So says San Francisco Zoning Administrator and Assistant Planning Director Lawrence Badiner in reference to his City's 2005 ordinance requiring new residential buildings to reduce parking requirements and promote transportation options. "The idea is that if there are fewer cars in the world, more people use the Muni (local transit line) and there are less carbon emissions. It's all about sustainability." We learn this from the always interesting Neil Takemoto at his Cool Town Studios blog in a post entitled Developers Provide Green Incentives to Home Buyers (November 13, 2008).
Mr. Takemoto, who's blog has for years been on the cutting edge of placemaking development trends, says there's an emerging market for "green housing and transportation." He brings a few examples from the the bay area in Oakland and San Francisco where developers are offering free carsharing services and memberships, free bikes, bike repair lounges and lockers and free annual transit passes. And we learn that as of September, 2008 Oakland requires all developers with projects of more than 50 residential units or 50,000 s.f. of non-residential space to complete a "transportation demand management" plan, including strategies to increase bicycle, pedestrian, transit and car-share use. We also find from Neil that in San Francisco the parking requirements are as low as one parking space per four units in some neighborhoods. Now that's aggressive.
In our area these kinds of requirements have been in place since the late 1980's in Montgomery County (Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance) and the City of Alexandria (TMP Ordinance) and since 1990 in Arlington (TDM Policy). And to good effect. We'll come back and share some examples and findings in the future. It should be noted that the District and Fairfax are now exploring wasy to implement these kinds of TDM policies with new development too. What's interesting is that while these policies seem to have generally started as way to fight traffic congestion, they are now gaining additional currency as a green or sustainability issues. Let's hope more areas catch on to these good practices, regardless of the reason.
Chris Hamilton is the Commuter Services Chief for Arlington County, manager of CommuterPageBlog and The TDM Professional blog and is a biking/Metrorail commuter from Alexandria, Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C.
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