DTLA is around 50k population, so like any smallish town, you can do most of your life there. But like I said, there are train stations that can get you to most of the greater LA area - Pasadena, Santa Monica, HOLLYWOOD, Long Beach, Chinatown, etc etc.
I think most probably have a car, but I'm not sure it matters. Developers will cater to what people want. Most people will probably still want apartments with parking, so most development projects will continue to have parking.
Another portion of the population doesn't have cars or are otherwise uninterested in parking. This change would make it legal for there to be development projects that cater to this set of the population.
For the years i saw LA, everyone had a car, and used them religiously. Like, they would take their car to go around the corner.
It's kind of ridiculous.
1. I'm not sure why you think this is inconsistent with what I said.
You seem to think it is?
2. I'm not sure what census blocks you are including in your definition?
For a very long time, LA was also very famously anti-pedestrian, both in laws and enforcement. It's trying to change for sure, but I would not say it's there yet.
does removing parking minimums actually lower rents by the 17% of rent that's estimated to go toward parking?
parking podiums eat up the most pedestrian-friendly ground floor square footage, but i can sympathize with people wanting parking in their building. i wish all parking would be built underground, but yes, that's even more expensive.
>does removing parking minimums actually lower rents by the 17% of rent that's estimated to go toward parking?
No, because removing parking minimums is not the same as removing parking.
>parking podiums eat up the most pedestrian-friendly ground floor square footage, but i can sympathize with people wanting parking in their building.
In-building parking is a widely available amenity amply provided by the market. Regulatory parking requirements don't change that, they just make it illegal to not want parking.
It's funny, in London new housing has been built with the explicit planning condition that residents aren't entitled to on street parking and no parking is included in the development.
In SF as well, but the local government has shown itself unable to resist calls to later add parking entitlements to structures after they are built. For example all "live-work" developments are forbidden by law from participating in residential parking permit zones, but the city council has repeatedly established RPP zones on blocks where the sole residential buildings are all live-work.
Out of curiosity, what mechanism is used to bar residents of new buildings from on-street parking? Pressure on the on-street parking supply is the most common reason given to support off-street parking requirements.
Inner London boroughs issue permits for on street residents parking linked to a car registration.
If you live in a new development you can't get a permit.
I have been in a queue at the local council offices behind a guy who had bought a 500K+ flat without knowing he could not park his car within 2+ miles of it.
i get all that, and i'm not against this change generally, but i'm wondering about whether the savings are actually passed-through or does the developer/owner capture that value? i'm skeptical that (most of) the savings accrues to the renter.
Why wouldn't the savings/costs be passed along to the consumer as in every other segment of the market?
If I am a strawberry seller and my cost to buy strawberries goes down, I can pass those savings onto the consumer or not. But my competitors will all be making the same choice, so absent collusion, if I don't lower my prices, but my competitors do, then obviously they'll take my business.
In other words, profit margins are determined by how competitive a market is, not the cost of production.
If this change goes through, I imagine that profit margins for LA developers will remain similar to whatever they are now.
I think you are overstating the case that the market will pass this saving through. In reality there is some market-clearing price for a dwelling without a parking space and there's nothing the developer can do to influence it. This is the same reason that it's actually not possible to "build affordable housing" as many people demand. Yes you can build the housing but there's nothing you can do about the price it then commands.
right, my skepticism was about the actual market dynamics and the forces that might compel pass-through savings via competition, not the econ 101 idealization of commodity markets.
They are passed through, particularly for residential. When apartments and condos require 1-2 parking spaces per unit, it means that we aren't selling to people without cars, who are often people who can't afford cars.
My old unit in the DC area had something like $80,000 in parking attached to it. That could have been ground floor units or retail instead. The units would have been cheaper had the parking minimums not been there. In bigger buildings that put parking underground, those units can be very expensive to build.
> In-building parking is a widely available amenity amply provided by the market.
This is an odd claim to make. Regulation has historically required that it be provided in most (American) markets, hence the ample supply. I'm not sure how we could possibly know what the market would do on its own over the long term.
Requiring excessive parking will artificially and needlessly raises prices, true. But I would also be at least somewhat concerned that without sufficient regulation short term thinking on the part of builders might result in less parking than would be generally desirable.
I'm not at all convinced that urban planning should be done by market forces alone.
There is no "minimum air conditioning" requirement where I live, but pretty much every building I walk into has it. My apartment, like most apartments I've seen, also has it.
Turns out that people don't need the government to tell them what they want. People like AC, so most buildings have AC. Not particularly remarkable, but most apartments in my area also come with refrigerators, stoves, ovens, sinks, showers, and dishwashers, all sans-minimum-appliance requirement.
To me, a minimum parking requirement seems as weirdly dystopian as requiring ACs or dishwashers. Most people like those things, so most buildings will have them, but it shouldn't be illegal to decide you don't need an AC or dishwasher.
AC/heating are actually required by law in most of the US.
For example, in the Northeast, heaters have been required for all residential construction for many decades. Residences without heaters are legally considered not habitable. In most of the Southwest like Arizona and Nevada, new residential construction must have ACs (in CA, it's not a universal requirement and window units meet the requirement).
Few residential apartments come with washers. Generally, those would be apartments classified as "luxury" or better (where luxury is a rental term of art referring to amenities, not the actual quality of the building...)
I didn't know that about other parts of the US. I can see how it might make sense in Arizona. In California, mandating ACs would be enormously stupid. For one thing, it would needlessly inhibit use of the many other methods that exist for cooling buildings (a la Apple Campus). But also, the California climate is temperate enough that it is very much possible to live without AC. I have an AC but have not used it in more than a year. I see no reason why we should require everyone to have one.
I of course have no objection that buildings must be habitable. A building with dirty water, structural issues, or lacking heat in a cold place is obviously not serving any market segment.
Parking seems to me be fundamentally different than those issues though. I know many people that happily live without a car in LA. Why should it be illegal for developers to cater to them?
>This is an odd claim to make. Regulation has historically required that it be provided in most (American) markets, hence the ample supply. I'm not sure how we could possibly know what the market would do on its own over the long term.
Sure we can. Those regulations are not always binding. Buildings are built with parking capacity in excess of minimums all the time.
>Requiring excessive parking will artificially and needlessly raises prices, true. But I would also be at least somewhat concerned that without sufficient regulation short term thinking on the part of builders might result in less parking than would be generally desirable.
Why? What's the market failure? For that matter, why is there a "general desire" for the quantity of at-home parking I individually consume?
>I'm not at all convinced that urban planning should be done by market forces alone.
That's a strawman — removing parking requirements is a far cry from "market forces alone" doing urban planning. (It is, however, a great example of how non-market forces can create worse, environmentally inefficient, undesirable outcomes by submitting what should be private choices to mob rule.)
> It is, however, a great example of how non-market forces can create worse, environmentally inefficient, undesirable outcomes by submitting what should be private choices to mob rule.
There is no evidence that this is the case though. The vast majority of new construction has always been targeted towards the top of the market, which in the case of Los Angeles means a need for parking spaces.
The only clear case where the market would act differently would be in the case of commercial parking requirements, where a one sized fits all approach as exists today doesn't work as each neighborhood in LA drives a different amount.
>There is no evidence that this is the case though. The vast majority of new construction has always been targeted towards the top of the market, which in the case of Los Angeles means a need for parking spaces.
Changes will more likely happen at the margin. I have no doubt that an apartment building with 1 space per 1br apartment instead of 1.5 would still be marketable at the top end.
Where I live (not in the US) we have parking maximums, not minimums.
A new office development will not get planning approval if it has more than 2 parking spaces per 3 employees (based on some obscure measurement of building capacity). This is to reduce congestion and encourage more environmentally friendly methods of transportation.
