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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

#351

Post by sokoloff »

Spivak wrote: post #281
lukas099 wrote: post #258

I vote we ban all free public parking and let the free market determine how much parking there is and where.

If you let the free market decide the answer will be "a lot" and "everywhere there's business that want customers from outside walking distance" and "everywhere there's apartments and houses that don't have garages." Parking minimums are one of those things that are a huge PITA when you hit edge cases but when you go to city council meetings residents and business owners ask for more and cheaper parking because it dr…

> You can't remove parking in isolation, I genuinely wish you could. You have to fix the reason people want it in the first place.

This is both blindingly obvious and incredibly frequently overlooked.

Here's the 5-step plan for improving our city:

  1. Remove parking spots.
  2-5. We'll figure it out later; I promise.

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

#352

Post by lotsoweiners »

dublinben wrote: post #311
dylan604 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's yet another reason city dwelling in a multi-tenant building is just not conducive for many people. I couldn't imagine not being able to work on projects. Of course, having the desire/inclination of having that kind of hobby is probably something a city slicker just isn't going to do. I have wood working and machine working tools that I'm just going to lean towards not being allowed by whatever building rules.…

There's nothing inherently incompatible with living an a walkable community and participating in hobbies like woodworking. For example, after just a few minutes of searching, here's the first listing I found of a condo in a building that includes an expansive workshop among other amenities. (See photo 52.) This is in a location with a 92 walk and bike score, and a 78 transit score.[0] If that's not to your liking, he…

Yeah but in a decent suburban house you can have most all of those things available to you 24/7 on your own property without anyone bothering you, trying to make small talk, reserve equipment etc. I’m sure that works for some people but I like the ability to use my “amenities “ 24/7 on my terms.

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

#353

Post by deepakhj »

jandrese wrote: post #142
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.

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…

That's a tax on new construction which will reduce it. Tax all homeowners equally.

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

#354

Post by jen20 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #266
jen20 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> I can't see buildings without that being commercially successful There is no parking ban being enacted. It is a removal of an arbitrary parking minimum. If they can't sell the properties without it why would they remove parking?

Exactly what about my comment makes you think I believe that anyone will?

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

#355

Post by crazygringo »

bombcar wrote: post #329
mint2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s nice to have practically every amenity possible in easy walking distance I.e 5-10 minutes walk. Probably 20 restaurants, 20 small shops, coffee shops, ups, usps, fedex, hardware stores, museums, parks etc etc all within 10 minutes walk. It’s nice not having to drive for everyday errands. driving and parking is soul draining and causes suburbs to be ugly, not to mention freeways. Those are ugly as sin.

A ten minute walk is half to 3/4 of a mile. I doubt you can find all those things in that distance except in the densest of cities. And even then you might be quite restricted as similar stores seem to clump together.

You definitely can, except for museums which are less common. :)

And stores of a kind clumping together is a suburban phenomenon, not an urban one. You're not usually going to find two hardware stores next to each other in a big city, or two UPS stores. Even fast food, which is almost always "clumped" in the suburbs, gets pretty evenly distributed in cities. A McDonald's will just be on a random corner, not as part of a row next to Burger King and KFC.

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

#356

Post by hedora »

sokoloff wrote: post #339
lukas099 wrote: post #240

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. Good. Then more people will choose different forms of transportation or internalize their costs. If parking becomes scarce, providing parking will become more profitable and people will pay the actual (enormous) cost of…

I live on the edge of Cambridge, MA. I can leave my house and go east into the city or west into the suburbs. Almost all of my voluntary spend is done to the west because of the dramatically higher convenience. Parking becoming difficult and/or expensive pushes patrons to places where that's not the case.

Good. Hollowing out the urban core will prevent pollution from busses, trains and bike tires, and subsidize the oil industry.

/s

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

#358

Post by anamax »

snake_doc wrote: post #327
anamax wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it’s nice to have practically every amenity possible in easy walking distance I.e 5-10 minutes walk. It might be "nice", but it's not possible without a very restricted definition of "every amenity" and even then there's an assumption that amenities are fungible and you're ignoring efficiency. If there's a grocery store every five minute walk, it's relatively small, which means that it has a crap selection…

You clearly have never lived in convenient (but high costs) parts of Manhattan. A 10min walk/transit window can span 20-40 city blocks depending on the location and transit options. All of your assertions are plain wrong.

> A 10min walk/transit window

Move those goal posts. The original claim was "easy walking distance I.e 5-10 minutes walk."

> can span 20-40 city blocks

20 NYC blocks is a mile, which is 20 minutes walking.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/average-walking-sp...

> convenient (but high costs) parts of Manhattan.

If it's so efficient and/or desirable, why only a fraction of NYC?

The answer is that those areas are a luxury good, with, as you put it, "high cost".

Note that the streets, which is the whole of "planning for autos", don't have any effect on what's in the streetfronts. And, since the high cost areas were also "planned for autos" ...

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

#359

Post by michael1999 »

bombcar wrote: post #325
michael1999 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 parking spaces is ~750sqft. A moving car is another 2000sqft. Once population density passes ~3 stories, the geometry stops working. Once drive time exceeds an hour or two, the math stops working. It's the urban rocket equation.

They’re not additive - a car can’t be parked and moving at the same time.

This is in response to a thread discussing the fact that LA has three parking spots per car, and they must (by counting) be mostly empty.

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

#360

Post by pandaman »

bluGill wrote: post #224
oh_sigh wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is 3 parking spaces per car inherently unsustainable?

It isn't unsustainable. However it is limiting. That is a lot of space that is 2/3rds empty yet not really usable for anything else. Worse, cars are heavy and so it isn't practical to go vertical with parking spaces (we can/do build parking ramps - but they are a lot more expensive and so few want to pay to park there, and even then there seems to be a limit to how tall you can make them) Cities are great because of…

> However if you have a niche interest you may discover not enough people live within range to support a place for your interest even though across the entire city there are enough people.

How are the cars limiting here? It's quite the opposite - you can have a special interest shop/venue in a cheap mall in some industrial area and get enough customers who can reach you by car. Without the car ubiquity you'd need to get into expensive real estate in the city center to get potential customers and charge them for your rent, which is fine if you are dealing in, say, collectible wines or artisanal Swiss timepieces and no business if you want to sell Gundam models or knitting sullies.

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