Human Transit

how sim city greenwashes parking

 

Here's a shot of an edge city from the new SimCity. Notice what's missing?

  (Source: BLDGBLOG)

From Geoff Manaugh's interview of the new SimCity's designer, Stone Librande:

Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?

Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots. 

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive. 

In other words:  SimCity deliberately misleads players about parking because if they showed parking in its true dimensions, it might make dysfunctional land use patterns look (and act) dysfunctional.  

And we can't have that.  

Sim City contains other examples where the real math underlying how cities work is distorted to appeal to supposedly prevailing prejudices, but few are as egregious as this one.  Practically any working urban planner will tell you that managing parking, without a SimCity tooth fairy that builds it for free underground, is a dominant factor in urban form and perhaps the biggest single obstacle to denser and more sustainable forms of development.  Change that assumption, as SimCity does, and you're working in fairyland.

And it's refreshing to hear the designer confess that the distortion is intentional -- a lie rather than a confusion.  

Game makers can say it's only a game, just as movies that glorify violence are only movies.  But like movies, seemingly realistic and immersive simulation games teach people to misunderstand how the world works in a way that makes them less effective in dealing with the world.  Of course, SimCity has been doing this  -- with an explicitly anti-urban bias that belies its name -- since the beginning.

the photo that explains almost everything (updated!)

You've seen photos like this. A large group of people, with images comparing the amount of precious urban space they take depending on the mode of transport they use.  This new one is by Australia's Cycling Promotion Fund.

This photo makes at least three important points, two of them probably not intended.  In this one image you can see that:

• Bike racks on buses (and most other transit) can never be more than a niche market. 

The rack on the bus in pic #1 carries two bikes, which is great for those two people.  But if all the bikes in pic #2 try to get onto the bus in pic #1, we have a geometric impossibility.  Bike racks are already as large as they can be if the driver is still to be far enough forward to drive safely.  A non-folding bike inside a transit vehicle takes the space of several passengers, so could fairly be accommodated only at several times the fare.  In the ideal sustainable future, you will have to park your bike at the station, or return your rental bike, just as Europeans do.  If transit does accommodate your bike, you really should pay a fare premium that reflects the rough number of passenger spaces displaced, or the supply/demand ratio for 2-3 bike racks vs 20 people wanting to use them.

• "Personal Rapid Transit," or small demand-responsive buses, or driverless cars that work like taxis, will never, ever, ever substitute for surface transit in high-demand urban settings, such as where all these people want to travel. 

 Dreamers along these lines may well be right about many suburban areas, where demand is sparse and the land use pattern precludes efficient transit.  But when all the people in this picture want to travel, driverless cars may take less space than the cars shown here, but they will still take far more space than a bus would.  The scarcity of space per person is part of the very definition of a city, as distinct from suburbia or rural area, so the efficiency with which transport options use that space will always be the paramount issue.  

(Of course, this very thought experiment presumes that we will actually achieve, and culturally accept, driverless cars that require very little space between them, in which the prevention of ghastly accidents -- especially with pedestrians and bikes who may appear with zero warning and minimal stopping distance -- is achieved through the absolute infallibility of human-designed hardware and software.)

To make the same point more generally:

• In cities, urban space is the ultimate currency.  

We spend too much time talking about what things cost in dollars and not enough about what they cost in space.  That, of course, is because urban space is perversely priced to encourage inefficient uses of it and discourage efficient ones.  If you're going to claim to be able to visualize how technology will change the world of 2040 -- as the techno-futurists claim to do -- you should also visualize what a political system ruled by people now under 40 would look like.  These people are much less emotionally attached to cars, care about environmental outcomes much more, and value urban space much more than their parents do.  Given that the revolution in urban pricing has already begun (see the London and Singapore congestion charges, and the San Francisco and Auckland dynamic parking systems), isn't it foolish to assume that today's assumptions about how we apportion urban space will still rule your techno-utopia?

