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.
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 poor minorities to the suburbs and inverse how it's arranged in the US now, it will make the suburbs look bombed out - until you fix the minority poverty problem.
as usual, it’s probably a mixture of many things, and poverty is one, property prices is another, and there are certainly many many others.
we (engineering types) have this terrible habit of declaring that it is One Thing when in reality, complex problems are… complicated. shocking, i know. it isn’t a simple math problem with a one answer. human problems are significantly more chaotic and fractal.
i don’t want to imply that we shouldn’t look at these and add our ideas, only that id love to see us lessen our crutches of “You’re wrong, it’s X!” and recognize that others are probably correct as well.
Honestly that would be fixed with expanded immigration. Look at places where the limited immigrants we have had in recent years primarily ended up and have changed the demography, like LA county or Miami-Dade county, and they don’t look like those midwestern or great plains cities. In fact there are almost no vacant parcels anywhere today, with majority latino populations now reflecting the recent waves of immigration.
Immigrants have a lot of motivations. Jobs are one, but unless the immigrant was recruited for a specific job (which is common) it isn't primary. There are jobs everywhere, even in blighted cities.
Immigrants with no particular job in mind look for places where the cost of living is low: they tend to have much worse job prospects than normal, so a minimum wage job in a low cost of living area is better life than double minimum wage in a high cost of living area.
Immigrants often have poor English skills (or whatever the local language is). They often are used to food not common in the country. So if they can find a community of other immigrants that means people they can comfortably talk to, and also makes it more likely that someone can figure out the process of getting food they like into local stores.
LA has extremely dysfunctional housing policy. A wave of immigration does nothing but increase demand for housing and drive up prices on rather limited stock. It has not lead to an increase in housing stock or better commercial districts. Adding more people who don't really speak the language laws are written in doesn't change the laws that prevent you from building vibrant cities.
There is very little mixed use. Majority of the city is zoned single family. The only reason there are no parking minimums is because the California changed that law. It has nothing to do with expanded immigration. LA, despite the immigration, is in massive need of a zoning overhaul to build a vibrant city. Very little is walkable, it is very car-centric, and the zoning is the strong opposition to all of this.
There are at least 15 million illegals currently in the US. If they all left, there'd be atleast 3-4 million housing units freed up instantaneously, mostly in areas already with hard to get housing. It should be pretty obvious what that would do to housing prices.
No, I don't. Which is why I changed 15 million into 3-4M housing units...
The country is not full. But the places with jobs have more renters than rentable units.. which is why a 2br costs $3k a month.
You got 2 out of 3 points completely wrong, and your other was a pedantic point about wording. You should probably slow down and think before discussing this subject.
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).
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.
> Nothing changes overnight but it allows for denser development esp. around existing public transit lines.
The problem is there a barely any decent "existing public transit lines" in Austin. Existing public transit line, singular, perhaps, and in a decade or so we'll get some more. In the meantime it just means traffic gets much shittier with no real alternatives.
> The problem is there a barely any decent "existing public transit lines" in Austin. Existing public transit line, singular, perhaps, and in a decade or so we'll get some more. In the meantime it just means traffic gets much shittier with no real alternatives.
"Let's keep doing the same thing that doesn't work and complain when anyone decides to try something else".
Except there is no real sane plan to actually do something else. If they were, say, replacing street parking with light rail lines, I'd be onboard. This is basically just ignoring the problem and pretending like "alternative transportation methods" will magically spring up.
You are basically saying that markets don't work and we should ignore them. If we let developers decide how much parking they can allocate why would they allocate less than would be needed to sell their properties?
By making it less likely that places are further apart for no reason then the need for cars is reduced.
I think you're assuming that mass transit is the only lever to improve traffic. Eliminating parking minimums allows businesses to pop up nearer to where people live, where they're accessible by foot or micromobility. If anything, plentiful parking in and of itself causes traffic to be shitty because driving becomes the only safe/comfortable way to get around; housing and businesses come to have huge paved deserts between them, completely hostile to non-car mobility.
> Eliminating parking minimums allows businesses to pop up nearer to where people live, where they're accessible by foot or micromobility.
This is just fantasyland thinking as it applies to Austin TX. These regulations largely impact downtown, which is already dense and already has services downtown.
You're ignoring emergent alternate modes of travel. Two big ones - electric bikes and app-based ride-sharing (Uber) would greatly benefit from a reduced sea of parking while also allowing transport.
This code change will pretty much be focused on malls / shopping centers that currently have more parking space than store space. So new malls or changes to existing will result in a more rational balance than the ocean of tarmac we have now.
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 transitional years of people fighting for parking spaces at ridiculous prices before the transit gets built.
Worked for Europe. Everyone there lives in houses perhaps only half the size of a typical US home, and they're happy with it. Most people have the option to go live in the countryside, have a big house and drive a car, all for the same money, yet they choose to have a small city apartment and use public transport.
This is false. Europe always had public transit, up-front. If you look at e.g. Paris you see that the peak in car ownership and beginning of the decline coincides with the economic crash of 2008:
Overall, the change has been small, and most people still have a car. And the metro network was very advanced by 1939 (unlike some US cities, these lines stayed):
That's in one of the densest and most famously walkable cities in the world. Most cities in the United States aren't going to be Paris anytime soon, and that's before we consider the dismal state of regional transport (particularly around the West Coast) which was also already extensive in France prior to 2000.
There is just no real basis for claiming that Europe restricted cars prior to building good transit. You might find it in one or two cities, but certainly not most -- in Europe, socialist and communist parties held significant sway until the late '70s in many countries (in a few they've hung on), and pushed for transit the whole time.
> The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.
So do you propose we lift all bans on drunk driving as to make life slightly more enjoyable for a subset of society?
At some level all laws trade off “making life shittier” for some to “make life better” for society. You can argue against particular laws but categorically being against it reduces your argument as asking for anarchism.
That’s framing “getting out of a local optima” in the most negative terminology. Guess everyone should stay stuck in the local optima and not even attempt to find a better one or global one.
The problem is that a functional public transit system requires functional roadway design to begin with. Austin is a sprawling mess with a highway system of concentric rings cut through with crossing highways. It's designed for lots of cars funneling people to and from sleepy bedroom communities & downtown. It's not designed for moving masses of people point to point where they need to go.
With the roads Austin has, public transit is expensive to maintain and slow. Expanding the system won't change that, but only exacerbate the current problems.
" 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."
Not necessarily true. In the situation where infrastructure building is almost impossible, the only net result for this is the pubic transit will become more and more expensive.
If there is a demand for parking spots in an area, dedicated paid parking can be created — based on market forces rather than minimums. This parking is also often more dense and built upwards. It’s a more efficient use of city space.
As is, parking is subsidized by all residents of a city rather than the people who actually consume parking. Much of this space goes unused throughout the day, and the aggregate effect necessarily means sprawl.
It’s not. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that did this and it was a nightmare. All street parking filling up by 4pm. Half hour walks to your car. Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. Guests basically just being SOL - you’d literally be unable to have guests over because if you left to pick them up there’d be no spot when you got back, and if they drove themselves they’d never find a spot.
Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).
EDIT I am rate-limited so can't reply, but this part:
"If you have 200 cars"
This is only the case if the demand for parking / driving is perfectly inelastic, which would be quite extraordinary. Empirically, when you charge for parking or institute toll roads, traffic tends to fall, in some cases sharply (because many journeys are low value). I repeat: if the parking spaces are still congested, the price should be raised until they're not.
Assuming the number of cars would stay the same is like the lump-of-labour fallacy. Lump of metal fallacy?
Then there's the supply side: guess what, that's not inelastic either! If it's profitable to provide parking, someone will build dedicated facilities for it and charge for their use. This may be an alien concept for some of you, but only because parking minimums cause such oversupply that they can't be run profitably. In cities where parking is priced sanely, it's unremarkable to see this.
"Cars will just overflow into adjacent neighbourhoods" okay, so charge for parking there too, until they don't. Duh.
I don't see why cars should get to sit somewhere rent-free but a human being can't. Urban land is valuable; if you want to occupy it, pay what it costs, ya fuckin welfare queens.
my language is harsh but it's hard not to be when I see so many americans (it's always americans) confidently claiming that life is impossible without free parking. but I live in a city without free parking and things work just fine. I can literally just look out of my window and it disproves all the doomsaying. every commute and trip to the supermarket is uneventful and not ruined in the slightest by a lack of free parking. you pay for parking and it's fine. it's literally just fine. I went to virginia one time, I saw literal acres and acres and acres of empty parking space, oceans of asphalt; nobody seemed to think anything of it but I thought it was mad, like some kind of braindead economic allocation fuckup from a communist country that we'd all laugh about. I wanted to shout: you are being terraformed by asphalt-based lifeforms! why do I have to explain to americans how a free market price mechanism works? on a forum for people to shill their california startups? I shouldn't need to tell you this!
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 the problem being discussed. They are an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion.
> Raising the price would just extract more value for the owners from a very limited resource.
Yes. If you own a limited resource it's your right to make money from that. I know we like to pretend people making money from things they own is somehow evil but it's how all of civilization has been built and is an objectively good thing.
> If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously.
No, but is a point where 50 can park simultaneously and nobody who wants to park there and can afford to is denied that ability.
Both points you made are valid but neither fixes or even touches on the problem being discussed: there are more cars than parking spots and this causes problems. The economic theory is an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion. Price is just about who gets to have one.
Effectively you'll still have 150 cars that cannot be parked next to the owners' residence, that get dumped on the street elsewhere probably in the next lower cost neighborhood, and with the additional issues OP mentioned.
Put it another way, if you want to solve the housing crisis and I tell you "owners can set whatever price they want for the house to extract maximum value and nobody who can afford that will be denied the house" am I wrong? But did I solve the problem?
> No, but is a point where 50 can park simultaneously and nobody who wants to park there and can afford to is denied that ability.
That sucks for the people who are denied the ability to park there because they can't afford it though. Telling people that they need to walk miles to get to a doctor or a grocery store and that only the wealthy deserve to have access to 90% of the city doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
> only the wealthy deserve to have access to 90% of the city
There parking minimums drive up housing costs. They’re why that person has to drive longer to get to that place. Perhaps why they need to make a car payment at all.
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 complexes that provide parking, pricing many people out, while doing nothing to eliminate the need for their cars.
You can't solve the problem of "I need a car" just by taking away the places people put them at night.
The problem we have is built into the design of our cities from the ground up and it impacts every aspect of how they are structured and used. Eliminating parking spaces while the absolute need for cars continues to exist doesn't solve the problem at all.
This is the kind of move that should be done selectively, and only after alternative options are created, if it's done at all.
> This will drive up the price of apartment complexes that provide parking, pricing many people out, while doing nothing to eliminate the need for their cars
There is zero evidence for this. There is evidence for parking minimums raising housing prices.
I’m curious about the overlap between off-street parking minimum requirement advocates and anti-development NIMBYs who don’t believe in supply and demand.
When most people need something, and there is suddenly a much smaller supply of that thing, prices for the now scarce but still needed thing tend to increase. That's basically self-evident.
If you have evidence that shows otherwise please feel free to provide it. I suspect that if examples showing otherwise exist at all they won't be remotely representative of the situation these cities will face.
> When most people need something, and there is suddenly a much smaller supply of that thing
Yes. We have rising, elastic house and stable, inelastic paid parking prices [1[2]]. Due to these regulations, we cannot substitute limited space away from off-street parking towards e.g. housing.
The research you link to discusses pricing for parking spaces, but nowhere does it state that eliminating parking spaces doesn't increase the price of what little parking is left.
The idea that developers being responsible for providing adequate parking would mean that we can't have adequate space housing is a new argument, but not a compelling one. Clearly jacking up the prices for on-street parking means we'd have more money and more space for other things, but that doesn't solve the problem of there being too many cars on the road or eliminate the need for people to keep and drive cars.
While the one paper you linked to suggests that higher prices could help reduce the demand for cars and driving, it also explicitly states that price of vehicle ownership is only one of many variables that has an affect those demands. The availability of viable alternatives to car ownership/use is the one being ignored here.
If I will die unless I go to the hospital every week for 6 months for chemo treatment and the only way to get there is by driving, the amount they'll charge me for parking isn't really a factor until it becomes so high that I can't afford to get the treatment I need. The fact that I also can't get to work, the grocery store, the doctor's office, the pharmacy, my kid's school, or the homes of my friends family without a car means that I'm still going to need to own (and still need a place to park) my car even if I could afford to uber my cancer-ridden body to and from the hospital every single week. (this is purely an example, I'm not, to my knowledge, cancer-ridden)
You simply can't solve the problem of people needing to own and park cars by only reducing the number of available parking spaces. Reducing the number of parking spaces is something that should be done only once viable alternatives are established.
For whatever it's worth, the person you're replying to took the courtesy of pointing you to some research they're familiar with, and your "it's just one paper" point (or really, any of your points here) would be much more convincing if you responded in kind to that courtesy.
On topics like this you can argue from first principles endlessly and never get any closer to the truth. Better to show us some data, I think.
> When most people need something, and there is suddenly a much smaller supply of that thing, prices for the now scarce but still needed thing tend to increase.
No one is arguing against the idea that eliminating parking requirements increases (in short-run, first-order analysis) the market clearing price of parking spaces.
The contentious part is that the presence of the freedom to build housing without parking requirements (enabling, e.g., housing plus commercial spaces to be built in a space that would otherwise have the same housing plus parking) does nothing to reduce the demand for autos.
