Applying suburban SFD parking standards to urban rentals is stupid

Parking requirements are a pseudoscience, and most engineers mis-apply suburban standards to urban contexts when actual research is explicitly clear that vehicle ownership for urban renters (lower income, smaller households, shorter trips) is less than the '1 stall per bedroom'-ish metric most municipalities have fecklessly adopted.

With robotaxis, more VMT is inevitable. But perhaps, not much.

The simulations on robotaxis have been clear for years: more VMT is inevitable, because trip-ends are poorly matched to trip origins. If two people are going from home to work, that's four Origin-Destination trips, of which only two are ferrying people*. More miles on the road, but less demand for parking at destinations. 

Is that a worthwhile social trade-off? Ignoring the equity question ("Who benefits?"), and converting it all into something fungible (dollars), what's the value of a parking space versus the cost of road capacity? Answering that question requires bounding it in time and space: a parking space where, and VMT when. The value of a parking space in Manhattan could easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, while a parking space in rural west Virginia might actually be negative. Likewise, the cost of adding an additional car to the roadway at 3a is basically zero - the road is sized to serve peak hour traffic, and 90% of the time, isn't carrying anything like that volume. So as a thought experiment, say it's the peak hour and parking for a major league baseball event, where parking is $300 an hour for a prime spot. For the robotaxi user, not parking is a clear win - the cost of the trip might be $45, for a $90 round trip--still a huge win. But for society, what's the marginal cost of the additional VMT generated by the robotaxi moving to its next fare.  Extreme case is that it's pure dead-head - no outbound fare from the stadium and drives all the way back to where it picked up the last guy to start its next fare. 

Quick google suggests a value of 1.6 cents per mile for federal costs, plus .1-.5 per state. Call it two cents a mile. Say the stadium trip is 20 miles. So that's .02 * 20, or forty cents. 

Ride-hailing companies will argue that this is an absurd case, but empirical evidence has not been made broadly available. Published meta-analysis suggests robotaxis will generate more VMT, but not that much. Six percent is more than a rounding error, but far less than the 50% I've seen bandied about in the past. I suspect that it's density dependent - if you convert a whole city to ride-hailing, you get much better matching--the next pickup after a drop-off, the dead-head DO pair, is much lower. As a thought experiment, consider a city with only one robotaxi, taking fares on a more or less random basis. Adding a second robotaxi substantially increases the chance that time and place can be made to match, and adding a thousand robotaxis is exponentially better, as the DO distance and time match converge exponentially. 

But as with many urban schemes, the devil is in the details. Lots of schemes falter because while the end-state is optimal, a long-term project requires every intermediary stage to be sufficiently self-supporting to sustain itself if/when there is a pause in the progress of the scheme. In a way, that speaks well for the future of robotaxis--they've proven to be financially viable even at very low levels of penetration.

Also clarifies why Uber expanded from city to city only incrementally - it required massive subsidy (to drivers and passengers) to ensure sufficient market participants for the scheme to work in the first place. Lacking drivers, wait times would be analogous to that of phone-hailed taxis. But lacking a series of passengers, no driver will find it worth their while to make that first pickup. So the whole market had to be bootstrapped into existence.

The suburban social compact and parking

A ways back, I read a post where someone talked about new development disrupting the  'social compacts" of their neighborhood. Today, I realized that part of what makes suburbia 'work' is regulation. Not legal regulation, but social regulation, via social shaming. It's a series of unwritten rules and often unspoken rules with bounds established by the informal process of social shaming, gossip and stigma.  

Which relies on people sharing the same norms and values. So when your neighborhood ceases to consist solely of family households (with children), suburbia stops working. Clearest example I can cite is parking: in suburbia, you only park in front of your own house. Even if you have five cars and your neighbor has one, you only park on 'your' curb. As a urban renter, the whole idea is laughable: I park where-ever I can find parking, regardless of whose house it is. So as a suburban neighborhood shifts over, regulating things like parking has to shift from being a social compact to having legal framework. So you see the emergence of resident parking programs. Which is on it's face grossly inequiable--residents have no more right to the public right of way than any other person. But there is another sense of the word 'equitable', a more legal sense, that says when you've done someone harm, you owe them recompense, that they should be no worse off than they were before. Personally, I'm of the "Paris is worth a mass" school of thought. If a resident parking program that unfairly privileges incumbents is the price of getting new housing permitted, I'm willing to pay it. Because when you come down to it, most neighbor opposition is due to parking--people don't want to have the privilege they've been enjoying impaired.