UPDATE:  A reader points out one other key point, which is that

• the photo understates the space requirements of bikes compared to the other two.  

Once you put these three systems in motion, the cars and bus will need more space in one dimension -- forward and back.  However, in motion, the mass of bikes will expand in two dimensions, it will need to be both longer and wider for all the bikes to move safely.  This could have been rectified in the photo by consciously spacing the bikes to a distance where riders would feel comfortable at a brisk cycling speed that ensures not only stopping distance but also space for passing.  Masses of cyclists on a recreational ride may all agree to ride in tight formation at the same speed, but in daily life cycling infrastructure must accommodate the the fact that people in a cycling crowd will have different desires and intentions around speed, which affects lateral spacing and stopping distance.

the price is right: market-based parking comes to new zealand (guest post)

This guest post is by my friend and colleague Stuart Donovan, with whom I've worked on a range of excellent transit planning projects over the years.  Stuart is the head of the New Zealand office of MRCagney consultants, a credentialed engineer, and the manager of numerous successful transit and transport policy research projects around New Zealand and beyond.
 

For me parking is like sex, money, and religion – it’s one of those things you avoid bringing up in polite conversation. The reason is that most cities have an over-supply of under-priced parking, yet most inhabitants of those cities believe exactly the opposite; that there is never enough parking.

Changing this belief is tough work. A large part of it seems to reflect a common assumption that even as cities grow they will be able to continue to provide similar levels of parking as they have had in the past. Deeper analysis suggests this assumption is invalid.

It’s invalid because economic and geometric realities prevent cities from expanding their parking at the same rate as they grow. In terms of off-street parking, higher land values tend to squeeze out space-intensive activities. In terms of on-street parking, limited kerb space and a range of competing uses, such as bus stops, constrains the degree to which more on-street parking can be provided.

For these two reasons, the supply of off- and on-street parking will always struggle to keep pace with the rate that cities grow. And of course combining constrained supply with growing demand will almost inexorably lead to higher prices. This economic relationship is the main reason why larger cities tend to command higher parking prices, other factors remaining equal.

During the 1950s many cities tried to subvert this economic equation. They implemented regulations that required new developments to provide large amounts of off-street parking. But minimum parking requirements simply meant that the cost of parking was paid for by developers, instead of users. The cost of parking was quite simply subsumed elsewhere in the economy.

Minimum parking requirements had a number of unintended impacts. Their primary impact was to create an over-supply of parking and lower the direct cost of parking for drivers. In this way, minimum parking requirements actually made a difficult problem even more challenging, because – over several decades – they have reinforced people’s cultural expectation for cheap parking.

Transport planners recognise that parking is a key influence on the travel decisions that people make. Aside from access to a vehicle, the price and availability of parking is probably the single most important determinant of whether people choose to drive.

So people who are passionate advocates for more efficient passenger transit, such as most readers of this blog, should also be passionate about addressing our parking issues. It’s hard to avoid the fact that abundant parking and efficient passenger transit are mutually exclusive outcomes.

But what can we do to address parking issues?

The solution to off-street parking supply seems quite clear: Cities should remove minimum parking requirements and allow developers to determine how much off-street parking they need for their development. This will usually be less than what minimum parking requirements currently stipulate.

Progress towards the removal of minimum parking requirements has already occurred in a number of cities around the world. My home city of Auckland, New Zealand (population circa 1.5 million) removed minimum parking requirements in the city centre in 1996 and has not looked back: More people now use passenger transit to access the city centre in peak hour than use private vehicles.

Fewer cities have made progress, however, with the way they manage on-street parking. Most still rely on time-limits (e.g. one hour) overlaid with paid parking. The combination of time-limits and paid parking creates an inconvenient situation, e.g. when your visit to the dentist takes 2 hours instead of 45 minutes you may return to your car to find that in addition to having holes where you wisdom teeth used to be your wallet has been further emptied by a parking infringement.