I feel like this would be putting the cart before the horse in the US. Failing to put parking in a place with poor walkability and terrible public transportation doesn't seem like it would encourage much of anything.
The cars are the reason the buses are slow. 22% of LA workers travel to work without a car, which isn't great but it's not zero either. Metro LA added a dedicated bus lane on Flower and they are moving more than one bus per minute in that lane. As soon as you remove the cars everything else gets a lot better.
Yeah, except no. This is just one of those tropes that motorists use to force cities to subsidize them. Every study on this topic has conclusively shown that parking causes traffic. The construction of parking precedes the worsening of traffic, the amount of parking built is proportional to the amount of traffic observed, and the reverse process is also observed to correct the problem: removing parking alleviates traffic congestion. The case that parking causes traffic congestion is as strong as the case that smoking causes lung cancer.
Hey, do you have anything handy to support this? I can totally do my own research if it's hard for you to recall your sources. Just hoping for a quick lead or two. If you roughly remember the title of the papers or the names of authors or the regions studied, anything at all, it'll help me search faster and I'd be mega grateful.
Construction of parking preceding the worsening of traffic is not the same as parking construction causing traffic congestion. Adding more servers behind a load balancer will also precede congestion on your network. Because you've increased your capacity to service additional throughput, but did not increase your network link to handle that higher throughput. So at some point, it'll start thrashing.
Same with parking. You build parking in areas where you anticipate increased demand or already have unmet demand. By building parking, you increase your capacity to meet that demand.
If you have unmet demand (i.e. not enough spaces for the volume of vehicles that wish to park in an area), you're limiting the economic throughput of that area. Yes, you're reducing traffic congestion in the process, but at a very real economic cost for those whom were being patronized by that now-gone traffic.
Same with anticipating new demand. If you're building in an area, you want to be sure the area has enough parking capacity to absorb the intended volume of people traffic your building will have. If you're building a new skyscraper or mall or big box store, that's likely not true. So you incorporate parking into your project. Once your building (and parking) come online, you'll start attracting a higher volume of individuals to an area. Which, except for the most underutilized or mature transportation networks, will have a corresponding impact on congestion due to the greater throughput of individuals to the area.
If you have mature public transportation, then your transportation network likely has the bandwidth to absorb this throughput increase with a lesser impact on congestion than if you're in an area with immature public transportation options. But mature public transportation tends to be very expensive to build and maintain. Which is only likely to happen after growing to the point of having heavy enough congestion to make such expensive and regionally disruptive changes both politically palatable and economically feasible.
If you want faster buses, evict the cars from the bus travel lanes.
That's hard to do without BRT - we have plenty of dedicated bus lanes (the right lane) around here, but they all allow cars for right-hand turns, so buses still get stuck behind a line of cars.
Without BRT and center-island boarding, it's harder to reserve anything but the far-right lane since the bus needs to get there to pickup/dropoff passengers.
> That's hard to do without BRT - we have plenty of dedicated bus lanes (the right lane) around here, but they all allow cars for right-hand turns, so buses still get stuck behind a line of cars.
Dedicated bus signalization, no right turn on red, and cars perform right turns from the second lane. Dedicated signal phase can be combined with separated bike lanes to improve safety for other road users, as well.
Are they? It's always seemed to me that frequent stops, circuitous routes and long travel distances are the reason the buses are slow relative to cars. After all, cars have to deal with other cars as well. And for comparison, to the south, San Diego has much better traffic than LA, but the buses are still quite slow (e.g. I recently considered taking the bus rather than a 15-minute drive in San Diego, but it would have been over an hour by bus).
Buses have to stop to be useful. Any theoretical bus route will be circuituous for some subset of users.
The solution to these issues is to provide bus signalization, dedicated lanes, and/or queue jumping opportunities. These changes minimally inconvenience cars while significantly speeding up buses. It makes it so that a bus route, while longer, can be time-competitive with driving (or rather, closer enough that it overcomes the inconvenience of walking to/from stops and sometimes having to wait for your bus)
You guys are both right. Removing cars from a bus lane makes the buses go faster.
And having frequent stops makes buses go slower.
Traveling long distances doesn't make the bus any slower; it just limits the frequency you can revisit a stop on the route without increasing the number of buses on that route.
I didn't mean long travel distances make buses go slower, I meant they amplify the disadvantages of buses, and America tends to have a lot of distance between things. If a trip would take one minute and it takes four instead, that's probably fine. If a trip would take 15 minutes and it takes an hour, that's a bigger problem, even though it's the same relative slowdown.
- Motorcycle to work: 15 - 20 minutes door to door (driving generally ~30 minutes, but 40 minutes or so during busy periods)
- Bus to work: > 60 minutes (7 minute walk, 5 minute wait, 45 minute average bus journey, 7 minute walk)
Cycling would, I reckon, take me about 45 - 50 minutes door to door until I got fitter, but that would be fine because I'd be getting loads of exercise, so the trade-off becomes worthwhile even though it takes longer. (The reason I don't cycle is there's no safe route.)
Presumably it just depends on whether the road is congestion. Roads are essentially non-rivalrous (my use of the road doesn't reduce your ability to use the road), until the road is congested.
Presumably most congested roads are used mostly by cars, so I suppose you could say that "cars cause congestion and congestion makes buses slower." But of course, the congestion also makes the cars slower as well.
There are different bottlenecks in buses depending on the situation, and I'm not familiar with LA. However, the places where I've tried using the bus, the latency involved in walking to the bus stop, waiting for the bus, getting off and walking to the transfer bus stop, waiting for the bus, then walking to my destination far exceed the delay added the stops the bus had to make. In many cases it exceeded the total time on the bus altogether. Increasing the frequency that buses run a route has huge impact on travel time, but there is a limit as to how much you can do that without adding a dedicated lane. The small improvement in speed caused by not having to deal with cars is just icing on the top.
I was pleasantly surprised with LAs bus system the last few times I've been. They have both express buses and ones that hit every stop. I also find LA to be very walkable.
If such a thing were to happen in the US, given the current state of infrastructure, optimistic scenario would be increased demand for UberPool / Lyft Line and carpooling in general. At least in the short term.
Not in DTLA. There's plenty of public transit options that exist and more being built, so it seems like the right time to stop building new buildings with tons of parking. I live in Santa Monica and most people I know making a commute between Santa Monica and DTLA are already doing so carless.
It's just lifting a requirement, for know. Presumably, there are currently cases where you have to build a parking lot even though it's the headquarters for Fundamentalist Cyclists International and situated right next to public transport.
After that, it's chicken-and-egg more than cart-and-whores. With surface parking lots taking up easily half the space in many US business districts, eliminating them could double density and thereby cut average distances in half, making other modes of transportation much more feasible.
Essentially, the US at one point chose cars as the dominant mode of transportation and got trapped in that decision. Anybody who has seen alternatives knows this is a tremendous burden on quality of life, yet any change will, in the short term, also hurt in different ways.
We've been digging the "cars first" hole for 75-100 years, so it is going to be painful for a while to get out. Less accommodation for cars is necessary for people to really consider alternatives.
It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. As long as there's requirements to provide loads of parking space there's not going to be much pressure for proper walkable and public transit accessible locations and without locations being built around these ideas there's not pressure to make them accessible by non-car traffic.
Here’s a crazy idea: let the property owner and developer decide the correct amount of parking to provide. And the size of the apartments. And the number of floors to build.
The regulations here should be based around things like structural integrity, egress, and safety. Not views, not density, not what size of apartment is “too big” or “too small.” All of those are things the market can sort out.