I have a hard time keeping mum when someone talks about their 'right' to parking, because they haven't got one, in the legal sense. But urban history is pretty clear--the process of getting rights largely consists of traditional and customary privileges becoming enshrined in law (by treaty or charter)*. So insisting on a right to parking is hardly unprecedented or unreasonable.

It's worth a moment to talk to talk about the rest of the suburban social contract: most of it governs the acceptable use of 'public' space: streets, 'park strips', sidewalks. But a surprising portion of it governs lawns/landscaping. It's your property, but your neighbor has to look at it, which affects their ability to enjoy their own property. But, since lawn care is expensive, it's one of the first thing that breaks down when people not party to the 'suburban social contract' move in. Hence, there are a surprising number of public laws governing requirements to mow. 

There is an interesting class lens of the suburban social contract: things that happen in public space are regulated by public law, and so middle-class people have access to legal relief--they can call the police or code enforcement. But things like fences fall largely outside that penumbra. So it's only those wealthy enough to say 'my lawyer' who legally contest this. So you see a surprising amount of litigation about fences, quasi-fences, trees, spite fences, etc.   

*Which I suspect is why 'blue' cities are having a hard time advocating for themselves versus their red home states--there is a reliance on using courts to establish 'rights', as opposed to insisting on customary rights. And perhaps cities in conflict with their home state would do better to insist of legal recognition of the customary rights they've been enjoying. 

On Displacement

All renters move, and often. Partially it's a response to changing conditions (employment, family size) but also in response to being able to take advantage of a better deal (better rent, better quality, better location) elsewhere. So renters (per se) aren't displaced. When people talk about displacement, they are talking about the displacement of an ethnic community--when a traditionally Black / Mexican / Jewish / Chinese / Irish / Italian / Greek / Korean / Hmong / Ethiopian community ceases to have a majority of that ethnicity, typically because a wealthier, whiter, less immigrant population is moving in.  

If the housing stock is is fixed, newcomers inevitably displace incumbents, in a zero sum game that always sees the incumbents outbid. And over time, the decline in the size of the ethnic community population can no longer support 'specialty' services, markets, grocers, and (eventually) churches. And that is a loss. As strands are pulled away, the fabric of a community dissolves. And it's not something that can be casually recreated, because it's an both: a) an emergent property of a density of recurring interactions with a single spatial & temporal locus; and also b) the product of the purposeful effort by past community leaders (even if you've got dry tinder, it still takes someone to strike a match).   

There is a disjunction in community norms about acceptable behavior - newcomers vs incumbents. And the newcomers are of the hegemonic in-group, they have the law on their side (de facto or de jure), endangering incumbents through exposure to the police. 

So when people talk about displacement, we should be clear on what that means and what that requires: Enough NIMBY* to prevent new rising rents from being matched with new development, and a zero-sum game reducing the ethnic population below the threshold necessary to support specialty stores and services.  

*There is nothing more NIMBY than a parking requirement--people fighting the addition of new people or businesses, excluding them simply to prevent competition for a limited resource that they have no legal claim or right to exclude. 

Free Fares for SLC

Reading the SL Trib today, the news article was on free fares, suggested as a way to bolster transit ridership. UTA has tried a couple of 'free fare days' as a pilot program, which boosted ridership by about 16%. Article said fares make up 11% of UTAs budget. The usual rhetorical questions about the cost of collecting fares were offered (with no quantification of how much fare actually actually costs--my bet being minimal). Fundamentally, UTA can't do away with the fare collection infrastructure in SLC without doing away with it system wide. And that's not happening.

