Free bike parking at the 2010 Arts, Beats and Eats in Royal Oak

“Parking policy exerts great influence on mode choice and urban design.”
U.S. Parking Policies: An Overview of Management Strategies, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.

“The widespread practice of employer-subsidized parking is a significant but often overlooked determinant of mode choice for the journey to work.”
Employer-subsidized Parking and Work-trip Mode Choice, Pickrell, D. H. and Shoup, D. C.

Mode choice — whether someone choices to drive solo, carpool, take transit, bike, or walk is often determined by cost to park ones car.

Recently. this was proven very vividly in the city of Royal Oak.

With the Arts, Beats, and Eats festival moving to Royal Oak, the city looked to recover some city costs by charging for all parking around the event. The $15 parking price was high enough to prompt locals to keep their cars in their driveways and walk or bike.

And fortunately the event organizers partnered with KLM bike shops to offer free valet bike parking. There were two parking lots and both were quite full as the photo shows. In addition, bikes were parked all around the event perimeter.

Clearly, vehicle parking policy is a major determining factor in whether people drive, bike, or walk to downtown. If you provide below market pricing (including free) vehicle parking, don’t expect a lot of people to doing anything but drive solo downtown – especially downtown workers.

Recently the city of Royal Oak announced increasing the downtown parking fees a small amount – not to $15. This should help encourage biking and walking downtown, as well as ride sharing.

And according to “parking guru” Shoup, parking rates should be raised until there is a 15% parking vacancy rate. This reduces traffic levels by helping motorists find parking more quickly and it will likely encourage other modes of travel.

The key, however, is to re-invest those parking fees into the downtown.