Where Parking and Mobility Meet

By Ravali Kosaraju, PE, PTOE

In some corners of the parking industry “mobility” is considered a dirty word. For some professionals who have devoted their careers to finding new ways for people to park conveniently and safely, the current emphasis in mobility is off-putting. 

In fact, though, parking and mobility are intrinsically connected. Mobility isn’t meant to replace parking; it’s meant to collaborate with it. In fact, as counterintuitive as it may seem, parking is an essential element of mobility.

To understand this, it’s first necessary to take a step back and look at what mobility really is. Mobility is the essential element of urban life. It’s about access. Access to the things people need to live a healthy and rewarding life. Access to friends and relatives, healthcare and other essential services, entertainment, shopping options, work, and recreation opportunities. Transportation is an element of mobility, but it’s not the totality of mobility. Rather, mobility is about having high quality transportation options. 

What makes mobility options “high quality”? First is choice. Do residents and visitors have multiple transportation options? Are there opportunities to use their personal vehicles, access ride-share servicers, utilize public transit, and take advantage of micromobility? Is the community pedestrian friendly? Having a single transportation option isn’t conducive to mobility.

Time is also a key element. If it takes too long to go to and from destinations in a community, because of traffic or because there are too many stops on a bus line or subway line, you don’t have mobility. No one wants to spend hours to get to a grocery store and back, or from work and back.

Finally, safety is a key element of mobility. If it isn’t safe to walk, drive, take public transit, or bike you don’t have mobility. 

So, transportation doesn’t equal mobility. You must offer…

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If College and Healthcare Should be Free, Why Not Transportation?

First, A Mobility Wallet is Needed, Then Some Drive.

By Gabe Klein, Partner at Cityfi

Mobility What?

For the past 5 years, I have tried to get anyone that would listen, particularly in the mobility and real estate space to think about the importance of a “mobility wallet.”  Back in pre-pandemic 2017, I was working in West Palm Beach on the Downtown Mobility Plan with the city’s Mayor, Assistant City Manager, Head of Transportation, and a slew of great consultants. As we were meeting with the planning department, local developers, the Downtown Development Authority, and others, it became clear that there was a need to productize and simplify the mobility offerings in the city from the County’s transit services (Palm Trans) to the cities Circulator Trolley, the bikeshare system and so forth. The city’s first planned microunit development was also being planned (it did not come to fruition), which spurred the conversation, “Why are we going to build parking spaces that are the same size as the units themselves?” We then realized that changing zoning was (and is) hard but writing new zoning specifically for microunits was very practical and could require an alternative to building parking. But what would that be?

Like a game of telephone, I now realize that there are many variations of what a “mobility wallet” means, and what it can do for our communities. In the original context, we envisioned creating an environment where instead of a developer funding many millions of dollars in new parking, we would entice (carrots) and require them in some cases (sticks) to alternatively fund a mobility wallet for every household in their apartment building, with $150-$200+ of free mobility services including unlimited transit, bikeshare and some number of rides on Brightline rail, a ride…

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