More and more, my mind turns to SLC needing it's own transit agency (on top of UTA).  No one in UTA is happy when that gets brought up--if SLC breaks off, I imagine their budget goes to bits. UTA allocates service to cities in proportion to how much sales tax revenue the city contributes to UTA. If SLC ceased contributing, UTA would lose...perhaps a quarter of it's sales tax funding? And all the transit-service feasible destinations are in SLC, so without those destinations, none of the existing UTA routes would be feasible. Leave SLC out, UTA's ridership collapses, and so does the agency.

But there is a conflict: SLC wants a kind of service that UTA is not providing: Urban shuttle. Short trips on fast, frequent and reliable transit. Can't blame UTA--that's a very expensive type of service to provide. But if you are traveling within SLC, it's the only kind of service you care about: hop-on, hop-off trips, for (otherwise) walkable distances: 20 minute walks. SLC effectively wants another 400 S. Trax corridor....rather it wants several of them.

SLC's future is in being composed of 'Transit Oriented Corridors' (TOC). TOD is for suburbia: dense, mixed use, walkable nodes set amidst the suburban sprawl. TOC is for urban locations where station areas overlap: where both walking and riding between station are feasible. Portland gets it--at this point, Portland's CBD is so saturated with fixed guideway transit stations (LRT and streetcar) that like 90% of the whole thing is within walking distance of transit. (Paris does even better--98% within the Periphique, IIRC).

Not that I suggest the urbanization of all of SLC--I like the bungalow neighborhoods, and I'd like them to stay. But I recognize that SLC is growing, and growth means a need for more space, and more spacing needs building. But I'd like to see that building take the form of high-density (elevators required) next to transit stations, rather than scattered about in 'missing middle' penny-packets.

To circle back: SLC wants transit capable of supporting car-free living. (Any central city that tries out out-suburb suburbia is playing a mugs game.) UTA doesn't want to provide it. There is an essential conflict there, and one that is not going away. One way for SLC to achieve its desires (at great expense) is to build a geographically limited streetcar network, and make those streetcars free. The other way is to build a free-fare bus network.

Why fare-free? Because most of the bus trips made within SLC are short. Walkable distances. Distances where it's not worth paying the $2.50 for a ticket, but too far to walk. Electronic passes solve a lot of the issues of fare-free transit. I recall the weird rigamarole of 'pay when board' vs 'pay when exit', depending on where you boarded, and the complications of entry/exit from bus doors. With electronic passes, you tap on, and you go.  SLC is already partially fare-free, through various pass systems: U students, high school students, city employees, things like the Hive pass. It might be possible to just go one step further, and make it free to all residents. Then transit becomes a utility, a fee for service: Each parcel gets assessed on the basis of use (# of units), and then every address is mailed a transit pass.

Given that half of SLC's density is employment (actual pop is only 165k or so, IIRC), might also extend the pass program to employees, through an employer-parking cashout program. 

"Shared vehicle, doesn't park, doesn't occupy curb space"

"Shared vehicle, doesn't park, doesn't occupy curb space"

This was the claim I heard made about shared vehicles. First off, the vehicle is rarely 'shared'. If the driver is in the vehicle, that's not a 'shared' ride. You are being chauffeured. The driver is not a passenger. (If I drive my kid to school, it's not a 'shared ride'--I'm driving him to a place, being a 'taxi-mama'.) It's only a shared ride when there are 2+ passengers in the car. Which is rare. How rare? In my experience, perhaps 1% of all the rides I've ever taken, did I share a ride with someone. (And that was in a major metropolitan city).

"Shared vehicle, doesn't park, doesn't occupy curb space"
A TNC is just a dial-a-ride taxi with a better fare structure. Taxis occupy curb space. They aren't in motion all the time. (Or perhaps even most of the time). They _do_ require parking space. That said, taxis are probably in motion more than TNCs, because they spend much of their time 'cruising' for fares, rather than parked and waiting for fares. So Taxi's probably take up more road space  than a TNC would (a moving car taking up about 3x as much space as a parked car, due to safety-required separation between two moving cars.)

