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LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

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Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#111

Post by mktmkr »

briandear wrote: post #109
mktmkr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does Uber carry approved child safety seats?

No, but to make sure we are talking about the same thing, a car share is a bit like renting a car by the hour. Uber is a computer-dispatched taxi service. Uber is not "car sharing". It is also not their other bullshit moniker "ride sharing"

Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#112

Post by obelos »

briandear wrote: post #103
obelos wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do cyclists pay for their road usage? I paid over $600 for my California car registration and I pay significant gasoline taxes. I also pay significant income taxes. And bridge tolls. The taxes and fees that I directly pay for my car (registration and gas taxes) aren’t being used 100% for my road usage. That money is being used for bike lanes I never use or buses I never ride. So I am paying for someone else’s “extern…

Bike lanes would incur 10% of their current cost if they didn't have to be engineered around the ubiquitous SOVs. That's another externality of automobiles, and it doesn't account for how insufficient, broken, and unsafe that bike infra is, all because it has to route around cars being catered to as the “first class” use of ROW.

Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#113

Post by sokoloff »

mktmkr wrote: post #64
kbenson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn’t most residents of the building need the shared car at roughly the same time to pick up their kids from school?

Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#114

Post by sokoloff »

mktmkr wrote: post #111
briandear wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Uber carry approved child safety seats?

No, but to make sure we are talking about the same thing, a car share is a bit like renting a car by the hour. Uber is a computer-dispatched taxi service. Uber is not "car sharing". It is also not their other bullshit moniker "ride sharing"

I think there’s a fair argument that Uber Pool is pretty close to, or at least has substantial elements of, what one would naturally call ride sharing.

Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#115

Post by baddox »

chc wrote: post #55
mktmkr wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

Presumably it just depends on whether the road is congestion. Roads are essentially non-rivalrous (my use of the road doesn't reduce your ability to use the road), until the road is congested.

Presumably most congested roads are used mostly by cars, so I suppose you could say that "cars cause congestion and congestion makes buses slower." But of course, the congestion also makes the cars slower as well.

Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#116

Post by BubRoss »

mktmkr wrote: post #19
chc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this would be putting the cart before the horse in the US. Failing to put parking in a place with poor walkability and terrible public transportation doesn't seem like it would encourage much of anything.

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...

Shouldn't the busses themselves end up removing cars from the road?

Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#117

Post by tdxgx »

StringyBob wrote: post #10

Where 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.

That's sounds insane for here in the US

Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#118

Post by jaredklewis »

gamblor956 wrote: post #93
jaredklewis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anything odd about the claim. There is no "minimum air conditioning" requirement where I live, but pretty much every building I walk into has it. My apartment, like most apartments I've seen, also has it. Turns out that people don't need the government to tell them what they want. People like AC, so most buildings have AC. Not particularly remarkable, but most apartments in my area also come with refriger…

AC/heating are actually required by law in most of the US. For example, in the Northeast, heaters have been required for all residential construction for many decades. Residences without heaters are legally considered not habitable. In most of the Southwest like Arizona and Nevada, new residential construction must have ACs (in CA, it's not a universal requirement and window units meet the requirement). Few residenti…

I didn't know that about other parts of the US. I can see how it might make sense in Arizona. In California, mandating ACs would be enormously stupid. For one thing, it would needlessly inhibit use of the many other methods that exist for cooling buildings (a la Apple Campus). But also, the California climate is temperate enough that it is very much possible to live without AC. I have an AC but have not used it in more than a year. I see no reason why we should require everyone to have one.

I of course have no objection that buildings must be habitable. A building with dirty water, structural issues, or lacking heat in a cold place is obviously not serving any market segment.

Parking seems to me be fundamentally different than those issues though. I know many people that happily live without a car in LA. Why should it be illegal for developers to cater to them?

Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#119

Post by mktmkr »

sokoloff wrote: post #113
mktmkr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn’t most residents of the building need the shared car at roughly the same time to pick up their kids from school?

No because fewer than 20% of households in Los Angeles have school-age children. That puts a ceiling on your worst case right there.

Re: LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown

#120

Post by sokoloff »

mktmkr wrote: post #119
sokoloff wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t most residents of the building need the shared car at roughly the same time to pick up their kids from school?

No because fewer than 20% of households in Los Angeles have school-age children. That puts a ceiling on your worst case right there.

Provided that the housing wasn’t in some way differentially appealing to families with children (cheap 3BR, good schools, parks nearby, other amenities)
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