban environment
» Policy Brief
» LA Metro's Blog The Source
» ERL Perspective by Matt Eckelman: Life Cycle Assessment in Support of Sustainable Transportation