I have seen Lyft Vehicles, pulled over on the side of the road, checking their phones, as they wait for Google maps to locate their next fare in the queue. (Peak times, not so much, as trips get added to the queue faster). 

Do they take up space in the middle of the day? Ie, do they take up all-day parking space, the way that a car driven to work does? No, clearly not. But cars still need to be stored someplace. (Likely in whatever suburban wonderland TNC drivers live). Which brings up a VMT issue: If a TNC driver drives someone to work, then drives home. Then, in the afternoon, drives someone from work to the grocery store, and then someone else from the store to home. Then they drive themselves home. Point being that the driver made two trips home (one morning, one evening) to drive one person to and from work. So if we assume that everyone will take a TNC to work, VMT is going to explode. Rule of thumb (from a PhD student who drove UBER was he drove 1.69 miles for every passenger mile). So 69% more VMT, to achieve the same amount of mobility? The roadway network will never withstand that kind of increase.

 Of course, it might. If the demands on the roadway network were spread over a wider period of time. Presumably, fewer drivers want to drive during congested conditions, because it's slower. And while they get paid both per mile and per minute, I believe the incentive structure also pays them by trip. So there is a strong incentive to maximize the number of trips you make. And even if not, it's better to be earning for both miles and minutes than sitting in traffic. 

So you have fewer drivers during congested times, and people have to wait longer to take a TNC during congested times. (So the reliability declines, and more drivers are inclined to say "Screw it, I'll just drive myself"). At which point, you've basically enacted congestion pricing. Ie, when things are congested, it costs more to drive.  

Uber and Lyft are NOT transit

TNC are  not mass transit; it's a taxi. (There is no massification)

Shared ride _is_ transit. It's a jitney. Jitneys also follow routes. 

The idea that you can combine the 'on-demand' dial-a-ride of a taxi with a jitney is fallacious.

How much detour are you willing to tolerate? And when does it make sense to stop and add another person.

Massification relies not only on spatial convergence, but also temporal convergence: 

Same people in the same place at the same time. 

Which implies it will mostly take place during times of peak demand. 

Which becomes the classic transit agency problems: Sufficient peak capacity is excess off-peak capacity.

The real innovation of TNC's is not the 'dial-a-ride'. It's the ability to use 'surge' pricing to manage the match between supply and demand. It both reduces demand (through higher prices) and draws in additional drivers (through higher fares). 

This is core to the whole TNC model, as it draws in latent supply.

'Latent supply' is how the whole TNC thing works. Most cars are parked most of the time.

Commuting in the morning, the commute+shopping in the evening.

Parking Requirement are Terrible for Downtowns

No, really. But they are ESPECIALLY terrible for historic main streets and down towns.

Sandpoint, Idaho removed minimum parking requirements a decade ago. The city's director of planning describes what happened since.

The 2009 approval of a 60,000 square foot, 3-story bank headquarters in the heart of downtown ended up requiring 218 parking spaces. Because only 110 were provided (which was plenty), the bank was subjected to in-lieu parking fees totaling over $700,000. Well, being bankers, they soon realized the cheaper alternative was to buy up adjacent properties and demolish the buildings for surface lots. Consequently, small businesses were evicted and the much-beloved downtown historic development pattern was diminished.

In Defense of Land Use Regulation

Arguably, any public regulation of land, by limiting the either the use or potential use a land-owner can make of the land. Yet a total lack of regulation of land is neither fair nor reasonable, as things which happen on your neighbors property directly affect yours. The oldest case would likely be mandatory building set-backs so as to provide fire-breaks. More recent cases would be 'public nuisances'; if your neighbor begins to use their garage as a concert space, the whole neighborhood suffers from the sound, while receiving none of the benefit. *

*I joined the 'Market Urbanism' group on Facebook, because I'm interested in congestion pricing and dynamic pricing for parking. Instead, I find myself engaged in debates about the virtues/values of land-use regulation. (As an urban planner, I'm generally for it). But it is forcing me to sharpen my rhetorical skills, so I suppose that's a plus.

