With this post I am taking a brief detour from the inaugural series of Graphing Parking to feature a graph for the Sightline Institute’s ongoing series, “Parking? Lots!” Alan Durning has been leading this in-depth analysis focused on parking policy in Cascadia. I encourage everyone to check out the article as well as the previous three installments.

This graph is an adaptation of the earlier “Living Space vs. Parking Space” that I did for cities in the contiguous 48. Fortunately for me, Mieko Van Kirk and Pam MacRae of the Sightline Institute did the heavy lifting in researching each city’s requirements for this version.

I have a couple of observations I’d like to add:

Two things stood out for me especially. First the common suspicion that suburbs have higher parking requirements than their principal cities has been universally upheld here. Obviously this is just one land use in a sample that includes only three major metropolitan areas, so the graph doesn’t prove definitively that this holds true as a rule. Additionally, as you can see in the previous graphs, Seattle and Portland have some of the lowest minimums in the US, so it is unsurprising that the suburbs’ are a bit higher. Nevertheless, the fact that there is not a single exception says a lot. I would be interested to see if cities with already high requirements such as Albuquerque or Jacksonville have suburbs with yet higher parking minimums.

Second, this graph challenged my assumption that smaller stand-alone cities would behave just like suburbs. It’s actually a mixed bag. Spokane, Washington and Eugene, Oregon both mimic the requirements of the larger cities. It would take looking at various other uses to find out whether this similarity applies in general, but I will no longer take for granted that a relatively small (around 200,000 in the city proper) population automatically translates to higher requirements. If there are many more similar cases out there, it would go a long way towards demonstrating that cities don’t need Manhattan-like conditions to ease up on parking minimums.

Vector versions: Cascadia apartments; Cascadia apartments landscape