As always, I have absolute faith the free market with arrive at the correct answer. It was government regulation that created the issues in the first place.
LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
61–70 of 174 posts
Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t that basically just the libertarian mindset? Ie let individuals optimize for their own interests, even when the t as the detriment of the community? Markets are definitely efficient in sorting out short term individual goals, but not much beyond that.
I agree that markets can't solve everything, especially within the tight networks of externalities that exist in high-density cities. But with parking, I think the problem is the opposite: car owners create a negative externality (use of limited city-provided parking) that ends up costing non-car-owners because cities then require buildings to build parking.
I agree that cities can screw this up, but the idea of leaving parking policy completely up to the free market is also unappealing. Parking mins are dumb, but parking maxes can make a lot of sense.
Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
#63Where I live (not in the US) we have parking maximums, not minimums. A new office development will not get planning approval if it has more than 2 parking spaces per 3 employees (based on some obscure measurement of building capacity). This is to reduce congestion and encourage more environmentally friendly methods of transportation.
Here’s a crazy idea: let the property owner and developer decide the correct amount of parking to provide. And the size of the apartments. And the number of floors to build. The regulations here should be based around things like structural integrity, egress, and safety. Not views, not density, not what size of apartment is “too big” or “too small.” All of those are things the market can sort out.
This would eliminate too many middlemen and bureaucrats. We need the government to mandate what's optimal based on what lobbyists from parking construction firms advocate for. We also need to ensure the requirements are sufficiently high enough so that only a select few companies can effectively bid, ensuring minimal competition and maximum profitability, and maximum political donations.
This is a critical cycle that must be preserved!
Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
1 shared car is shown to replace between 7 and 20 private cars in various deployments. Building new housing with dedicated car-share parking is a great way to go.
Housing may be a little harder to accomplish usefully for the people that would live there for this idea, but business would likely work well. The problem with housing (if it encompasses a large area and not just small subsets of the available area) is that some people functionally need a car for their job or life. Cutting off large amounts of housing from those that commute or those that need to make semi-regular lo…
Car shares are definitely not for driving to work but I fail to see why you can't use them to pick up your kids. Car sharing solves the problem where people can easily journey to work without a car, but they want one for other purposes like shopping.
Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
#65As a resident of LA, I don't see this actually accomplishing much due to the specific market of downtown LA. Like the article mentions, basically all the new construction in that area comes in at the top of the market. Almost everyone in that socioeconomic class in LA has a car and would want a nearby place to park it. Developers therefore aren't going to build a new luxury high-rise and not provide parking for its r…
I think this is just low cost/effort to reduce a particular problem. DTLA is the most walkable and accessible to public transit place in the city, the only issue is there's nothing there worth walking to besides the Staples Center.
The real area of focus for reducing traffic and vehicle usage should be the San Fernando Valley corridors (Sepulveda/405, the 5, and the 101 to San Gabriel Valley). Iirc from a recent report on KPCC there's like 600k daily commuters between the valley and the southland, and another 700k between the valley and San Gabriel Valley.
We have one metro stop in the SFV, which serves the 3 million residents. It's no wonder it's surrounded by a massive parking lot, and most commuters don't use it anyway.
Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
#66I'm not familiar with downtown LA but I haven't heard great things about public transportation in LA. Are they just trying to encourage less driving without providing any alternatives?
Downtown has the best transport access in the entire city. There are frequent trains in every direction and long-distance thru Union Station. While not Germany-level, it is quite good. Combined with the rise of rideshare and rentals etc, large parking garages are becoming obsolete.
>Downtown has the best transport access in the entire city
The only problem is that most people don't have a reason to go there. The streets are usually empty aside from the homeless encampments.
The only reasons I've ever had to go to DTLA was to attend a conference and some games at the Staples Center. It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.
Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
#67As a resident of LA, I don't see this actually accomplishing much due to the specific market of downtown LA. Like the article mentions, basically all the new construction in that area comes in at the top of the market. Almost everyone in that socioeconomic class in LA has a car and would want a nearby place to park it. Developers therefore aren't going to build a new luxury high-rise and not provide parking for its r…
>That said, we might as well remove this regulation requiring parking if the market will dictate a similar level of parking anyway
Part of the reason to enforce parking in new construction is to alleviate the pressure on street parking. Preexisting businesses could be pushed out as new construction draws more people without making parking available.
Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's crazy because it doesn't work. All of those factors rely upon the use of common, municipal resources, and those municipal resources, especially streets, often can't be expanded.
Although the fact it's illegal to buy that parking and build housing shows which need is more important evidently.
When you're willing to externalize the costs of making mass-SOV transportation possible, to the advancement of personal gain, yes, “the market” will push people toward taking advantage of that discounted resource. Until there is established some sort of per-use fee for ROW use that offsets those externalities, the market pricing is already critically warped and cannot be used as an oracle for what people are willing to pay for being able to get to that parking spot, 10k sq foot residential lot, etc.
EDIT: discounted, not “free.”
Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downtown has the best transport access in the entire city. There are frequent trains in every direction and long-distance thru Union Station. While not Germany-level, it is quite good. Combined with the rise of rideshare and rentals etc, large parking garages are becoming obsolete.
>Downtown has the best transport access in the entire city The only problem is that most people don't have a reason to go there. The streets are usually empty aside from the homeless encampments. The only reasons I've ever had to go to DTLA was to attend a conference and some games at the Staples Center. It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.
>The only problem is that most people don't have a reason to go there.
This is out of date. There's a lot more to do downtown these days.
Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cars are the reason the buses are slow. 22% of LA workers travel to work without a car, which isn't great but it's not zero either. Metro LA added a dedicated bus lane on Flower and they are moving more than one bus per minute in that lane. As soon as you remove the cars everything else gets a lot better. https://twitter.com/metrolosangeles/status/11538072082299576...
Are they? It's always seemed to me that frequent stops, circuitous routes and long travel distances are the reason the buses are slow relative to cars. After all, cars have to deal with other cars as well. And for comparison, to the south, San Diego has much better traffic than LA, but the buses are still quite slow (e.g. I recently considered taking the bus rather than a 15-minute drive in San Diego, but it would ha…
[deleted]