> The contentious part is that the presence of the freedom to build housing without parking requirements does nothing to reduce the demand for autos.
Why would it? Without alternatives to cars as a means to get people to where they need to go, people will still require cars. As long as people are required to own and drive cars not having enough available parking does nothing to help reduce the amount of cars being owned/driven. In fact, we know that it increase the number of cars on the road. That's how we end up with statistics like "30% of all traffic in urban areas come from people circling around looking for places to park".
You can't solve the problem of people needing cars by not addressing the reasons people need cars, and only reducing the number of parking spots for the cars people already need.
Because it would both enable and incentivize development patterns where people need cars less.
> Without alternatives to cars as a means to get people to where they need to go, people will still require cars.
Dense mixed-use development puts more of the places people need to go in places that don't require cars to get to them. (It also mass transit to other places more viable.)
Your focussed on alternatives ti cars to get to a fixed set of locations, but a big point of dense mixed-use development is to provide alternative locations.
> You can't solve the problem of people needing cars by not addressing the reasons people need cars
The reason people need cars is that the places they need to be a far away because of development patterns; one of the key features of development patterns that causes this is...the space use created by parking requirements.
> Because it would both enable and incentivize development patterns where people need cars less.
As for enabling, nothing stops developers from doing that now. As for incentivizing them, if they can make more money not meeting most people's needs then that's what they'll do. This is also why so many cities have a huge amount of luxury housing available, but a massive lack of affordable housing. What makes developers the most money isn't always what's best for a city.
> Dense mixed-use development puts more of the places people need to go in places that don't require cars to get to them. (It also mass transit to other places more viable.) Your focused on alternatives ti cars to get to a fixed set of locations, but a big point of dense mixed-use development is to provide alternative locations.
I agree with this, but none of these cities are creating mixed-use development or building out their mass transit systems to link them. They're getting rid of parking spaces without any of those things in place.
> The reason people need cars is that the places they need to be a far away because of development patterns; one of the key features of development patterns that causes this is...the space use created by parking requirements.
A reason people need cars is because things are far away. Another reason is that there are no other means to get anywhere else. As long as those things are true, people still need cars. As long as people still need cars, they need places to put them.
The space use created by parking requirements would be a nice problem to solve, but it can't (and shouldn't) be addressed until the requirement of owning cars has been dealt with. When people no longer require cars, we can reduce the amount of space we've set aside for housing them.
> As for enabling, nothing stops developers from doing that now
Zoning regulations and parking requirements, which in many places exist for for both housing and commercial development, and vastly expabd the footprint of both, often do.
I'll concede that with the requirements in place developers have to provide the parking, and although that can mean a lot of things (from lots to underground/rooftop parking) it will increase costs.
Still, I think it's better to have those costs borne by developers and passed to property owners than have everyone else suffer the negative externalities caused by not having those necessary parking spaces available.
I think we'd agree that ideally, the parking spaces wouldn't be necessary because of good public transportation and city planning, and I think that once those things are in place those parking spaces could be reclaimed and repurposed, I just feel that for as long as the parking spots are needed it's better for the developer to provide for them in their plans.
> 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 selectively, if at all. If there is sufficient market demand, the requirements will be unnecessary to get developers to include them, if not, then the requirements are most often a harmful constraint that limits housing supply.
> 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.
> 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
No? They park them outside the city centre. Or they rent them. You're speaking as if Austin is the first city in the world--or even America--to do this.
If you live in an apartment complex inside the city centre, parking outside of it won't help you. If you live in an apartment complex outside of it and there's not enough parking spots to leave your car while you sleep you still have the same problem.
> Or they rent them.
Most people can't afford to uber everywhere. Should the poors not be allowed to go to work or the doctors office?
Austin is only one example, but any city without enough parking to meet demand has these same well-documented problems. Please tell me which cities in America have ditched off-street parking while doing nothing else to reduce people's dependence on cars and had no problems as a result.
> live in an apartment complex inside the city centre, parking outside of it won't help you
Of course it does. You use city transportation systems when in the centre. And you take an Uber or train to your parking lot when you need to drive a bunch.
> Should the poors not be allowed to go to work or the doctors office?
Versus not being able to afford housing?
That's the tradeoff. There is no free lunch. Increasing space dedicated to parking raises the cost of housing. It also reduces density, thereby reducing wealth and increasing transit times.
> If they have no place to put them, they won't have them
That's not how it works. Have you ever lived in an area developed without any parking planning? I have, it's miserable.
People will still have the cars because they are necessary for every aspect of life. Making parking difficult does not change that, so they'll still have the car, now it just becomes a neighborhood warzone on where to park and everyone suffers.
The way you change this is not by removing parking, but by removing the need to have a car. Build excellent and affordable public transit first and then.. well there is no step two.
Most people don't really like to drive and don't like car expenses, so if you build excellent public transit a lot of people will give up their cars and the parking problem disappears as a side-effect.
Leaving aside that neither groceries or medical services are free, the problem isn't that parking will now cost something. There won't be enough parking to go around and many people will be entirely priced out. People will be unable to park near the services they need and many will have no place to park/charge the cars they still require at the end of the day when they're at home.
That's not a good situation for anyone except for a very small number of people who will make more money than they have been, and small number of already wealthy people who will find lots of available parking they can easily afford now that they don't have to compete with the poors. Everyone else gets screwed and the problem of people needing cars doesn't change at all.
Right, so now only the most rich can go visit the area (shops, friends).
I know a lot of people have the opinion that only the rich should get to do things but I don't subscribe to that. At least with public street parking the misery is egalitarian, both the Yugo and the Ferrari can circle for hours looking for parking.
Although having enough parking for everyone would be even better.
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 would need the public infrastructure for that to be possible. But if you make cars unaffordable for the average person, suddenly there would be A LOT more pressure on local government to get public infrastructure done.
Sure but public infrastructure doesn't magically appear overnight. It takes years, decades even, and costs a ton of money. I think the solutions may come laterally from developments in autonomous construction robots. They're being developed in Japan due to negative population growth reducing the available construction workforce.
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).
Parking, Roads, Gasoline, Pollution, etc... We so heavily subsidize people's cars for no reason. For the cost of all of it we could have free healthcare and amazing public transportation then lower taxes with the left over money.
There is a litany of "middlemen"; Drs, Corporations, Hospitals, Insurance, Pharmacies, Drug Companies, marketing, Lawyers ... ALL have a stake in something.
A large part of that is inflated health care costs. US citizens have to pay more than twice as much on average. Some services such as ER visits can cost 10x as much. US spends twice as much per capita than UK but get much less from it. Also keep in mind that the amount spent on roads is only a fraction of the total cost of cars in the USA.
jacking up the prices for parking spaces due to artificially induced scarcity will mean that cars are still every bit as essential to get around, but now only the wealthy will be able to afford to park them, screwing over the population least able to arrange/afford alternatives. I guess it's somehow better if the increasing number of poors in the US have to park miles away from their jobs (if they're lucky enough) and have to walk/run the rest of the way.
Like it or not, our cities are already built to make cars a necessity and pricing people out of access to the majority of places within a city isn't a solution to the design of public transportation or roads.
Because before developers were required to ensure that when they built something adding parking spaces to handle the demand they were introducing to an area was their responsibility. Now developers can (and will) push that externality onto the public at zero cost to them. The city has a very limited amount of parking spaces it can provide at any cost which means that removing that requirement will suddenly make parking much more expensive and harder to obtain.
London for example have buildings which are prohibited of having parking (or getting street permit). Providing an option not pay for parking space when buying an apartment is not that.
I really don't. I'm not even sure what kind of person would have a conflict of interest while supporting that we keep the requirement until actual alternatives are available to everyone.
While I have a car, and enjoy having one, and have a nice parking space in a heated underground garage, I also work remotely and don't drive all that much. I'm in a privileged position and could afford to uber (within the city anyway).
This is just a bad/non-solution to a very real problem that will do more harm than good.
Do you pay for that spot? Would you keep the car if it was costing you $150/mo to park it there? If not, then removing parking minimums accomplishes exactly what it is intended to do.
The cost of the spot is factored into the cost of the building so it still costs something, but even if it were a separate bill I'd still be stuck paying for it because I need a car and it has to go somewhere (plus I live in an area where it snows and don't want to get up at 5AM to move it every time that happens or scrape the ice off my windows/mirrors before I can leave).
Assuming bad faith is somewhat ironic and kind of a crummy way to interact online. Do you not think it's conceivable that someone could possibly think this is a bad idea honestly?
This is step 1 of reversing car centricity in these areas. Believe it or not some people in Europe in their 30s don’t even know how to drive because it’s just not needed. When you require parking spots for housing you increase the distance between everything. Going places requires transport because you have all these god forsaken parking lots you have to traverse to get to your destination.
Step one should be creating adequate public transportation so that the people with the fewest options are still able to get to work, doctors, and grocery stores even after existing parking spaces go away and no new ones are built.
Parking lots aren't what's keeping people in subdivisions from being miles away from those places. Parking spots aren't what's keeping people in cities from being able to walk to where they're going either. Parking lots are extremely walkable spaces even while being hot and unattractive.
You could get rid of every parking lot in your city and you'd still have highways you can't cross or safely walk/bike along side of, you'd still have housing set miles away from city centers, and you'd still have no access to most places by public transportation. Our cities are built from the ground up with the expectation that people will use cars to get around. That was a mistake, but getting rid of parking spots isn't the cure.
I've been in places like Tokyo where public transportation met all of my needs. We can do it, but you need the infrastructure in place first or you're just hurting people by leaving them with zero alternatives to what you're taking from them.
It'll take a massive increase in public transportation infrastructure, and a long and slow redesign of our cities and how we live to fix the mess the auto-industry has put us in. It's a transition that's long overdue, but the reality of the situation now is that people still need their cars.
Making sure that people have something to fall back on before we take their cars away from them or remove the places they put them at night/charge them should be a priority. What these cities are doing is the opposite of that.
Many households have more than one car per driver. With WFH many of these cars sit largely unused. We went down to being a one car family over a year ago and it has rarely been an issue. It requires a little bit of planning. "Hey I need the car on Thursday. Does that work for you?" Otherwise, a second car would mostly only get used because "Well, it hasn't been driven in a while".
I agree that WFH is a game changer here. Households in that situation are incentivized to get rid of excess vehicles since they cost money to maintain, license, and insure. With downtown office spaces and the nearby businesses that depend on them being abandoned, a lot of parking space can be reclaimed there too.
> but now only the wealthy will be able to afford to park them, screwing over the population least able to arrange/afford alternatives
Think for a minute about what it means to be wealthy. Is it having more money? Yes, but... The true meaning of being wealthy is having more options available to you. If some people can park but some people can't park, then by definition it's the wealthy people who can park.
Another way to look at it is, what's the point of accumulating money? It's to buy you more options. Let's say hypothetically that the government gives every individual person a fixed amount of housing, food, a car, and free parking. But it is illegal to trade these commodities in any manner; you are only entitled to exactly your share and no more. In this fantasy world, accumulating money would be meaningless because it doesn't enable you to do any more than your fellow man.
So yes, the fact that once you start restricting driving, then only the wealthy can afford to drive and park - that's a feature, not a bug. It's by design.
The reason people keep buying cars after prices rise 57% in a decade: the extra $10,000 amortized over 10 years is less than living even 1 year near the things you drive to. Things you drive to includes your parking space!
It doesn't make any sense to own a car and live in a dense urban development. What more needs to be said? Live in the suburbs if you have a car.
Fortunately bridge and toll community members are insensitive to these changes. They see no problems with 2 hours of schlepping, $16 of tolls and $25 parking to drink $0.50 of vodka priced at $17 at a downtown bar. If they were sensitive to these issues, that behavior would have ceased much sooner than a pandemic-induced shock to their routines.
That said, I don't see anything wrong with the suburban lifestyle, I am a product of it. Instead of focusing on issues like parking costs, which cities can never beat suburbs at because suburbs have essentially infinite land, cities should fix their education systems, because they can realistically beat suburbs on the concentration of human capital. My community would be far more appreciative of that than bullshit about parking spots.
> It doesn't make any sense to own a car and live in a dense urban development.
Public transport can be good but it's never that good. I live in zone 1 (ie very centrally) in London and there are still many journeys where it is quicker and cheaper for me to drive than to take any kind of public transport. This is true for longer journeys (going outside London) especially but surprisingly it's also true for quite a few short journeys (even going a couple of miles) - it depends a lot on the layout of the public transport network and the roads, and this is before considering journeys where I might want to bring bulky or heavy things with me which are basically impossible to do by public transport. I end up driving enough that the cost of car ownership vs short term rentals makes sense in pure economic terms but the convenience difference of ownership vs short-term rental is also pretty big.
> Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long.
People need to stop being shitty to each other.
> Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).
I don't think this is fair. Fewer parking spaces might mean higher profits for developers on a per-unit basis, but I'd rather them make money and provide more additional housing units that are sorely needed, especially in cities, than build apartment complexes with garages or parking which then necessitate higher taxes and more public spending to support roads, car crashes, and other related externalities.
"But public transit costs money too" yes, just redirect state highway department budgets to transit 1-1 and then you're not spending any more and getting higher ROI.
Further, we should move to a model where the highways are paid entirely by usage fees (gas tax, tolls, etc) instead of subsidized. They're for the benefit of private operators, so the private operators should pay for them. The investments should be in public transit instead.