Isn’t that basically just the libertarian mindset? Ie let individuals optimize for their own interests, even when the t as the detriment of the community? Markets are definitely efficient in sorting out short term individual goals, but not much beyond that.
I agree that markets can't solve everything, especially within the tight networks of externalities that exist in high-density cities. But with parking, I think the problem is the opposite: car owners create a negative externality (use of limited city-provided parking) that ends up costing non-car-owners because cities then require buildings to build parking.
I agree that cities can screw this up, but the idea of leaving parking policy completely up to the free market is also unappealing. Parking mins are dumb, but parking maxes can make a lot of sense.
It's crazy because it doesn't work. All of those factors rely upon the use of common, municipal resources, and those municipal resources, especially streets, often can't be expanded.
When you're willing to externalize the costs of making mass-SOV transportation possible, to the advancement of personal gain, yes, “the market” will push people toward taking advantage of that discounted resource. Until there is established some sort of per-use fee for ROW use that offsets those externalities, the market pricing is already critically warped and cannot be used as an oracle for what people are willing to pay for being able to get to that parking spot, 10k sq foot residential lot, etc.
Do cyclists pay for their road usage? I paid over $600 for my California car registration and I pay significant gasoline taxes. I also pay significant income taxes. And bridge tolls. The taxes and fees that I directly pay for my car (registration and gas taxes) aren’t being used 100% for my road usage. That money is being used for bike lanes I never use or buses I never ride. So I am paying for someone else’s “externalities” while public transportation riders pay a subsidized fare. I am not opposed to public transport at all — but when we hear about motorists paying more for their “externalities,” I might argue that public transport users ought to be paying their fair share. Electric car drivers don’t even pay a gas tax but they roll on the same roads as everyone else without actually paying their “fair share.” They even get to clog up the HOV lanes despite rolling with a single person. I am stuck behind some single driver in a Tesla, while I have 5 people in the car while also getting the privilege of subsidizing his use of the road. I also get in traffic jams on roads like El Camino in Palo Alto while buses get to stop and block the road to unload a single person.
It’s fashionable to hate cars, but when I need to get from Mountain View to the Hayward Airport at 4:30am, there is no combination of public transport that would get me there in less than 2 hours. Going from Palo Alto to Livermore on public transport is practically impossible. These European-style high density dreams aren’t based in reality for the majority of the United States. Making San Francisco high density would certainly be great, but applying that model to the rest of the Peninsula is just a pipe dream. 50 floor apartments like Korea would be the only way to make that work, but that still doesn’t account for the reality we have. Saratoga to Milpitas— how does that work with public transportation? The United States is built around cars. That horse has left the barn. You can’t realistically redesign the entirety of America to fit a model that is ideal for Copenhagen. Even in Europe, there are vast searches that are car dependent. Putting a tram or high frequency buses in southern France for instance would be ridiculous outside of Marseille perhaps. Even in the cities: how do you deliver a refrigerator easily within a pedestrian-only city? How about moving trucks? I spent a lot of time in Venice and prices for things are astronomical simply because everything has to be delivered via boat. Venice’s geography makes this unavoidable, but intentionally destroying city logistics because of some fantasy is ridiculous. We can do better, but the anti-car movement doesn’t really understand the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Bike lanes would incur 10% of their current cost if they didn't have to be engineered around the ubiquitous SOVs. That's another externality of automobiles, and it doesn't account for how insufficient, broken, and unsafe that bike infra is, all because it has to route around cars being catered to as the “first class” use of ROW.
> Putting a tram or high frequency buses in southern France for instance would be ridiculous outside of Marseille perhaps.
Yeah, there's no trams in southern France. Except for in Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Grenoble, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice, Saint-Étienne, and Toulouse. And there are plans for trams in Nîmes and Avignon.
Perhaps if the "anti-car" argument is framed more precisely, you'll see that it's entirely consistent with using a car for those 4:30 am trips to the airport. What all these efforts seek to minimize is not all car travel for all people, but rather routine car travel for many/most people. That includes, first and foremost, daily work commutes, because that's what dictates road capacity necessary to make traffic jams manageable, so that's the kind of car travel that's a) most expensive for society b) leads to cityscapes that are uncomfortable or actively hostile for pedestrians and cyclists. The way to do that is by giving them a viable alternative, not merely inconveniencing them by, say, neglecting highways and calling it a day. A city where commutes by public transit are a viable option* for, say, 3/4 of the population is a city where the other 1/4 has fewer traffic jams to contend with, and where that same 3/4 can make an economically rational decision to spend $150 a month on Uber instead of owning a car, which will cover airport trips, grocery trips, etc.
Yes, definitely. Granted, this may vary from state to state, and I don't know the situation in California. Most of the roads that I travel on are city and county roads that are paid for out of my property taxes. Ironically, our property taxes are higher because living in a bike friendly zone with good access to public transit increases our property value.
I'm not allowed to ride my bike on the freeways, and I avoid the major federal / state highways. I suspect that those are what suck up the most money.
I pay income tax.
Most cyclists still own cars. My family pays for registration of two cars that we drive less because of our bikes. We pay gas taxes when we drive, plus license fees, and state-mandated insurance.
Our bikes do negligible damage to the roads, and we reduce the need for both road construction and parking space.
I'd be willing to bet that if we analyzed all of the numbers carefully, we'd find the net effect is that motorists and cyclists both pay -- to subsidize the trucking industry.
If I was a builder, my incentives are closely aligned with the city - build something that appeals to buyers. If I build a fancy apartment building where everyone owns cars but I provide no parking, well those aren’t going to be very desirable.
Why are your incentives (as a builder) always closely aligned with the city?
Consider Japan, which has building restrictions to avoid eternal shadows. Building height is a function of the setback from the street.
A buyer may well want a taller building, and a builder might well be happy to provide it, when the city is dead set against it.
What is the mechanism by which "the market" balances out the desire by the megarich to live in tall towers in NYC, with the desire by those who use Central Park to not be in shadows more?
The value of the owner’s asset (the building) is based on more than just the building itself, but also on the surrounding area and the quality of life.
It doesn’t help an owner if they build units nobody wants to live in because of shadows, no parking, etc.
It seems that your answer to my question "What is the mechanism by which "the market" balances out the desire by the megarich to live in tall towers in NYC, with the desire by those who use Central Park to not be in shadows more?" is that the megarich should build as many towers as they want until the megarich themselves no longer want to live with Central Park in shade.
That is, if the megarich enjoy the 50 mile views and don't care about Central Park at all, then it can smother in shadow, yes?
And the only mechanism for the people who want to have sunlight in the Park is to make the megarich either socially or physically uncomfortable enough (perhaps by threats of violence?) that they decide it's time to move away ... or buy more security?
If so, your mechanism seems rather prone to encourage social unrest.
If I was a builder, my incentives are
closely aligned with the city
Imagine I've got a fixed-size plot of land, and I'm constructing a 12 space parking lot and a 3-floor building with 3 apartments per floor. 1 space per apartment, plus 3 spare for guests/deliveries/two-car families. No underground parking or anything, just a basic paved lot.
I'm planning to sell all the apartments and move on to another project, so I won't have to solve any parking problems residents or locals end up having.
I have the option to add an extra floor on, so there would be 12 apartments - but no guest parking any more.
I won’t replace parking with units unless that makes the building more valuable overall. If there is a strong demand for parking spots, the existing units are likely to lose value by having no parking. And I’d also have to shell out cash upfront to compensate them.
There is a great deal of human civilization that works well despite looking nothing like the postwar suburban United States. This idea that anything outside status-quo zoning codes will lead to the collapse of civilization seems easily disproven by most middle-class people's travel experiences.
