I thought a generation of remote work would change attitudes about cities. Why are we still trying to cram into small spaces?
U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
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Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
#22> "I think our country has used its land wastefully, like a drunk lottery winner that's squandered their newfound wealth," said resident Tai Hovanky.
This sounds like a comment from someone who lives in a city and doesn’t get out. There is an incredible, vast, mind-boggling amount of empty space in the US. I have flown and driven across the country many times. City dwellers are occupying a fraction of 1% of the space available.
The idea that we must live in hyper-dense cities is utter nonsense. If you like that lifestyle, great, but it’s not reasonable to force it on everyone else.
Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further. End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit. Unfortunately, there probably will be t…
The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.
Worked for Europe. Everyone there lives in houses perhaps only half the size of a typical US home, and they're happy with it. Most people have the option to go live in the countryside, have a big house and drive a car, all for the same money, yet they choose to have a small city apartment and use public transport.
Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before: If you build a building of this size, you MUST also build at least X parking spaces. Now: If you build a building of this size, you MAY build as many parking spaces as you think you need. Seems like a strict improvement to me.
It’s not. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that did this and it was a nightmare. All street parking filling up by 4pm. Half hour walks to your car. Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. Guests basically just being SOL - you’d literally be unable to have guests over because if you left to pick them up there’d be no spot when you got back, and if they drove themselves they’d never find a spot…
> Without readily available and reliable public transportation
Cool. Let's do that, too!
Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
#25It’s one thing to ditch parking minimums, but it has to be matched with investment in public transit. Simply eliminating parking spots doesn’t eliminate demand when there are no other options for getting around. And I suspect the public transit investment will be way more controversial and difficult to implement.
this doesn't eliminate parking spots. they're eliminating parking minimums , which in most cases are not backed by any sort of science or study - parking minimums get set mostly randomly, as a roadblock for development that people don't want in their neighbourhood. there's no good reason for most of these parking minimums, and they're not necessarily parking spots in places where there is any demand. steet parking, p…
Your comment is completely wrong, at least as it applies to Austin as explained in the article.
Parking minimums are simply a requirement that if you build an apartment building with N apartments, you need to include a number of parking spots that is a function of N. The idea being that if you're building a number of places for people to live, the vast majority of them (especially in Austin) will need a place to park, and it's not really fair for you to externalize that need onto public streets just so you can make more money by adding more apartments with no parking.
That's the argument anyway, and it makes sense. The counter argument is that it also keeps us as a car-dependent city, and makes it harder to build affordable housing.
I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least in Austin. Public transportation (or, basically any transportation) is notoriously bad in Austin, and for decades we've basically had the stance "if you don't build it, they won't come", but that hasn't quite worked out.
Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
#26A big problem with this is the incredibly long payoff time. You make parking go from miserable to insufferable, but it will take a decade minimum for good public transit and making popular areas bikeable/walkable. Sad experience with government projects tells I’m being generous on the timescale. If you make the infrastructure problems in Austin more painful for a decade there will be a migration away and we might hav…
Sounds like a skill issue. Paris made itself bikeable pretty quickly.
As for disabled: improvements to walkability and bikeability are also improvements to disabled accessibility in almost all cases. Not all disabilities are visible, and some even preclude driving at all. And when car parking is a hard requirement, there are dedicated disabled-parking zones.
EDIT: "X was built for walkability but Y was built for the car" you always hear this but it's just a lazy BS excuse not to do anything or think critically about the built environment. many of the cities people tout as "obviously this was built to be walkable" used to be clogged with cars (including Paris). it has wide boulevards! and many cities people think "oh this is obviously built for cars so we shouldn't bother" used to be totally walkable and had world-beating public transport (Los Angeles). it's ahistorical, learned helplessness, never backed by any rigorous comparisons, just vibes.
Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that did this and it was a nightmare. All street parking filling up by 4pm. Half hour walks to your car. Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. Guests basically just being SOL - you’d literally be unable to have guests over because if you left to pick them up there’d be no spot when you got back, and if they drove themselves they’d never find a spot…
It sounds like the parking was underpriced. EDIT I am rate-limited so can't reply, but this part: "If you have 200 cars" This is only the case if the demand for parking / driving is perfectly inelastic, which would be quite extraordinary. Empirically, when you charge for parking or institute toll roads, traffic tends to fall, in some cases sharply (because many journeys are low value). I repeat: if the parking spaces…
Raising the price would just extract more value for the owners from a very limited resource. But the resource stays just as limited.
If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously. The overflow ends up clogging the surrounding neighborhoods, on top of the outcome described by OP.
Edit. @pc86, both points you make are valid but neither addresses or fixes the problem being discussed. They are an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion.
Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further. End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit. Unfortunately, there probably will be t…
The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.
> The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.
So do you propose we lift all bans on drunk driving as to make life slightly more enjoyable for a subset of society?
At some level all laws trade off “making life shittier” for some to “make life better” for society. You can argue against particular laws but categorically being against it reduces your argument as asking for anarchism.
Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further. End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit. Unfortunately, there probably will be t…
The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.
That’s framing “getting out of a local optima” in the most negative terminology. Guess everyone should stay stuck in the local optima and not even attempt to find a better one or global one.
Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
#30It’s one thing to ditch parking minimums, but it has to be matched with investment in public transit. Simply eliminating parking spots doesn’t eliminate demand when there are no other options for getting around. And I suspect the public transit investment will be way more controversial and difficult to implement.
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> Nothing changes overnight but it allows for denser development esp. around existing public transit lines.
The problem is there a barely any decent "existing public transit lines" in Austin. Existing public transit line, singular, perhaps, and in a decade or so we'll get some more. In the meantime it just means traffic gets much shittier with no real alternatives.