The days when free or at least cheap parking in the Washington suburbs was a right are waning fast. In an era of carbon footprints, greenhouse gases and crippling congestion, the goal of today's planners and politicians is maximum inconvenience for drivers.
The District of Columbia is pulling up parking lots and putting in expensive meters and spots priced to move drivers out of their cars and onto a train, bus, bike or their feet. Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in Virginia are thinking along similar lines, considering changes to codes to reduce the number of parking spaces builders have to include.
"What we're seeing is a sea change," said Rick Siebert, property management chief for Montgomery County's parking division. "We want to support economic development, but the old system ended up with the roads too crowded and questions about quality of life."
Montgomery, with plentiful Metro stations, has long promoted public-private subsidies to transit riders and other strategies to discourage driving in the county's business districts. Forty-two percent of the people in downtown Silver Spring get there without a car, for example. But the County Council thinks it can do better and hired a consultant to overhaul the parking code. Two spaces for every condo, three for every 1,000 square feet of office space could soon be history.
Not so long ago, the suburbs couldn't get enough parking. Now lots are "underparked" and need to be "unbundled" from the price of a town house or condominium, in the buzzwords of planners. Curbside meters should be priced for "performance." If it cost $100 a day to park in Friendship Heights (a hypothetical price), drivers might reconsider.
Planners mapping out a new, pedestrian-friendly mini-city in Tysons Corner, Va., to dovetail with the Metrorail line under construction are proposing parking standards unheard of in Fairfax County, where three-car families are not unusual. Buildings near the four future train stations in Tysons will no longer have to have a minimum of parking. The code now calls for at least 2.6 spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space; stores must have up to six spaces per that area.
Lenders have traditionally balked at financing projects unless they have enough parking, on the theory that a building with more space for cars will attract a higher-paying tenant than one with fewer. Garage parking can cost a developer up to $50,000 per space to build, though.
