U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by busterarm » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:32 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #144

busterarm wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What part of "one hundred times out of a hundred" did you miss? You don't end up with the choice because nobody builds parking.

Queens NY has this problem pretty severely. Zoning requires parking past 7 stories in building height, so every building is 7 floors at maximum density with no parking. Residents often find themselves circling their neighborhoods for hours looking for parking. Living without a car and being fully-dependent on public transit absolutely sucks in most of the borough.

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

#192

Post by ZoomerCretin » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:32 PM UTC

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…

This is a chicken-and-egg situation. We can't get rid of parking until we have good public transit! We can't have good public transit because all the parking mandates reduce density so much that you can't live without a car!

If you bite the bullet and remove parking, better public transit will come. If you never remove parking, you will never have better transit.

By another measure, removing parking mandates is a very immediate success because it lowers rents by several hundred dollars a month: https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/11/126192-parking-refor...

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

#193

Post by detourdog » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:32 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #188

detourdog wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Nobody is really space constrained. Clearly the answer is no then. That doesn't make space-constrained Austin's answer an automatic yes either though. The city is very car-dependent. The starting point isn't "take away peoples' ability to have a car". It should be "make it more attractive not to have a car". Changing parking minimums comes far down that road.

It's not clear to me. I really wish you could take the effort to explain your thinking. If there is no place to park but your neighbor's yard how it would work in a civilized society and help housing costs.

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

#194

Post by swalling » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:32 PM UTC

This isn't really a new trend, Texas is just a laggard because it is an unusually car-dependent state. Most major cities have been trending toward eliminating parking minimums, at least in downtown cores.

Here's a map from 2015: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/11/18/a-map-of-citi...

And one updated as of 2021: https://parkingreform.org/resources/mandates-map/

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

#195

Post by throw0101d » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #84

throw0101d wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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. Try $1000/mo on average: * https://money.com/owning-new-car-cost-total-2023/ If you're making >$100K that may not sound like that much, but the average/median US salary is lower. (That probably doesn't include externalities either: health, climate change, comm…

$1k/mo is a new car with no down payment, most people aren't doing that. It's literally the most expensive way to get a vehicle! Maybe #2 depending on your views on leasing and how you calculate cost there. And even using the $1k/mo number, you're still paying thousand s more in rent to save that.

> $1k/mo is a new car with no down payment

The average monthly payment for a used car is $500/mo, and $700/mo for a new car:

* https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/average-...

Then add maintenance, insurance, depreciation, fuel. And that's just the stuff that shows up on a spreadsheet (of which depreciation most folks don't really think about).

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

#196

Post by quietbritishjim » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

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…

No, those numbers don't show that by themselves. That's because there's nothing about cars per person, only spaces per car. Cars would not be a problem at all if there were even 50 spaces per car... but only a total of 10 cars!

I think the implicit attitude that your comment seems to have of one car per person is the real issue.

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

#197

Post by Ekaros » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

jadengeller wrote: post #125

letitbeirie wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 min…

If downtown apartments are not sufficiently desirable without parking, developers will build parking.

What I will guess happens is that they are still desirable, they will not be cheaper. And there will be parking problems...

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

#198

Post by arcticbull » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #184

arcticbull wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... have hundreds of years worth of civil projects designed to get people from A to B. We better get started right away then, huh.

You don't start by building public transit. You start by bulldozing roads and housing and moving/rebuilding communities.

Do you have a citation for that? Large portions of Paris for instance aren't exactly old-world high density development. Luckily they're putting in the GPE, which is 120 miles of metro service. [1] Once you have the metro, you can put in higher-density development around the stations, and over time, the neighborhood changes. That's just fine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express

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

#199

Post by adrr » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

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.

Have you been to neighborhoods that don't have parking mandated parking spots? Anything built in the 60s to 80s. Drive around for 1/2 hour trying to find a parking spot every day, pay hundreds/thousands of dollars a year in fines because you forgot to move you car on street cleaning day. Repeat if you work at place in these old neighborhoods, like Venice or West LA where all the tech companies are located.

The issue isn't parking spots, the issue is that construction has had 0 efficiency gains in the last 50 year. Its cheaper to produce a car, grow food, produce computer chips, etc. Its not cheaper to build a building or a parking structure. Make it cheaper to build and it will solve house prices. And its not raw materials that make it expensive. There is no automation. We still pour concrete and frame buildings that same way we did 50 years ago.

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

#200

Post by wharvle » Wed, Jan 03, 2024, 7:35 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #177

wharvle wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great deal of highway spending is subsidizing truck shipping. Most of the damage done to highways comes from big trucks, and taxes on them don't come anywhere near paying for it. [EDIT] Incidentally, maybe we shouldn't subsidize truck shipping! But using usage taxes to pay for highways while not shifting the burden such that truck shipping is paying the lion's share of the cost and is no longer (so very much, at le…

Truck shipping has never made sense to me. It's significantly less fuel efficient than rail shipping, and paying people to just sit there and drive for their entire lives feels kinda torturous to me...

Lots of communities aren't served by rail, ship, or barge (or nowhere near enough capacity of those, or efficiently connected to the wrong places—how much raw iron ore or coal does a small town need?) so truck shipping's all they've got. Rail may pass through nearby, but without unloading capability or sufficient capacity at a proper train yard. Trucks drive to them from the nearest hub or notable train yard, which may be way more than your usual "last mile" concern that a city or whatever has. Tens of miles, to the warehouses that serve them, then tens of miles more to the nearest major store, that kind of thing.

Rural living would be way more expensive and inconvenient without truck shipping subsidies. Which, maybe making rural living artificially cheap is a good idea and maybe it's not, but that's one big shift that would happen if we made truck shipping pay its way entirely.

[EDIT] For true long-haul, I'm with you, the majority of that's surely only viable because of those subsidies, and we'd be better off pushing that to rail, ship, and barge.