I have to completely disagree with you here in terms of parking. Cities absolutely need to do significant transportation planning or you get the mess that exists throughout huge portions of the developing world. Even Los Angeles with it's traffic problems doesn't even come close to Mumbai. While governments aren't always good about solving these issues, the market would be worse as it's too decentralized to care about tragedy of the commons type problems.
Additionally, I also indirectly disagree with the last two points because it is absolutely crucial that cities have some control over population changes as it relates to density. Utility overload is a real issue, and needs to be accounted for. Schools need to get built, sidewalks widened, and so on.
What's ultimately needed is a form of adaptive city planning, that reacts to market forces (such as population changes, desire from developers to build new buildings, ect) with planned solutions such that there are no tragedy of the commons issues that come about. What's unacceptable is the 20+ year horizon planning that most cities do now.
This would eliminate too many middlemen and bureaucrats. We need the government to mandate what's optimal based on what lobbyists from parking construction firms advocate for. We also need to ensure the requirements are sufficiently high enough so that only a select few companies can effectively bid, ensuring minimal competition and maximum profitability, and maximum political donations.
When bus fares are increased to account for the actual cost of the bus system, then let’s talk about metered usage for cars. Bus and train fares are heavily subsidized so those users aren’t paying their fair share either.
My building in the suburbs outside of DC had the same requirement put on them by the county. They weren't allowed to build enough parking to accommodate a full building in order to encourage people to use alternative transportation.
This is something of a problem because one of the features of the building is a large conference center where we can hold events. Luckily the older buildings on campus all over overbuilt parking so it's not a completely unworkable issue, but it does mean people who come for the conference need to walk over from the neighboring building.
I actually use the relatively convenient metro stop most days, but sometimes I have to drive and it is always a crapshoot if the underground parking will be full. The funny thing is my building is in one of the least walkable suburbs in the world. The suburb was completely built around cars and plans to make it even a little walkable are at least a decade way from completion (have not even started yet).
Great way to kill a city's economy. Instead of the bookstore I go to (which often requires me to come twice for a given book), I will now order online. I will not window-shop, and I will not find that cool-looking sweater in the store next to the bookstore. I will also not have a coffee at he cafe on the way to the garage.
My monies will no longer benefit these businesses, and if enough people stay away, they will eventually have to shut down. Storefronts will be boarded up, meanwhile, somewhere next to an interstate, another Amazon Warehouse grows.
This trend has already started, especially in small-to mid-sized European cities (large ones seem to hang on a bit longer, mostly because their public transit systems were heavily updated in the late 20th century). But even in Berlin, or Munich, or Paris I start noticing storefront rot - increasingly more shops, often specialized ones (which served as focal points for customers from afar who might then use that day to do secondary purchases) go out of business.
In the end, you will have very dense city centers filled with large-brand stores, next to major traffic hubs, and slums around it. Cities will lose their one major advantage: the desirability of living there.
In London, councils (and TfL, who are responsible for transport and roads) will often fight against developers who want to include excessive parking, or expand existing parking. Getting planning permission for new developments is significantly easier if they're car-free.
> This is to reduce congestion and encourage more environmentally friendly methods of transportation.
A similar policy operates here in the UK, except that the parking allowance is significantly less generous.
I find it utterly asinine because it is not paired with the necessary corollary: you can't "encourage" more environmentally friendly methods of transportation, you have to actually - you know - take action and build the infrastructure.
Example: I live about 10 miles from the office and would cheerfully cycle into work come rain or shine because it would be great exercise, but there is no safe cycle route, so I'm forced to use some form of motorised transport (I have a car but usually ride a motorcycle). Buses are available but they're once an hour, take too long, are often tardy, and don't run late enough into the evening.
Depending on where you live there are better options available (guided busway paired with a cycleway, or the train) but there's no joined up thinking when it comes to more sustainable transportation. The result is that vast swathes of the area around Cambridge (UK) are either inadequately served, or not served at all.
> I find it utterly asinine because it is not paired with the necessary corollary
Doesn't it self-regulate though ?
If it's not viable to build in a place for a specific use, developers will go to greener fields. It happens in a lot of heavily congested cities. Making whole areas unfit for heavy traffic moved the office building elsewhere, generally in places that where more welcoming to them.
Possibly in an ideal world, but not in this one (or certainly not on any timescale that I'd regard as acceptable - human lifetimes, and working lifetimes especially, aren't that long in the grand scheme of things and I'm already at least half way through on both fronts).
I have a similar problem also in the UK (next door in Bedford) - That is the problem a lot of proponents of public transport don't want to address.
If you do want to get rich middle class people to use busses - you will have to accept that the services will have to have a lot more investment and increase in cost and be partially rebalanced away from servicing pensioners and to be blunt poorer workers.
The problem is local councils prioritise bus service in order to cater to the urban users who are mostly pensioners "granny farming"
> and be partially rebalanced away from servicing pensioners and to be blunt poorer workers.
Having been both dirt poor and relatively affluent more than once, and growing up poor, I'm not really sure buses do an adequate job for elderly or poorer people either: they just use them because there are no other options. And in that context I'm deeply uncomfortable with any initiative that makes them less accessible for the elderly, infirm, or those with low income.
This may be more a UK thing but since the over 60's bus pass was introduced that has distorted how bus travel is managed.
Also certainly where I am they pull busses off peak commuting times to make more $ bussing kids to school which effects both poor and better off workers
Cambridge really needs to build enough housing for the jobs it has. People seemed to live in outlying villages because it’s so unaffordable. Apparently the colleges own all the land and haven’t really allowed many homes to be built. Good public transport is so much easier to provide in an urban environment.
Lost in this can be the specifics of "parking". Put in lots of 3-5 minute zones for ride hailing, add 10-15 minute spots for deliveries. Make sure there are enforced truck parking only for restaurant and business deliveries. Car share only parking. Scooter and bike parking. etc.
And yes, if I want full time parking for my car I will pay for it. It's not that expensive if that's my priority.
These are generally the kind of parking configs that most city people would benefit from.
1 shared car is shown to replace between 7 and 20 private cars in various deployments. Building new housing with dedicated car-share parking is a great way to go.
Housing may be a little harder to accomplish usefully for the people that would live there for this idea, but business would likely work well. The problem with housing (if it encompasses a large area and not just small subsets of the available area) is that some people functionally need a car for their job or life. Cutting off large amounts of housing from those that commute or those that need to make semi-regular long trips for other reasons (maybe picking up children weekly for a custody agreement, or taking care of a relative that is semi-dependent).
Maybe paid dedicated parking separate from the housing and only allowed to people that live in the area (with an increase in price for a second car for a household) would suffice, as long as it was planned well. But that's the problem, poor planning (or changes over time) could cause problems again.
Car shares are definitely not for driving to work but I fail to see why you can't use them to pick up your kids. Car sharing solves the problem where people can easily journey to work without a car, but they want one for other purposes like shopping.
No, but to make sure we are talking about the same thing, a car share is a bit like renting a car by the hour. Uber is a computer-dispatched taxi service. Uber is not "car sharing". It is also not their other bullshit moniker "ride sharing"
I think there’s a fair argument that Uber Pool is pretty close to, or at least has substantial elements of, what one would naturally call ride sharing.
Provided that the housing wasn’t in some way differentially appealing to families with children (cheap 3BR, good schools, parks nearby, other amenities)
It's a good thought, but until public transportation is a 1st party citizen in LA, this will just cause more problems in the long run. Busses are still seen as a method of transport for impoverished people, not for the masses. Trains and light rail simply aren't a priority for either the city nor the population. For comparison, Sydney is similar to LA in terms of density and affluence, but has 7.7 times as many people riding their rail transport[1]. LA should be focusing on creating a positive draw to public transport by increasing service, availability, and quality, rather than creating a negative pressure by decreasing parking availability.