Reforming on-street parking policies often become bogged down in comments from residents and businesses about parking being “too expensive.” And when confronted with such questions many parking reform proposals die an unnatural death. But most discussions of cost focus only on the hourly rate, rather than the cost of infringements. I would argue that the latter needs to be included in discussions of cost, because it drastically changes the nature of the conversation.

Until recently San Francisco was the only city that had really forged ahead with major on-street parking reforms, under the measured encouragement of Donald Shoup and aided by a federal transport research grant. San Francisco’s approach to on-street parking reforms is brilliant in its simplicity: They recognised that time-limits were a relatively inefficient way of managing demand, especially in areas where pay parking also applied.

In most locations with pay parking, San Francisco has sought to remove time-limits. In these areas they now rely almost solely on prices to manage demand: If demand goes up then hourly rates also go up, and vice versa. If you’re interested you can (and should!) read more about San Francisco’s trail-blazing approach to on-street parking policy on the SFpark website. The most interesting result is that revenue from meters went up, but revenue from infringements went down.

So San Francisco had effectively substituted meter revenue for infringement revenue; and while many people hate paying for parking, in my experience they have an even deeper hatred towards parking tickets, primarily because it makes them feel “unlucky”. Until recently SFpark was a lone super nova in an otherwise cold and dark parking universe.

Until yesterday when my home city of Auckland, New Zealand announced that it was applying to join San Francisco’s elite parking club. Auckland has followed a similar line to San Francisco, by removing all time-limits from on-street car-parks the city centre and instead relying on prices to manage demand. They point to the following advantages of this approach:

• Easier to understand – so long as you’re paid up you’re good to go. No need to search for a car-park that allows you to park for as long as you need.
• Simpler to enforce – parking wardens only have to check that the ticket is valid, which greatly expedites the enforcement process.
• Reduced street clutter – a consistent approach to on-street parking means that only a few “Pay and display” signs are required, rather than a forest of confusing restrictions.

One of Auckland’s interesting tweaks is the implementation of a free 15 minute grace period, which is intended to replace the need for so many dedicated taxi and loading zones (drop off/pick up). Basically, with this grace period every space in the city becomes a potential drop off / pick up space, so long as you don’t park for longer than 15 minutes, which results in more efficient utilisation.

Overall, Auckland expects that the changes will be broadly revenue neutral. But this hides a very significant shift in where revenue comes from. Whereas in the current situation a large proportion of revenue is derived from those unlucky people visiting the dentist (i.e. through infringements), in the future revenue from parking infringements is expect to decline, whereas meter revenue increases.

One of the less obvious benefits of the approach taken by Auckland and San Francisco, however, is that they’ve set out an agreed policy process for setting parking prices. That is, they have developed a transparent formula through which parking prices are adjusted in response to demand. This greatly reduces opportunities for public/political interference in the setting of parking prices.

It’s now not so easy for individual residents or businesses to demand lower prices on their particular street, because the prices are determined by the policy. While people can seek to change the policy itself (indeed that is their democratic right) in doing so they are at least required to engage with broader questions such as: How would this impact parking across the entire city centre?

The most telling sign of the broad-based stakeholder support for Auckland’s proposed changes is the comes from the Chief Executive of Heart of the City (business association) Alex Swney, who said:

“For many years parking has been seen as a major reason not to come into the city. We see today’s announcement as a significant change in approach to parking in the city.  It recognises the ‘moving feast’ of parking demands of our businesses and their customers. It’s a major step forward and we are sure we will be looking back in a year and see significant improvement as a result.”

As one of the people that contributed to the development of this policy I’m quite biased in its favour. I can’t help but sense that this represents a big step in the direction of more transparent and sustainable on-street parking policy in Auckland.

As someone who regularly visits cities overseas it also makes me ask: Which city will be next?

further cause for canadian triumphalism

Yesterday I posted some data we were playing with, suggesting that Canadian cities have consistently higher transit ridership than similar US ones.  Commenter Matt pointed me to his own charts on the subject, which are based on Paul Mees's database.  One of Matt's charts makes use of citywide average density, a stat to which I'm allergic for reasons explained here and here.  But here's the other one.  

