“Parking where it belongs” in Calle 93: private space dedicated for parking and, beside it, sidewalks that had previously been occupied by free parking space

Yes, this is almost all parking spaces! This 8-floor building in 85th Street has five floors for parking, two for its main purpose (a grocery market) and one for a terrace. This is one of the consequences that nobody expected from Bogotá’s “private only” parking policy.

One of Bogotá’s concession parking lots, built by the municipality. Each is underground, with a generous public space at ground level.

As I described before, Peñalosa’s view was that space for parking should not altogether disappear, but rather be transferred from the public to the private sphere. As Peñalosa himself says, “cars are like shoes: why should citizens expect the city administration to give them a closet to store them when they are not used?” He argued that this should be the private sector’s role and they should charge for it.However, this leaves the questions: how much parking space should the private sector provide, and should it be regulated to avoid over-supply of parking spaces?In all of Bogotá’s transport policy documents, the preoccupation around parking is the adequacy of supply. All studies and documents (mainly, the Mobility Master Plan of 2005) specify that there should be more parking spaces to cater to demand, and that “studies shall be developed to establish the necessary supply to be developed”. As in many cities, the view in Bogotá has been that if cars are stored in an off-street parking location then all problems would be solved, regardless of oversupply or lack of pricing controls.Accordingly, two main actions were established since 2000. The first was to provide a 10-year tax-exemption for property tax (‘predial’) and business tax (‘ICA’) for multi-level parking enterprises in the city. However, the structure must have only parking as its purpose, with no housing or any other business on any of the floors.The second was for the city to build five underground parking lots, the operation of which was outsourced under concession contracts. The contracts guarantee a certain level of demand to the concessionaires so that in situations of low demand there is a subsidy. According to a parking operator in Bogotá, this subsidy amounted to around 6700 million pesos (approximately 3.5 million USD) per year as of 2010 for just those five parking facilities. In the last ten years, this has generated 54 thousand million pesos (27 million dollars) in losses for government.An untouched subject in Bogotá has been the crucial issue of parking minimums in buildings of the city. As is the case in most developing cities, Bogotá has established minimum parking spaces for each land use, loosely based on standards from the US. Internationally, such standards have been widely criticized for promoting car dependence, for being based on flimsy evidence, and for harming housing affordability, among other issues.An additional regulation that results in a problematic effect is that parking lots that are part of a building are not allowed to provide its parking service to other businesses. This is has been justified on the grounds of security (Bogotá has been host to various bombings inside parking lots throughout the last 30 years). However, it has generated paradoxical situations where, for example, a supermarket in front of a night club cannot provide its parking lot as a service to the latter, and an additional parking lot must be built for this purpose in the same area.The first post in this series highlighted Bogotá’s success in reclaiming public realm from parked cars. This was a dramatic achievement.However, this post has explained the flipside, which has been an overly enthusiastic effort to provide off-street parking, without enough regard to the danger of over-supplying such parking.