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

391–400 of 432 posts

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

#391

Post by mint2 »

codexb wrote: post #362
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.

Except 100 small shops and restaurants can’t be supported by walk-only pedestrians unless you create super-ultra-dense residential. It’s really nice not to share walls with 4 different neighbors and be able to have a yard and let your kids play outside your house. Residential density is worse in every way for most of the population.

That’s wrong. It’s true that areas planned around cars can’t support that number of small shops and restaurants.

Actually nearby it’s the street with more car traffic that has the most empty store fronts because everyone hates walking on it.

The main issue with the walkable cities is the housing is expensive.

The reason for that is demand exceeds supply. People love the cities judging by the absurd house prices in them. It’s just that we don’t have enough of them.

A main reason for that is single family zoning and parking minimums.

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

#393

Post by lukas099 »

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.

Put another way, it will be harder for people in suburbs to reap the benefits of density while being subsidized by it.

And the 'spend' from people driving in from the suburbs to go shopping will easily be overshadowed by greater economic activity resulting from a denser urban core.

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

#394

Post by [deleted] »

anamax wrote: post #322
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.

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#395

Post by Eisenstein »

jen20 wrote: post #389
Eisenstein wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is a non-issue, why raise it?

To point out that the intended effect of removing the minimums in Austin is highly unlikely to change actual behaviour in practice, other than perhaps in the units designated for low income people who likely will have to make do without parking.

I will parry my uneducated guess against yours and say that it will possibly help and will certainly not hurt. I guess we will have to find out.

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

#396

Post by verve_rat »

electrondood wrote: post #387
talldatethrow wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are at least 15 million illegals currently in the US. If they all left, there'd be atleast 3-4 million housing units freed up instantaneously, mostly in areas already with hard to get housing. It should be pretty obvious what that would do to housing prices.

Ah yes, the "this country is full" trope. Also, "illegal immigrant" is the term. No human being is inherently illegal. You seriously think each person who is here illegally is renting or owning their own unit of housing?

The US might not be full, but it does seem like you have run out of houses?

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

#397

Post by Moldoteck »

colechristensen wrote: post #376
FarMcKon wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just say 'I don't like this' instead of making up a bunch of 'just so stories' about why. Fine if you don't like density, but the whole pseudo-science `Dense urbanization is detrimental to health, physical and mental` is just mental.

I live in a downtown high rise. It’s 25 degrees outside, I have a lady friend who lives a mile away. I feel unsafe riding public transit at night here, much less her. She experiences extreme harassment walking here during the day (did it once, never again, I was on the phone with her, it was horrifying). How do you propose she visit me without a car and available parking? Uber would cost her more than an hour of her…

You gave an anecdotal example. I can give one too: generally medium density, mixed use, bikeble areas are much safer compared to other options, bc there are always people around, some go to work, some go to shopping, some go to drink a coffee, etc, adn ppl usually feel safer in this areas. On the other hand, low density areas are less safe bc there's no one around to call police if something happens. It's also a health problem both phisical and mental: ppl are more isolated from other ppl, it's harder to meet other ppl, it's much harder when you are old and ppl generally move less bc they must use a car for everything instead of walking/biking to the destination. In low density areas there's also a deficit of 3'rd places to meet ppl

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

#398

Post by lukas099 »

rcpt wrote: post #269
chung8123 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need all of that to have every amenity at a walking distance. I live in the suburbs and I still have almost every amenity walking distance. Do I need 20 restaurants and coffee shops? Having space for your hobbies is nice so if your priority is hobbies that need space living out of the city is nice. If your priority is going out for things it is probably better to live in the city.

> live in the suburbs and I still have almost every amenity walking distance Are you sure you live in a suburb?

There are some suburbs like this, it's just not the norm of how we build anymore. And sometimes the walk is not long, but is not very pleasant.

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

#399

Post by Moldoteck »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #328
Eisenstein wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other tactic is 'do something to reduce car dependency'.

That's my whole point. Just getting rid of parking doesn't reduce car dependency if there aren't better alternatives.

Getting rid of parking minimums may propell the alternatives. What if businesses discover most ppl get to them by public transport/bike? They will demand authorities to accomodate those ppl so that profits will rise, or they will build themselves more infra(at least good bike parking) for this. Right now businesses are forced to accomodate car drivers even if sometimes it's not the best business decision and this might change. Also, less parking means more space, that can be used for different things like recreation zones or just building a mixed use building that will guarantee more clients to nearby local shops/businesses (depending on what the demand is ofc). In other words getting rid of parking minimums allows ppl/businesses to experiment and see what's the best use for that land, be that a public space like parks, kids playfield, mixed use building, just another business, bike parking or something entirely else. Right now all that space was locked by strange laws with numbers taken from the air

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

#400

Post by Moldoteck »

tellsomething wrote: post #94
_dain_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But really, your whole life is sustained by providers driving. Taxes in the city comes from humans being able to physically move their bodies to the right location. because the only way to get around in a city is by driving, right?

It will sure do great to inflation when your plumber has to take the bus and instead of having 5 customers per day only has 2.

In a nice designed city, getting to the destination with public transp is faster compared to cars, due to dedicated lanes, more direct paths, semaphore priority (Amsterdam for example) and this is applied to bike paths too. Car infra is designed in a way that it exists but is not optimal/as fast as possible, they optimize for ways to transport great amount of ppl as fast as possible and cars can't do that
Post reply on HN