[1] 359m annual ridership in Sydney with a 4.6m population, vs 108m annual ridership in LA with a 10.1m population.
However, the city of LA entirely includes several other cities within its borders, and the LA Metro area population is roughly 10-12 million...
Also with respect to the rail comparisons, most of LA Metro's ridership is on the bus system, which absolutely dwarfs Sydney's total public transit ridership, even after huge drops in ridership.
This is not a silver bullet, but a small step in the right direction. I think it causes problems in the short run, but helps strengthen public transit in the long run.
It’s frustrating how few cities in the US are liveable without a car. One of the best parts of SF is that it’s so small and easy to navigate without a car.
And NYC’s subway system is complete disarray. Not sure what other cities are manageable without one.
If you're talking about livable within the city limits (i.e., you don't live in the suburbs) then I think you'd find locals in Boston, DC and Chicago would say they can live happily without a car. I think a pretty significant chunk of folks in Philly, Portland (OR) and Seattle would probably say the same, though not to the same extent as those other ones. Not disagreeing that there are few overall, but there are a few beyond NYC and SF.
As a resident of LA, I don't see this actually accomplishing much due to the specific market of downtown LA. Like the article mentions, basically all the new construction in that area comes in at the top of the market. Almost everyone in that socioeconomic class in LA has a car and would want a nearby place to park it. Developers therefore aren't going to build a new luxury high-rise and not provide parking for its residents.
That said, we might as well remove this regulation requiring parking if the market will dictate a similar level of parking anyway. I simply think this type of change would see a greater impact in neighborhoods in which car ownership levels are lower.
Removing parking requirements for office and commercial buildings seems like a better end to start in. If you work in the city and live outside, you should be discouraged from driving, and/or be encouraged to drive only to hubs closer to the city and ride in on public transport.
It depends on the goal. If the only goal is to reduce car usage, sure. However, the area already has a problem with housing costs and a rule like this would just cause costs to skyrocket near transit hubs. You need a more robust public transit system for that type of proposal to work without those negative consequences and LA isn't there yet.
Providing parking is expensive - perhaps developers will create units that are more affordable if they are not required to spend the extra money to provide parking.
Parking is hardly the driver of unaffordable housing. Requiring “affordable housing” as a condition of building “market housing” is what makes housing expensive — the market units have to be priced very high to cover the loss from the below market units. It’s essentially rent control on new construction.
The value of this is the law currently dictates that parking spaces must be provided on a per unit basis to the person living in the unit. This would often relate to not being able to split out the cost of parking from the cost of the apartment, so for those without a car they'd have to pay more.
The law dictates construction of the parking spaces on a per unit basis, it doesn't require the parking spaces are rented/sold with the specific units. Developers are therefore already able to separate out parking costs from housing costs to a certain extent, but residential parking in LA is cheap compared to other large cities so there is probably still some subsidizing going on.
I think this is just low cost/effort to reduce a particular problem. DTLA is the most walkable and accessible to public transit place in the city, the only issue is there's nothing there worth walking to besides the Staples Center.
The real area of focus for reducing traffic and vehicle usage should be the San Fernando Valley corridors (Sepulveda/405, the 5, and the 101 to San Gabriel Valley). Iirc from a recent report on KPCC there's like 600k daily commuters between the valley and the southland, and another 700k between the valley and San Gabriel Valley.
We have one metro stop in the SFV, which serves the 3 million residents. It's no wonder it's surrounded by a massive parking lot, and most commuters don't use it anyway.
>The real area of focus for reducing traffic and vehicle usage should be the San Fernando Valley corridors
I totally agree with you on this. Lost of people in this thread are talking about how good/bad transit access in the LA area, but there is no doubt the valley is totally undeserved in that regard.
DTLA is the most walkable and accessible to public transit place in the city, the only issue is there's nothing there worth walking to besides the Staples Center.
And Disney Hall, the Broad, and MOCA on Bunker Hill. Grand Avenue park for events. The Arts District and its many restaurants and breweries. Little Tokyo and the 3 museums there. FiDi's many restaurants. Historic Core and the old Broadway theaters, some still in use. The tens of thousands of new apartments constructed in South Park, Skid West, and Skidrokyo. For architecture nerds, nearly 100 years and a dozen different architectural styles spread out between all of the DTLA districts but especially in FiDi and HC.
We have one metro stop in the SFV, which serves the 3 million residents. It's no wonder it's surrounded by a massive parking lot, and most commuters don't use it anyway.
The sooner the Sepulveda Pass rail/monorail is built, the better.
>That said, we might as well remove this regulation requiring parking if the market will dictate a similar level of parking anyway
Part of the reason to enforce parking in new construction is to alleviate the pressure on street parking. Preexisting businesses could be pushed out as new construction draws more people without making parking available.
> basically all the new construction in that area comes in at the top of the market.
There's a reason for this.
As a result of the fact that new construction is required to have 1-2 parking spots, developers need to put in a lot of parking. And because they need to put in a lot of parking, they need to be expensive. And because they need to be expensive, they might as well be luxury apartments. As a result of all this, all new construction is luxury apartments.
The biggest impact that lifting this requirement will have is that it will increase the amount of affordable housing.
I don't know much about the US housing dynamics but it seems very unlikely that prices will get lower due to less parking being required. It's more likely the builders will profit more.
We went through a similar situation with airplane tickets where I live. The govt agency in charge of aviation and the airlines all wanted the free luggage requirement gone citing cost reductions. They got it, the fares didn't get any cheaper and now you have to pay extra.
I really don't see the 17% reduction in space required for parking being passed onto buyers. People will continue to demand 1-2 parking spots because that's a high cost area and people buying there don't care that much about that discount, if that even happens.
The two markets are not so similar. Air travel can only support a limited number of suppliers (in some locations this number is zero), since commercial airplanes are very expensive and require the use of valuable airport facilities. Housing isn't like that. Lots of investors can afford the note on a small apartment building. If one developer pads her profits, another one will undercut her.
The parent of your post was correct in saying "required", as in legally required for that zoning.
After you subtract the required parking spots, setbacks, sidewalks, driveways then what you're left with is a few super-expensive townhouses in most of LA or the project gets cancelled.
I'm not familiar with downtown LA but I haven't heard great things about public transportation in LA. Are they just trying to encourage less driving without providing any alternatives?
Downtown has the best transport access in the entire city. There are frequent trains in every direction and long-distance thru Union Station. While not Germany-level, it is quite good.
Combined with the rise of rideshare and rentals etc, large parking garages are becoming obsolete.
>Downtown has the best transport access in the entire city
The only problem is that most people don't have a reason to go there. The streets are usually empty aside from the homeless encampments.
The only reasons I've ever had to go to DTLA was to attend a conference and some games at the Staples Center. It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.
Los Angeles is less downtown-focused than other big cities but I still don't think that's a fair representation.
You can go to a hockey game or a basketball game in DTLA, and you're near stadiums for baseball, football and soccer. If you'd rather see a symphony than a game of sportsball you can listen to the LA phil at Disney Hall (and if the architecture of Disney Hall is more modern than you prefer, there's plenty of older buildings worth checking out).
There's a bunch of museums if you're into that kind of thing. On the grungier side, there's Santee Alley and the fashion district if you want to get that "third world bazaar" experience without having to travel.
You can get food from dozens of different cultures, even without visiting enclaves like Chinatown or Little Tokyo.
The streets are usually empty aside from the homeless encampments.
Objectively false. The homeless camps are in Skidrow and near City Hall.
It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.
