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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

#61

Post by TexanFeller »

_dain_ wrote: post #26
TexanFeller wrote: post #12

A 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…

Paris was originally built to be traversed by walking and on horseback. It was originally built for density and walkability with roads tacked on later as an afterthought. Many streets in the core of Paris, Rome, etc. are tiny and barely fit for cars. Not as easy in a city that grew up with cars and are have as much roadway as buildings.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#62

Post by medvezhenok »

close04 wrote: post #27
_dain_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the approach Singapore (and in some ways, Hong Kong) takes; you can own a car, but you must purchase a 10-year use permit, which costs in some cases much more than a car itself (something like $80,000 over 10 years). So if you're buying a Toyota Corolla ($20K car), you'd still need a $80K operating permit to use it.

That's why 90%+ of the people in Singapore use public transportation or carpool. Granted, you would need the public infrastructure for that to be possible. But if you make cars unaffordable for the average person, suddenly there would be A LOT more pressure on local government to get public infrastructure done.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#63

Post by up2isomorphism »

Before you abolish an old infra you need to build new ones, however, since US politicians can get away with not building anything, so they opt for abolishing old infra as their credit for the next move, and as a consequence people suffer with lower and lower quality of life.

BTW, I lived in China and Europe for many years and exclusively ride bicycles for a long time, it was not the same experience. If you believe what current US politician is getting you one step closer to that, you are just deluding yourself.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#64

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #39
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. "Let's keep doing the same thing that doesn't work and complain when anyone decides to try something else".

Except there is no real sane plan to actually do something else. If they were, say, replacing street parking with light rail lines, I'd be onboard. This is basically just ignoring the problem and pretending like "alternative transportation methods" will magically spring up.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#65

Post by kilotaras »

autoexec wrote: post #54
_dain_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

jacking up the prices for parking spaces due to artificially induced scarcity will mean that cars are still every bit as essential to get around, but now only the wealthy will be able to afford to park them, screwing over the population least able to arrange/afford alternatives. I guess it's somehow better if the increasing number of poors in the US have to park miles away from their jobs (if they're lucky enough) an…

> artificially induced scarcity

How is *not requiring* parking to be provided inducing scarcity artificially?

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#66

Post by crote »

oceanplexian wrote: post #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…

I actually agree with that - and I grew up in a rural area.

The US has been building a lot of low-quality low-density suburban neighborhoods. They are actively hostile to the people living there, as there are both no amenities within a human distance from your home and there is no space for recreation. Life is constantly being strangled by a forced dependency on car travel.

In cities everything is a stone's throw away, and you can get there either walking or by bike. In rural areas there's plenty of space for outdoor hobbies and for children to play. The suburbs are a worst-of-both-worlds scenario.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#67

Post by deutschepost »

oceanplexian wrote: post #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…

This is about arbitrary parking regulations. Not about dense cities.

The idea that we must live between enormously huge parking lots is 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

#68

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #36
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 par…

The comment just said, that the function of N that gives the number of parking spots (really it's just going to be a proportionality factor) is "set nearly randomly". Nothing in your comment counters that assertion. Which I personally don't find implausible (although that is without any exposure to the decision process in Austin in particular)

It's not "set nearly randomly". It's a function of the estimated number of adult occupants, based on the number of bedrooms I believe.

Besides, the argument isn't "let's look at the calculation for required number of spots and tweak it if necessary", it's "let's get rid of parking altogether and pretend like people won't just still drive and park on the street."

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#69

Post by pc86 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #34
1-6 wrote: post #21

I thought a generation of remote work would change attitudes about cities. Why are we still trying to cram into small spaces?

I'm not sure what you mean. Even with remote work, living in a high-density area offers advantages - the primary one (in my mind) being that you don't have to own a car.

"Let's pay 3x as much for rent [and other things that more expensive with density] to save $300/mo on a car payment" is certainly an interesting life choice.

More seriously though I do think there are benefits to city living if that's a lifestyle you want, but saving money is almost never one of them unless you have a job where you can make a LOT more living in the city, which sort of by definition means you're not going to be working remotely.

Re: U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

#70

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #33
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 par…

> I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least it 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. Well, since what you have been doing hasn't worked, maybe let's try the other tactic.

The other tactic would be to actually build out viable public transportation.
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