The y-axis here is "Journey to Work" (JTW) mode share, the percentage of commutes to work that go by transit.  It's striking how completely the three countries' cities are sorted out.  Only Edmonton lags from the Canadian pace and ends up right on the Australian trendline, while Sydney does the opposite.

Why are US cities so much weaker on this score?  Lots of factors, but a big one has to be the decentralization of employment.  The classic suburban business park, which is pretty much impossible for transit to serve effectively, is far more prevalent in the US than in Canada or Australia.  From what I know of Vancouver and Australian cities, most business park development has some nexus with industry, whose space needs justify the low density.  Recently we've seem some more American-inspired versions, but nothing on the scale and extent that's common around US cities.

The concentration of employment is part of why Sydney looks so good.  Sydney is Australia's most multi-polar city, with many secondary mixed-use highrise activity centres.  These centres are dense enough to have significant parking costs, and are almost always right on the rail system.  The result is a multi-directional pattern of demand that's relatively easy to serve well.

Still, Sydney's place on this chart, surging up onto the Canadian trendline, is also a reminder of the essential role of negative incentives -- sticks rather than just carrots.  Sydney shows 22% of all journey-to-work trips on transit, citywide, but this is driven mostly by the massive and constrained CBD, where over 70% of all commutes are on transit.  If you surveyed the riders on a crush-loaded non-air-conditioned train in midsummer, I doubt many would say that they're on the train because it's a wonderful service.  They're on the train because parking in the Sydney CBD can cost more than $60/day.

In any case, we're on the leadup to Canadian Thanksgiving, so I thought this little occasion for Canadian triumphalism would be apt. 

UPDATE:  Just to clarify, the dots here represent entire metro areas, not just incorporated central cities.

new blog to watch: paul barter on parking

Paul Barter, an Australian transport expert based at the National University of Singapore, has a new blog project, Reinventing Parking.  From his Introductory message:

A key aim of this blog is to help inform the parking policy choices confronting decision-makers and communities. I have my own views of course and I will not be shy to share them. However, I mostly want to help you to clarify your own thinking on parking policy. I want to help you understand the implications of the various parking policy choices, so you can choose your own, with 'eyes wide open'.  If you have very firm ideas on parking policy, this site may shake them up a little perhaps.

Parking policy plays a huge role in shaping metropolitan areas and their transport patterns, yet parking is usually planned with little thought for its power. It can create enormous cross-subsidies in society, yet most people hardly notice. Parking policy choices can be pivotal for cities, yet there is widespread confusion over the nature of those choices and what they imply. We need to do much better.

Just today I was in a meeting where I was asked for my opinion about the transit ridership we might get out of a new suburb.  My response was that it's a little bit about the carrots -- the service we provide -- but sadly a lot of it is about the sticks: how bad the alternatives are.  The fastest route to high transit ridership, if that's your goal, is to constrain road space and constrain parking, so that both become expensive in either time or money.  That's why Sydney's CBD has Australia's highest percentage of commuters using transit.  It's not that the transit is wonderful; it isn't.  It's that parking all day in the Sydney CBD can cost $60 or more, and road tolls can easily add another $10.

Parking is also the main reason that so much of our urban fabric is so unfriendly to pedestrians.  If you've ever relied on transit in any typical North American suburb, you've spent a big chunk of your life walking across parking lots.  Parking demand pushes buildings further apart, defeating the pedestrian.  It also raises the cost of high-density living. (When I lived in Vancouver in 2006, I could not find an apartment in a highrise building that didn't require me to rent a parking space that I wouldn't use.) 

Remarkably, these decisions are often not based on the developer's assessment of parking demand, but rather on minimum parking requirements imposed by local governments.  Increasingly, we're seeing a new focus on turning that around:  Eliminating minimums, selling parking places separate from apartments, and even, in San Francisco, a serious effort to let the free market set parking rates.

