Title: Land Use Zoning as Transportation Regulation
Author(s): Pickrell, Don and Donald Shoup
Published: 1981 by Transportation Research Record, 786, pp. 12-18
Online Access: http://pubsindex.trb.org/document/view/default.asp?lbid=168326
Abstract: Land use zoning, which is frequently relied on to improve resource allocation in the land market itself, is also used to indirectly regulate the urban transportation market. The effects of one of the means by which it does so, the requirement for a minimum amount of off-street parking space in conjunction with new commercial development, are discussed. Evidence is demonstrated that this minimum amount of parking is well above what the land market would supply in the absence of such requirements. The result is to depress the market price of parking to a level below the cost of its supply. This indirect regulation of the price of parking has several consequences, principally an increase in the number of trips made by automobile. Aside from their effects on the urban transportation market, parking requirements may also cause distortions in the urban land market. In effect, they can impose a "tax" on new development, which not only slows the redevelopment of older areas but may also alter the spatial pattern of new development in undesirable ways. Unwisely used, land market controls can thus aggravate some of the transportation, and other, problems they are intended to solve. This illustrates the potential hazard of attempts to remedy urban transportation problems indirectly--for example, by intervention in the land market rather than direct intervention in the transportation market itself.
Category: Transportation, Land Use, and Urban Form
See other articles by the author(s): Donald Shoup Don Pickrell
Author(s): Pickrell, Don and Donald Shoup
Published: 1981 by Transportation Research Record, 786, pp. 12-18
Online Access: http://pubsindex.trb.org/document/view/default.asp?lbid=168326
Abstract: Land use zoning, which is frequently relied on to improve resource allocation in the land market itself, is also used to indirectly regulate the urban transportation market. The effects of one of the means by which it does so, the requirement for a minimum amount of off-street parking space in conjunction with new commercial development, are discussed. Evidence is demonstrated that this minimum amount of parking is well above what the land market would supply in the absence of such requirements. The result is to depress the market price of parking to a level below the cost of its supply. This indirect regulation of the price of parking has several consequences, principally an increase in the number of trips made by automobile. Aside from their effects on the urban transportation market, parking requirements may also cause distortions in the urban land market. In effect, they can impose a "tax" on new development, which not only slows the redevelopment of older areas but may also alter the spatial pattern of new development in undesirable ways. Unwisely used, land market controls can thus aggravate some of the transportation, and other, problems they are intended to solve. This illustrates the potential hazard of attempts to remedy urban transportation problems indirectly--for example, by intervention in the land market rather than direct intervention in the transportation market itself.
Category: Transportation, Land Use, and Urban Form
See other articles by the author(s): Donald Shoup Don Pickrell