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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

#211

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pavon wrote: post #140
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.

Without other rules or planning to compensate, it creates a tragedy of the commons where every builder wants to offload their parking needs onto the rest of the neighborhood in order to save money. I lived near a neighborhood that had older denser development, that originally served just that neighborhood, but later became a hip place for people to go, thus exceeding existing parking. It was very frustrating that res…

> It didn't help that the urbanism activists in our area seem to consider parking garages to be a tool of the devil and protested any plans to build one in the area.

So Alice wants to build a high-density housing tower without having to build a ten-story parking structure beneath it, and we prohibit Alice from doing that, even though Bob wants to build a ten-story parking structure right next to it, because we prohibit Bob from doing that.

I feel like these could both be solved in the same way.

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

#212

Post by chimeracoder »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #196
chimeracoder wrote: post #123

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. 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.

> 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!

Okay yes, but we're not talking about a hypothetical city in a hypothetical world in which there are 3 million people who share 10 cars. We're talking about Los Angeles, which everyone reading this thread knows (or can Google) has, in the real world, close to one registered car per person. We're talking about this in a thread about parking minimums in the US, which are almost always found in cities that have approximately one car per person, or at least one car per household.

In that sense, no number ever shows anything "by itself" because meaning is always constructed contextually, but at some point we have to all understand context because it's both tedious and Sisyphean to spell everything out every time.

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

#213

Post by jandrese »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #207
jandrese wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discourage…

What if we had a way of making buildings of a given size, or, say, value, contribute cash to the local and state governments, that the governments could then distribute as needed to transit, emergency services, infrastructure, schools, etc? We could even make it an annual fee so that they have to contribute to ongoing costs, and maybe periodically we could reassess the value of the property.

Sounds like it would be wildly unpopular and politicians would mess with your figures to get votes, even when that would ruin the budget. Sometimes specifically to ruin the budget because what they really want is to reduce/remove those services.

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

#214

Post by AnthonyMouse »

brewdad wrote: post #186
jandrese wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discourage…

Impact fees on new developments are already a thing to pay for other infrastructure improvements like sewer, utilities, roads, and parks. No reason it couldn't be extended to transit as well.

Property owners already pay property taxes to fund infrastructure. Larger developments pay more in taxes (and the residents who live there pay income taxes etc.)

"Impact fees" are just a way to discourage new development.

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

#215

Post by busterarm »

arcticbull wrote: post #198
busterarm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most of Paris as we know it was built in the 1950s and 1960s. Especially in the 1970s French politicians took on ambitious public works projects in Paris.

Most of the housing and most of the population was obliterated in the late-1930s through the mid-1940s, as you might recall. Two-thirds of the city's population had fled before the German invasion started even.

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

#216

Post by chimeracoder »

dylan604 wrote: post #159
chimeracoder wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been without a car for 4 years now, and it is becoming a burden. For the first 2 years it wasn't so bad because of lock down. Now, even with my e-bike (which I love and would continue to use if I had a car) there are certain things I just cannot do. Inclimate weather is a big one, and in my location, June-September is inclimate weather of 100°+ weather. Carrying things home from the hardware store is not condu…

> When you're living in a place that's designed with cars in mind, Being born in a place is a lottery with random chance deciding the rules for you. Sure, as an adult, you can potentially choose to leave for the less green pasture and live in an urban environment of city designed for other means of transpo if you're one that doesn't mind moving away from their entire familial support structure. Not say it can't be do…

> Being born in a place is a lottery with random chance deciding the rules for you. Sure, as an adult, you can potentially choose to leave for the less green pasture and live in an urban environment of city designed for other means of transpo if you're one that doesn't mind moving away from their entire familial support structure. Not say it can't be done, but people just assume these decisions are something people are willing to make just because they did. It's nonsensical.

Nobody in this subthread is saying anything to that effect. This thread was prompted by someone asking why anyone would want to live in a [car-free] urban environment in the first place. The ability to do so is implied by the question, not something being prescribed by edict.

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

#217

Post by brewdad »

njarboe wrote: post #112
foxyv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parking, Roads, Gasoline, Pollution, etc... We so heavily subsidize people's cars for no reason. For the cost of all of it we could have free healthcare and amazing public transportation then lower taxes with the left over money.

Um... Just US healthcare spending is 17.3% of GDP. $4.5 Trillion per year. No way this works.

Cut out the middle man (insurance companies and their profits) and you can get this number dramatically lower.

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

#218

Post by bluGill »

ljsprague wrote: post #182
kjkjadksj wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly that would be fixed with expanded immigration. Look at places where the limited immigrants we have had in recent years primarily ended up and have changed the demography, like LA county or Miami-Dade county, and they don’t look like those midwestern or great plains cities. In fact there are almost no vacant parcels anywhere today, with majority latino populations now reflecting the recent waves of immigratio…

You're confusing correlation with causation. Immigrants are more likely to go where there are jobs.

Immigrants have a lot of motivations. Jobs are one, but unless the immigrant was recruited for a specific job (which is common) it isn't primary. There are jobs everywhere, even in blighted cities.

Immigrants with no particular job in mind look for places where the cost of living is low: they tend to have much worse job prospects than normal, so a minimum wage job in a low cost of living area is better life than double minimum wage in a high cost of living area.

Immigrants often have poor English skills (or whatever the local language is). They often are used to food not common in the country. So if they can find a community of other immigrants that means people they can comfortably talk to, and also makes it more likely that someone can figure out the process of getting food they like into local stores.

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

#219

Post by Amorymeltzer »

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...

Easily one of the best books I read last year, and probably the one that had the biggest lasting effect on the way I look at things.

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

#220

Post by pavon »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #211
pavon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without other rules or planning to compensate, it creates a tragedy of the commons where every builder wants to offload their parking needs onto the rest of the neighborhood in order to save money. I lived near a neighborhood that had older denser development, that originally served just that neighborhood, but later became a hip place for people to go, thus exceeding existing parking. It was very frustrating that res…

> It didn't help that the urbanism activists in our area seem to consider parking garages to be a tool of the devil and protested any plans to build one in the area. So Alice wants to build a high-density housing tower without having to build a ten-story parking structure beneath it, and we prohibit Alice from doing that, even though Bob wants to build a ten-story parking structure right next to it, because we prohib…

It is certainly a place to start! Although in this case I never heard of a developer wanting to build a parking structure on their own (and don't know if existing code would have prevented them). It was always the city wanting to build an adjacent parking structure as part of revitalization efforts to extend the success of that neighborhood further down the street.
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