So parking matters.  That's why I'm watching the SF Park experiment in San Francisco.  And it's why you should be reading Reinventing Parking.

melbourne: don't miss the rock-star of parking

Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, will be at a full-day seminar at Melbourne Town Hall on November 4.  Details here.

congestion pricing: the view from canada

Canada's Frontier Centre for Public Policy has just published a paper by my colleague Stuart Donovan on the case for road pricing.  The gist:

Accurate transport pricing not only reduces congestion, it also generates additional revenue to fund investment in additional capacity when and where it is justified by demand. Most importantly, accurate transport pricing is mode-neutral in that it neither discriminates against nor favours any transport mode, although it does favour high-value vehicles, such as buses and emergency vehicles. Accurate transport pricing also allows people the freedom to manage their travel needs in the way that best suits them. Some workplaces, for example, may allow their employees to work flexible hours in order to reduce their transport costs.

PDF here.

san francisco: a free market in parking begins

(Update: Welcome, Andrew Sullivan readers!  Please have a look around, including the welcome and manifesto.  We do fun stuff here.)

American parodies of San Francisco as leftist and socialist may soon need some revision.  San Francisco will soon have the most libertarian, free-market parking policy in the nation.  And it should become easier to find parking.

Conventional American policy says that parking should be made available at subsidized discounts, or even for free.  The fact is, 12 square meters of real estate in a dense city has a land value, and that means it has a fair rental value.  What's the value?  Easy.  Ask the market. 

Under SF Park, the cost of parking on-street will vary by time of day based on observed demand.  As their website describes it:

To help achieve the right level of parking availability, SFpark will periodically adjust meter pricing up and down to match demand. Demand-responsive pricing encourages drivers to park in underused areas and garages, reducing demand in overused areas. With SFpark, real-time data and demand-responsive pricing work together to readjust parking patterns in the City so that parking is easier to find.

The goal is to ensure that there's always a space available, so that people stop endlessly driving in circles looking for parking.  People will be able to check online to find out the current parking cost in the place they intend to visit.  Parking garages will have a better chance of undercutting on-street rates, so that those garages can fill.  If you've ever driven in San Francisco, you know that it's hard to decide to use a garage because, well, if you just drive around the block once more, you might get lucky.  Under SF Park, if you just drive around the block once more, you'll probably find a space, but it will cost more than a garage, especially if you'll be there for a while.  So drivers are more likely to fill up the garages.

If the program fails, which I hope it doesn't, it will be as a result of being too timid.  There will inevitably be pressure to set a maximum parking price, at which prices will stop rising, which means that space will fill up, which means that everyone will be driving around the block again.  Andrew Price at Good asks:  Could parking costs reach $10/hour?  Conceivably yes, for a few high-demand hours, which are almost certainly also hours when transit is abundant.  What's wrong with that?  

Current plan is for parking rates at a particular time of day to be adjusted only monthly.  This is a crude approximation of the actual volatility of demand, which reflects many factors other than time of day and day of week.  In a complete free-market system, parking costs would change more dynamically based on actual utilization at the time. 

But there's a problem with pure dynamic charging, of course: the decision to use parking happens when we leave home in our car, so we really need to know then what the parking cost will be.  The crude monthly adjustment system will ensure that you can always find that information online, but of course, you could adjust every two days and that would still be true. 

I hope San Francisco will use their new occupancy data to figure out how to predict demand more precisely, incorporating variables other than time of day.  In Hayes Valley, for example, street parking demand is almost certainly going to be affected by events in the nearby Opera House and Symphony Hall, as well as other smaller events.  (Even if on-street parking limits are too short to use when attending the Opera, the parking garages that serve the Opera will be full, pushing others on-street who would otherwise park there.)  Weather may play a factor, though that one may cut both ways.  We're more likely to make discretionary trips in sunny weather, but we're more likely to choose driving over transit or cycling in cold and wet weather.  It will be interesting to see how weather affects the utilization profiles that SF Park observes.

