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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

#401

Post by shiroiuma »

medvezhenok wrote: post #62
close04 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising the price would just extract more value for the owners from a very limited resource. But the resource stays just as limited. If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously. The overflow ends up clogging the surrounding neighborhoods, on top of the outcome described by OP. Edit. @pc86, both points you make are valid but neither addresses or fixes…

This is the approach Singapore (and in some ways, Hong Kong) takes; you can own a car, but you must purchase a 10-year use permit, which costs in some cases much more than a car itself (something like $80,000 over 10 years). So if you're buying a Toyota Corolla ($20K car), you'd still need a $80K operating permit to use it. That's why 90%+ of the people in Singapore use public transportation or carpool. Granted, you…

Here in Tokyo, you're not allowed to buy a car unless you can prove to the police that you have a place to park it (and that it actually fits: they'll come measure).

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

#402

Post by Moldoteck »

bombcar wrote: post #346
Moldoteck wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit can be built fast. Replacing ppls cars with uber is nonsense: most trips are when ppl go to work and to home, so at peak hours all ppl need cars, so you need abt the same nr of cars with uber just like with personal cars, you don't solve congestion. That's why public transport wins, you get one unit to transport a lot of ppl, that's why uber/lyft are total bs for replacing good transit. There's no way…

The average passengers per bus-mile in the USA is incredibly depressing. (It is very hard to have a transit system that handles capacity at load and still provides short enough head times as to not be annoying off-peak.)

That's bc it's poorly designed and low density. A transit with own lane+priority on intersection will mean you get reliably to the destination every single time and fast. Ditching park mins will allow building more housing and as result will increase the density too. That's chicken and egg problem and cities must start tackling it by having some budget loss at the beginning by building better transit

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

#403

Post by refurb »

coldpie wrote: post #79
pc86 wrote: post #69

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. More seriously though I do think there are benefits to city living if that's a lifestyle you want, but saving money is almost never one of them unless you have a job where you can make a LOT more living in the city, which sort of by definition means you're not g…

Who said anything about money? Owning a car sucks, dude. Without a car, you don't need a place to store it, you don't need to worry about the safety of your $25,000 item every time you want to go somewhere, you don't need to worry (as much) about being turned into hamburger by your own or some other idiot's mistake. When I go somewhere, I hop on the bus, read a book for a while, and then I'm at my destination. It's f…

That seems like a pretty subjective and personal opinion.

I love having a car. It gives me freedom and flexibility. It enables me to do the hobbies I like. It even gives me more career options and a broader range of housing options.

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

#405

Post by bluGill »

bombcar wrote: post #334
bluGill wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200 years ago 98% of humans were farmers and lived either on the farm or in a small village in walking distance of the farm. Todays cities are nothing like how people lived before modern days. If you were a substance farmer (as was your best case) you had about 5 acres of land - about what you get in the exurbs (though a modern exurb house is a lot bigger/nicer). If you were a slave (not unlikely) you lived in a very…

Even today a small “rural” town (which the census considers urban, mind you) can be quite the walkable paradise, if your demands for what is nearby are adjusted to be reasonable (say, a target OR a Walmart, but not both).

Maybe, but most of them are not large enough for a walmart. They might have a dollar general, which is just barely enough. The smaller ones don't even have a grocery store anymore. The towns that can support a walmart are large enough that you can't really live in walking distance of the walmart (which is often on the edge of town and far from anything else)

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

#406

Post by bluGill »

bombcar wrote: post #326
bluGill wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most housing units will have more than one person, and most of those people have cars. In most cities space dedicated to cars (parking and roads) covers about 50% of all land use. Housing, factories, stores, parks, churches, and the like are the other half. Note that the above is about land area. Housing units are often stacked vertically, while car parking rarely stacked.

Where land is actually precious, parking gets stacked. Where it is not stacked, it’s obviously not that terribly valuable.

Stacking parking is done. However it is so expensive to build that before it is worth stacking parking you are already building less parking than there is demand. The cost to park in stacked parking regularly means the costs to park there are high enough to make most customers look for alternatives. There are places just outside of downtown where the demand for cheap surface lot parking is higher than total parking spaces - but the people who go there would not pay for stacked parking. Thus while stacked parking exists, it is more costly than the value most people consider it to provide.

Of course places where stacked parking is even a thought are also places where density is high enough that it isn't hard to run a great transit system and so there is less need for parking at all.

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

#407

Post by bluGill »

pandaman wrote: post #360
bluGill wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cars work best in low density. Eventually the total area of the city is so great that even though in theory you can drive across it, the total time that takes means some trips are unreasonable to do. If that story that sells Gundam models (I have no idea what this is so I assume it is a great example of a rare niche) is on the other side of the city it may be more than an hour drive at off peak times to get there and so for practical purposes it isn't in reach.

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

#408

Post by nunez »

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.

You got me super interested in this book now. This is a pattern that I've kept seeing in my visits to lots of other cities in the US (especially cities in the South) and I always wondered why that was (aside from white flight and big auto, though I figured those weren't the _only_ reasons).

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

#409

Post by tellsomething »

tstrimple wrote: post #170
tellsomething wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One can like one tradeoff more than the other, but the fact that infrastructure means subsidy, and that urbanism choices are picking some people's interests over others is just factual. You do have a point. But, do you think cities prosper in spite of this subsidy? It seems like an investment that pays off in second error effects. I mean, why aren't cities without infrastructure growing like mad? Because it's not p…

The investment only pays off in areas with the tax base to recoup the upfront cost. Largely this isn't the suburbs or rural areas and only some parts of urban environments. Massive suburbs are built without the ability to maintain their infrastructure in the future based off of the taxes of its residents. There is an interesting image in this article ( https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... )…

I will read the article later on, only skimmed it.

I don't trust the numbers though.

I've noticed in my area that companies congregate near their nexus. Attorneys will get an office near the tribunal, accountants near the IRS building, etc. Also, big companies will set their headquarters in the state capital but earn money from all over the place.

This makes it seem like the capital "makes" all the money though it's actually just fiscally declared in that place.

I suspect that chart shows the same thing. Eg. perhaps the gutters may not be covered from the home tax, but that person goes to work someplace, spends money elsewhere and maybe has a company registered elsewhere in the city.

Though, I do agree that overinvesting may happen for infrastructure. I don't buy it though that, for example, suburbs are inherently a subsidy.

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

#410

Post by [deleted] »

verve_rat wrote: post #396
electrondood wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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