The Boulder City Council has directed city officials to draft an ordinance eliminating the city’s off-street parking minimums and establishing new requirements for developers to encourage the use of alternative modes of transportation.
The effort marks a significant departure from decades-old regulations designed to accommodate cars. It aligns with broader efforts to rethink urban planning. The proposed changes are intended to use Boulder’s limited land more efficiently, reduce housing costs and promote alternatives to driving.
“It’s such an exciting time to be making these kinds of improvements for our community,” Councilmember Ryan Schuchard said during a council study session on Jan. 23.
Across most of Boulder, city code requires developers to include at least one off-street parking space per housing unit. For commercial projects, parking minimums are tied to square footage. These regulations have led to nearly twice as many parking spaces as the city needs, according to a 2024 study by Fox Tuttle, a Denver-based consulting firm.
Transportation reform advocates argue parking minimums are inflating housing costs. The cost of parking varies, but a single underground parking space is estimated to cost up to $50,000 to build. This expense drives up the cost of new housing units and may force developers to prioritize parking over housing due to space constraints. They say the regulations also contribute to urban heat by creating sprawling blacktop parking lots and make streets less safe for cyclists and pedestrians by encouraging car dependency.
The likely changes to city code follow a 2024 Colorado law that takes effect in June, prohibiting cities like Boulder from enforcing parking minimums near bus and train stops. But some city councilmembers had already indicated they wanted to go further by eliminating parking minimums citywide.
City staff on Jan. 23 also outlined a proposed transportation demand management policy designed to reduce car dependency. Under the plan, developers would have to provide a financial guarantee in perpetuity to fund programs such as free bus passes for tenants or employees. The ordinance is also likely to require design standards to make it easier for people to get around on a bike, on foot or by other means besides a car.
While most councilmembers support the parking reforms, some raised concerns over the potential costs for businesses to provide incentives and the possibility of higher parking fees for drivers.
“I do want to just push back and just make mention that we’ve been trying to pull down costs to businesses and make things less onerous,” Councilmember Tara Winer said.
“I do have some concerns just around increased costs for visitors coming in,” Councilmember Taishya Adams said. “It just sets up our community to be even, you know, more elitist, and that’s not what we want.”
Councilmember Mark Wallach questioned whether the reforms would have meaningful impact, citing a recent survey that found the city is still falling short of its goal to reduce single-occupancy vehicle trips to 20% by 2030. A 2023 survey found that about 35% of trips were made in vehicles with only one person.
“Despite our best efforts, we have neither compelled nor induced the general population to get out of their cars and ride our non-existent mass transit system or ride bikes,” Wallach said. He added, “Our planning processes have to acknowledge the fact that people are going to continue to drive.”
Additional proposals from city officials included adjustments to on-street parking rules, such as expanding paid parking zones in residential neighborhoods and reducing the number of guest and visitor permits in areas with limited parking. They also suggested creating a “digital mobility wallet” to provide credits for parking or alternative transportation options, such as e-scooters or bus rides.
Councilmembers also indicated they are interested in bike parking design requirements for new developments. While inverted U-racks are already required in public spaces for new projects, councilmembers want more secure bike parking that can accommodate e-bikes and cargo bikes.
Two councilmembers suggested retroactively applying bike rack design standards to existing businesses. Such a requirement would likely require replacing “cora” or “coat hanger” racks, which are often difficult to use for bikes with baskets or larger tires. However, city officials said that retroactive regulations would require more legal analysis and fall outside the scope of their current parking reform work plan.
Councilmembers have not yet scheduled a public hearing for a parking reform ordinance. A vote is expected before the end of June.
I heard staffer Cris Hagelin quote something like $28K per structured parking space tonight. My recall is more like upwards of $140K and $200K, up at the Moxy for a structured parking space. I think the minimum may be $50K for a surface space. He must be using very old data. Call me out if I’m wrong!
Of course this would compel an even stronger argument for the elimination of parking minimums, for the effect on land value, which I’m not supportive of. Boulder’s already saturated and it will only drive up density, congestion, services and the cost of housing. I believe it was foundational to the Jared Polis initiative for increasing population through his TOD density reform, multiplex and ADU incentives, what Elon Musk has lately coined “pro-natalism”. Jared’s interested in the White House in ’28. He’d be right at home.
Lynn, I agree with your comment about saturated. These efforts to shoe horn in another thousand or ten thousand people are idiotic, because we’ll be at the same spot that we’re at now, but with worse quality of life.
Boulder has tons of room for new residents and ending parking mandates can help. If we didn’t have such much of the city dominated by huge roads and parking lots there would be more space for people and it would be easier for thousands to commute, get groceries, and go to school. Efforts to block new residents only segregates communities on the basis of wealth. I hope to see the day when there is much denser development in Boulder and many less cars.
Who’s using the parking spaces? residents or workers driving in from outside the city?
Tourists? Where is the shortage? Business districts or residential areas?
What are the peak demand times for parking? Where are they? Is the demand caused by housing, work, shopping or something else? Would meters in crowded areas reduce demand.
