Archive for August 31st, 2009

Reading this interesting post led me to John Van Horn’s always provocative (for people who think parking can be provocative) blog. There, in a Shoupian riff on inefficient government-set minimum parking requirements (for so-called “free parking”), he mentioned an interesting behavioral twist he dubbed the “Costco Effect” (implicit in this is the assertion that Costco somehow has parking lots that tend to fill up quickly; I don’t know if Costco as a policy builds smaller lots than, say, Wal-Mart):

As I read through the original report one comment stood out. It mentioned that by having fewer parking spaces, even in smaller cities and towns, people would begin to change their habits and, for instance, make fewer trips to the store and stock up when they did go. This is sort of like leaving a pile of stuff at the bottom of the stairs and then carrying it up when you got a complete load rather than making numerous hikes up and down.

Our behavior has been altered by the lack of parking. Costco’s sales aren’t. This is a rocking store, among the top in the chain. They have limited parking, but it doesn’t seem to hurt business. And we smart shoppers still buy the same amount we always would. However , dare we say it, the parking, or lack of it, has caused us to think more clearly about how we go about shopping.

This is an interesting corollary to another “Costco Effect” that’s been identified by
Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Leonard Lee of Columbia Business: Essentially, that people spend more at discount clubs with fees than those without. I’ll leave it up to you to draw any linkages between the two effects.

I’m currently down in Savannah, Georgia, at the meeting of the Governors Highway Safety Association. At an afternoon panel I was struck by a brief line of inquiry let out by Michael Ronkin. Briefly, he asked the audience to consider the word “pedestrian.” If you see someone coming down the hall toward you in an office, do you think of them as a pedestrian? If you were hiking in the woods and someone came walking along, would you say, ‘here comes a pedestrian’? The word pedestrian, Ronkin suggested, only makes sense in relation to traffic, and I suppose it’s a function of our auto-centric society that to do something we were born to do, indeed evolved over a long time to do, should be considered a “mode,” an “activity,” or some kind of “road user.”

Strange too is the confluence of its meaning; not just the sense of a walker but from the Latin pedester, meaning “plain, prosaic.” This contrasts with equester, i.e., one who goes by horse, which is decidedly not equated with the plain or prosaic. Was there even some kind of pre-automobile bias against people walking? I don’t have in front of me, but if any book would have an answer it’s presumably Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust. The irony, of course, is now that it’s driving that’s become pedestrian, and walking which is novel.

Following the talk the group assembled for a “pedestrian safety walking tour” of the historic center (such an exercise would be futile in the suburbs) of Savannah, one of the country’s “ten most walkable cities” (in part because of the squares originally put in as part of a defense regimen, and one wonders here about a thesis to be written on military defense planning and walkable cities; i.e., medieval city walls as the original urban growth boundaries). Even walkable Savannah has its issues; Bay Street, for example, is 12% heavy truck traffic (to and from the port), lumbering down nine-foot lanes — as the city’s engineer explained it, people feel they are going faster than they really are, because of their size. Then there’s Paula Deen. Her “Lady and Sons” restaurant has become so popular (following her rise on TV) that massing waiting crowds often develop on the corners; the city eventually installed a four-way stop.

But once one is on the lookout for it, one realizes how strange that word — pedestrian — is; waiting at a marked crosswalk for vehicles to stop — some do, many don’t (though the city has seemed more concerned with jaywalking than “failure to yield” by vehicles) — one sees huge signs, warning those same drivers to “Stop for Pedestrians.” I thought, ‘wait, who’s a pedestrian? Is that me?’ Simply by going out for a walk I’ve become this strange being, studied by engineers, my rights presumably codified by signs (why not: “Stop for People”). On the same signs were often attached additional signs advising not to give to panhandlers (and call 911 if physically intimidated), subtly equating walking with being exposed to an urban menace (in some places you might be considered the menace).

Lastly, I wanted to check out a restaurant that had been recommended. I punched it into the maps app on the iPhone, and noted that the default setting for giving directions, and journey times, is for car. The time mentioned was 3 minutes. Walking, the third option, was 9 minutes. I doubt that the time listed for car includes walking to the car — that moment when all of us become pedestrians — finding parking at the destination, walking to the destination.