Making Parking Earn its Keep

Multi-tasking has been popular since computers gave us the ability to conduct research, write a paper, listen to music and chat with a friend, all at the exact same time. Efficiency makes our fast-paced lives possible, so we need everything to do more for us. If we can talk on the phone while driving to work and if a home can double as an office, then why can’t a parking space serve a multipurpose function as well?

Unless you’re in the business of parking and charging daily or monthly rates for spaces, a 10x15 rectangle, margined off with yellow lines, doesn’t make money. In an urban area, where every square foot is valuable, parking spaces can seem like liabilities rather than assets. Residential developers need to find creative ways to make parking spaces work overtime; and in some cases multitask as well. Valid concerns about congestion, overflow and the impact the increase in residential traffic brings have made downtown parking a hot topic-one that warrants a closer look into what’s happening in parking garages when no one’s around.

Greg McHenry, project developer at Milhaus, says, “In a recent set of studies, we wanted to find out how spaces are actually used over the course of a 24–hour day. Our study involved counting the number of spaces occupied at every hour (even midnight) over the course of a three month period. What we found was interesting:

Capacity - The parking areas are never full. In apartment buildings where the residential occupancy rate remains above 94%, parking is always available. The Maxwell, 530 East Ohio Street, has a use rate that peaks at 80% and the Packard, 450 East Ohio Street, is never more than 70% full at any time of day.

Density - Most days, parking spaces empty out between 7:30 and 9:00 am leaving a 60-70% vacancy during much of the daytime hours. It isn’t any surprise that as people return from work, the spaces begin to fill up again, but not all at once. The incoming wave of cars increases gradually between 5:00 and 10:00 pm.” The graph below shows an average of the percentage of spaces occupied at the Packard on any given day during the study, and the results for the study on the Maxwell appear very similar. What we found, McHenry explains, “Was a lot of wasted parking space.”

The beauty of such research is that it allows companies like Milhaus to make decisions with confidence that innovative strategies used to deal with challenging issues like time, space and money have a chance of working out. “From this data,” McHenry notes, “I think it is safe to say that at minimum, 30% of residential spaces could also be used for daytime office or retail parking without a capacity issue. As for how that plays out in practice, here are some theories for consideration: [In terms of capacity,] parking at a 0.90 space/unit ratio is more than sufficient to satisfy multifamily parking needs. [In terms of density,] residential parking can share at least 30% of their spaces between the hours of 8:00am and 6:00pm. These theories are applicable on a case-by-case basis and based on tenant demographic.”

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