Any studies of the impact of the easing of residency limits has had on parking needs? If a house that formerly housed 3 adults now has 5 or 6 or 7, how many more cars has that added?
Maybe cutting back on development is the answer.
JB, yes, cut back on development. This measure lowers the cost of development without a proven solution.
me thinks the city council is living in a fantasy world & needs a reality check rather than impose its version of reality on the city. you can’t strong-arm people into not driving. positive reinforcement works better than punishment. why not come up with a way to discourage excessive driving by rewarding people who drive less rather than punish those who, for many reasons, like, say, disabilities or long commutes, have to drive more?
Jamie, I agree. And the incentives and infrastructure should be put in place first. Free shuttles, vans, etc. with an app, so I can get from my house down to Broadway and then catch a bus or van that runs frequently. So free transportation is part of the reward, but you could also have a bike lane that reads a tag on your bike with rewards scaled to frequency, so that the more you ride the more you are compensated. Plus, if I have my own bike, that should be acknowledged since that reduces the costs of providing transportation. And in the end we need to see that system working before we take out the old system. Of course, such a system has lots of costs, but you can phase it in perhaps with some costs transferred to people that continue to drive. Instead the council is taking away costs from development all at once without a corresponding amount of spending on a workable solution.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/2/3-major-problems-with-parking-minimums
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/20/business/parking-minimums-cars-transportation-urban-planning/index.html#:~:text=Affordable%20housing%2C%20environmental%20and%20public,spot%20in%20New%20York%20City.&text=It%20costs%20about%20$28%2C000%20to,a%20long%20train%20of%20consequences.%E2%80%9D
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/2/3-major-problems-with-parking-minimums
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/20/business/parking-minimums-cars-transportation-urban-planning/index.html#:~:text=Affordable%20housing%2C%20environmental%20and%20public,spot%20in%20New%20York%20City.&text=It%20costs%20about%20$28%2C000%20to,a%20long%20train%20of%20consequences.%E2%80%9D
Agree with Councilwoman Adams. Making Boulder more elitist. And the price of houses with parking spots just increased (again). Folks, cars aren’t going away. And with electric cars on the rise, where will we locate the plug-in infrastructure for all the cars parked on the street? And who will pay for building that infrastructure???? Oh right, taxpayers. Boulder City Council, congratulations for ensuring a huge future cost for Boulder residents. Honestly that’s all you keep doing to us.
If we didn’t have as many cars, costs would be much lower. I live car free in Boulder and it works great. Of course not everyone can live car free but imposing cars on everyone by planning everything around low density development and huge parking lots just makes us more divided and subservient to spiraling costs in road maintenance, gasoline, insurance, and road injuries. We could do a lot better for Boulder, the environment, and equality if we planned Boulder around bikes, transit, and sidewalks rather than 2 tons vehicles for individuals.
I’m looking for information about CU purchasing properties on the north side of Colorado west of 28th for development of a student housing complex. Does anyone know the intended size, especially height, of the project or plans for access?
It’s amazing how much pointless virtue-signaling and busywork the City Council can come up with to avoid discussing real economic/housing issues. This won’t address or improve either of those things; meanwhile they’re still foolishly fighting the FAA about erasing the airport. Will there ever be a single meeting or dare say even discussion about an Occupancy Tax to end this nauseating tax shelter/write-off haven that Boulder’s become for the overpriced commercial and “luxury” residential property market? Me thinks NOT
Wallach reiterates Boulder’s nonexistent mass transit system. Fix that and compelling people not to drive just might fly.
That’s a high bar to cross Joan.
RTD should at least make sure all the buses run on the weekend.
I do use public transit as often as I can. I have learned from experience that it is rarely practical. In most cases, public transit takes 2-3 times longer to get me to my destination. I am just not going to ride a bike in freezing temperatures or when there is snow and ice on the ground and I don’t know anyone who will. Boulder is not NYC. Most of the city is not walkable. We don’t have cheap, efficient, convenient mass transit. We don’t even have light rail like much of Denver metro. I am very much looking forward to the day that I don’t need a car. For me, that will be when I can summon a ride from my phone and have an autonomous electric vehicle pick me up in five minutes or less and take me point to point for the same or less than it costs to do so in my car. Unfortunately, that day is not here and is still many years away.
Anyone advocating the removal of parking spaces should only be taken seriously under one condition: you cannot own a car. If you truly believe we should all be taking public transit, riding bikes, and walking everywhere, then you clearly don’t need a car. If you own a car and advocate these policies, you can’t be taken seriously. Simple litmus test, if you want to get rid of cars start with your own. This proposal will lead to housing with zero parking spaces. The plan is no parking near public transit, no parking where you live, no parking where you shop, dine, etc. It’s practically a complete ban on cars. It’s a pipe dream and totally tone def to the needs of the population.
Well put. See my comment above.