In a recent post on congestion, I observed that current road-pricing policy requires us to save money, a renewable resource, by expending time, the least renewable resource of all.  If you've ever circled a block looking for parking, while missing or being late for something that's important to you, you know that the same absurdity is true of our on-street parking policy.  SF Park deserves close watching.  And if it doesn't work well, ask yourself:  "Is it because it doesn't make sense to charging for parking based on demand, or is it because they were too timid to do it completely?"  The answer will almost certainly be the latter.   The policy itself relies only on free-market principles that already govern many parts of our economies, because they work.

eight fewer cars = 74 more bikes

This just has to happen:  Portland's TriMet has removed eight parking spaces from the Park-and-Ride at its Sunset Transit Center light rail station, and replaced them with secure space for 74 bikes.  From the Oregonian coverage:

Look at it this way: There are now 74 parking spaces where there was [sic] once just eight -- as long as you're riding a bike to link up with light rail or a bus.

"That's potentially 74 cars that won't be using the park and ride," said Rob Sadowsky, executive director of the Portland-based Bicycle Transportation Alliance. "It's 74 people who aren't in traffic, who aren't putting carbon into the atmosphere, and who are exercising."

Sunset Transit Center ("Sunset TC" on this map) has always been a strategic location for access to the Blue and Red light rail lines.  It's the first station beyond the major barrier of the West Hills, so for areas to the west it's the only place to go for a fast light rail trip into the city.  The light rail line also turns south at this point, so the entire area north and west of it needs to feed to this station, by bus, car, and bike. 

Because of this strategic geographic position, this station will always be one of TriMet's busiest for access by all those modes.

People who park there are currently paying in time and inconvenience rather than money.  The parking often fills up, leaving angry motorists looking for a space.

But Lisa McAdams of Hillsboro said losing parking spaces to a bike and ride isn't fair to people trying to take public transit instead of driving into Portland. "I'm sure a lot of people are ticked," she said.

After five minutes of searching inside the Sunset garage Thursday afternoon, McAdams was about to give up and drive her Honda CR-V downtown when someone backed out of a space.

Yes, Lisa, you'll often be circling the garage as long as the parking there is cheap or free.  It's that old law of supply and demand.  Meanwhile, you have eight fewer chances to park, but there are 74 more chances for human beings to get on light rail, and get where they're going.  Looks like an easy call.

guest post: samuel scheib on parking, the field of nightmares

Samuel Scheib is the senior planner at StarMetro (Tallahassee, Florida) and the editor of Trip Planner Magazine: the art and science of transit.  He holds master's degree in planning from Florida State University, as a Transit Fellow. 

Parking was one of the earliest problems associated with the widespread automobile ownership that began in the 1910s and 1920s; having a place to leave cars—the terminal capacity—is as important to the transportation system as the carriageway that moves them.  By the 1930s, urban streets were filled with cars that were driving in circles searching for curb parking.  The accepted solution to this congestion problem was off-street parking.  Soon, cities around the United States had enshrined off-street parking requirements in their zoning laws.  According to Donald Shoup (The High Cost of Free Parking) a 1946 survey found that only 17% of the cities in the study had zoned parking requirements; just five years later that percentage was 76.  Today free, unlimited parking is the expectation for most drivers:  parking is free for 99% of all automobile trips in the U.S.

The type and design of unlimited, off-street parking can only be described as the greatest missed opportunity in the history of transportation planning.  Without documentary evidence I can only imagine that the first shopping centers and other structures that boasted off-street parking were doing exactly that: having the parking in front was the best way to show it off.  It is arguably easier to park in front of a building than behind it, but only by the tiniest degree of difficulty; driving an extra hundred yards is far easier than walking that distance.  If transportation planners had been able to peer ever-so-slightly around the corner of history they might have realized the potential of what off-street parking would later reap.  If the zoning had specifically required off-street parking and maximum building setbacks (that is to force the buildings to be located within 20 or 30 feet of the carriageway) our nation would look completely different today. 

