We should look locally at developing land use policy to encourage smart growth. This need set up an adversarial condition with developers, but when they include measures that promote multi-modal connectivity like transit and bike and pedestrian facilities, they could be given incentives in the form of increased allowable density or expedited review and approval.

CAT could be re-tooled into a world class transit model but it will require spending more on the system and a strong CAT board. Unfortunately, both are in short supply.

John McMasters
County Commission Chairman Candidate
http://www.johnmcmasters.com

This is more about roads than parking garages, but the same general idea applies, I think.

An excerpt:
“”There is a whole confluence of government policies — tax, spending, regulatory and administrative — that have subsidized sprawl,” said Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. A gallon of gasoline costs more than $8 in Britain, Germany, France and Belgium, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Much of the price difference is due to higher taxes.

Federal spending is about 4 to 1 in favor of highways over transit. Today, more than 99 percent of the trips taken by U.S. residents are in cars or some other non-transit vehicle, largely as a result of decades of such unbalanced spending.

The policies — building so many highways and building so many houses near those highways — have had a direct bearing on how and where people live and work. More Americans, 52 percent, live in the suburbs than anywhere else. The suburban growth rate exceeded 90 percent in the past decade.

But there’s been a radical shift in recent months. Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer highway miles in May than a year earlier. In the Washington area and elsewhere, mass transit ridership is setting records. Last year, transit trips nationwide topped 10.3 billion, a 50-year high.”

But in this case, the parking garage part costs 30 times as much because there’s a lot more work to put into excavating the rock, and then building levels of parking, than there is to the park. Much of the work for the park will be landscaping. And waiting for the trees to grow.