I don’t own a car and solely take public transit and bike (including in this snow and ice). First it is possible, I hardly feel like I have a worst ability to transport myself to needs and wants and when I do the minimal pain is well worth the thousands of dollars I save each year. Still it should be far easier to bike and take transit which is why reforms like eliminating parking minimums are an important step .. but as you say it isn’t the only necessary reform.
It sounds like a move towards the very freedom reduced, joy squelching and limiting life of a S.M.A.R.T. city. My mind keeps returning to the highly desirable (by me) ZEAL the east end of Pearl St in the Hyatt Place area near the railroad, great eatery – impossible parking. I have a long wheel base vehicle and trying to bend it around the corners involved in parking in the underground structure and then having to pay for that with machines so restricted in their functioning that they often don’t work is crazy making. It punishes the customer, punishes the business and makes it very hard for a business to entice customers to it. Who profits? Some out of state or out of country parking garage owner? The city councilmen who approved it and get a kick back? Why are we doing this to ourselves? Let’s not make Boulder an impossible and unpleasant town to live and do business in. These new ideas in urban planning do not make for home towns, they make for bureaucratic nightmare cities. No to SMART city infrastructure attempts.
In my opinion, Boulder is an impossible and unpleasant town to live and do business in because there are so many cars, huge roads, and parking lots.
Yes Phil, but Jared supported it. I wonder how folks will allow their cars to be forcibly removed from them. I also oppose the Family Hostile Vibrant Neighborhoods, but I don’t believe that ordinance has yet been approved, so we have some say on form based code for that. I think that the parking minimums removal is limited to sq. footage distance from Transit Oriented Development , or Jared wouldn’t have been able to pull it off at all. But it has an effect that “drives” density. And congestion.
There are over 3,700 City of Boulder public parking spaces downtown.
10s of thousands of empty spots throughout the city. Time to convert empty parking lots to housing.
Go downtown on the weekend, you won’t find a bunch of empty spaces. And the tens of thousands of spaces are private, on the street, or in your imagination. There’s a trade off between more housing and quality of life. We’re already there. When you don’t get through the traffic light, there’s too much traffic. Take out parking, and you’ll get people driving around and around until a space opens up.
And what kind of bargain is the city striking with developers? The developer saves $50k, $100k or more per space, and we get a Lime scooter or an enhanced bike rack. We’ve seen this movie before: remember how the developers were going to build affordable housing. Oh yeah, they didn’t; they chipped in some chump change, so the city could build affordable housing. And the City couldn’t figure out why the developers weren’t building affordable housing, so they hired a consultant for $50k to tell us that it was cheaper to pay the city. In summary, Council has a dumb idea, developers win, consultants win, people in Boulder lose.
Instead of increasing congestion by eliminating parking and expecting people to use the non existence mass transit, maybe we could put solar panels on top of the parking lots. This would help reduce to our carbon footprint and still keep Boulder livable.
Congestion is caused by cars. Public transit does exist in Boulder but it should be much better. More solar panels would help but the carbon cost of cars is so large that we won’t be able to make any significant progress on saving the climate unless it is possible for most people to drive far far less or not own a car. This includes electric cars – for example a diesel bus is more climate friendly than an electric car per passenger mile. We can do this by building housing where people want to live so that more transport is available by foot, by expanding our transit to be frequent fast and reliable, and streets that prioritize bikers and walkers over cars.
Great idea!
Go to Hong Kong. Super dense and super expensive. The most desirable places and things are expensive.
During college, I lived in a medium sized European city as an exchange student. My host family was an elderly couple. They owned one car. We used public transportation for everything or walked. Their city was dense, ie, the grocery store, bakery, butcher, pharmacy, park, and doctor, were all less than a block to one block away. My school was a mile walk (or a bus trip) from home. I NEVER looked at the bus schedule the entire time I lived there as their buses ran so frequently that if one was pulling away, the next was soon to appear and you could hop on. I actually did not even know my host family had a vehicle until they decided to take me to their tiny village one weekend which was an hour and a half away.
Fast forward to my life here….I have a car. One of my kids has a car. My spouse has a car. My spouse also has a work provided ecopass he has NEVER used (despite wanting to use it) as the rtd schedule would add 1.5 hours to his commute EACH way. I want my other two younger kids to take rtd to school, but the rtd schedule makes it unrealistic and their school is too far to bike/walk. (Not to mention bike theft, it is an issue!) My point is, unless the public transportation situation changes drastically it is completely unrealistic to expect people to give up their vehicles. We are a family who is motivated to utilize public transportation but yet we own three vehicles. By removing space for vehicles without a salient plan to improve public transportation options is ridiculous. And I can see how there is a push for density, but what I am seeing built is not even close to a small 1-2 block sized community that contains all one needs so it is unrealistic to take away the ability to economically park ones vehicle without thinking through how people complete the essential tasks of life. I cannot imagine my elderly host family of my college days taking rtd in Boulder to go to the bakery, grocery store, etc. Who is in charge of this plan? You need to work for the people to think through the nuts and bolts of this decision before you proceed with this plan.