A great deal of highway spending is subsidizing truck shipping. Most of the damage done to highways comes from big trucks, and taxes on them don't come anywhere near paying for it.
[EDIT] Incidentally, maybe we shouldn't subsidize truck shipping! But using usage taxes to pay for highways while not shifting the burden such that truck shipping is paying the lion's share of the cost and is no longer (so very much, at least) subsidized, would be making non-commercial drivers subsidize truck shipping (even more than they already are) which subsidy (to some degree) benefits everyone, including non-drivers, which seems like a weird and/or bad move to me.
Truck shipping has never made sense to me. It's significantly less fuel efficient than rail shipping, and paying people to just sit there and drive for their entire lives feels kinda torturous to me...
Lots of communities aren't served by rail, ship, or barge (or nowhere near enough capacity of those, or efficiently connected to the wrong places—how much raw iron ore or coal does a small town need?) so truck shipping's all they've got. Rail may pass through nearby, but without unloading capability or sufficient capacity at a proper train yard. Trucks drive to them from the nearest hub or notable train yard, which may be way more than your usual "last mile" concern that a city or whatever has. Tens of miles, to the warehouses that serve them, then tens of miles more to the nearest major store, that kind of thing.
Rural living would be way more expensive and inconvenient without truck shipping subsidies. Which, maybe making rural living artificially cheap is a good idea and maybe it's not, but that's one big shift that would happen if we made truck shipping pay its way entirely.
[EDIT] For true long-haul, I'm with you, the majority of that's surely only viable because of those subsidies, and we'd be better off pushing that to rail, ship, and barge.
What neighborhoods, exactly? Parking minimums have been the de facto law for cities, it's only in the past decade that trend has been starting to be reversed in the US.
My parents live in a residential, SFH neighborhood that's basically designated overflow parking for revelers. Especially during Pride Week, motorists will fill every street parking spot, only to stroll into the drunken debauchery, and then stagger back and attempt to locate their vehicles.
They've also seen ZipCar type services where short-term rental vehicles are just abandoned. Once, I woke up to find a luxury Alfa Romeo sedan that had taken a joy-ride across the border and was abandoned in front of our place.
The main street there dead-ends, and so the highest traffic is from lost motorists vainly attempting to hook up to the freeway.
My parents jealously guard their prime parking spots, I mean insanely: they love to walk but if they need to tote cargo more than 1 yard out of the way, we never hear the end of their moaning, and I live hundreds of miles away. They participate in Neighborhood Watch and won't hesitate to get cars tagged, inspected and towed if someone tries to mess with their "public street parking" spots. (Recently renovated "garage" is full of junk.)
As a holder of a driver's license who hasn't owned a car since 1997, I also never hear the end of their moaning about rude cyclists, oblivious pedestrians, City-sponsored transit lanes, or repainted roads to encourage sharing with pedestrians and multi-modal transport.
Around here, most of the moaning and screaming is directed at light rail, without considering for a moment how it takes drunks and inept drivers off the road and completely out of their way.
So you want to arm twist people to suit your agenda? It does not work this way. Personally I aways support and would vote for more public transport but not by forcing me to abandon my car. If that is the approach the only vote you'll get from me is fuck you. And I am a nicer guy who mostly uses EUC, bike and feet.
Nobody is forcing you to abandon your car, you are just going start absorbing the true cost of the externalities (whether in tolls, taxes, inconvenience, etc). You can decide for yourself then whether using or owning a car is worth that.
Sure. Foot me a bill since I am affecting other person's lives. Just make sure it is correct. Also do not forget to compensate me as I am affected by other people.
The problem with public transport is it serves too many masters. Is it a system to allow the disabled to get around? Is it a system to enable everyone in town to get around? Is it a commuting system? Should it be subsidized or revenue neutral? Trying to solve all these problems makes the public transport systems not work for any of them well.
Street parking should have a price attached to it in my opinion. It is a public resource that should be charged for use everywhere, including out in front of your suburban home. We push these prices on everyone when it should be the people using them that pay.
Effective public transit isn't something you can bolt onto a city after the roads are all built. Cities like Austin that were designed for cars from the outset are hopeless lost causes.
Old world cities can have great public transit because they were dense long before cars existed and have hundreds of years worth of civil projects designed to get people from A to B.
Do you have a citation for that? Large portions of Paris for instance aren't exactly old-world high density development. Luckily they're putting in the GPE, which is 120 miles of metro service. [1] Once you have the metro, you can put in higher-density development around the stations, and over time, the neighborhood changes. That's just fine.
Most of Paris as we know it was built in the 1950s and 1960s. Especially in the 1970s French politicians took on ambitious public works projects in Paris.
Most of the housing and most of the population was obliterated in the late-1930s through the mid-1940s, as you might recall. Two-thirds of the city's population had fled before the German invasion started even.
> anything that you leave to optionality in code enforcement ends up being a thing that never happens ever
No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them.
Cities like Austin have regulated themselves into a housing-cost crisis. It’s almost a miracle that rational economic policy is being given space by voters.
Marble countertops aren't competing for space that you could otherwise use to build more apartments to sell/rent.
Parking is.
Until parking spaces cost more than apartments do, developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred.
Eh, Milwaukee has fairly lax parking requirements (including no minimums for most downtown developments) but most developments have more than legal required. Developers are pretty open about the reason (it's not uncommon for neighbors to push back on parking due to traffic concerns): they lost money on the parking, but without the spots they can't rent the apartments at all. Walmart doesn't build parking because the city makes them, they do it because their target market has cars and won't visit without a parking lot.
And even if this does drive up parking costs to match rents, is that such a bad thing? Why should we legally mandate that developers subsidize parking?
We have an abundance of parking required by law and not enough housing units - removing the requirement should encourage more money to be invested into anything but parking no?
Seems like letting businesses decide whether or not it's worth opening a business with the available parking would cause one of two things to happen:
1. We wind up with the actual correct amount of parking required for a given set of businesses - instead of some arbitrary amount dictated by legislatures decades ago.
2. Everyone is tired of the lack of parking and votes to increase public transit funding.
Multiple means of egress from bedrooms, fire-rated walls between units, accessibility requirements, auto-closing doors, fire suppression systems, CO and smoke detectors, are all things that we could remove the requirements for and also leave to the businesses and builders to decide whether or not the market demands those things.
> developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred
Once we have apartments with and without parking on the market, we'll see how much more people are willing to pay to get parking, and future developers can build accordingly.
What part of "one hundred times out of a hundred" did you miss? You don't end up with the choice because nobody builds parking.
Queens NY has this problem pretty severely. Zoning requires parking past 7 stories in building height, so every building is 7 floors at maximum density with no parking. Residents often find themselves circling their neighborhoods for hours looking for parking. Living without a car and being fully-dependent on public transit absolutely sucks in most of the borough.
I understand both sides of the issue. My problem is the lack of context given to this solution for housing.
I live in small (2,000ish households) New England town with some streets that predate automobiles. Nobody is really space constrained. The housing 3 miles a way is at least half the cost of my town.
The public transportation is poor and it took about 25 years to build less than 3 miles of bike path.
Should my town ditch off-street parking minimums in an attempt to increase housing supplies?
That doesn't make space-constrained Austin's answer an automatic yes either though. The city is very car-dependent. The starting point isn't "take away peoples' ability to have a car". It should be "make it more attractive not to have a car".
Changing parking minimums comes far down that road.
It's not clear to me. I really wish you could take the effort to explain your thinking. If there is no place to park but your neighbor's yard how it would work in a civilized society and help housing costs.
A better example would be where a "development" community's rain water goes. The areas booming right now in the south east usa will build the next development up 4 feet above the previous community and get approved through the county council permit process. Then the first big rain storm or hurricane comes by and the formerly dry community is now flooded out for the new community that got built, which also floods because drainage wasn't factored in.
Then you’ll end up with the building equivalent of the titanic which had a lot of luxurious amenities and decor, but skimped on the more boring stuff like structural integrity. You can see this in effect in parts of Asia. The closest example we have in the US is the Millennium Tower. There were regulations, (someone could correct me) but they decided to “bribe” their way out of it.
Ironically, I still share your opinion about over regulation, but we can’t ignore the other argument.
> No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them.
"Follow the money" always works.
Builders want (reasonably enough) to increase profit. Marble countertops add a few thousand in cost but now you can sell these as luxury units for tens of thousands more! So it's profitable, so it happens.
Building parking space instead of additional units is not profitable, so it won't happen unless required.
Its expensive to build parking. Loads of shopping centers end up having to build seas of parking spaces due to these parking minimums given their square footage even though the actual car traffic wouldn't come close. I imagine a lot of those stores would have preferred paying for far less real estate and paving.
Shopping Centers are an entire different zone than housing. You typically do not build them in the same places. They're built in less desirable places than housing which makes the parking spaces cheaper and an efficient use of the space.
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.
Parking lots are a common place to store excess snow when it is plowed. Obviously from the parking lot itself, but also sometimes snow is hauled in dump trucks from other areas where there is no space to store the snow.
In snowy areas the piles can grow quite large and take up a sizable amount of parking lot space. These large piles then take considerably longer to melt away than snow in surrounding areas, sometimes lasting well into Spring.
Except this sort of code has a very real impact on volume of business, in the case of retail outlets, restaurants, venues or anything that's open to the public.
Can you see the design conversations going, "let's provide for practically no parking spots, so we can get less foot traffic and nobody will want to come shop here!"
In areas that support public transit and promote multi-modal, the businesses which thrive there are ones which cater to folks who eschew private vehicles. And that's a distinctly different crowd! So I think it'll work out great.
My apartment charges me to maintain a parking spot in the garage, giving them more money for minimal extra maintenance. This way people that don't have cars don't have to subsidize my parking spot, but it's still super worth it for the landlord.
If the cost to provide (guaranteed, protected) parking spots ends up being higher than people are willing to pay for them, maybe they're not actually worth what we're currently paying for them.
Here in Switzerland I've seen the opposite - the amount of parking requested by the developer (true, this was for local bank growth and not condos) was slashed significantly by municipality, as in 'don't bring your cars to your work', effectively removing 1 underground level of parking and some more, right under the bank.
There are very few countries out there that would see such behavior flying, when facing a wealthy developer (it used to be the biggest company in this village/small town) who gives a lot of local work, for just parking spots that are anyway completely hidden under the building.
Without other rules or planning to compensate, it creates a tragedy of the commons where every builder wants to offload their parking needs onto the rest of the neighborhood in order to save money. I lived near a neighborhood that had older denser development, that originally served just that neighborhood, but later became a hip place for people to go, thus exceeding existing parking. It was very frustrating that residents could never find a place to park because all the parking was taken local businesses patrons, and patrons couldn't find parking because that one collage bar was having a busy night and taking all the parking for five blocks around.
It didn't help that the urbanism activists in our area seem to consider parking garages to be a tool of the devil and protested any plans to build one in the area. To me they are an ideal compromise/stop-gap solution. They allow you to build dense walkable neighborhoods today even when most people will be driving. And once public transit has improved to the point where less parking is needed, you just have a few buildings to tear down instead of entire areas to redevelop.
Edit: And to be clear I think the "best practices" that most of the country used for the past 50 years to set parking minimums were massively inflated, and created many problems. I'm absolutely in favor of revising them, but I firmly reject swinging around to the other extreme of "to solve the public transit chicken-egg problem, we must make car use intolerable".
> It was very frustrating that residents could never find a place to park
This is the original tragedy of the commons though: a bunch of people assuming they can just park on the street. The frustration is the solution. Either build yourself private parking, pay for private parking, or ditch the car. Or enjoy the frustration.
> It didn't help that the urbanism activists in our area seem to consider parking garages to be a tool of the devil and protested any plans to build one in the area.
So Alice wants to build a high-density housing tower without having to build a ten-story parking structure beneath it, and we prohibit Alice from doing that, even though Bob wants to build a ten-story parking structure right next to it, because we prohibit Bob from doing that.
I feel like these could both be solved in the same way.
It is certainly a place to start! Although in this case I never heard of a developer wanting to build a parking structure on their own (and don't know if existing code would have prevented them). It was always the city wanting to build an adjacent parking structure as part of revitalization efforts to extend the success of that neighborhood further down the street.
We have minimum parking requirements that produce an oversupply of parking, therefore parking is cheap, therefore building parking garages is unprofitable. If you don't mandate them, the cost of parking will increase until building parking garages is profitable, and then people will build parking garages (or have fewer cars, in places where that's practical).
This doesn't even increase costs. Right now someone is paying $3000/month for a $2500 apartment and a $500 parking space. Without the parking requirements you could get a $2500 apartment for $2500 and choose whether you want to pay the extra $500 for the parking space.
Not only that, this would make it cheaper to build more apartments, so then the $2500 apartment drops to $2250 from lower scarcity, which reduces the cost of apartment+parking space as well by not force-allocating a parking space to someone who can do without a car and leaving more for the people who can't.
The lack of developers building parking garages tells us that the actual value of the parking is not as high as we think it is in most areas - and in fact parking garages are often built more to protect the vehicles than to provide extra parking.
Alice doesn't want to build it because if she doesn't she can afford to build twice as many housing units on the same lot, which is worth more money even without parking spaces, and the building doesn't need such an expensive foundation if it doesn't have to support a multi-story parking structure in addition to the housing units.
