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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

#241

Post by marcosdumay »

c22 wrote: post #183
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…

There are always some cars being driven at any given time, so you could technically get away with even fewer spaces than cars. But the fewer spaces you have the less likely the available ones are near your destination.

That's one thing that self-driving cars would help.

And the more often the car is running, the fewer parking spots you need, so shared cars help here too.

But neither would beat a well organized hierarchical and capillary mas-transit.

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

#242

Post by vel0city »

detourdog wrote: post #155
dave78 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the problem isn't the fact that parking requirements exist but rather that they require way too many parking spots. Most shopping center lots in my area are never close to full, even on the busiest Christmas shopping days.

I here this a lot but in the North East at least those extra spots can be used during the winter for snow management. Snow management can be done in other ways but that is a cost analysis exercise.

Can you elaborate on the snow management aspects?

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

#244

Post by lukas099 »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #15
londons_explore wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further. End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit. Unfortunately, there probably will be t…

The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.

It's not making life shittier, it's making life better.

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

#245

Post by lukas099 »

londons_explore wrote: post #5
voisin wrote: post #3

It’s one thing to ditch parking minimums, but it has to be matched with investment in public transit. Simply eliminating parking spots doesn’t eliminate demand when there are no other options for getting around. And I suspect the public transit investment will be way more controversial and difficult to implement.

Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further. End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit. Unfortunately, there probably will be t…

> End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit.

Also, far more tax revenue (from making land more productive) makes public transit more affordable for the city.

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

#246

Post by brewdad »

Ekaros wrote: post #197
jadengeller wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

My adult child lives in an area of Seattle where parking minimums have been eliminated. Their building, built 3 years ago, has about 65 adult residents. There are 10 parking spaces on site and the street the building sits on has zero street parking. Renting a parking space adds about 10% to the cost of renting. Currently there is still one spot available if a resident wants to pay for it.

If they had built 60 parking spaces and let residents park for free, I feel confident there would be at least 50 spots in regular use based on how nearby buildings with larger parking lots are utilized. Since the parking is underground, the most expensive type of parking to build, I also feel confident that rents would be at least 10% and probably 20% higher with "free" parking.

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

#247

Post by [deleted] »

adventured wrote: post #147
pramsey wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not the cause at all. Extreme minority poverty and the potent bifurcation of incomes, education and wealth in the US is the cause. Parking won't fix any of that realistically. You can push minority poverty to the suburbs, which for example is what France does, however it doesn't solve anything about the bombed out look, it merely redistributes the problem to somewhere else. You can gentrify the cities and push…

[deleted]

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

#248

Post by jandrese »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #229
jandrese wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes less than a month to build city-wide rudimentary protected bike lines. Citation needed. Maybe a month of actual painting time once you've done all of the planning, but planning the routes and going through all of the approvals and meetings is absolutely not possible in a single month. Not even a single year.

If you do it on every street you don't have to spend any time planning the routes.

Absolutely not true. Every intersection is its own special snowflake and if you don't consider the intersections your bike paths will not be usable.

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

#249

Post by shortsunblack »

pc86 wrote: post #69
AlexandrB wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean. Even with remote work, living in a high-density area offers advantages - the primary one (in my mind) being that you don't have to own a car.

"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…

According to American Automobile Association, annual cost of car ownership is 12182 US$[1]. That is 3x montly than that you claim.

[1] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2023/08/annual-new-car-ownership-co...

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

#250

Post by autoexec »

dragonwriter wrote: post #168
autoexec wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, at least not for most people anyway. People need cars to get to where they need to go. When the developer of an apartment complex has to provide parking for its residents everyone has a place to put the cars they need. When those developers don't have to provide parking space anymore, people will still need cars, but will now have no place to put them at night. This will drive up the price of apartment comp…

> When those developers don't have to providing parking space anymore, people will still need cars but now have no place to put them at night. If they have no place to put them, they won't have them, and if they don't have them, then either (1) they won't live there at all, or (2) they don't actually need them. > This is the kind of move that should be done selectively No, having parking requirements should be done s…

> If they have no place to put them, they won't have them

This is demonstrably false. People still need cars to get to where they need to go, like work, or their doctor's office, or the grocery store. There are no alternatives. Public transportation doesn't get them there. Ubering everywhere is more expensive than owning a car. Until alternatives exist, not having a car isn't an option.

If you've been to cities where there isn't enough street parking to meet demand you'd know that even when people have no place to park their cars they still keep cars. They just go to extremes to find/keep/make parking wherever and whenever they can and often have to spend long periods of time driving on streets/circling blocks to find a spot. They block traffic to wait for someone they think might be leaving soon, they walk great distances to get from where to park to where they need to be, they park in illegal or dangerous places.

There are many negative consequences to this behavior which impact everyone around them, but people can't help but do it because they're left with no alternatives. Examples of this abound. I've seen statistics like 30% of all traffic in urban areas are just people looking for places to park. (some studies have found that number to be as high as 75%!) or that the average amount of time drivers spend per year looking for place to park is 17 hours!

> No, having parking requirements should be done selectively, if at all.

That means the same thing.

> If there is sufficient market demand, the requirements will be unnecessary to get developers to include them

That's not how markets work. If it will make developers more money to not give people the amount of parking they need, then developers will not give people enough parking. All other negative externalities be damned. None of it means there will be fewer cars on the road.

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