Pretty much everyone hates parking podiums.

For one, they're almost universally reviled from an architectural and aesthetic standpoint. And, even when they're built unobtrusively—as with the upcoming Broadway @ 4th building, where floors 2 through 6 will be dedicated to parking—they're a massive wasted opportunity to provide more space for people to live and work in some of the most desirable areas in the city. The same goes for pretty much every parking structure with more spaces than drivers, but podiums have a particularly unpleasant effect on the street-level experience of urban denizens. With the changing demographics of cities and the declining demand for parking in urban areas, more needs to be done to mitigate the blighting impacts of overbuilt parking facilities, now and especially into the future.

In recognition of this need, the Los Angeles City Council last year adopted a bicycle parking ordinance that allowed developers to replace up to 30 percent of their required parking spaces with bicycle parking. Not only does this make bicycling a more attractive choice, it reduces the total space that developers need to devote to parking (bikes and cars together), lowering the cost of new development and opening up land to a more diverse set of uses. In a place like Downtown LA, in addition to many other transit-oriented cities around the country, a better option would be to simply eliminate parking minimums entirely, but the bike parking ordinance is a start.

In that spirit (and because parking podiums suck) we should provide another incentive: allowing developers to reduce their parking burden with spaces dedicated to car-share services like Zipcar and Car2Go*.