There are nearly a dozen museums in DTLA including 2 world-famous art museums, an opera, 4 operational Broadway-style theaters that are still regularly in use, around a dozen smaller performance theaters, more than 200 restaurants including one of the world's busiest/most profitable restaurants, 3 bowling alleys, 3 karaoke bars, more than a dozen nightclubs, 3 arcades, 3 higher-ed schools (not including USC, which is technically outside of downtown in its own neighborhood), more than a dozen parks, around a dozen breweries, 2 large movie theaters (including one used to premier a number of Hollywood movies), events every weekend in the summer. Oh, and the food-cart phenomenon got its start in DTLA at the corner of 9th and Hope, where some of today's most famous restaurateurs got their start slinging fusion tacos to FIDM students.
If anything, there's too much stuff jammed into DTLA compared to the rest of the city.
Gov'ts can do 3 things - encourage something, do nothing, or discourage something. Parking minimums encourage people to drive cars. This is LA taking a small step towards picking winners (cars...) just little bit less.
As always, I have absolute faith the free market with arrive at the correct answer. It was government regulation that created the issues in the first place.
> Finally, I would add that that charging 5p for disposable plastic shopping bags has had a hugely positive effect on curtailing the use of single use plastic bags.
Although it's increased purchases of garbage bags, which use more plastic in the end because they're thicker.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadDTLA is extremely walk/bike/train/bus friendly, most long term residents I knew did not own cars.
Another portion of the population doesn't have cars or are otherwise uninterested in parking. This change would make it legal for there to be development projects that cater to this set of the population.
Hopefully it's changing.
2. I'm not sure what census blocks you are including in your definition?
For a very long time, LA was also very famously anti-pedestrian, both in laws and enforcement. It's trying to change for sure, but I would not say it's there yet.
parking podiums eat up the most pedestrian-friendly ground floor square footage, but i can sympathize with people wanting parking in their building. i wish all parking would be built underground, but yes, that's even more expensive.
No, because removing parking minimums is not the same as removing parking.
>parking podiums eat up the most pedestrian-friendly ground floor square footage, but i can sympathize with people wanting parking in their building.
In-building parking is a widely available amenity amply provided by the market. Regulatory parking requirements don't change that, they just make it illegal to not want parking.
If you live in a new development you can't get a permit.
I have been in a queue at the local council offices behind a guy who had bought a 500K+ flat without knowing he could not park his car within 2+ miles of it.
Fun.
I don't live there any more.
If I am a strawberry seller and my cost to buy strawberries goes down, I can pass those savings onto the consumer or not. But my competitors will all be making the same choice, so absent collusion, if I don't lower my prices, but my competitors do, then obviously they'll take my business.
In other words, profit margins are determined by how competitive a market is, not the cost of production.
If this change goes through, I imagine that profit margins for LA developers will remain similar to whatever they are now.
My old unit in the DC area had something like $80,000 in parking attached to it. That could have been ground floor units or retail instead. The units would have been cheaper had the parking minimums not been there. In bigger buildings that put parking underground, those units can be very expensive to build.
This is an odd claim to make. Regulation has historically required that it be provided in most (American) markets, hence the ample supply. I'm not sure how we could possibly know what the market would do on its own over the long term.
Requiring excessive parking will artificially and needlessly raises prices, true. But I would also be at least somewhat concerned that without sufficient regulation short term thinking on the part of builders might result in less parking than would be generally desirable.
I'm not at all convinced that urban planning should be done by market forces alone.
There is no "minimum air conditioning" requirement where I live, but pretty much every building I walk into has it. My apartment, like most apartments I've seen, also has it.
Turns out that people don't need the government to tell them what they want. People like AC, so most buildings have AC. Not particularly remarkable, but most apartments in my area also come with refrigerators, stoves, ovens, sinks, showers, and dishwashers, all sans-minimum-appliance requirement.
To me, a minimum parking requirement seems as weirdly dystopian as requiring ACs or dishwashers. Most people like those things, so most buildings will have them, but it shouldn't be illegal to decide you don't need an AC or dishwasher.
For example, in the Northeast, heaters have been required for all residential construction for many decades. Residences without heaters are legally considered not habitable. In most of the Southwest like Arizona and Nevada, new residential construction must have ACs (in CA, it's not a universal requirement and window units meet the requirement).
Few residential apartments come with washers. Generally, those would be apartments classified as "luxury" or better (where luxury is a rental term of art referring to amenities, not the actual quality of the building...)
I of course have no objection that buildings must be habitable. A building with dirty water, structural issues, or lacking heat in a cold place is obviously not serving any market segment.
Parking seems to me be fundamentally different than those issues though. I know many people that happily live without a car in LA. Why should it be illegal for developers to cater to them?
Sure we can. Those regulations are not always binding. Buildings are built with parking capacity in excess of minimums all the time.
>Requiring excessive parking will artificially and needlessly raises prices, true. But I would also be at least somewhat concerned that without sufficient regulation short term thinking on the part of builders might result in less parking than would be generally desirable.
Why? What's the market failure? For that matter, why is there a "general desire" for the quantity of at-home parking I individually consume?
>I'm not at all convinced that urban planning should be done by market forces alone.
That's a strawman — removing parking requirements is a far cry from "market forces alone" doing urban planning. (It is, however, a great example of how non-market forces can create worse, environmentally inefficient, undesirable outcomes by submitting what should be private choices to mob rule.)
There is no evidence that this is the case though. The vast majority of new construction has always been targeted towards the top of the market, which in the case of Los Angeles means a need for parking spaces.
The only clear case where the market would act differently would be in the case of commercial parking requirements, where a one sized fits all approach as exists today doesn't work as each neighborhood in LA drives a different amount.
Changes will more likely happen at the margin. I have no doubt that an apartment building with 1 space per 1br apartment instead of 1.5 would still be marketable at the top end.
A new office development will not get planning approval if it has more than 2 parking spaces per 3 employees (based on some obscure measurement of building capacity). This is to reduce congestion and encourage more environmentally friendly methods of transportation.
https://twitter.com/metrolosangeles/status/11538072082299576...
If you want faster buses, evict the cars from the bus travel lanes.
Same with parking. You build parking in areas where you anticipate increased demand or already have unmet demand. By building parking, you increase your capacity to meet that demand.
If you have unmet demand (i.e. not enough spaces for the volume of vehicles that wish to park in an area), you're limiting the economic throughput of that area. Yes, you're reducing traffic congestion in the process, but at a very real economic cost for those whom were being patronized by that now-gone traffic.
Same with anticipating new demand. If you're building in an area, you want to be sure the area has enough parking capacity to absorb the intended volume of people traffic your building will have. If you're building a new skyscraper or mall or big box store, that's likely not true. So you incorporate parking into your project. Once your building (and parking) come online, you'll start attracting a higher volume of individuals to an area. Which, except for the most underutilized or mature transportation networks, will have a corresponding impact on congestion due to the greater throughput of individuals to the area.
If you have mature public transportation, then your transportation network likely has the bandwidth to absorb this throughput increase with a lesser impact on congestion than if you're in an area with immature public transportation options. But mature public transportation tends to be very expensive to build and maintain. Which is only likely to happen after growing to the point of having heavy enough congestion to make such expensive and regionally disruptive changes both politically palatable and economically feasible.
I do not envy urban and transportation planners.
That's hard to do without BRT - we have plenty of dedicated bus lanes (the right lane) around here, but they all allow cars for right-hand turns, so buses still get stuck behind a line of cars.
Without BRT and center-island boarding, it's harder to reserve anything but the far-right lane since the bus needs to get there to pickup/dropoff passengers.
Dedicated bus signalization, no right turn on red, and cars perform right turns from the second lane. Dedicated signal phase can be combined with separated bike lanes to improve safety for other road users, as well.