Would people still want to buy and drive cars?  Yes, but if the buildings were near the street (as they were in Çatal Höyük, ancient Athens, Rome, Constantinople, the great cities of Europe, and American cities east, west, and central built before 1930) other modes of transportation would have remained viable -- and most importantly conventional – compared to the automobile.  

Conformity is never so welcome as in the transportation sector, and misery never more alone.  Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to walk along a big-box, sidewalk-free U.S. highway knows that as depressingly ugly as this public space is, the worst part of the experience is the exposure, the feeling of being the lone freakish pedestrian on Planet Auto.  Even those of us who are strong transit advocates may recognize--when we are completely honest with ourselves--that when we are in our cars and see people walking in these hostile environments we have the knee-jerk thought that there must be something wrong with that person:  Poor?  Homeless?  Mentally ill?  Mode choice can be the source of scorn or pity.

Were those parking lots behind the structures, several things would have happened.  First, we would have preserved blocks and polygons.  They may have been larger than the ones that preceded them in the 19th century, but the corner lot would have retained value and each side of the block, rather than just the front, would have had importance.  Second, parking would be shared.  Today it is not uncommon to see fences between the side-by-side parking lots of big box stores.  (The fence in this image protects the shopping of a Border's Books from the adjacent Office Depot.)  Not many people walk between them anyway, and certainly not between two or three stores, a distance of a half mile or more in the ugly and hostile environment, but the store providing ample parking does not want to share with the guy next door who has fewer spaces.  That cooperation would have happened in the block system; a shared parking lot would have made access to four buildings (or more) easy and convenient and those property owners would have bought and sold spaces as a percentage of the floor space, or by some other formula.  However accomplished, business owners would have recognized the value of that shared commodity just as the contemporary merchant knows the importance of an attractive, shared atrium/corridor inside the shopping mall.

Third, and most important, the urban streetscape would have been preserved.  Not only is transit--and by extension walking--most effective in this environment, but the proximity of the buildings to the street would have forever prevented the 8-laning of America.  The costs of widening would have been exorbitant because municipalities would not have been buying just land (land that may have constituted drainage ditch anyway), but they would also have had to buy and destroy the buildings atop the property. 

(In this Tallahassee image, the small building in front is from the 1920s, while the new building behind it reflects new planning policies that encourage buildings adjacent to the street.)

City leaders and public works officials in cities as large as Atlanta (16 lanes of interstate in some places) and Los Angeles down to modest municipalities like Tallahassee have come to understand that they can't build enough roads at low enough costs to solve our transportation problems.  Had the buildings not been so far apart, transportation planners and officials would have arrived at this conclusion far sooner, perhaps before the 1956 Interstate Highway Act.  Yes, engineers have widened urban streets often to within a few feet of the buildings, but they were widening the tip of the funnel, and had the pressure not come from far wider streets in the sprawl it is unlikely that road widening would have been the de facto solution to congestion.

Ninety percent of planning involves fixing the planning decisions of the previous generation.  Let the Big Dig (burying the old elevated central artery in Boston) and urban renewal stand as exhibits one and two.  Perhaps the people who instituted those first off-street ordinances were guilty of looking only 20 years ahead.  They would have seen the problem those buildings near the road would have represented for future expansion.  But like the legendary frog who jumps out of hot water but boils in slowly heating water, earlier generations did not foresee 8-, 10-, 12-lane parking lots through the hearts of downtowns or those warnings on variable message displays to stay indoors because of poor air quality.  The off-street parking lot facing the street represented the acquiescence, the complete capitulation to, the needs of the automobile.  The greatest failure was the simplest thing, applicable to all areas of life:  Young planners, look ye farther ahead and always choose balance.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and the all-for-the-car attitude has yielded an appropriate field of horrors.