Bob wants to build it on the next lot over once he sees these new buildings going up and is willing to bet that the new residents will generate demand for parking, and can choose how many stories to make it based on the local demand for parking, which is based on numerous hyper-local conditions that are best evaluated by the owner of that specific lot and not just based on how many housing units are in each building.
> No one is prohibiting Alice from building the 10-story parking structure. The change is she's no longer required to build it.
Alice is a smart capitalist and will build two apartment buildings instead, maximizing profit from selling the units.
By the time the buildings are completed, the mortgages signed and the people start moving in and fighting for parking, Alice is long gone, moved on to the next project in some other city.
This is the problem parking minimums were intended to help reduce.
> Without other rules or planning to compensate, it creates a tragedy of the commons where every builder wants to offload their parking needs onto the rest of the neighborhood in order to save money.
Good. Then more people will choose different forms of transportation or internalize their costs. If parking becomes scarce, providing parking will become more profitable and people will pay the actual (enormous) cost of temporary car storage downtown.
I live on the edge of Cambridge, MA. I can leave my house and go east into the city or west into the suburbs. Almost all of my voluntary spend is done to the west because of the dramatically higher convenience.
Parking becoming difficult and/or expensive pushes patrons to places where that's not the case.
Put another way, it will be harder for people in suburbs to reap the benefits of density while being subsidized by it.
And the 'spend' from people driving in from the suburbs to go shopping will easily be overshadowed by greater economic activity resulting from a denser urban core.
> Good. Then more people will choose different forms of transportation or internalize their costs.
That's not really how it goes. This assumes that if you make it painful for people to do what you don't like (park), they'll stay and live the way you want.
But no, people will simply abandon the area due to inconvenience. The area I mentioned above (previous post) went from a nice affluent residential area to a dilapidated area where only the poor and university students (also poor) lived. Everyone who could afford to leave, left.
Humans will always look for a better solution for themselves unless you impose a complete dictatorship. It is not possible to advance a cause (whether it be less cars or more public transit or better EV support or better bike paths, etc) by simply making the status quo inconvenient. People will simply avoid it.
You advance a cause by making the new alternative actually more attractive, then the majority of people will happily adopt it.
Yeah, the local college planners in our city wanted to “discourage” vehicle use, and deliberately had only a few parking lots put in, mostly reserved for faculty of course. What has actually happened is every residential street within 4-5 blocks absolutely choked with vehicles parking on the curbside during the semesters. It’s a shitshow.
> The local residents need to retaliate with requiring permits for street parking. Fight fire with fire.
This is what happens, and exactly what happened near here. All neighborhoods within a mile or so of the university require permits for street parking.
But here's the thing, fighting fire with fire does not lead to a nice society. Now it's a huge pain to visit any friends within that zone because they have to shuffle their cars (with resident permits) to the street so guests can park on their driveway to avoid being ticketed. When you fight fire with fire you also get burned. Lose-lose.
How about: If you build a building of this size you must contribute $X to the public transit system to expand service to your building, adding drivers and routes if necessary.
We have so many subsidies for cars baked into the system, but hardly anything for other forms of transit, and then we complain endlessly about how expensive transit is to run and have to cut service to make ends meet, which of course discourages people from taking transit.
Impact fees on new developments are already a thing to pay for other infrastructure improvements like sewer, utilities, roads, and parks. No reason it couldn't be extended to transit as well.
Property owners already pay property taxes to fund infrastructure. Larger developments pay more in taxes (and the residents who live there pay income taxes etc.)
"Impact fees" are just a way to discourage new development.
What if we had a way of making buildings of a given size, or, say, value, contribute cash to the local and state governments, that the governments could then distribute as needed to transit, emergency services, infrastructure, schools, etc? We could even make it an annual fee so that they have to contribute to ongoing costs, and maybe periodically we could reassess the value of the property.
Sounds like it would be wildly unpopular and politicians would mess with your figures to get votes, even when that would ruin the budget. Sometimes specifically to ruin the budget because what they really want is to reduce/remove those services.
Isn’t that somewhat counterproductive if you are trying to attract developers to build in your cities urban core? They might decide to just build in the suburbs or another city that pencils out better.
> Now: If you build a building of this size, you MAY build as many parking spaces as you think you need.
Remember who is doing the planning and building. It is a developer who only has a short-term interest in the site. They want to build something, extract the maximum profit per sqft they can, sell it off and move on. They won't be involved by the time everyone moves in and starts living in that area.
You could blame the people moving in that they should've thought of parking before buying, and that's true. But people can be too optimistic when they like a place and just hope it works out. It doesn't work out, then they spend a lot of time driving around hoping to park somewhere. Early in my adult life I lived in an area like that, it was a nightmare.
The developer who decided to build a 6 story (24 apartment) building with just 8 parking spots? Long gone, not their problem.
this doesn't eliminate parking spots. they're eliminating parking minimums, which in most cases are not backed by any sort of science or study - parking minimums get set mostly randomly, as a roadblock for development that people don't want in their neighbourhood. there's no good reason for most of these parking minimums, and they're not necessarily parking spots in places where there is any demand. steet parking, parking garages, and parking lots will continue to exist.
then they get carried forward as precedent because people hear "eliminate parking minimums" as "eliminate parking spots" and fight against it, but they don't make any sense.
Your comment is completely wrong, at least as it applies to Austin as explained in the article.
Parking minimums are simply a requirement that if you build an apartment building with N apartments, you need to include a number of parking spots that is a function of N. The idea being that if you're building a number of places for people to live, the vast majority of them (especially in Austin) will need a place to park, and it's not really fair for you to externalize that need onto public streets just so you can make more money by adding more apartments with no parking.
That's the argument anyway, and it makes sense. The counter argument is that it also keeps us as a car-dependent city, and makes it harder to build affordable housing.
I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least in Austin. Public transportation (or, basically any transportation) is notoriously bad in Austin, and for decades we've basically had the stance "if you don't build it, they won't come", but that hasn't quite worked out.
> I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least it Austin. Public transportation (or, basically any transportation) is notoriously bad in Austin, and for decades we've basically had the stance "if you don't build it, they won't come", but that hasn't quite worked out.
Well, since what you have been doing hasn't worked, maybe let's try the other tactic.
Getting rid of parking minimums may propell the alternatives. What if businesses discover most ppl get to them by public transport/bike? They will demand authorities to accomodate those ppl so that profits will rise, or they will build themselves more infra(at least good bike parking) for this. Right now businesses are forced to accomodate car drivers even if sometimes it's not the best business decision and this might change. Also, less parking means more space, that can be used for different things like recreation zones or just building a mixed use building that will guarantee more clients to nearby local shops/businesses (depending on what the demand is ofc).
In other words getting rid of parking minimums allows ppl/businesses to experiment and see what's the best use for that land, be that a public space like parks, kids playfield, mixed use building, just another business, bike parking or something entirely else. Right now all that space was locked by strange laws with numbers taken from the air
The comment just said, that the function of N that gives the number of parking spots (really it's just going to be a proportionality factor) is "set nearly randomly". Nothing in your comment counters that assertion. Which I personally don't find implausible (although that is without any exposure to the decision process in Austin in particular)
It's not "set nearly randomly". It's a function of the estimated number of adult occupants, based on the number of bedrooms I believe.
Besides, the argument isn't "let's look at the calculation for required number of spots and tweak it if necessary", it's "let's get rid of parking altogether and pretend like people won't just still drive and park on the street."
It’s also not “abolish all parking” it’s “don’t force parking”. Or rephrased in a libertarian way “if there is a need for parking the market will provide it” (I make no comment on whether to expect a positive or negative outcome of this experiment)
I mean, you seem to be adamantly opposed. I assume for good reason (at least in your mind). Why not make an argument that actually relates to the proposal? At least I would give your opinion more weight that way
Parking minimums either serve no purpose (meaning developers would naturally provision at least that many parking spaces on their own accord, making the minimums a no-op) xor eliminating parking minimums will eliminate some parking spots.
If there are truly no other options, then the developers are going to have to severely reduce the price of their real estate or choose not to build there. This is simply taking an implicit approach to things, which may or may not work.
If anything doing this is a way for cities to implicitly get citizens on board for investing more in public transit. All of the new apartment buildings in the hip parts of town don't have any parking for your cars, so you're forced onto public transportation more, which you might think stinks, so you now care more about voting for infrastructure improvement.
> If there are truly no other options, then the developers are going to have to severely reduce the price of their real estate or choose not to build there. This is simply taking an implicit approach to things, which may or may not work.
True. But only to a limited extent as long as demand remains significantly higher relative to supply. e.g. if you're moving to a city due to work etc. and and have limited you're much more willing to compromise (use street parking, private lots some distance away etc,).
I think people will just take the path of least resistance which is voting for building more parking again. They won’t punish themselves in the short term so that the neighborhood they live in is more affordable and walkable in 20 years, when they won’t even live there anymore by then.
Nixing parking minimums for businesses in already-walkable, transit-connected downtown cores is overdue, and areas close to that density can easily become new downtown cores when infill is allowed to cover their parking lots.
Nixing parking minimums for downtown apartments, to your point, is a terrible idea (outside the densest areas of NYC at least, where parking minimums are already effectively nil) because most transit systems in the US are designed to bring suburban commuters into the city, so even if said apartment is situated directly above a multi-modal mass transit hub, it might not necessarily connect its residents to much more than a handful of giant parking decks clustered around a freeway.
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.
Speaking for my metro area, while it is true that there are significant resources in Express routes and other commuter-movers to get people into the downtown hub, a secondary, or even primary aim of our transit system is to GET PEOPLE SHOPPING.
Our transit centers are literally hosted by shopping malls, more often than not, until they are significant enough to be freestanding or independent of such malls. The routes are carefully planned to get people from one major retail center to another; the stops stop in front of stores, restaurants, and venues; it's all quite transparently consumer-focused.
The transit system here would look significantly different if they concentrated on moving workers to places of business. Transit riders work in certain areas which simply aren't served at all by transit. Take call centers, for example: a call center is usually situated in a business park or industrial zone. This will not have bus stops. I worked in a call center where I'd take my bicycle every day to ride the last mile, quite literally.
I regularly negotiate with recruiters about commute distance, and it's always my chore to explain how distance means a different thing to a transit rider: I can ride the train a long ways and it's a short, easy commute; if I need to transfer 2 buses it's a huge pain, 3 hours each way, even if it's 1/3rd of the distance of that single train ride.
Transit systems which serve upper-middle-class workers in downtown hubs do it because those workers find it impractical to park downtown, not because they can't afford private vehicle ownership. I took advantage of Caltrain in the Bay Area, just so I didn't put so many miles on my car.
Transit systems like mine don't actually serve the proletariat nor support our commuting needs; they're fundamentally here to encourage consumerism and stimulate retail economies, and that's how they score such massive subsidies that they hardly even need people to pay fares.
In theory it will eliminate the demand because it will be so much of a hassle people won't demand it. When there are no other options for getting around people will have to move to be closer to where they need to be and that increase in price will be weighed against the increase in the price of owning a car.
The amount of money we collectively spend subsidizing driving is utterly insane.
Yet every public transit measure is jet with the same tired dogma of “it’ll raise our taxes” or “it will run at a loss”. Street parking tons at a loss. Why is this never brought up?
Significant money is spent by the likes of the remaining Koch brothers to fight public transit infrastructure in every city.
Yet taking drivers off the road will make driving better and faster.
The shortsightedness of this is bewildering.
Parking minimums are a start, particularly for building more affordable housing but it’s barely scratching the surface and even this small gesture will often be met with fierce opposition.
The middled/old-aged NIMBYs in the suburbs don't use Uber/Pub-trans so they don't care and don't want to ever vote for it being improved or "taking my tax dollars." They still equate public transportation with being poor and not how millions of people who live IN the city get around, nor how THEY can benefit from being able to come downtown or go to the mountains skiing more frequently.
You know who wants tons of parking spots? Those people with their Suburbans and 6 kids who only come downtown for a sports game once every 3 months but complain about how scary and stressful being downtown is.
If you want a concrete example of this- when Austin caused Uber/Lyft to exit the market in 2016 (iirc) based on them "not fingerprinting drivers" one of the big arguments for letting them leave from one of (or the most) important council members was some comment along the lines of, "Well I've never needed an Uber/Lyft before in my life. Why can't you use cabs?" Ironically this person lives in Clarksville (or Tarrytown) which is one of the most expensive suburbs right outside of downtown and they probably never NEED an Uber. I bartended back in 2016 when this was going on and it SUCKED when they left. We had already gotten them into Austin WAY later than most other cities and it finally felt like I could travel around without a headache and the bullshit that yellow cabs bring with it ("Sorry sir, my credit card is not working tonight! Cash only but we're here already, so you must find ATM!")
People who actually go out and do things and didn't want to have to go back to cabs not showing up, potentially getting a dwi/dui, etc were angry beyond belief at the council.
> They still equate public transportation with being poor and not how millions of people who live IN the city get around.
I rode BART out of Oakland for years. I don’t agree with NIMBYs but it’s not like they are making it up.
I assure you, it is indeed full of insane people, homeless, the trains are nasty and smell like urine, frequently break down or get stopped because people regularly suicide themselves on the tracks. I’m sure in Asian countries the trains are fantastic but here people aren’t adults and ruin it for everyone.
> I’m sure in Asian countries the trains are fantastic but unfortunately public transit riders here aren’t adults and ruin it for everyone.
