Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 432 posts

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

#71

Post by letitbeirie »

voisin wrote: post #3

It’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.

I wish they'd be a little less one-size-fits-all.

Nixing parking minimums for businesses in already-walkable, transit-connected downtown cores is overdue, and areas close to that density can easily become new downtown cores when infill is allowed to cover their parking lots.

Nixing parking minimums for downtown apartments, to your point, is a terrible idea (outside the densest areas of NYC at least, where parking minimums are already effectively nil) because most transit systems in the US are designed to bring suburban commuters into the city, so even if said apartment is situated directly above a multi-modal mass transit hub, it might not necessarily connect its residents to much more than a handful of giant parking decks clustered around a freeway.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #47
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…

How is parking legislation like this forcing 'that lifestyle' on everyone else?

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by close04 »

pc86 wrote: post #43
close04 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Raising the price would just extract more value for the owners from a very limited resource. Yes. If you own a limited resource it's your right to make money from that. I know we like to pretend people making money from things they own is somehow evil but it's how all of civilization has been built and is an objectively good thing. > If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200…

Both points you made are valid but neither fixes or even touches on the problem being discussed: there are more cars than parking spots and this causes problems. The economic theory is an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion. Price is just about who gets to have one.

Effectively you'll still have 150 cars that cannot be parked next to the owners' residence, that get dumped on the street elsewhere probably in the next lower cost neighborhood, and with the additional issues OP mentioned.

Put it another way, if you want to solve the housing crisis and I tell you "owners can set whatever price they want for the house to extract maximum value and nobody who can afford that will be denied the house" am I wrong? But did I solve the problem?

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

#74

Post by ripply »

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…

This is step 1 of reversing car centricity in these areas. Believe it or not some people in Europe in their 30s don’t even know how to drive because it’s just not needed. When you require parking spots for housing you increase the distance between everything. Going places requires transport because you have all these god forsaken parking lots you have to traverse to get to your destination.

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

#75

Post by rmbyrro »

georgeecollins wrote: post #48

In Los Angeles there are ~ 3 parking spaces per car, and < 1 housing unit per person. We mandate a bunch of parking for every new building, but no housing. Its no wonder that people live in cars.

In Brazil there are 3 cars per parking space, so people park in illegal places, traffic becomes caos, and no one can get to their homes with sanity.

Don't fool yourselves. There are many ways to reduce housing costs and increase housing supply.

Reducing parking spots is lame.

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

#76

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

the_snooze wrote: post #51
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.

I think you're assuming that mass transit is the only lever to improve traffic. Eliminating parking minimums allows businesses to pop up nearer to where people live, where they're accessible by foot or micromobility. If anything, plentiful parking in and of itself causes traffic to be shitty because driving becomes the only safe/comfortable way to get around; housing and businesses come to have huge paved deserts bet…

> Eliminating parking minimums allows businesses to pop up nearer to where people live, where they're accessible by foot or micromobility.

This is just fantasyland thinking as it applies to Austin TX. These regulations largely impact downtown, which is already dense and already has services downtown.

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

#77

Post by jen20 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #50
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…

What would you consider Austin or the suburbs of Austin? If you live in a city or close enough to one, sprawl is terrible as it gives you all the cons of car dependence with fewer benefits of a concentrated population center. The rest of the country can decide they want to live 45 mins drive from a grocery store, but fixing car dependency in cities should be a priority, and I think you'd agree with that.

The density of downtown Austin has increased _substantially_ since 2015, but it's still not straightforward to live there without a car. Most of the shops downtown sell tourist tat, not useful items, and most of the everyday commercial districts are inaccessible by public transit.

Almost all new high rise construction just has a couple of floors of parking garage, and handles it well. I can't see buildings without that being commercially successful, especially since much of the work that attracts people who like downtown is out in the burbs (sometimes not even in the same county).

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

#78

Post by crote »

screye wrote: post #46
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…

Bike infrastructure means some brick separators and painted lanes. It takes less than a month to build city-wide rudimentary protected bike lines. BRT is similarly quick to implement, if a little more expensive. Remove 1 lane of parking from major downtown roads & replace with a painted BRT lane. Order about 50 buses to run in 1 way loops around the downtown area. Have high frequency BRT between the out-of-downtown p…

> Bike infrastructure means some brick separators and painted lanes.

The biggest issue with bike infrastructure is that the people responsible for infrastructure genuinely believe this. The end result is usually a scattered bunch of stupidly dangerous "bike lanes" which aren't of use to basically anyone.

You need a separate biking network, which interfaces with car traffic as little as possible. This means you're essentially building "cycling highways" through car-free or car-minimal residential streets. Doing this properly means re-engineering those streets and intersections basically from the ground up, not just putting some paint on a highway gutter.

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

#79

Post by coldpie »

pc86 wrote: post #69
AlexandrB wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Who said anything about money? Owning a car sucks, dude. Without a car, you don't need a place to store it, you don't need to worry about the safety of your $25,000 item every time you want to go somewhere, you don't need to worry (as much) about being turned into hamburger by your own or some other idiot's mistake. When I go somewhere, I hop on the bus, read a book for a while, and then I'm at my destination. It's fantastic.

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

#80

Post by autoexec »

kilotaras wrote: post #65
autoexec wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because before developers were required to ensure that when they built something adding parking spaces to handle the demand they were introducing to an area was their responsibility. Now developers can (and will) push that externality onto the public at zero cost to them. The city has a very limited amount of parking spaces it can provide at any cost which means that removing that requirement will suddenly make parking much more expensive and harder to obtain.
Post reply on HN