The solution to these issues is to provide bus signalization, dedicated lanes, and/or queue jumping opportunities. These changes minimally inconvenience cars while significantly speeding up buses. It makes it so that a bus route, while longer, can be time-competitive with driving (or rather, closer enough that it overcomes the inconvenience of walking to/from stops and sometimes having to wait for your bus)
And having frequent stops makes buses go slower.
Traveling long distances doesn't make the bus any slower; it just limits the frequency you can revisit a stop on the route without increasing the number of buses on that route.
- Motorcycle to work: 15 - 20 minutes door to door (driving generally ~30 minutes, but 40 minutes or so during busy periods)
- Bus to work: > 60 minutes (7 minute walk, 5 minute wait, 45 minute average bus journey, 7 minute walk)
Cycling would, I reckon, take me about 45 - 50 minutes door to door until I got fitter, but that would be fine because I'd be getting loads of exercise, so the trade-off becomes worthwhile even though it takes longer. (The reason I don't cycle is there's no safe route.)
Presumably most congested roads are used mostly by cars, so I suppose you could say that "cars cause congestion and congestion makes buses slower." But of course, the congestion also makes the cars slower as well.
The glass half full answer is that it incentivizes economic activity to happen elsewhere.
We should be pushing people to get rid of their cars instead of keeping them.
After that, it's chicken-and-egg more than cart-and-whores. With surface parking lots taking up easily half the space in many US business districts, eliminating them could double density and thereby cut average distances in half, making other modes of transportation much more feasible.
Essentially, the US at one point chose cars as the dominant mode of transportation and got trapped in that decision. Anybody who has seen alternatives knows this is a tremendous burden on quality of life, yet any change will, in the short term, also hurt in different ways.
The regulations here should be based around things like structural integrity, egress, and safety. Not views, not density, not what size of apartment is “too big” or “too small.” All of those are things the market can sort out.
EDIT: discounted, not “free.”
It’s fashionable to hate cars, but when I need to get from Mountain View to the Hayward Airport at 4:30am, there is no combination of public transport that would get me there in less than 2 hours. Going from Palo Alto to Livermore on public transport is practically impossible. These European-style high density dreams aren’t based in reality for the majority of the United States. Making San Francisco high density would certainly be great, but applying that model to the rest of the Peninsula is just a pipe dream. 50 floor apartments like Korea would be the only way to make that work, but that still doesn’t account for the reality we have. Saratoga to Milpitas— how does that work with public transportation? The United States is built around cars. That horse has left the barn. You can’t realistically redesign the entirety of America to fit a model that is ideal for Copenhagen. Even in Europe, there are vast searches that are car dependent. Putting a tram or high frequency buses in southern France for instance would be ridiculous outside of Marseille perhaps. Even in the cities: how do you deliver a refrigerator easily within a pedestrian-only city? How about moving trucks? I spent a lot of time in Venice and prices for things are astronomical simply because everything has to be delivered via boat. Venice’s geography makes this unavoidable, but intentionally destroying city logistics because of some fantasy is ridiculous. We can do better, but the anti-car movement doesn’t really understand the Law of Unintended Consequences.
A better question is: do automobile users? And the answer is: no. Roads are subsidized: https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...
> when I need to get from Mountain View to the Hayward Airport at 4:30am
Well it sounds like the right tool for that job. But that doesn't mean it's the right tool for every job or even most of them.
> Going from Palo Alto to Livermore on public transport is practically impossible
That's a political choice that those places made. It can be fixed if there's the will to do so.
Yeah, there's no trams in southern France. Except for in Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Grenoble, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice, Saint-Étienne, and Toulouse. And there are plans for trams in Nîmes and Avignon.
Yes, definitely. Granted, this may vary from state to state, and I don't know the situation in California. Most of the roads that I travel on are city and county roads that are paid for out of my property taxes. Ironically, our property taxes are higher because living in a bike friendly zone with good access to public transit increases our property value.
I'm not allowed to ride my bike on the freeways, and I avoid the major federal / state highways. I suspect that those are what suck up the most money.
I pay income tax.
Most cyclists still own cars. My family pays for registration of two cars that we drive less because of our bikes. We pay gas taxes when we drive, plus license fees, and state-mandated insurance.
Our bikes do negligible damage to the roads, and we reduce the need for both road construction and parking space.
I'd be willing to bet that if we analyzed all of the numbers carefully, we'd find the net effect is that motorists and cyclists both pay -- to subsidize the trucking industry.
If I was a builder, my incentives are closely aligned with the city - build something that appeals to buyers. If I build a fancy apartment building where everyone owns cars but I provide no parking, well those aren’t going to be very desirable.
Consider Japan, which has building restrictions to avoid eternal shadows. Building height is a function of the setback from the street.
A buyer may well want a taller building, and a builder might well be happy to provide it, when the city is dead set against it.
What is the mechanism by which "the market" balances out the desire by the megarich to live in tall towers in NYC, with the desire by those who use Central Park to not be in shadows more?
It doesn’t help an owner if they build units nobody wants to live in because of shadows, no parking, etc.
That is, if the megarich enjoy the 50 mile views and don't care about Central Park at all, then it can smother in shadow, yes?
And the only mechanism for the people who want to have sunlight in the Park is to make the megarich either socially or physically uncomfortable enough (perhaps by threats of violence?) that they decide it's time to move away ... or buy more security?
If so, your mechanism seems rather prone to encourage social unrest.
I'm planning to sell all the apartments and move on to another project, so I won't have to solve any parking problems residents or locals end up having.
I have the option to add an extra floor on, so there would be 12 apartments - but no guest parking any more.
What do you imagine my incentives are?
I won’t replace parking with units unless that makes the building more valuable overall. If there is a strong demand for parking spots, the existing units are likely to lose value by having no parking. And I’d also have to shell out cash upfront to compensate them.
Additionally, I also indirectly disagree with the last two points because it is absolutely crucial that cities have some control over population changes as it relates to density. Utility overload is a real issue, and needs to be accounted for. Schools need to get built, sidewalks widened, and so on.
What's ultimately needed is a form of adaptive city planning, that reacts to market forces (such as population changes, desire from developers to build new buildings, ect) with planned solutions such that there are no tragedy of the commons issues that come about. What's unacceptable is the 20+ year horizon planning that most cities do now.
This is a critical cycle that must be preserved!
This is something of a problem because one of the features of the building is a large conference center where we can hold events. Luckily the older buildings on campus all over overbuilt parking so it's not a completely unworkable issue, but it does mean people who come for the conference need to walk over from the neighboring building.
I actually use the relatively convenient metro stop most days, but sometimes I have to drive and it is always a crapshoot if the underground parking will be full. The funny thing is my building is in one of the least walkable suburbs in the world. The suburb was completely built around cars and plans to make it even a little walkable are at least a decade way from completion (have not even started yet).
Hacker news loves to talk about solutions to zoning problems that only benefit people who don't live there.
My monies will no longer benefit these businesses, and if enough people stay away, they will eventually have to shut down. Storefronts will be boarded up, meanwhile, somewhere next to an interstate, another Amazon Warehouse grows.
This trend has already started, especially in small-to mid-sized European cities (large ones seem to hang on a bit longer, mostly because their public transit systems were heavily updated in the late 20th century). But even in Berlin, or Munich, or Paris I start noticing storefront rot - increasingly more shops, often specialized ones (which served as focal points for customers from afar who might then use that day to do secondary purchases) go out of business.
In the end, you will have very dense city centers filled with large-brand stores, next to major traffic hubs, and slums around it. Cities will lose their one major advantage: the desirability of living there.
A similar policy operates here in the UK, except that the parking allowance is significantly less generous.
