LISBON — Just behind the Campo Grande metro station, one of the largest real estate projects under construction in Lisbon is being built. Four office buildings with space for stores, a supermarket, and three more with 245 apartments. And 2,436 parking spaces. In total, there will be nearly 5,000 public and private parking lots in the area.
This project was approved, even though congestion is a constant reality in this area. And despite the fact that, right next door, there are two metro lines and dozens of bus routes, in one of the city’s most important transportation hubs.
In Entrecampos, at the former Carnival (Feira Popular), there is already movement on the land where streets and several buildings will rise. The plan is to create 1,471 parking spaces there. Next door, at the new Fidelidade headquarters, which is at an advanced stage of construction, 431 parking spaces are being created — less than 100 meters from the Entrecampos metro and train stations.
In the eastern part of the city, where the city’s biggest urban development operations are planned for the coming years, with the construction of thousands of homes, both public and private, the scenario repeats itself. Of the 3098 parking lots to be created, 2852 are expected to be private and 246 public, an average of two parking spaces per dwelling.
The construction of parking spaces is an obligation in new projects, which is a result of the city’s urban planning rules. You might think that increasing the supply of parking in the city center would improve mobility in Lisbon. However, experts believe this may not be the case.
At a time when traffic levels in Greater Lisbon are already above pre-pandemic levels, the creation of hundreds of new parking spaces may, on the contrary, be deepening car dependency and jeopardizing the city’s goals for reducing car use. According to experts, it could be a mistake to keep increasing the parking supply: more places to leave your car could actually mean more traffic and more reasons to take the car.
And in the guidelines for Lisbon’s MOVE 2030 mobility strategy, the municipality has set itself the goal of reducing the amount of car use in journeys within the city from the 46% recorded in 2017 to a maximum of 34% by the end of the decade.
“A Colossus” of parking in Campo Grande
The 2,436 new parking spaces being created in the Campo Novo real estate project, will double the current supply in this area of Campo Grande. In the various parking lots in the vicinity, there are already around 2,200 parking spaces, a figure that doesn’t include the on-street spaces that are priced and managed by EMEL, the municipal mobility company.
“Very briefly: 2,400 spaces is a colossus and will induce traffic in equal measure,” says urban planner and urban mobility specialist Rita Castel’ Branco. By comparison, she points out, “just think that next door”, the José de Alvalade Stadium has 1,315 parking spaces.
The guidelines for construction and urban planning in Lisbon — the 2012 Municipal Master Plan — stipulate a minimum number of parking spaces for each apartment built in the city, as well as for offices or commercial areas.
In the case of housing, urban planning rules do not set maximum parking values, so the decision to build more parking is left in the hands of real estate developers. But there is obviously an undeniable link between the market value of properties and the inclusion of more parking spaces in the sale price.
Parking studies guru: “Minimum values are pseudoscience”
In Lisbon, the number of parking spaces to be created in new projects differs depending on the location. There are four zoning districts imposing different values. Near metro and train stations, the ratio of spaces to be created is lower (a novelty introduced by the 2012 PDM) depending on proximity, to 0.7 or 0.9 parking spaces for apartments with two or fewer bedrooms and to 1 or 1.25 for apartments with three or more bedrooms or larger areas.
Lisbon is not alone in imposing minimum car parking requirements. This has been common practice in cities all over the world for decades.
But that hasn’t stopped a growing chorus of criticism and doubts from experts.
Today, many not only question the relevance of setting parking minimums, but also the process by which the values that cities now define as necessary are arrived at.
In Rita Castel’ Branco’s opinion, Lisbon should follow “good practices” such as those adopted in European and North American cities:
Mexico City eliminated minimum parking requirements in 2017; Austin, Texas, eliminated the rules by the end of last year; Paris is removing 72% of surface parking spaces, freeing up space for other uses; Oslo, eliminated more than a thousand spaces.
The urban planner believes that minimum parking requirements “have very pernicious effects and encourage the use of cars”. The rules that impose minimum values “have been replaced in other countries by the opposite, by maximum parking supply ceilings”.
Donald Shoup, guru of urban studies on parking and automobile traffic, professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, has been studying the subject of minimum parking requirements for decades, having published one of the best-known critical manuals on this subject: The High Cost of Free Parking.
Creating more parking in city centers has led to more traffic and increased car dependency, says Donald Shoup. What’s more, he says, “it takes space away from other uses, from stores and restaurants and from housing to make room for cars.”
In an exclusive interview with Mensagem, the expert explains why he calls the definition of minimum values for parking “pseudoscience”.
