Parking Management and Downtown Land Development: The Case of Downtown Berkeley, CA

This paper presents findings from a study of land use, parking, mode choice, and housing and jobs development in downtown Berkeley, CA, a medium-sized city with four decades of experience with parking management and transit-oriented development. The paper sheds light on the multiple roles that parking management, including reduced parking requirements and parking pricing, can play in a downtown area. It also illustrates the performance of transit-oriented development in smaller cities.
Berkeley's long support of high quality transit, restricted parking, and walking and biking facilities has resulted in transit, walk, and bike usage far higher than US averages. These high mode shares are found among residents, workers, and shoppers. Nevertheless, traffic is heavy, parking is full, and concerns about the parking and traffic impacts of infill development persist.
The surveys of downtown shoppers, workers, and residents and the study of parking occupancy and turnover show that infill projects perform well in terms of traffic, transit use, and economic development, and justify the low parking requirements that the city has adopted for such developments.
Parking shortages are caused in large part by overtime parking, facilitated by broken meters and by meter feeding by employees; the effective supply of on-street parking could be increased through better enforcement. Enforcement, in turn, would divert some street parkers to garages and others to less expensive walk, bike and transit modes.

Elizabeth Deakin et al., Parking Management and Downtown Land Development: The Case of Downtown Berkeley, CA, Univ. of Cal. (2004), available at http://www.cityofberkeley.info/uploadedFiles/Planning_(new_site_map_walk-through)/Level_3_-_General/TRB2004-003099.pdf.