Public Policy always implies subsidy--either to someone, or to their competitors.

Reading Peter Gordon's blog always reminds me that all public policies imply subsidies--either to someone, or to someone's competitors.

When they began, our health and safety regulations are a 'subsidy' for companies already engaging in them. The Dodd-Frank Act on banking is often decried as a subsidy for big banks, because the cost per customer of compliance is lower than for smaller banks.

My friend Rob refers to me as a 'Parking Republican' as I have zero issue with pricing either parking or roads. And why not? It's fiscally sound and economically efficient. Von Thunen pointed out that there is always direct trade-off between rents (real estate) and transportation costs, and the whole field of urban economics is based on it. As a nation, we invested piles of money in lowering transportation costs (adding roads). This massively lower the cost of transportation, which then massively lowered the cost of urban land. (Hence turning central cities into slums for a fifty years).

Free roads and free parking subsidize the automobile. Why not transit?

Notes on Parking for Railvolution

Parking as a 'common property resources'

-rivalrous, non-excludable

-Tragedy of the commons results

-Almost all parking management is based on shifting it from being a common-pool resource to a public good, by increasing excludability.

1) Exclusion through 'club lists' (resident parking permits)

2) Exclusion through pricing (metered parking)

The first is generally seen as more equitable, but the latter is understood to be more efficient. The ethical acceptability ties into the political acceptability. There will be a political backlash against any policy that makes some some people better off while making others worse off, especially if the harms are concentrated and the benefits diffuse. Right now, in Utah, Brigham Young University started to charge to park on campus. Suddenly, all the on-street parking just off-campus is jammed. Residents who were using it are enraged-their free available parking is gone, through no action of their own. 

After a few mobs-with-torches situations, politicians get gun-shy about parking. And hence cautious, doing so in limited cases. Rare indeed are cases like Britain (where minimum parking requirements are now forbidden, nation-wide) or the city of Buffalo (where minimum parking requirements have been eliminated city-wide). This sort of disjointed incrementalism should be welcomed: Better some than none. And better to discover potential problems during a test-case, rather than everywhere, all at once. 

The 'equitable' approach itself has serious equity issues of its own. Limited passes to those currently parking is unfair, as that is to the detriment of those who are not currently using the parking--it seems only fair that everyone should get an equal number of passes. Doing so vastly undermines the effectiveness of the program. Current parking use is responding to the actual supply of parking. Over-providing permits swamps the supply, doing little to ensure parking availability. It is also inefficient, as residents 'loan' unused parking permits to friends and family, which is neither efficient nor equitable. 

Pricing parking efficiently has problems as well. My dad refused to drive downtown, because he wasn't willing to pay for parking. When we did, we parking in strange marginal lots, many blocks from our destination. Berkeley, California, has one of the best, where on-street parking (the most available) was made more expensive, while off-street parking was made cheaper. This both increased the perceived availability of parking, and provided an incentive to go to the (cheaper) garages. 

Snow Day

From Eschaton:

Snow Job

Snow reveals much in the urban hellhole, especially when it lingers for a few days. One thing it reveals is just how many people don't actually need their cars. That people "need" their cars drives demands for cheap parking permits, which fills up available parking spots with cars that people don't actually need, which makes car owners apoplectic and opposed to any development which doesn't have off street parking in a city where most lots can barely fit a house, which drives down local population density, hinders revitalization of walkable neighborhood commercial corridors, leads to more people "needing" or wanting cars, worsening the parking problem, etc...

Rich people who like cheap long term storage for their weekend cars get very concerned about the needs of poor people whenever people suggest increasing parking permit fees (The first one is $35 per year. They're basically free). Snow reveals just how many of those cars are not used for daily commutes.

Cities spent decades hollowing themselves out by trying to be "more like the suburbs." Sadly, too many "new" city arrivals who have decided they like city living can't look around the urban landscape, see how big cars are, and do the simple math to figure out just how much space they take up.