“Because in the same way that you don’t know how many parking spaces are needed for a new restaurant, nobody [else] knows. Nobody knows where these figures come from,” says Shoup. “I’ve never been in a city where they could explain to me why the minimum parking requirements should be higher or lower. No one learns this when they study planning, even though these ratios are pointed out by city rules in a very precise way.”
Lisbon City Council confirms that “there is no traffic and transport impact study in the original allotment process, nor in the addition to the allotment”, adding that “in the original process there are traffic reports associated with the acoustic study”.
Compulsory parking limits the construction of affordable housing. The consequences of imposing minimum parking requirements may be limiting the construction of affordable housing and the construction of alternative housing solutions to the conventional model, which today combines housing with parking. In the midst of the housing crisis, the requirement to build parking is making projects more expensive, which in turn is driving real estate developers towards the luxury segment.
Donald Shoup is clear
“It’s obvious that it’s a terrible mistake to make it compulsory to build parking lots. Not only does it increase the cost of housing, but it also means that a lot of housing won’t be built.”
The construction of underground parking makes the total cost of the project up to 25% higher, according to a study published in February by Todd Litman, executive director of the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute (VTPI), Canada’s transportation research institution.
Building one parking space for a house can increase the total cost of the project by 12.5%, but building two spaces makes the construction up to 25% more expensive.
Canadian experts prove that, with the obligation to create parking, building for the luxury sector pays off compared to building affordable housing. “A developer is equally rewarded for producing 10 units of high-priced housing with three parking spaces per unit, but makes 30% less profit if they produce lower-priced housing with three parking spaces.”
What about those who do not wish to own a car?
When questioned by Mensagem, the Order of Engineers said it had no data “to assess whether the construction of affordable housing is being impacted by the costs of building parking lots” in Portugal.
But in Lisbon, the construction of housing alternatives, such as cooperatives, is threatened by parking regulations. Inês Areosa is coordinating HabiRizoma, the housing section of the integral cooperative Rizoma, and is also part of CoopArroios, a project by three cooperatives that aims to build a housing cooperative in the parish of Arroios. Most of the people involved in the project, being from “a very central area of the city, very well served by public transport, don’t feel the need to own their own car and move around more by soft means” — on foot and by bicycle.
According to Inês, the wish of many of the people who today want to build housing cooperatives in Lisbon is that the urban planning rules can be revised “case by case”, according to the real needs of the cooperative members.
In Lisbon, the model of housing cooperatives that the city council is proposing does not include the possibility for future residents to participate in the housing design process and most of them — with the exception of the project planned for Arroios — provide for basement parking, a fact that Inês Areosa has been critical of.
A 2018 study by Miriam Pinski, a transportation researcher at the University of California, also concluded that “parking requirements hide the cost of parking a car in housing costs”.
A successful example of bypassing the minimum parking requirements is the La Borda housing cooperative building in Barcelona. The residents, who participated in the design phase of the building, managed to circumvent the obligation to build parking and set a precedent that will allow other housing projects in the future not to need to build parking, which, in addition to the significant savings in the final value of the project, also avoids some of the major environmental impacts of the work, resulting from the construction of underground parking.
HabiRizoma and CoopArroios want to achieve something similar to the Barcelona project. “In discussions with the government, they managed to waive this restriction. And the condition was the installation of a bike rack.
More parking increases car usage
In a study published in 2021, carried out in the U.S. city of San Francisco, researcher and professor of urban planning at the University of California, Adam Millard-Ball, concluded that the existence of parking in residential buildings has an influence on car ownership. In other words, parking not only affects the increase in the price of construction, but also traffic and the decision to own a car.
And in Lisbon? “A few years ago, when Baixa (Downtown) didn’t have parking lots, it didn’t occur to most people to go there by car,” points out João de Abreu e Silva, a professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and a researcher in demand modeling for transport systems. Today, with hundreds of parking spaces in the Baixa area (there are around 1,800 spaces in the Restauradores, Praça da Figueira and Martim Moniz underground car parks alone) the researcher believes that because there is “the guarantee of being able to park, this helps people to decide to take the car.”
The engineer believes that minimum parking requirements “are usually overestimated and therefore have an inducing effect on car ownership and, consequently, car usage”.
“We demand parking and accessibility is never demanded,” laments Rita Castel’ Branco, who believes that Lisbon should consider imposing “limits on parking in many areas of the city”. In fact, increasing the supply of parking runs counter to Lisbon’s goals of reducing car use by 2030.
“The more we encourage car mobility, the more it imposes itself on the urban space, the more pressure we create and the less space we get to create other alternatives,” she says.
