Adi Nochur
At approximately 160 square feet, your average parking spot may not seem like the worst offender of using sought-after space or a staple of climate change. However, when you look at parking spaces across the Greater Boston region that are going unused during peak hours, there’s a clear problem.
At the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, we care deeply about how our region, and the state at large, uses land and space. With the current housing crisis, space seems hard to come by, and we need to take a critical look at how we use space, no matter how small, now more than ever.
MAPC’s “Perfect Fit Parking” research spans the past eight years, and our findings show that those small parking spaces add up very quickly, with serious implications for both urban and suburban communities.
What’s the Harm?
The most recent phase of our research, conducted in 2022, looked at multifamily sites in six communities west of Boston and found that 39 percent of the off-street parking spaces provided were not utilized during peak hours (i.e., overnight on weeknights). This finding is consistent with previous phases of research throughout Greater Boston, including one initial survey that found that more than 41 acres – about 31 football fields worth – of heat-trapping pavement sat vacant overnight.
Eric Bourass
To reiterate the point – in every municipality and at every development we observed, parking was oversupplied. Municipalities with the most parking per unit had the lowest utilization, meaning developers had to build hundreds of parking spaces that are not needed.
What’s the harm in having some extra parking? Isn’t it just a little more pavement than needed? For starters, excess parking leads to increased car ownership and usage, which in turn increases traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. Pavement is also an impervious surface that does not let water soak into the ground, contributing to increasingly severe flooding events. Impervious surfaces contribute to the urban heat island effect that has rightfully gotten more attention over the past few years.
The urban heat island effect occurs when areas with higher concentration of buildings and paved roads absorb and radiate the sun’s heat and are hotter than surrounding areas with more green spaces. Among other things, it can cause increased energy consumption, elevate emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases, compromise health and comfort, and impair water quality. Heat islands are also inequitably distributed and disproportionately affect low-income and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) communities due in part to the history of redlining in many U.S. municipalities.
One Solution: Smart Redevelopment
Unfortunately, excess parking and pavement is not limited to multifamily developments. Strip malls across the state – many of which are underutilized, underperforming, or obsolete – present a great opportunity for redevelopment. Redevelopment can in turn create more open space (less pavement) and also increase our housing supply.
In a 2022 report, “Rethinking the Retail Strip,” we found that approximately 13.7 square miles (an area larger than the city of Woburn) of the MAPC region alone are devoted to strip malls. Redeveloping only the top 10 percent of suitable commercial strip sites in each city or town studied (374 sites) could avert the creation of 10 to 24 square miles of impervious surfaces that would result from greenfield development of multifamily or single-family homes.
As previously mentioned, another aspect of impervious surfaces is that they are a contributing factor to stormwater flooding, as noted in our recently released “Water, Water, Everywhere…” report that analyzed 27,000 flood claims from the series of storms that ravaged the MAPC region in March 2010. Our warming climate is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of rainfall, suggesting that storm events like March 2010 will happen more often. With new development and an increase in impervious surfaces, combined with our changing climate, more and more residents and businesses will likely be affected by extreme flooding events.
In retrospect, it’s fair to question our desire for parking spaces and pavement. MAPC data now show that the need for parking has been overcalculated, at least at multifamily sites. We can shift from parking minimums to maximums, reduce parking ratios, unbundle parking from housing costs and explore more strategies for shared parking. And, we can take a critical look at our vast square footage of commercial impervious surfaces – retail strips or other – to better meet the region’s needs in a sustainable and equitable manner.
Converting one small parking space into greenery will not deter the course our climate is on, but fundamental changes in our thinking, policies and actions can.
Adi Nochur is a senior transportation planner and Eric Bourassa is transportation director at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