I find it utterly asinine because it is not paired with the necessary corollary: you can't "encourage" more environmentally friendly methods of transportation, you have to actually - you know - take action and build the infrastructure.
Example: I live about 10 miles from the office and would cheerfully cycle into work come rain or shine because it would be great exercise, but there is no safe cycle route, so I'm forced to use some form of motorised transport (I have a car but usually ride a motorcycle). Buses are available but they're once an hour, take too long, are often tardy, and don't run late enough into the evening.
Depending on where you live there are better options available (guided busway paired with a cycleway, or the train) but there's no joined up thinking when it comes to more sustainable transportation. The result is that vast swathes of the area around Cambridge (UK) are either inadequately served, or not served at all.
Doesn't it self-regulate though ?
If it's not viable to build in a place for a specific use, developers will go to greener fields. It happens in a lot of heavily congested cities. Making whole areas unfit for heavy traffic moved the office building elsewhere, generally in places that where more welcoming to them.
Possibly in an ideal world, but not in this one (or certainly not on any timescale that I'd regard as acceptable - human lifetimes, and working lifetimes especially, aren't that long in the grand scheme of things and I'm already at least half way through on both fronts).
If you do want to get rich middle class people to use busses - you will have to accept that the services will have to have a lot more investment and increase in cost and be partially rebalanced away from servicing pensioners and to be blunt poorer workers.
The problem is local councils prioritise bus service in order to cater to the urban users who are mostly pensioners "granny farming"
Having been both dirt poor and relatively affluent more than once, and growing up poor, I'm not really sure buses do an adequate job for elderly or poorer people either: they just use them because there are no other options. And in that context I'm deeply uncomfortable with any initiative that makes them less accessible for the elderly, infirm, or those with low income.
Also certainly where I am they pull busses off peak commuting times to make more $ bussing kids to school which effects both poor and better off workers
And yes, if I want full time parking for my car I will pay for it. It's not that expensive if that's my priority.
These are generally the kind of parking configs that most city people would benefit from.
Maybe paid dedicated parking separate from the housing and only allowed to people that live in the area (with an increase in price for a second car for a household) would suffice, as long as it was planned well. But that's the problem, poor planning (or changes over time) could cause problems again.
[1] 359m annual ridership in Sydney with a 4.6m population, vs 108m annual ridership in LA with a 10.1m population.
Also with respect to the rail comparisons, most of LA Metro's ridership is on the bus system, which absolutely dwarfs Sydney's total public transit ridership, even after huge drops in ridership.
Backwards, they are talking about ending a subsidy, not reducing parking directly.
And NYC’s subway system is complete disarray. Not sure what other cities are manageable without one.
I can't think of any others besides the 3 you mentioned that I'd want to go carless in offhand.
That said, we might as well remove this regulation requiring parking if the market will dictate a similar level of parking anyway. I simply think this type of change would see a greater impact in neighborhoods in which car ownership levels are lower.
The real area of focus for reducing traffic and vehicle usage should be the San Fernando Valley corridors (Sepulveda/405, the 5, and the 101 to San Gabriel Valley). Iirc from a recent report on KPCC there's like 600k daily commuters between the valley and the southland, and another 700k between the valley and San Gabriel Valley.
We have one metro stop in the SFV, which serves the 3 million residents. It's no wonder it's surrounded by a massive parking lot, and most commuters don't use it anyway.
I totally agree with you on this. Lost of people in this thread are talking about how good/bad transit access in the LA area, but there is no doubt the valley is totally undeserved in that regard.
And Disney Hall, the Broad, and MOCA on Bunker Hill. Grand Avenue park for events. The Arts District and its many restaurants and breweries. Little Tokyo and the 3 museums there. FiDi's many restaurants. Historic Core and the old Broadway theaters, some still in use. The tens of thousands of new apartments constructed in South Park, Skid West, and Skidrokyo. For architecture nerds, nearly 100 years and a dozen different architectural styles spread out between all of the DTLA districts but especially in FiDi and HC.
We have one metro stop in the SFV, which serves the 3 million residents. It's no wonder it's surrounded by a massive parking lot, and most commuters don't use it anyway.
The sooner the Sepulveda Pass rail/monorail is built, the better.
Impressive ignorance.
The historical, governmental, a cultural, entertainment, and now residential center is "not worth walking to."
And the Staples Center? Perhaps 99 on the 100 things to do list.
Part of the reason to enforce parking in new construction is to alleviate the pressure on street parking. Preexisting businesses could be pushed out as new construction draws more people without making parking available.
There's a reason for this.
As a result of the fact that new construction is required to have 1-2 parking spots, developers need to put in a lot of parking. And because they need to put in a lot of parking, they need to be expensive. And because they need to be expensive, they might as well be luxury apartments. As a result of all this, all new construction is luxury apartments.
The biggest impact that lifting this requirement will have is that it will increase the amount of affordable housing.
We went through a similar situation with airplane tickets where I live. The govt agency in charge of aviation and the airlines all wanted the free luggage requirement gone citing cost reductions. They got it, the fares didn't get any cheaper and now you have to pay extra.
I really don't see the 17% reduction in space required for parking being passed onto buyers. People will continue to demand 1-2 parking spots because that's a high cost area and people buying there don't care that much about that discount, if that even happens.
Then why are you commenting?
The parent of your post was correct in saying "required", as in legally required for that zoning.
After you subtract the required parking spots, setbacks, sidewalks, driveways then what you're left with is a few super-expensive townhouses in most of LA or the project gets cancelled.
Combined with the rise of rideshare and rentals etc, large parking garages are becoming obsolete.
The only problem is that most people don't have a reason to go there. The streets are usually empty aside from the homeless encampments.
The only reasons I've ever had to go to DTLA was to attend a conference and some games at the Staples Center. It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.
This is out of date. There's a lot more to do downtown these days.
https://urbanize.la/post/perla-condo-tower-tops-out-4th-broa...
Still, skid row is as bad as it ever was.
You can go to a hockey game or a basketball game in DTLA, and you're near stadiums for baseball, football and soccer. If you'd rather see a symphony than a game of sportsball you can listen to the LA phil at Disney Hall (and if the architecture of Disney Hall is more modern than you prefer, there's plenty of older buildings worth checking out).
There's a bunch of museums if you're into that kind of thing. On the grungier side, there's Santee Alley and the fashion district if you want to get that "third world bazaar" experience without having to travel.
You can get food from dozens of different cultures, even without visiting enclaves like Chinatown or Little Tokyo.
Objectively false. The homeless camps are in Skidrow and near City Hall.
It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.
There are nearly a dozen museums in DTLA including 2 world-famous art museums, an opera, 4 operational Broadway-style theaters that are still regularly in use, around a dozen smaller performance theaters, more than 200 restaurants including one of the world's busiest/most profitable restaurants, 3 bowling alleys, 3 karaoke bars, more than a dozen nightclubs, 3 arcades, 3 higher-ed schools (not including USC, which is technically outside of downtown in its own neighborhood), more than a dozen parks, around a dozen breweries, 2 large movie theaters (including one used to premier a number of Hollywood movies), events every weekend in the summer. Oh, and the food-cart phenomenon got its start in DTLA at the corner of 9th and Hope, where some of today's most famous restaurateurs got their start slinging fusion tacos to FIDM students.
If anything, there's too much stuff jammed into DTLA compared to the rest of the city.
Once it becomes the norm, Uber/Lyft can continue jacking up prices.
They have a while to reach profitability and taxi-prices in any case. I won't blame them when they do.
https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-regulates-...
Although it's increased purchases of garbage bags, which use more plastic in the end because they're thicker.
You cannot both encourage people to use cars and encourage people to not use cars - it's a waste of money.