How Does Removing Parking and Road Space Affect People With Disabilities?

Image via Unsplash.

A central theme of our work here at Strong Towns is the immense cost of building and maintaining automobile-centric cities and towns, and the need to find alternatives to this pattern of development before it bankrupts us. This elicits some predictable lines of pushback.

Here is the single most common argument I hear against removing parking spaces or traffic lanes from an urban environment—say, by ending parking minimums, taking away street parking for a bike lane, or converting a street lane to bus only:

"But people with disabilities need to park. The alternatives to driving don't work for everyone."

It's clearly true that there are people for whom the alternatives to driving and parking a car are not practical. Even in a gold-standard 15-minute neighborhood with a high degree of walkability and many useful destinations, there will be people who aren't served as well by active transportation. Some destinations are too far to travel by walking, biking, or using a wheelchair or other non-motorized device, and the route may not be safe or comfortable. Some people really do rely on the quick, door-to-door access that is a car's best selling point, and getting off a bus or train a few blocks away isn't going to cut it. 

This includes many people with disabilities. It also includes many elderly adults and young children. In more context-specific situations it might include, say, people whose work requires them to haul heavy loads, or people who need to travel complex, multi-stop routes in a day on a tight schedule. It can also include people for whom safety concerns in public spaces are a barrier to traveling without the protection of a car.

These people, for the foreseeable future, will arrive at places in cars, and will need to park those cars.

What does not follow from this is that, in order to be fair to those who rely on motorized transport, we must resist all changes that would diminish the convenience of driving and parking. This is completely backwards, and it's worth recognizing why. 

Here are three reasons even those who heavily depend on car access right now need not fear a transition to less auto-centric places, and might still welcome it. 

Image via Unsplash.

1. Creating alternatives to driving saves the parking and road space for those who need it most.

If you truly need to get from A to B by car, and nothing else will suffice, your trip will be easier, not harder, if you aren't stuck in traffic with all sorts of people who could take advantage of other options.

I used to have this debate with people in San Francisco, a very walkable, bikeable city with plenty of transit in which driving can be a pain. Whenever the city would stripe a new bike lane or bus lane, there would be a chorus of protest on behalf of not just San Franciscans with disabilities, but, for example, contractors who need trucks to haul their work tools. My response was always the same: If you're a roofer with a work truck, or a person with a disability who can’t easily get to and from the bus, wouldn't you rather not be stuck in traffic behind Joe Techie on the way to his desk job? Wouldn't you rather Joe Techie start riding the bus, because the bus now passes his apartment building more often and gets to his office faster?

You want the marginal convert, the traveler who could most easily make the switch to riding transit, or riding a bike, or walking, to make that switch. But in most cities, this means taking some steps to reallocate space away from drivers. Not to punish drivers, but to unwind the massive subsidy to drivers (the portion of this from free parking alone in the U.S. is estimated between $127 billion and $374 billion annually) that induces people who don't have to drive to compete for space on the streets with those who do.

Image via Flickr.

2. We're not starting from a blank slate, but with a glut of automobile space.

There's good news when it comes to reallocating some of that space: we have a lot of it to work with. There is a staggering oversupply of parking in almost every U.S. city, often even in the downtown.

It would be one thing to eliminate parking minimums if parking were scarce, raising the specter of people with disabilities being forced to park blocks away from their destination. But rather than insist on a glut of parking everywhere to alleviate this concern, local officials should be focused on reallocating the parking that exists to favor those who need it the most. 

Surprisingly little of the existing parking supply is reserved for people with disabilities. The federal Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) has standards for private lots and garages that amount to 2% to 4% of spaces which must be accessible. The ADA does not address public street parking directly, but state law may: In Florida, for example, I found a statute that states, "There must be one accessible parking space for each 150 metered on-street parking spaces provided by state agencies and political subdivisions." In a city in which alternatives to driving are convenient and attractive, one would expect a much larger share of drivers to consist of those who lack easy alternatives. Our standards for how we allocate parking space should evolve accordingly as we improve those alternatives.

Cities should be charging for parking at rates that promote turnover, so there will almost always be a parking spot open near where you're trying to go (a principle articulated by parking economist Donald Shoup). We can encourage the sharing of privately-owned parking lots at times when those businesses are closed or experiencing lower demand. Technology has made market-based solutions for this easier than ever.

If parking is priced according to market forces, those who most need it will not always be those most able to pay. But there are ways of providing direct subsidy if we have the political will to do so. Many cities already allow you to pay for metered or garage parking electronically; it is not hard to layer onto such a system a set of free or discounted parking passes made available, for example, to people with qualifying disabilities. 

Image via Flickr.

3. Our cities aren't really designed around the needs of people with disabilities. Retooling the system frees us up to build places that are. 

It's important to keep our eyes on the big picture: the system of transportation that we have built, in almost all of America post-World War II, is one in which the destinations of our day-to-day lives are too spread out from each other to be accessible by any means other than a private motor vehicle. Who actually benefits from this?

Steve Wright makes the case in a recent Strong Towns article that people with disabilities do not; that people with disabilities can actually thrive and enjoy much more independence in compact urban places built around proximity, connection, and accessibility.

The suburban experiment has in fact made mobility and access to resources and social opportunities more, not less, difficult for anyone who is not an able-bodied adult (and also affluent enough to afford their own car). Children lose the chance to learn independence. The growing population of seniors face terrifying rates of isolation and loneliness as they age out of driving.

The suburban experiment is also horribly expensive. The specter of insolvency looming over our cities should worry all of us. But it should particularly worry our most vulnerable neighbors, whose needs are predictably the first to get short-changed. As Wright observes, "Ask any person with a disability. They will tell you their body is not what limits them. Endless broken sidewalks, buses with inoperable lifts, transit systems with up or down stairs but no elevators, parks without paved trails, pools without lifts, homes without zero-step entrances—those are the things that are limiting."

A city in which we're no longer bankrupting ourselves expanding highways and reserving half of our downtowns for parking is a city in which we can actually afford to do right by our neighbors with disabilities, rather than asking them to beg for table scraps for the kinds of investments Wright lists. It's time to move beyond the scarcity mentality that says, "We need to make things massively convenient for the average driver so that 1% of what they get can go to making things minimally adequate for me."

People with disabilities get around in cities all over the world in which the car is not king. But within the existing broken system, those who have particular needs have found particular accommodations, often involving a car or van and a designated, free parking space. Within a different system, they will find different solutions. It's incumbent on our communities to work together to smooth that transition. But it would be a huge mistake to try to prevent it altogether, and all the more misguided to do in the name of equity or inclusion.

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