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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

#141

Post by 0xfaded »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #13
coldpie wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

Unfortunately people will fight tooth and nail to maintain their existing expectations and will see public transit as a threat to their cars.

You have to take away cars (parking) first so that they start demanding public transportation.

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

#142

Post by jandrese »

coldpie wrote: post #8
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.

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.

How about: If you build a building of this size you must contribute $X to the public transit system to expand service to your building, adding drivers and routes if necessary.

We have so many subsidies for cars baked into the system, but hardly anything for other forms of transit, and then we complain endlessly about how expensive transit is to run and have to cut service to make ends meet, which of course discourages people from taking transit.

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

#143

Post by ryanmcgarvey »

busterarm wrote: post #119
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything that you leave to optionality in code enforcement ends up being a thing that never happens ever No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them. Cities like Austin have regulated themselves into a housing-cost crisis. It’s almost a miracle that rational economic policy is being given space by voters.

Marble countertops aren't competing for space that you could otherwise use to build more apartments to sell/rent. Parking is. Until parking spaces cost more than apartments do, developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred.

Isn't this (part of) the point?

We have an abundance of parking required by law and not enough housing units - removing the requirement should encourage more money to be invested into anything but parking no?

Seems like letting businesses decide whether or not it's worth opening a business with the available parking would cause one of two things to happen:

1. We wind up with the actual correct amount of parking required for a given set of businesses - instead of some arbitrary amount dictated by legislatures decades ago. 2. Everyone is tired of the lack of parking and votes to increase public transit funding.

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

#144

Post by dkarl »

busterarm wrote: post #119
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything that you leave to optionality in code enforcement ends up being a thing that never happens ever No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them. Cities like Austin have regulated themselves into a housing-cost crisis. It’s almost a miracle that rational economic policy is being given space by voters.

Marble countertops aren't competing for space that you could otherwise use to build more apartments to sell/rent. Parking is. Until parking spaces cost more than apartments do, developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred.

> developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred

Once we have apartments with and without parking on the market, we'll see how much more people are willing to pay to get parking, and future developers can build accordingly.

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

#145

Post by detourdog »

busterarm wrote: post #119
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything that you leave to optionality in code enforcement ends up being a thing that never happens ever No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them. Cities like Austin have regulated themselves into a housing-cost crisis. It’s almost a miracle that rational economic policy is being given space by voters.

Marble countertops aren't competing for space that you could otherwise use to build more apartments to sell/rent. Parking is. Until parking spaces cost more than apartments do, developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred.

I understand both sides of the issue. My problem is the lack of context given to this solution for housing.

I live in small (2,000ish households) New England town with some streets that predate automobiles. Nobody is really space constrained. The housing 3 miles a way is at least half the cost of my town.

The public transportation is poor and it took about 25 years to build less than 3 miles of bike path.

Should my town ditch off-street parking minimums in an attempt to increase housing supplies?

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

#146

Post by tuna74 »

busterarm wrote: post #119
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything that you leave to optionality in code enforcement ends up being a thing that never happens ever No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them. Cities like Austin have regulated themselves into a housing-cost crisis. It’s almost a miracle that rational economic policy is being given space by voters.

Marble countertops aren't competing for space that you could otherwise use to build more apartments to sell/rent. Parking is. Until parking spaces cost more than apartments do, developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred.

Then parking spaces will be priced according to what the market wants to pay.

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

#147

Post by adventured »

pramsey wrote: post #117
elektor wrote: post #2

There is a thorough book on this topic, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Highly recommend it if you're interested in the causes of so much of our dysfunction in housing costs. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634461/paved-paradi...

Yep, good read and wonderful on the vicious cycle that led to the downtowns of most US cities looking like WWII bombed out zones by 1975.

That's not the cause at all. Extreme minority poverty and the potent bifurcation of incomes, education and wealth in the US is the cause.

Parking won't fix any of that realistically. You can push minority poverty to the suburbs, which for example is what France does, however it doesn't solve anything about the bombed out look, it merely redistributes the problem to somewhere else. You can gentrify the cities and push poor minorities to the suburbs and inverse how it's arranged in the US now, it will make the suburbs look bombed out - until you fix the minority poverty problem.

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

#148

Post by Throw839 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #137
coldpie wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

Here in Switzerland I've seen the opposite - the amount of parking requested by the developer (true, this was for local bank growth and not condos) was slashed significantly by municipality, as in 'don't bring your cars to your work', effectively removing 1 underground level of parking and some more, right under the bank. There are very few countries out there that would see such behavior flying, when facing a wealth…

Extra parking would bring in "poor" people who live in France, Italy or Germany but commute to work in Switzerland. Just another form of elitism.

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

#149

Post by oh_sigh »

chimeracoder wrote: post #123
smt88 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LA is a disaster for transit and housing, but your numbers aren't a problem on their face. Any car being used will need >1 space at all times: one at home and one wherever it's being parked when its driver has gone somewhere. If you have We need far more parking spaces per car in LA once we consider the millions of people who are driving in the city and live outside of it. As far as housing, we'd have a 100% fully ho…

> LA is a disaster for transit and housing, but your numbers aren't a problem on their face. Any car being used will need >1 space at all times: one at home and one wherever it's being parked when its driver has gone somewhere. Actually, those numbers are a problem on their face. They're an illustration of why cars, and societies that are structured around enabling automobile transit as the primary (or even sole) mea…

Why is 3 parking spaces per car inherently unsustainable?

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

#150

Post by scythe »

londons_explore wrote: post #23
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is false. Europe always had public transit, up-front. If you look at e.g. Paris you see that the peak in car ownership and beginning of the decline coincides with the economic crash of 2008:

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/france/motor-vehicle-ownership-p...

Overall, the change has been small, and most people still have a car. And the metro network was very advanced by 1939 (unlike some US cities, these lines stayed):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro#/media/File:M...

That's in one of the densest and most famously walkable cities in the world. Most cities in the United States aren't going to be Paris anytime soon, and that's before we consider the dismal state of regional transport (particularly around the West Coast) which was also already extensive in France prior to 2000.

There is just no real basis for claiming that Europe restricted cars prior to building good transit. You might find it in one or two cities, but certainly not most -- in Europe, socialist and communist parties held significant sway until the late '70s in many countries (in a few they've hung on), and pushed for transit the whole time.

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