Not sure why you would turn an obviously systemic problem into one of personal responsibility. Do you think there are no mentally disabled or homeless people in other countries?
This attitude seems startlingly common in the US. It's like the pessimistic side of American Exceptionalism - "This problem, which many other countries have tackled successfully, cannot be fixed here".
< They still equate public transportation with being poor and not how millions of people who live IN the city get around.
Because statistically that’s very true almost everywhere in America. Even flagship cities like NYC have pathetic trains/subways compared to Europe/Asia and 90% of the population has never been that far abroad to see what’s possible. I’ve tried the express busses and “train”(can you call it that with only two cars!) in Austin and gave up because they waste much more time and are less comfortable than driving. Never saw rich professionals on them, but plenty of mentally ill, drug addicted, and unbathed(not that we should avoid the homeless as much as we do now) persons.
I worked on 2nd and Congress for 4 years and almost every single person I worked with who lived in the suburbs took the train from around the Domain/Aboreteum/further-north-Canada area. They would usually bike, park-at, or get dropped off at a park-n-ride.
Nobody said addicts, etc aren't on trains. I said people think that is who is only on it. My software engineer dad-friends absolutely took the train every single day and so did a TON of people who worked downtown. They constantly complained that the trains were full and I remember them changing schedules based on how full they were.
They all said they took the train because it was faster and they didn't have to sit in traffic.
I've also taken tons of buses. I lived off the drag and worked on 2nd. I always took a bus by UT down Congress to get to downtown. A bus is a bus. Every city bus has bus issues like you mentioned. Yawn. It's even worse here in Denver.
I live in Portland, Oregon, and my house has a city bus stop with service every 15 minutes literally around the corner. If you walk 3-5 blocks, you can access 2 more bus lines, and if you're willing to go 10 blocks you can get to half a dozen more. We have light rail (Trimet MAX) and the Portland Streetcar with just over a mile walk. It's one of the reasons we moved where we did. I work for Google, and Google Portland gives me a free unlimited transit pass, as our office is located on the downtown transit mall. I've literally never driven into the office; a 20 minute bus ride with less than a 2 block walk is incredibly nice.
My family takes transit all the time; I have 3 teens old enough to get their licenses and none of them have put much effort into learning how to drive because they can get around well enough using transit.
If you talk to our Baby Boomer neighbors, though, you'd think that the second you step foot on a bus or train you'll immediately be assaulted by violent junkies. We do have a big unhoused problem here (like everywhere) but my neighbors seem to think transit is only for the poor; it's sad, really, as many of them are getting to the age where they really shouldn't be driving.
Seems silly to think infrastructure means subsidising. Why don't you switch to dial up so that all the cables underneath the ocean can be slowly removed in order not to bother wild life over there?
But really, your whole life is sustained by providers driving. Taxes in the city comes from humans being able to physically move their bodies to the right location.
I mean, wouldn't it be ideal to get all the benefits of a complex industrial society without a complex industry? It sure would.
>But really, your whole life is sustained by providers driving. Taxes in the city comes from humans being able to physically move their bodies to the right location.
because the only way to get around in a city is by driving, right?
In a nice designed city, getting to the destination with public transp is faster compared to cars, due to dedicated lanes, more direct paths, semaphore priority (Amsterdam for example) and this is applied to bike paths too. Car infra is designed in a way that it exists but is not optimal/as fast as possible, they optimize for ways to transport great amount of ppl as fast as possible and cars can't do that
Of course infrastructure is subsidizing those who use it. Even more so when it comes to infrastructure that takes a lot of space, as every square foot of surface dedicated to one thing cannot be dedicated to another. And infrastructure induces demand by lowering some prices relative to others.
In an extreme case, imagine that your typical, currently congested highway gained another 6 lanes in each direction, and we raise speed limits to 100 mph. First, the right of way is now way bigger, so we need to wreck a lot of buildings for this infrastructure. It makes being able to travel near that highway really nice for a while: Minimal congestion! A straight out windfall by people owning land near it. But that also means that the area redevelops, as farmland that was in the middle of nowhere is now a reasonable commute downtown! But as the development continues, the highway will fill up. And since downtown streets were not changed, it's the area downtown near the highway that is now a congested mess, as the limitation is getting from there to buildings.
And again, a subsidy for you can be a harm for me: If every street is 8 lanes wide, it's very hard to cross. Every pedestrian crossing added is also infrastructure, but it slows down traffic. Every bit of lawn you use is another bit of distance I have to wade through to get to my destination, vs an area with the same number of houses, but without lawns.
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.
> 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 possible and cities with infrastructure outcompete them.
Only way to make this work is if you outright ban infrastructure and then make competition impossible in that domain.
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...) which shows the areas of a city which earn a ROI and those which are just expenses. The poorer and denser parts of the cities are the only ones which pay for themselves (and thus everyone else).
> There are some remarkable things to note right off the top. When we added up the replacement cost of all of the city's infrastructure—an expense we would anticipate them cumulatively experiencing roughly once a generation—it came to $32 billion. When we added up the entire tax base of the city, all of the private wealth sustained by that infrastructure, it came to just $16 billion. This is fatal.
> It's obvious to me why this is fatal, but for those of you for whom it is less clear, let me elaborate.
> The median house in Lafayette costs roughly $150,000. A family living in this house would currently pay about $1,500 per year in taxes to the local government of which 10%, approximately $150, goes to maintenance of infrastructure (more is paid to the schools and regional government). A fraction of that $150—it varies by year—is spent on actual pavement.
> To maintain just the roads and drainage systems that have already been built, the family in that median house would need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year. That assumes no new roads are built and existing roadways are not widened or substantively improved. That is $3,300 in additional local taxes just to tread water.
> That does not include underground utilities (sewer and water) or major facilities such as treatment plants, water towers and public buildings. Using ratios we’ve experienced from other communities, it is likely that the total infrastructure revenue gap for that median home is closer to $8,000 per year.
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.
A big problem with this is the incredibly long payoff time. You make parking go from miserable to insufferable, but it will take a decade minimum for good public transit and making popular areas bikeable/walkable. Sad experience with government projects tells I’m being generous on the timescale. If you make the infrastructure problems in Austin more painful for a decade there will be a migration away and we might have a death spiral from losing the tax base to pay for all that shiny public transit.
Car free areas also raise objections about accessibility for the disabled. How do you get your wheelchair to the middle of that car free area half a mile from the public transit stop closes to where you want to go.
Sounds like a skill issue. Paris made itself bikeable pretty quickly.
As for disabled: improvements to walkability and bikeability are also improvements to disabled accessibility in almost all cases. Not all disabilities are visible, and some even preclude driving at all. And when car parking is a hard requirement, there are dedicated disabled-parking zones.
EDIT: "X was built for walkability but Y was built for the car" you always hear this but it's just a lazy BS excuse not to do anything or think critically about the built environment. many of the cities people tout as "obviously this was built to be walkable" used to be clogged with cars (including Paris). it has wide boulevards! and many cities people think "oh this is obviously built for cars so we shouldn't bother" used to be totally walkable and had world-beating public transport (Los Angeles). it's ahistorical, learned helplessness, never backed by any rigorous comparisons, just vibes.
Paris was originally built to be traversed by walking and on horseback. It was originally built for density and walkability with roads tacked on later as an afterthought. Many streets in the core of Paris, Rome, etc. are tiny and barely fit for cars. Not as easy in a city that grew up with cars and are have as much roadway as buildings.
Bike infrastructure means some brick separators and painted lanes. It takes less than a month to build city-wide rudimentary protected bike lines.
BRT is similarly quick to implement, if a little more expensive. Remove 1 lane of parking from major downtown roads & replace with a painted BRT lane. Order about 50 buses to run in 1 way loops around the downtown area. Have high frequency BRT between the out-of-downtown parking area <-> downtown core.
> Bike infrastructure means some brick separators and painted lanes.
The biggest issue with bike infrastructure is that the people responsible for infrastructure genuinely believe this. The end result is usually a scattered bunch of stupidly dangerous "bike lanes" which aren't of use to basically anyone.
You need a separate biking network, which interfaces with car traffic as little as possible. This means you're essentially building "cycling highways" through car-free or car-minimal residential streets. Doing this properly means re-engineering those streets and intersections basically from the ground up, not just putting some paint on a highway gutter.
Thank you for saying this, the half measures currently being implemented most places are indeed woefully inadequate. The “bike lanes” near me are just painted lanes that frequently intersect turning cars. I would LOVE to bike to work, but not if I have to fear serious injury every day.
I cycle quite a lot in London which has put a lot of these in and honestly I think most of the separated lanes etc are a waste of money - they only really make a difference on the busiest roads with the narrowest lanes or at the most dangerous junctions. What does seem to be hugely underestimated is the need to provide lots of decent secure cycle parking at every destination.
> 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.
Maybe instead of planning bike lanes we should be addressing the root causes of why it takes such such an absurd amount of time to make changes like this. Once we do that we can get back to bike lanes.
Nothing about this makes it a 'car free area'. They are saying no more arbitrary minimums. Nobody is saying parking is not allowed. You better believe businesses will still want parking for their customers. And a new apartment complex/condo is still going to have them to attract tennants.
This is a chicken-and-egg situation. We can't get rid of parking until we have good public transit! We can't have good public transit because all the parking mandates reduce density so much that you can't live without a car!
If you bite the bullet and remove parking, better public transit will come. If you never remove parking, you will never have better transit.
> How do you get your wheelchair to the middle of that car free area half a mile from the public transit stop closes to where you want to go.
One would assume you would wheel your wheelchair there. You know, the same way people walk their feet there.
> Car free areas also raise objections about accessibility for the disabled.
What about all the people with disabilities that make driving dangerous or impossible, would love to know how we’re making driving accessible for the blind. There are far more people with disabilities that makes car travel difficult, than there are people for whom direct point-to-point car travel is an absolute necessity (short of someone being rushed to a hospital, I’m not sure what people would need regular, direct, point-to-point car travel).
Erm, you realise that before the “modern city”, every urban area was small and walkable, on account of the car not being invented.
The “modern city” or at least the US’s version of a “modern city” is the first time humans have ever lived so far apart at such scale. Enabled only because the car has conditioned so many people to think that driving 30mins to get anywhere interesting is “normal” or “natural”.
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 crowed boarding house with the other slaves on more land. Sure ancient Rome had 1 million people, but that was not the norm and even then most people were farmers in little villages not living in the city.
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)
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 going to be working remotely.
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 fantastic.
It's pretty nice in my experience, dude. But I don't live in a city so it's more of a necessity and none of these downsides are really an issue - which is sort the entire point.
Ditching cars feels like giving up regular alcohol use did, where the scales fell from my eyes and I see how much better my life is without it, but I can't quite communicate it to others without seeming like a huge judgmental prick :)
I've been without a car for 4 years now, and it is becoming a burden. For the first 2 years it wasn't so bad because of lock down. Now, even with my e-bike (which I love and would continue to use if I had a car) there are certain things I just cannot do. Inclimate weather is a big one, and in my location, June-September is inclimate weather of 100°+ weather. Carrying things home from the hardware store is not conducive activity with my e-bike. Large item purchases, blah blah blah. If I were to rent a car suitable each time, I could just pay the monthly car payment
> I've been without a car for 4 years now, and it is becoming a burden. For the first 2 years it wasn't so bad because of lock down. Now, even with my e-bike (which I love and would continue to use if I had a car) there are certain things I just cannot do. Inclimate weather is a big one, and in my location, June-September is inclimate weather of 100°+ weather. Carrying things home from the hardware store is not conducive activity with my e-bike. Large item purchases, blah blah blah. If I were to rent a car suitable each time, I could just pay the monthly car payment
You haven't specified where you live, but from the details you've written, we can narrow it down far enough to safely conclude that you're not living in a place that's designed to support a car-free lifestyle.
I have lived for over fifteen years without a car. Not only do I not miss it, but I'd pay to be able to live like this. I can rent a car whenever I need it (something like once or twice a year) and the total annual cost is a fraction of what a monthly car payment would be almost anywhere in the country: gas, financing, repairs, fees, other expenses, etc. all add up to way more than people realize[0].
When you're living in a place that's designed with cars in mind, it's hard to imagine living comfortably without it, but when you're living in a place that's designed for other means of transportation, it's hard to imagine ever going back to cars.
> When you're living in a place that's designed with cars in mind,
Being born in a place is a lottery with random chance deciding the rules for you. Sure, as an adult, you can potentially choose to leave for the less green pasture and live in an urban environment of city designed for other means of transpo if you're one that doesn't mind moving away from their entire familial support structure. Not say it can't be done, but people just assume these decisions are something people are willing to make just because they did. It's nonsensical.
> Being born in a place is a lottery with random chance deciding the rules for you. Sure, as an adult, you can potentially choose to leave for the less green pasture and live in an urban environment of city designed for other means of transpo if you're one that doesn't mind moving away from their entire familial support structure. Not say it can't be done, but people just assume these decisions are something people are willing to make just because they did. It's nonsensical.
Nobody in this subthread is saying anything to that effect. This thread was prompted by someone asking why anyone would want to live in a [car-free] urban environment in the first place. The ability to do so is implied by the question, not something being prescribed by edict.
> Carrying things home from the hardware store is not conducive activity with my e-bike. Large item purchases, blah blah blah. If I were to rent a car suitable each time, I could just pay the monthly car payment
Do you have on-demand car sharing in your city? Like Zipcar or similar? You could go on a heck of a lot of hardware store trips in one of these cars for the price of a car payment + parking + insurance + taxes + maintenance.
