On the streets of downtown Denver, it can feel like parking is disappearing as apartments and offices replace surface lots. But if you look up, there’s a different story playing out.
Many of the city’s new towers stand on parking “podiums” that can pack hundreds of automobiles into a project’s lower floors.
“The peculiar thing is, the public’s impression has always been there’s not enough parking,” said Chris Nevitt, the city’s manager of transit-oriented development. “Our professional judgment is that projects are being over-parked, sometimes wildly over-parked.”
In a region that has invested heavily in trains to get commuters to their downtown jobs, transit advocates worry that new parking undercuts the appeal of public transportation as it worsens traffic.
By one estimate, developers have built some 30,000 parking deck spots in the city core over the last decade — but no one knows exactly how the parking market is changing. It’s one of the biggest questions for both city leaders and for builders.
“Cars are only utilized on average about 5% of the time. They’re sitting there 95% of the time in a very expensive building. It’s really a tremendous under-utilization of resources,” said Brent Mather, the Denver design principal for the architecture firm Gensler.
Some are even talking about “peak parking” — the idea that autonomous vehicles and other changes could eliminate the need for some of the city’s parking, leaving behind useless parking stalls.
“We’re at a moment where our demand for parking is probably about as high as it will be as long as we continue to promote shared auto travel, transit and bikes. We’ll see less people needing to park in our downtown area,” said Andrew Iltis, transportation manager for the Downtown Denver Partnership.
The city already has tried to discourage new downtown parking through a handful of policies. And yet new parking arrives by the floor, often at a construction cost of $30,000 per spot.
For example, there’s Block 162, a 30-story office building under construction near a rail station in the heart of downtown. It will include 956 parking stalls — and about 50 bike spots — in 12 floors of parking, according to site plans. The developers advertise easy freeway access and 1.7 car spots per 1,000 rentable square feet.
“If all of those 956 cars were to queue at the same time, they’d stretch 3.6 miles,” wrote Ken Schroeppel, director of the Urban Design Program at CU Denver, who made the 30,000-spot estimate.
He continued: “We’re never going to meet our city’s climate change and sustainability goals if we don’t stop facilitating the mentality that everyone can get around the city in their own private automobile without any consequences.”
David Haltom, vice president for developer Patrinely Group, said Block 162 is trying to offer office tenants multiple options because parking is still a fundamental demand.
“Developers are really in a hard place right now,” said Scott Rathbun, a consultant for Apartment Appraisers & Consultants in Denver. “They’re building for the now and planning for the future — and we just don’t know how soon that future is going to arrive.”
The change
Change is already happening. Tourists are using apps like Uber instead of renting cars, so downtown hotels have seen sharp drops in parking demand, according to Joel Christensen, founder of the parking management company Parkwell. Parking decks also have seen a drop in evening traffic, he said.
“The general population has adopted alternative transportation solutions for going out and enjoying any sort of ballpark, dinner, movie,” Christensen explained.
The question is whether daytime driving habits will change, too. Millennials have bought fewer cars than previous generations, though that may partially be a result of economic conditions, CityLab reported. Also at play are scooters, car shares and autonomous vehicles. On the other hand, offices are packing desks more tightly under “open” plans — which means more potential drivers per building, Haltom said.
“If the old parking (construction) ratios continue, then we’ll probably be at a point in 10 years or so when we’ve over-saturated the market with inventory,” Christensen said. But, for now, “when it comes to the commute, they still prefer to drive.”
To some, that’s cause for concern. Each new parking deck can put hundreds of new cars onto a downtown block at rush hour, snarling traffic and even requiring off-duty traffic cops.
City changes
The city government doesn’t require parking for new projects in the city core, and developers are starting to experiment with that option.
For example, they might skip parking for studios and one-bedrooms in an apartment building. Gensler is working on a few local projects with “flexible” parking that could later be converted to space for humans. New hotels are slashing parking plans, too.
But the change has been slow. High-rise apartment developers are now building about 0.9 parking spots per bedroom, rather than one spot per bedroom in the earlier 2000s, according to data from Apartment Appraisers & Consultants.
Banks and investors fear that projects will fail because people “will go somewhere else, where they can have their car,” Rathbun said. Overall, he said, “we are seeing a change — that change is just happening slower than some people would like it to happen.”
The idea of less parking will draw a sharp reaction from some.
“We’ve had this thread many times: ‘I don’t even come downtown anymore, it’s too hard,’” said Brad Evans, who runs the urban criticism group Denver FUGLY. That perception might be a result of the competition for on-street parking, which is much cheaper than the new private parking.
“We just can’t make it impossible,” Evans said.
What’s next?
No one knows exactly how many parking spots have been built in downtown Denver, or how often they’re being used.
In the River North development area, an 18-month study by the River North Art District recently found about 18,000 parking spots. The vast majority were in private, restricted lots. And, interestingly, many were half-empty during bustling evening hours, said John Deffenbaugh, the planner behind the new transportation study.
In the short term, RiNo leaders will try to encourage better use of private parking, perhaps by advertising it to the public or encouraging property owners to share. They’re also interested in a circulating bus and other strategies.
More broadly, the Regional Transportation District is studying parking lots and their usage near transit stations through its Reimagine RTD effort.
Meanwhile, the city government is slowly introducing new policies. It has created parking “maximums” in River Mile, the planned development zone on the Elitch Gardens site. Staff also are looking at subsidized transit passes, car pool programs and other options.
Finally, the property owners themselves are making adjustments. For example, Parkwell is installing technology to change parking fees in response to demand. Some parking businesses also are considering scooter-charging stations and transit information displays.
The idea, Christensen said, is to find parking’s place in a changing transportation network.