 

Gentle Density, via Planetizen

From Planetizen:

Navigating the density debate might be easier if more cities embraced "gentle density," which Brent Toderian defines as "attached, ground-oriented housing that's more dense than a detached house, but with a similar scale and character. Think duplexes, semi-detached homes, rowhouses, or even stacked townhouses."

While even this mild form of densification draws opposition, it's less drastic than big blocky mid-rises. "Many people don't mind sharing a common wall and are eager to cut their costs and carbon footprint, but still appreciate a direct relationship with the ground. That's why fellow urbanist Daniel Parolek in San Francisco calls this kind of density the 'missing middle.'"

Rowhouses, townhouses and the like used to be an urban staple. But now, planners in many cities will have to relearn them. "In most cities though, deliberate zoning decisions have made this kind of housing illegal."

Full Story:

Canadian cities need more 'gentle density' to address housing crunch

Published on Tuesday, March 7, 2017 in Metro Toronto

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note the parking: One garage slot, one driveway slot. But no on-street parking. Perhaps because the frontage is too narrow to permit a parking slot and a driveway?

Housing Affordability in SLC

"The consensus among real estate experts is that the recent expansion in housing supply has managed to keep DC area rents from spiraling out of control....December's year-over-year multifamily apartment rent growth in the DC metro region was 2.6 percent.....considerably lower than the national average of 4 percent.....attribute this to DC’s above-average multifamily housing stock growth rate (3.6 percent last year, compared to 2.4 percent nationally)....supply has narrowly outpaced demand recently. - Greater Greater Washington.

Seems pretty clear to me. If rents are rising, supply is not meeting demand. SLC's rents are rising; We can't control demand; we can only control supply. There is strong market demand for housing, and the limit is regulatory. Relax regulatory limits, and increase supply.

I recognize no one wants a high-rise worth of buildings looking into their backyard. For owner-occupiers, their homes are their primary investment, and they are willing to fight to project that, which makes them politically powerful. So clearly some sort of buffering is going to be necessary. What that is going to look like is (broadly) hammered out: Two story buildings, over a half basement, with a total height of about 30'. The major conflict is over cars, and where to put them. On-street parking can accommodate 3 cars per 33' lot. Beyond that, off-street parking is required. How that is going to work out needs serious consideration as part of accessory dwelling units.

I'm opposed to efforts focuses on increasing the supply of owner-occupied housing. I rent, and I resent the implication that it means my housing preferences are inferior. It's also deeply inequitable: Providing a few more owner-occupied houses means a few more people are going to be able to 'win the lottery' by buying a home and sitting on it while it appreciates, without it doing anything to alter the fundamental dynamics of the housing market.

But relying on market solutions alone is not going to solve SLC's affordable housing problems. All the housing that is being added is being added on the higher end of the market. This is natural, and somewhat necessary--new construction requires higher rents. While that mitigates the tendency for mid-range apartments to be rehabbed and upgraded, it doesn't provide short-term relief for the low end of the rental market.

Market rate new construction requires high rents. So to provide low rents, a non-market intervention is required. SLC, as part of its homeless initiatives, is already engaging in this policy, at the low-income level. I'd like to see that extended further into the low-middle, and middle-income levels (50-80% of area median income).

As a long-term policy, a 'overbuild' in elevator apartments is appealing. Permit a very large number of high-rise apartments. Apartment construction is 'lumpy', and buildings 'package' units big bunches. Over-building is a expected characteristic of the development cycle; people start new projects until the financing runs out; the projects take a long time to complete, and my the time many hit the market, the increase in supply has caused rents to fall, and the projects are no longer profitable. Rather than competing with the private market at the peak of the cycle, the city should take over 'orphan projects' partially through the development process, and convert them to use as affordable housing. Denver's housing agency has done so with single family homes on a pretty successful basis.

To go even further, SLC could use public money to 'overbuild' the multi-family market after the development cycle has peaked. I'm less of a fan--the oversupply generates a 'hangover' effect that last decades, suppressing new market-rate multi-family development. I'd far prefer reducing market costs for new multi-family construction.