> Do you have on-demand car sharing in your city? Like Zipcar or similar? You could go on a heck of a lot of hardware store trips in one of these cars for the price of a car payment + parking + insurance + taxes + maintenance.
I think you're replying to the wrong person. I do use Zipcar on the rare occasion that I need a car. It's way cheaper than car ownership (not even including parking).
On the chance they were meaning to reply to me, no, I don't think a Zipcar is going to help me carry sheets of plywood or other similar large items. However, I'm not familiar with Zipcar, so I just took a look. Near me, there's a Kia Soul or a Toyota Prius. Nope, neither of those helpful for my needs. I'll continue with the "hey buddy...got another sixer-request", although, some requests become cases.
Yeah, I replied to the wrong person. Anyway, I don't see many people buying full sheets of plywood in dense cities, but if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't be going to my neighborhood hardware store with a Zipcar, because it doesn't have a lumber yard. I'd go to the Home Depot a few miles away, and I'd use their rental truck.
that's yet another reason city dwelling in a multi-tenant building is just not conducive for many people. I couldn't imagine not being able to work on projects. Of course, having the desire/inclination of having that kind of hobby is probably something a city slicker just isn't going to do. I have wood working and machine working tools that I'm just going to lean towards not being allowed by whatever building rules.
I love how those not wanting the city life is just looked down upon by those that are. But that's okay, I think those that live in the city are kind of just weird for similarly petty things
I've lived both lifestyles; it goes both ways. I like metal working and wrenching on cars, which was easy to do in my suburban garage, but I also like riding a bike to run my errands, walking to the bar, and regularly going to highly specialized meetups, which is easier to do in a city. There's no one lifestyle that's perfect for everything.
There's nothing inherently incompatible with living an a walkable community and participating in hobbies like woodworking. For example, after just a few minutes of searching, here's the first listing I found of a condo in a building that includes an expansive workshop among other amenities. (See photo 52.) This is in a location with a 92 walk and bike score, and a 78 transit score.[0] If that's not to your liking, here's another with a modest woodworking shop.[1] It seems like practically every luxury tower in the city has workshops among their fitness centers, pools, roof terraces, etc.[2][3] Minneapolis too cold? How about Seattle?[4]
> There's nothing inherently incompatible with living an a walkable community and participating in hobbies like woodworking.
Okay, so there are 10 buildings (out of several thousand) with woodworking in Minneapolis, but how many of them also support what my spouse likes to do?
This is a case where you don't want it in the building, which gets us to the "there's not enough space within a 5 minute walk for a wide range of `want to do's."
This is a case where I do want my woodworking or hobbies in the building, but I probably don't want your woodworking or other noisy/dusty hobbies in the building. Having a basement where I can tinker and a garage where I can do projects and car repairs and having that directly on my property where I can empty the rag bin, turn off the lights, and come back to it tomorrow or four weeks from now is exactly what I wanted (and why I'm not living in a denser part of the city).
Yeah but in a decent suburban house you can have most all of those things available to you 24/7 on your own property without anyone bothering you, trying to make small talk, reserve equipment etc. I’m sure that works for some people but I like the ability to use my “amenities “ 24/7 on my terms.
I find this kind of false dichotomy to be unimaginative. Nobody said you couldn't work on projects in this circumstance. Other commenters have shown this already.
And if this was true, why would it have to be? We shouldn't lock ourselves into that kind of world. There's no reason that people shouldn't be able to have access to workspaces just because they don't want to live in unsustainable car centric areas.
Okay, so someone has posted links to mythical urban workshops so that you can attempt to live without a car. So, since I'm so unimaginative, riddle me this Batman, how does one go about getting large materials to/from this workshop?
Some people love living in dense housing areas in a city. Others love living with more space in the suburbs or even rural areas. Often members of each group have a difficult time understanding why the other group has the preferences they do.
I've lived in a high-rise in a city and on acres in a rural area. I vastly prefer the latter. Right now, I live on about 1/5 acre in the edge of a proper city, which is a pretty good compromise to get the kids what will benefit them and still have some space and not have neighbors right up my ass every time I turn around.
>I can rent a car whenever I need it (something like once or twice a year)
I think this is obviously the crux of the issue. It depends on what you do and what your love. I would be renting a car/truck 2-3x a week based on my interests and passions.
I would like not having to drive to work, but would rather give up those 1.5 hours a day than everything else my vehicle lets me do.
that said, i support letting people chose for themselves.
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.
> "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.
$1k/mo is a new car with no down payment, most people aren't doing that. It's literally the most expensive way to get a vehicle! Maybe #2 depending on your views on leasing and how you calculate cost there.
And even using the $1k/mo number, you're still paying thousands more in rent to save that.
$1k/month doesn't just necessarily mean the financing on the car. When I look at the monthly requirements for the car, I include insurance in that number. If the place I'm living requires a parking fee, I include that number. I don't include gas/maintenance as those are variable, so I'm only including the fixed costs fees.
You can also get higher payments with money down if you have no to low credit ratings. Been there, done that. You play the game using the online calculators that dealers provide on how much your payment can change based on credit score and down payment, and the credit score will dramatically change compared to the down payment.
Then add maintenance, insurance, depreciation, fuel. And that's just the stuff that shows up on a spreadsheet (of which depreciation most folks don't really think about).
You wouldn't consider depreciation a cost in addition to your car payment, depreciation is on your balance sheet and your car payment is on your cash flow.
Your balance sheet would factor in only your interest payments and depreciation, the principal on your loan is irrelevant there because it's being realized as equity.
The average monthly payment for a used car being $500 does not mean that somebody on a low income has to pay $500 to own a car. I'd imagine that the average price paid for a cup of coffee is around $5, but that doesn't mean that that's what coffe costs. It just means that a lot of people pay way more than neccessary for coffee. Similarly- lots of people drive cars that are bigger, faster, newer, more luxurious, and more capable then necessary.
The bare minimum cost to own a vehicle is not $500 a month by any means- my 5000 dollar car has lasted me 6 years now as an example. Even if we consider it is now worth half of it's original value, that comes in at about $70 a month in depreciation. Hardly unaffordable
> The average monthly payment for a used car is $500/mo, and $700/mo for a new car
Average isn't a very interesting number here. I know a guy with a $15K/month car payment, I'm sure people like him push the average up.
If you're trying to save money, don't go for average. Buy a cheap used car, ideally in cash, and your operating costs will be minimal.
The sky is the limit how much you can spend on a car if you wanted to splurge(waste), but you can also a fully functional car for very cheap if you care to save money.
That's the average total cost to own a new car, not the average total cost to own a car. The average car is something like 12 years old, so the average cost will be significantly less. I haven't had a car payment for something like 22 years. Over that time, used cars have gotten to be better than new cars in the 80s used to be.
> it'd be better if they were option for living your life rather than a necessity
I totally agree with that. I 100% support other people having the option to own or not own a car and accept the tradeoffs that result from their choice.
If you're rich and money is no object, do what makes you happy.
But if money is tight enough that you care about cost, it is very silly to look into an expensive new car. Buy an older efficient Honda/Mazda/Toyota for less than $10K, insurance will be cheaper, operating costs very low.
> "Let's pay 3x as much for rent [and other things that more expensive with density] to save $300/mo on a car payment"
You must have one of those magical cars that runs on air, never needs to be filled up, never needs to be taxed, never needs to be insured and never breaks down. Wish I could have one of those cars.
In the meantime I’ll settle for using my feet and my bike. Never needed to fill them up with fuel, pay insurance, or tax. And my feet, at least, have never broken down.
$400/month is probably a reasonable average to cover the cost of a car though. Sure a new car will be over $1000/month, but a used car will be much cheaper. In ever city I've looked downtown housing is a lot more than that. Of course most cities let you live much cheaper just outside of downtown, if you can do that you have reasonable rents and good access to transit and so a car would be a large extra cost.
Cheapest TCO for a bought used car is about 400 euro per month here in Sweden, most will spend more because they drive more or buy a more expensive car. The majority of people will spend more than 600 euros per month at 1200km YMMV, the externalties are subsidized to at least 100-1500 euros per month depending on how you count.
All these numbers are from 2019.
Without car we pay about 300 euros per month for all transport needs, an extra 100 euros per month are direct subsidies. I would guess we would pay at least 800 euros per month for a car, probably more.
Most people do not do this everyday. You can use a car when you need to but driving for every trip is what has created the affordability and the congestion problem in America.
Because it’s nice to have practically every amenity possible in easy walking distance I.e 5-10 minutes walk.
Probably 20 restaurants, 20 small shops, coffee shops, ups, usps, fedex, hardware stores, museums, parks etc etc all within 10 minutes walk.
It’s nice not having to drive for everyday errands. driving and parking is soul draining and causes suburbs to be ugly, not to mention freeways. Those are ugly as sin.
You don't need all of that to have every amenity at a walking distance. I live in the suburbs and I still have almost every amenity walking distance. Do I need 20 restaurants and coffee shops?
Having space for your hobbies is nice so if your priority is hobbies that need space living out of the city is nice. If your priority is going out for things it is probably better to live in the city.
Of course I am sure. If you plan where you live you can live in the suburbs just fine and still be able to walk most places. I have done it in the last few places I have lived. They even have bus routes. Suburbs can be walk-able for those that make it a priority. Many don't care and will pick their homes with different criteria.
One that comes to mind is Arlington Heights, IL, a suburb to Chicago. It's very walkable and the places you can walk to are work walking to. My wife and I had to spend a week there and had lots of great meals throughout the day at various places, with lots of amenities for day-to-day life.
I was born, raised, lived in many, and will likely die in a city - but I just wanted to chime in to say that not all suburbs are awful.
> Because it’s nice to have practically every amenity possible in easy walking distance I.e 5-10 minutes walk.
It might be "nice", but it's not possible without a very restricted definition of "every amenity" and even then there's an assumption that amenities are fungible and you're ignoring efficiency.
If there's a grocery store every five minute walk, it's relatively small, which means that it has a crap selection AND it's expensive to run because it doesn't have any economies of scale. (Compare NYC's bodegas with even a crap Walmart and god help you if you're not the dominant community near your bodega.)
The number of places to eat/drink within a five minute walk is limited and/or they're tiny. Again, crap selection and no economies of scale.
Then consider our musician friends. Do you really think that NYC supports enough instrument stores to have one, let alone a good one, every five minute walk? (Remember, you need guitars, flutes, pianos, etc.)
And, musicians aren't special here - the same is true of any interest, such as books.
If it's so efficient and/or desirable, why only a fraction of NYC?
The answer is that those areas are a luxury good, with, as you put it, "high cost".
Note that the streets, which is the whole of "planning for autos", don't have any effect on what's in the streetfronts. And, since the high cost areas were also "planned for autos" ...
>If it's so efficient and/or desirable, why only a fraction of NYC?
You are misinformed. It is only part of NYC and rare in other cities across the US because of the planning which generally supports cars, including rules like the article, parking minimums. That makes it a luxury good. Build more walkable areas then it won't be a luxury anymore.
A 3/4 mile radius is a lot. There are quite a few small cities in the Bay Area that have this and more, although maybe not the museums. And they’re not very dense.
You definitely can, except for museums which are less common. :)
And stores of a kind clumping together is a suburban phenomenon, not an urban one. You're not usually going to find two hardware stores next to each other in a big city, or two UPS stores. Even fast food, which is almost always "clumped" in the suburbs, gets pretty evenly distributed in cities. A McDonald's will just be on a random corner, not as part of a row next to Burger King and KFC.
> A ten minute walk is half to 3/4 of a mile. I doubt you can find all those things in that distance except in the densest of cities.
I have all of that (except the museum) within 10 minutes walk in a very suburban (almost rural, but still suburb) area.
This myth that you must live in the densest cities (Manhattan or SF) to be able to walk to shops, restaurants and other daily useful things is just a myth.
I have all of that in 10-15 minute walks in my extremely suburban neighborhood. Hell I’ve got regular full sized grocery store and a super sized grocery store within a 10 minute walk and a super Walmart in a 15 minute walk.
That’s wrong. It’s true that areas planned around cars can’t support that number of small shops and restaurants.
Actually nearby it’s the street with more car traffic that has the most empty store fronts because everyone hates walking on it.
The main issue with the walkable cities is the housing is expensive.
The reason for that is demand exceeds supply. People love the cities judging by the absurd house prices in them. It’s just that we don’t have enough of them.
A main reason for that is single family zoning and parking minimums.
They want to visit friends, go to a museum, join a sports club, check out a book from the library, go shopping, visit a restaurant - there's way more of those in a city than in the countryside.
The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (mistaken) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks, which is certainly not the case:
Suburban design is the worst of both worlds: lacking the density of the urban so infrastructure is inefficient and so is transportation, and basically bulldozing what makes more rural living nice (closeness to nature).
I live in a neighborhood in an East Coast city where the housing is all row homes. I have about 1400 sq/ft or 130 m^2. It's really nice, I have a home office, we have a spare bedroom, I can walk 4 minutes to get groceries, there's a commercial street a few minutes walk away, and access to busses/a train. It's really quite nice.
