Discovering Transit in Montana

Don Shoup, America’s favorite (or at least my favorite) critic of parking policy authored a piece for the Journal of Planning Education and Research with this new angle to consider for transportation impact fees:

All new developments, per city and county zoning codes, are required to build a set amount of minimum parking. These minimum parking requirements at residences and businesses are always excessive. (Q: How many days a year is Kmart’s parking lot full? A: Zero.) If you think about it, these fees are inherently a form of impact fee. Requiring minimum parking lot sizes is an extra cost to the developer, and the developer and/or business rarely sees much benefit from excessively large parking lots. This amounts to wasted transportation infrastructure, a big heat sink, an impermeable surface, an eye sore, and a density lowering atrocity.

One better option that increases transportation revenue is to allow developers to opt in to a program where they could pay a fee per space in lieu of a certain amount of their minimum parking requirements.

Example: Wal-Mart wants to build a third store in Missoula (please, no!) and they are required X parking spaces per square foot of retail space. Let’s say they would be required to build 1,000 parking spaces. As a trade off, they could pay a fee, say $2,500/space, for up to 40% of those spaces. So instead, they build 600 spaces, and pay $1 million to the city. ($2,500 x 400 spaces = $1 million) This funding in turn increases transportation options (bike/ped infrastructure and transit service) to the area. Transportation options are improved benefiting the entire community, and Wal-Mart saves money overall on land purchase and construction of excessive lot capacity. The same would apply to transit-oriented residential and mixed-use developments.

This type of program has been implemented with success around the country. We should expand our local dialogue about impact fees, zoning, and transportation planning to include this possibility.