Finally, I'd like to suggest that the regulation most in need of attention is per-unit parking requirements. Parking is expensive, and mandating 2 stalls per unit seriously affects the affordability of a unit. There are increasing number of people in SLC that would be willing to make do with one less car (or no car) if that made rent cheaper. As a back of the envelope calculation, assume that a stall in a parking garage costs $40,000 to build. Using the 'building worth is 10 years of rent' ratio, that means a $40,000 bit of real estate is worth about $333 per month. I think many people would be willing to shed a car to reduce their rent by that much.

The immediate objection to such a policy would be the ease of violation: Deprived on on-site parking, people turn to on-street parking, and then overflow into near by areas, putting them in conflict with other users of on-street parking. Potential policy solutions include permitting reduced parking ratios only where on-street parking is metered for all nearby areas. For districts lacking meters, residents in the low-car or car-free units could be required to verify that they do not have a registered vehicle.

Parking in the CBD

I was reading this, and was struck by this bit at the end:

"argued parking lots can be a boon to the city — they're being used, after all. And the ordinance actually hinders development, he said, reasoning that it inhibits competition, and parking rates go up as a result. Owners in turn have less reason to develop lots, and dig in their heels"

Let's deconstruct that a bit: "They are being used, and are thus a boon". That argument is a bit tetchy--if I were to add free parking all over downtown, would that be a boon?

Short answer: 'No'. 

Long answer: Free parking is a subsidy to people who drive to downtown. Which is something that people who take transit, or live downtown don't get. Secondly, downtown real-estate is expensive. Letting someone use it for free is silly. 

But this is market based--why not let someone develop parking lots? The ordinance certainly hinders development of parking lots--that's the point. So, why not let half of downtown become parking lots? Lots of cities do. 

Because it kills walkability. Walking along a parking lot is boring and unpleasant. And downtown isn't just the premier office and retail center for the metro area--it's also the premier entertainment district, tourist destination, and convention center. People who come downtown for a show, to visit Temple Square, and to go to Conventions all wind up walking around downtown SLC. 

Does it actually inhibit competition for parking?

No. The lawyer is very clever--talking as if parking lots were the only option. You'll notice that multi-story parking structures aren't forbidden. Parking structures are the real competition to surface lots.

The Politics of Property Taxes

A quirk in Utah property tax also plays a role. When your property is assessed, it is assessed on the value of the improvements--the stuff on the land, rather than the land itself. (Why this is stupid will have to be a later post). The 'improvements' value of a parking lot is not very much--it's just asphalt over dirt. The value of a parking garage is much much higher, in the millions of dollars. For SLC, it makes financial sense to have anything BUT a parking lot.

And so SLC is holding down the supply of surface parking in the CBD. Which means supply is constricted even as demand rises. Prices are determined by the mis-match between supply and demand, so the cost of parking is going up. As the price of parking rises, the expected ROI on building a parking garage rises as well, so it makes financial sense to build a parking garage. 

Digging in their heels

The last bit is simply silly--if rates go up, owners have MORE reason to develop parking lots. More lots are being developed for the same reason no-one builds high rises in historic districts--it's illegal.

'Smart Lake City' -- Smart Parking Meters.

According to USA-Today, 'Smart' parking meters are coming to town. That town (sadly) is not Salt Lake City, but Charleston North Carolina. To give the article highlights"

Converting from drop-in-a-coin-and-twist-the-dial machines to a new generation of meters.
-Uses smart-card technology
-Pay by cellphone
-Meters linked by wireless networks that can be remotely controlled and alert officers to parking violations
-'Call in' to register for parking.
-$150 apiece
-$7000 to $10,000 for multi-space meters.
-Powered by solar panels.

That last factor is actually a surprisingly big deal.  The installation costs for a parking can exceed the cost of the meter for a normal parking meter. One that requires electrical hookups can be substantially more expensive. While solar panels aren't yet powering whole cities, they are increasingly powering small parts of it.

Too bad the story didn't have more to say about using wireless networks to let drivers know where parking is available. But cities are hurting for money, and parking is a nice source of revenue...