We've had about 3 years of (ubiquitous) remote work; that's nowhere near enough to call "a generation", nor to bring about a sea change in attitudes. Even then, this entire time there's been a steady chorus of voices admonishing us that if we think remote work is better, it's just because we're slacking off; we don't recognize the real, important benefits of ad-hoc in-person communication; this is just a fad that will end any day now. Aaaaany day now...
Small is relative; I live in a relatively large apartment (1000sqr feet) in a super dense part of a city; everything I can access (gym, food, healthcare) is within less than 5 walk and I have a great community of people I meet with almost every day; almost by accident :) I like the dense space, and 1000sqr feet is not really small. I don't see the value of owning endless nothing, I'd rather go to the forest to be alone, fortunately a bus line takes me there; or I can ride an ebike.
> "I think our country has used its land wastefully, like a drunk lottery winner that's squandered their newfound wealth," said resident Tai Hovanky.
This sounds like a comment from someone who lives in a city and doesn’t get out. There is an incredible, vast, mind-boggling amount of empty space in the US. I have flown and driven across the country many times. City dwellers are occupying a fraction of 1% of the space available.
The idea that we must live in hyper-dense cities is utter nonsense. If you like that lifestyle, great, but it’s not reasonable to force it on everyone else.
What would you consider Austin or the suburbs of Austin? If you live in a city or close enough to one, sprawl is terrible as it gives you all the cons of car dependence with fewer benefits of a concentrated population center. The rest of the country can decide they want to live 45 mins drive from a grocery store, but fixing car dependency in cities should be a priority, and I think you'd agree with that.
The density of downtown Austin has increased _substantially_ since 2015, but it's still not straightforward to live there without a car. Most of the shops downtown sell tourist tat, not useful items, and most of the everyday commercial districts are inaccessible by public transit.
Almost all new high rise construction just has a couple of floors of parking garage, and handles it well. I can't see buildings without that being commercially successful, especially since much of the work that attracts people who like downtown is out in the burbs (sometimes not even in the same county).
> I can't see buildings without that being commercially successful
There is no parking ban being enacted. It is a removal of an arbitrary parking minimum. If they can't sell the properties without it why would they remove parking?
To point out that the intended effect of removing the minimums in Austin is highly unlikely to change actual behaviour in practice, other than perhaps in the units designated for low income people who likely will have to make do without parking.
I actually agree with that - and I grew up in a rural area.
The US has been building a lot of low-quality low-density suburban neighborhoods. They are actively hostile to the people living there, as there are both no amenities within a human distance from your home and there is no space for recreation. Life is constantly being strangled by a forced dependency on car travel.
In cities everything is a stone's throw away, and you can get there either walking or by bike. In rural areas there's plenty of space for outdoor hobbies and for children to play. The suburbs are a worst-of-both-worlds scenario.
I lived in Davis, CA for a while and I feel like they had the right balance of suburban and urban development. I felt like it was extremely fair to cars despite being super walkable and one of the most bike friendly cities in the country.
They embrace mixed zoning, where homes and apartments mix with low density commercial, even in the same building. You can own a single family house if you need that, walkable to grocery and restaurants. Portland does this at a greater scale and it’s fantastic, unfortunately zoning and public transit won’t fix the other problems the city has.
This is about arbitrary parking regulations. Not about dense cities.
The idea that we must live between enormously huge parking lots is nonsense. If you like that lifestyle, great, but it’s not reasonable to force it on everyone else.
This is precisely it. Those of us who would like more density and walkability have very limited options in the US, because those who prefer to drive everywhere have their preferences enshrined in law.
Cities should be dense so rural lots don’t get subdivided into 7000 sqft suburban lots. As you say, literally no one is forcing you to live in cities. But preventing dense cities will force you to live in the suburbs.
> "Austin has developed as a low density city without adequate mass transportation system," said resident Malcolm Yeatts. "Austin citizens cannot give up their cars. Eliminating adequate parking for residents will only increase the flight of the middle class and businesses to the suburbs."
I think this is likely to happen. Also, as a potential customer, when I look at a business, if I see that the parking is going to be a hassle, I will pick another location even if it means it is further away. So this has potential to make the business situation worse as well.
They could make things better rapidly by have a downtown bus loop with dedicated lanes and a park-and-ride to the north and south of downtown. They don't have to solve the whole city at once just incremental improvements every year.
I should be for every n sq ft contribute a parking space or $$$ to mass transit. Otherwise people still need a car and live a miserable life of shuffling their cars around, taking public spots that should be reserved for commerce or occasional use, like guests, not permanent parking.
In Los Angeles there are ~ 3 parking spaces per car, and < 1 housing unit per person. We mandate a bunch of parking for every new building, but no housing. Its no wonder that people live in cars.
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 <=1 space per car, the car is either being unused or it's parking illegally sometimes.
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 housed population with <1 house per person because a large percentage of people live with one or more people.
> 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.
Actually, those numbers are a problem on their face. They're an illustration of why cars, and societies that are structured around enabling automobile transit as the primary (or even sole) means of transit, are inherently unsustainable and inefficient.
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.
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.
The price to pave a lot is by far the least unsustainable part of the situation. Asphalt is cheap. The opportunity cost of the land use is much higher in all but the most rural of places.
If everyone needs to have a car to get around that's 3 parking spaces per person. Or 6-12 parking spaces per household.
This is nearing the square footage of an apartment to house the same number of people. So for any given unit of housing real estate we need an equivalent or greater amount of parking real estate.
When everyone wants to live close together (ie in LA near where they work, socialize, etc. not in middle of Nebraska) that puts a real pressure on space, and drives up the cost for real estate.
Even if you want to increase density by building higher buildings, the cost of those condo/apartment towers now must factor in a parking garage pedestal taking up 1/3 of its height, and so must offices, shopping centers, etc.
I don't think the ratio of parking spaces per car needs to be reduced. Rather it needs to be recognized, and thus reveal the cost of policies that lead to one car per person. If you can reduce the cars per person ratio, you reduce the number of parking spaces required at a 3x rate.
3 parking spaces is ~750sqft. A moving car is another 2000sqft. Once population density passes ~3 stories, the geometry stops working. Once drive time exceeds an hour or two, the math stops working. It's the urban rocket equation.
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 all the different things you can get to. However cars spread the city out, and in this in turn means you can't do as many things. You can still do a lot, but eventually the distance (distances in cities are measured in time not meters!) is unreasonable and so you can't get someplace in your city. Dense cities enable more things. If you just want to go to walmart - so do everyone else so no problem. 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.
> However if you have a niche interest you may discover not enough people live within range to support a place for your interest even though across the entire city there are enough people.
How are the cars limiting here? It's quite the opposite - you can have a special interest shop/venue in a cheap mall in some industrial area and get enough customers who can reach you by car. Without the car ubiquity you'd need to get into expensive real estate in the city center to get potential customers and charge them for your rent, which is fine if you are dealing in, say, collectible wines or artisanal Swiss timepieces and no business if you want to sell Gundam models or knitting sullies.
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.
If it takes more than an hour of car travel then how long will it take without a car? I imagine your argument is that without cars the city wouldn't be as big, but the math doesn't work out: the travel time is proportional to the square root of the area while the additional area is linear. If a city with cars is triple the size of the same one without it would have taken only 1.7 time more to travel through. Public transit is way slower than 1.7x.
No, those numbers don't show that by themselves. That's because there's nothing about cars per person, only spaces per car. Cars would not be a problem at all if there were even 50 spaces per car... but only a total of 10 cars!
I think the implicit attitude that your comment seems to have of one car per person is the real issue.
> No, those numbers don't show that by themselves. That's because there's nothing about cars per person, only spaces per car. Cars would not be a problem at all if there were even 50 spaces per car... but only a total of 10 cars!
Okay yes, but we're not talking about a hypothetical city in a hypothetical world in which there are 3 million people who share 10 cars. We're talking about Los Angeles, which everyone reading this thread knows (or can Google) has, in the real world, close to one registered car per person. We're talking about this in a thread about parking minimums in the US, which are almost always found in cities that have approximately one car per person, or at least one car per household.
In that sense, no number ever shows anything "by itself" because meaning is always constructed contextually, but at some point we have to all understand context because it's both tedious and Sisyphean to spell everything out every time.
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.
You really can't average a wide area though, parking is a highly localized and cyclical problem set. During the night, most people will be at home, and during the day, most people will be at work. Your city will increase in population during the day as commuters from the suburbs commute to work. Events will happen in your city which will cause huge outliers in the demand for spaces.
Also, townhome rows typically have little to no street parking available because the driveways are so dense. This makes it impossible for friends to come over and park anywhere.
Obviously more than one person can occupy a housing unit (where each parking space can accomodate only one car), but this report from 2020[0] seems to indicate that LA has more than enough housing to accomodate its residents, it's just distributed unoptimally.
It seems somewhat obvious that you may need more parking spaces than cars since they move to different places throughout the day.
> since they move to different places throughout the day.
The question people are asking is how can cities make it easier both for people to live in them as well as move around them without needing a car to do so. By removing parking minimums, it implies that people will have a harder time driving, which will entice them to use other means to get around. But, the big issue is that cities also need to invest in those other means of getting around. That means making micro-mobility easier with protected infrastructure, more bus service, more light-rail, etc. LA had a light rail service until GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tire organized a shell company to buy out the system and eventually tear it out. They did the same thing to the Key System in the East Bay of the Bay Area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines
The ratio that's the problem here is cars per person, not directly parking spaces per car.
Now reducing parking spaces per car might put pressure to reduce cars per person, or implement alternatives to allow fewer cars per person, which would actually improve land usage.
Have you been to neighborhoods that don't have parking mandated parking spots? Anything built in the 60s to 80s. Drive around for 1/2 hour trying to find a parking spot every day, pay hundreds/thousands of dollars a year in fines because you forgot to move you car on street cleaning day. Repeat if you work at place in these old neighborhoods, like Venice or West LA where all the tech companies are located.
The issue isn't parking spots, the issue is that construction has had 0 efficiency gains in the last 50 year. Its cheaper to produce a car, grow food, produce computer chips, etc. Its not cheaper to build a building or a parking structure. Make it cheaper to build and it will solve house prices. And its not raw materials that make it expensive. There is no automation. We still pour concrete and frame buildings that same way we did 50 years ago.
It almost certainly DOES cost quite a bit less if you only include the costs that would have been, in, say, 1950 - and control for actually equivalent stuctures. Environmental cleanup? Tectonic studies? Worker safety? What are those? Does the 1950s deck even have an elevator? I bet it doesn't have a modern bank of ADA compliant ones, security cameras and lighting throughout, etc, etc, etc. How about lifespan?
I'm sure we could thrown up a hunk of concrete and rebar in the middle of nowhere in area with no environmental regs real cheap, especially if only care if it stands until the check clears.
This argument will convince approximately zero people. It only works on people who already agree that we are too car reliant. The vast majority of LA will not give up their car, and circling for a spot fucking sucks so they’ll use their political power to make sure they don’t have to.
The problem is that the current people generally find the statement like the above convincing because it is "simple and straightforward" even in fact it is boldly misleading. The common daily pain + political language above makes poor people suffer even more as a consequence of being misled.
Although it should be unnecessary to point it out, I would nevertheless say this "3 park space for car" is equal to "there are 3 spot for you to stand".
Before you abolish an old infra you need to build new ones, however, since US politicians can get away with not building anything, so they opt for abolishing old infra as their credit for the next move, and as a consequence people suffer with lower and lower quality of life.
BTW, I lived in China and Europe for many years and exclusively ride bicycles for a long time, it was not the same experience. If you believe what current US politician is getting you one step closer to that, you are just deluding yourself.
This seems like something where the outcome of the simulation is dramatically influenced by the starting assumptions to the degree that the results are useless.
It allows plots of land to be smaller, but is the extra space taken up by housing or businesses? Is the housing single family or high density? How do wider economic trends interact with developers' interest in building/not building? I would think interest rates interact with developers' willingness to build and what they want to build.
Those factors feel very subjective to me.
Not to mention that if a model existed that could accurately predict this, I would eat my hat if the model wasn't immediately bought out by a fintech firm for some absurdly large sum. Being able to accurately predict the housing market is a blank check for printing money.
The city I live in added "transit oriented development" a few years back along with a bus rapid transit along the same area.
The results appear to be a full bus, the whole sale replacement of one and 2 story buildings along the bus line and a general consensus in the city that it worked pretty well.
We just approved ending parking minimums and by right auxiliary housing units, read anyone can put in an apartment over their garage, this summer so the jury is out on it as yet city wide.
A traditional shopping mall won't die out. A post-1950s suburban-experiment strip mall might be affected.
You can't get rid of parking on its own. If there's plenty of mixed-use development around so people can walk/bike/transit to their destination, then things will be fine. If you're getting rid of parking AND the nearest residence is a mile away AND the only way to get around is by car AND you're not building anything new, then yes, it's silly.
Mostly because good transit implementation is so expensive only like a half dozen cities in the US are financially capable of building new rail transit or hiring a lot more bus operators. Also the fact bike lane projects in this country are seemingly done like a half mile at a time to the lowest standards, rather than a one shot whole network wide rollout of lanes that would make suburbanites feel safe to bike to errands. A robust bike network seems difficult only if you forget its just a matter of how you put paint on a road thats probably already regularly budgeted in routine road surfacing work, over having to spend real money and actually expand budgets. This all goes to show how timid politicians have become in recent years towards stepping off into the unknown and actually diverging from the status quo.
