Urban Land Institute: Parking decks create human interaction 'voids'

AUSTIN (KXAN) — The Urban Land Institute (ULI) Austin District Council released its report on Austin's downtown parking on March 20, which recommends that city leadership reduce "new parking construction across the entire downtown geography."

"As new buildings rise above the city’s streetscape, levels and levels of parking decking are layered into the building’s foundation, creating a meaningful void in activation along downtown streets," said a ULI spokesperson via email. "Pedestrians pass these new shiny buildings and are met with garage entrances leading to multiple levels of parking before any human experience – whether residential or commercial – can be seen on the floors far above."

The ULI's Technical Assistance Panel (TAP) created the report. TAP Chair David Carroll said that the report came from a three-day meeting of the panel that focused on ways to discourage developers from building more parking downtown.

"The garages tend to take up all of the street level façade, which can be used for retail commercial spaces to help activate the streetscape for pedestrians," Carroll said. "Building structured parking is very expensive, it's tens of thousands of dollars per parking space. That cost is ultimately passed on to a renter or buyer."

In the report, ULI recommends changes to city policy for new development and to prioritize the "human experience."

"One thing that the city actually already acted on was removing parking minimums citywide," Carroll said. "There's more short-term recommendations that could happen...then more that would need to happen after Project Connect is built when we have that more robust transit system. But also there's recommendations that really encourage and incentivize other modes [of transportation], like biking, walking, car share and things like that."

Some other recommendations include:

• Create parking maximums on new developments
• Encourage shared parking
• Limit the construction of new parking
• Increase on-street parking fees, but also add more free short-term parking

"Car culture is pretty pervasive in Austin and all of Texas," Carroll said. "It's going to be a little more difficult to tackle, it's just going to take time. But I think we're already seeing that shift -- we're already seeing projects build less parking today than they were even five years ago."