Compared to adding more lanes for cars, buying/leasing buses and hiring drivers has gotta be way cheaper. Road construction is expensive, especially if you have to get additional space in the right-of-way.
Lot of comments on building public transit first, before removing parking minimums. Public transit takes forever to build and its impossible to build usable transit with suburban sprawl. Usable transit --> reach destination in a reasonable time.
Instead of public transit, cities should encourage Uber/Lyft. Car payments + insurance + gas + repairs/maintenance + parking might be close to $800 - $1000/month for most people. Thats probably just the amount that works for ditching car and just use Uber.
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 you'll get faster to the destination if all ppl used uber vs a good built tram system, each tram with 7 wagons, 5 mins max between stops, priority at semaphores+dedicated lanes, the capacity is basically unbeatable by cars, it's just math and physics
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
I own my car outright. I do my own oil changes and other minor maintenance. My only consistent cost is gas.
No way in hell could you get me to agree to give up my car and use rentals/Uber/Lyft for everything. As a home owner, Uber and Lyft would fit my need about 50% of the time, maybe less, as I can’t run to Home Depot to pick up a load of rock/mulch/etc in an Uber. Sure, I could rent one of their trucks, but now I’m paying for an Uber both ways, and the rental truck, just to do a quick run to Home Depot.
I understand this may work for people in densely populated areas. But for the vast majority of everyone in the US, this would not be possible.
I yearn for American cities to discover what London has.
The city's mass-transit is intensely effective, and if you have to grab a car from point A to point B, there's never a taxi far away. It turns out if you don't have parking, a professional driver class can afford to make a living on being ever-moving luxury transit for people (and I bet most cities can rought-out a mass transit solution with a clever combination of buses and closing roads to cars / replacing them with delivery-only vehicle access, otherwise open-walkable).
This isn't really a new trend, Texas is just a laggard because it is an unusually car-dependent state. Most major cities have been trending toward eliminating parking minimums, at least in downtown cores.
That article is technically true but misleading. Most of Manhattan eliminated parking minimums back in 1982. Seattle eliminated or reduced minimums anywhere close to transit (which is a huge part of the city obviously) back in 2012. The entire state of Oregon eliminated parking minimums and single family zoning last year. Austin isn't setting a trend here, they're just catching up because the city has grown so quickly recently.
Most of Manhattan’s unilateral action 42 years ago probably doesn’t relate to a modern day trend.
Oregon sounds like it is setting a pace, I’m glad Austin managed to end single family zoning last year alongside it. I hope Seattle, and every single other major city government in the US will manage to one day remove citywide parking mandates alongside the unusually car dependent laggards in Austin.
If you let the free market decide the answer will be "a lot" and "everywhere there's business that want customers from outside walking distance" and "everywhere there's apartments and houses that don't have garages."
Parking minimums are one of those things that are a huge PITA when you hit edge cases but when you go to city council meetings residents and business owners ask for more and cheaper parking because it draws in business and keeps street parking available for residents.
You can't remove parking in isolation, I genuinely wish you could. You have to fix the reason people want it in the first place. And high density public transportation is unfortunately a double-edged sword because it means you need a government blessing to make an area a new hot spot and drives business and residential rents way up in the spots people can get to easily.
I've seen this play out in many old town cores in the 90s. In those cases parking wasn't entirely removed, but it was converted from free to quite expensively metered.
What happened? People stopped going to the small shops in the old downtown and went to the mall instead (free parking). The small shops slowly all died off and the old charming downtown is a boarded up ghost town. Yeah, great first step.
> when you go to city council meetings residents and business owners ask for more and cheaper parking because it draws in business and keeps street parking available for residents.
Apparently not that much, since that's the point of the article.
> If you let the free market decide the answer will be "a lot"
I'm sure there will still be a lot of parking, but at least it will be
1. Allocated more optimally in space (businesses who don't need it won't build it)
2. Paid for by those who use it, not subsidized by those who don't
3. Built more vertically, thereby taking up less real estate
4. Not in the perfect spot for a bike lane or sidewalk
The free market will reward massive retailers with lots of parking space that exist in the suburbs. There is no pre-existing infrastructure to bring customers to these parking-free locations in most cities.
Furthermore, semi-urban neighborhoods and alleys will enter a battlefield between tow trucks and illegally parked cars.
There is already a lot of private parking infrastructure in cities, and it wouldn't take long for profit-seekers to build new parking garages where demand exists. The new law could include a phase-out period if it's a problem.
Over time the suburban big-box retailers will lose as fewer people will drive cars.
> Over time the suburban big-box retailers will lose as fewer people will drive cars.
No, the downtown core will lose when the shopping traffic shifts to the mall as I noted in comment above.
I had a SO whose family owned one of those small shops in the old downtown when parking became restricted, so I've seen first hand what happens to downtowns when parking goes away (all those shops are gone now).
Parking spaces are outrageously expensive. By allowing housing to be built without far more parking than is needed, the cost of rent is lower by several hundred dollars (read: $200-$1000) a month because of how expensive land is, and how much land/space is required for cars.
I'm ok with this, but I wish they would do something about on street parking as well. People are still renting apartments and buying homes without parking, and they just use on street parking. Which is fine and all, but try being a pedestrian crossing the street when a car is parked way too close to the intersection (or be a driver where pedestrians seemingly pop into view from behind cars quickly). You really can't have your cake and eat it to, streets are not the solutions to our parking problems.
Very weird. My life has greatly improved since moving to a walkable city. It’s very nice to walk and get groceries for a meal that day or walk to a bakery or walk to a bar or walk to a store or walk to my doctors or walk to my friends.
When I lived in FL you had to drive everywhere. I’d rather be walking. We literally evolved to walk long distances, and cars don’t seem to be making our lives better with all the externalities getting ignored (air pollution, microplastics, and noise pollution).
I don’t mind if people want to drive, but they should be paying the true cost and not keep a massively subsidized lifestyle that can’t exist without massive federal funds.
I live in a downtown high rise. It’s 25 degrees outside, I have a lady friend who lives a mile away. I feel unsafe riding public transit at night here, much less her. She experiences extreme harassment walking here during the day (did it once, never again, I was on the phone with her, it was horrifying).
How do you propose she visit me without a car and available parking?
Uber would cost her more than an hour of her workday.
GP is damn right the opposition to parking is detrimental to health physical and mental as well as wealth.
You gave an anecdotal example. I can give one too: generally medium density, mixed use, bikeble areas are much safer compared to other options, bc there are always people around, some go to work, some go to shopping, some go to drink a coffee, etc, adn ppl usually feel safer in this areas.
On the other hand, low density areas are less safe bc there's no one around to call police if something happens. It's also a health problem both phisical and mental: ppl are more isolated from other ppl, it's harder to meet other ppl, it's much harder when you are old and ppl generally move less bc they must use a car for everything instead of walking/biking to the destination. In low density areas there's also a deficit of 3'rd places to meet ppl
Dense urbanization is not the point. We need medium density. Bikeable. There should be more housing choices than an apartment in a giant building by a highway OR a single family home with a big yard out in the suburbs. With relaxed zoning, small developers could start building smaller multifamily homes that regular people can afford to buy so they don't have to choose betwen renting one of those apartments or being "house poor". We used to have that medium density housing; it's what lends many older neighborhoods their charm. Make it legal to build again!
And with a medium density, less car-centric neighborhood, people can reasonably walk or bike to work, the grocery store, etc., meaning a car is optional and it's easy to get exercise. Right now we drive everywhere, spend loads of money on cars and roads, and wonder why we are so fat! It is not cheap, healthy, or sustainable to base our communities on the idea that everyone must buy a 3-5 bedroom house on a quarter acre in the suburbs and commute 30 minutes in a Jeep.
People are not leaving California because it's too dense, they're leaving because it stopped building homes.
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[ 1.0 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadhttps://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634461/paved-paradi...
[1] https://thewaroncars.org
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 poor minorities to the suburbs and inverse how it's arranged in the US now, it will make the suburbs look bombed out - until you fix the minority poverty problem.
we (engineering types) have this terrible habit of declaring that it is One Thing when in reality, complex problems are… complicated. shocking, i know. it isn’t a simple math problem with a one answer. human problems are significantly more chaotic and fractal.
i don’t want to imply that we shouldn’t look at these and add our ideas, only that id love to see us lessen our crutches of “You’re wrong, it’s X!” and recognize that others are probably correct as well.
Immigrants with no particular job in mind look for places where the cost of living is low: they tend to have much worse job prospects than normal, so a minimum wage job in a low cost of living area is better life than double minimum wage in a high cost of living area.
Immigrants often have poor English skills (or whatever the local language is). They often are used to food not common in the country. So if they can find a community of other immigrants that means people they can comfortably talk to, and also makes it more likely that someone can figure out the process of getting food they like into local stores.
There is very little mixed use. Majority of the city is zoned single family. The only reason there are no parking minimums is because the California changed that law. It has nothing to do with expanded immigration. LA, despite the immigration, is in massive need of a zoning overhaul to build a vibrant city. Very little is walkable, it is very car-centric, and the zoning is the strong opposition to all of this.
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 country is not full. But the places with jobs have more renters than rentable units.. which is why a 2br costs $3k a month.
You got 2 out of 3 points completely wrong, and your other was a pedantic point about wording. You should probably slow down and think before discussing this subject.
The problem is there a barely any decent "existing public transit lines" in Austin. Existing public transit line, singular, perhaps, and in a decade or so we'll get some more. In the meantime it just means traffic gets much shittier with no real alternatives.
"Let's keep doing the same thing that doesn't work and complain when anyone decides to try something else".
By making it less likely that places are further apart for no reason then the need for cars is reduced.
This is just fantasyland thinking as it applies to Austin TX. These regulations largely impact downtown, which is already dense and already has services downtown.
This code change will pretty much be focused on malls / shopping centers that currently have more parking space than store space. So new malls or changes to existing will result in a more rational balance than the ocean of tarmac we have now.
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 transitional years of people fighting for parking spaces at ridiculous prices before the transit gets built.
This is especially true about Austin.
https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/photos-...
There needs to be a will to change.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/france/motor-vehicle-ownership-p...
Overall, the change has been small, and most people still have a car. And the metro network was very advanced by 1939 (unlike some US cities, these lines stayed):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro#/media/File:M...
That's in one of the densest and most famously walkable cities in the world. Most cities in the United States aren't going to be Paris anytime soon, and that's before we consider the dismal state of regional transport (particularly around the West Coast) which was also already extensive in France prior to 2000.
There is just no real basis for claiming that Europe restricted cars prior to building good transit. You might find it in one or two cities, but certainly not most -- in Europe, socialist and communist parties held significant sway until the late '70s in many countries (in a few they've hung on), and pushed for transit the whole time.
America needs to CHOOSE to build transit. The carrot approach hasn't worked, so it's time for the stick.
So do you propose we lift all bans on drunk driving as to make life slightly more enjoyable for a subset of society?
At some level all laws trade off “making life shittier” for some to “make life better” for society. You can argue against particular laws but categorically being against it reduces your argument as asking for anarchism.
With the roads Austin has, public transit is expensive to maintain and slow. Expanding the system won't change that, but only exacerbate the current problems.
Also, far more tax revenue (from making land more productive) makes public transit more affordable for the city.
Not necessarily true. In the situation where infrastructure building is almost impossible, the only net result for this is the pubic transit will become more and more expensive.
If there is a demand for parking spots in an area, dedicated paid parking can be created — based on market forces rather than minimums. This parking is also often more dense and built upwards. It’s a more efficient use of city space.
As is, parking is subsidized by all residents of a city rather than the people who actually consume parking. Much of this space goes unused throughout the day, and the aggregate effect necessarily means sprawl.
Now: If you build a building of this size, you MAY build as many parking spaces as you think you need.
Seems like a strict improvement to me.
Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).
EDIT I am rate-limited so can't reply, but this part:
"If you have 200 cars"
This is only the case if the demand for parking / driving is perfectly inelastic, which would be quite extraordinary. Empirically, when you charge for parking or institute toll roads, traffic tends to fall, in some cases sharply (because many journeys are low value). I repeat: if the parking spaces are still congested, the price should be raised until they're not.
Assuming the number of cars would stay the same is like the lump-of-labour fallacy. Lump of metal fallacy?
Then there's the supply side: guess what, that's not inelastic either! If it's profitable to provide parking, someone will build dedicated facilities for it and charge for their use. This may be an alien concept for some of you, but only because parking minimums cause such oversupply that they can't be run profitably. In cities where parking is priced sanely, it's unremarkable to see this.
"Cars will just overflow into adjacent neighbourhoods" okay, so charge for parking there too, until they don't. Duh.
I don't see why cars should get to sit somewhere rent-free but a human being can't. Urban land is valuable; if you want to occupy it, pay what it costs, ya fuckin welfare queens.
my language is harsh but it's hard not to be when I see so many americans (it's always americans) confidently claiming that life is impossible without free parking. but I live in a city without free parking and things work just fine. I can literally just look out of my window and it disproves all the doomsaying. every commute and trip to the supermarket is uneventful and not ruined in the slightest by a lack of free parking. you pay for parking and it's fine. it's literally just fine. I went to virginia one time, I saw literal acres and acres and acres of empty parking space, oceans of asphalt; nobody seemed to think anything of it but I thought it was mad, like some kind of braindead economic allocation fuckup from a communist country that we'd all laugh about. I wanted to shout: you are being terraformed by asphalt-based lifeforms! why do I have to explain to americans how a free market price mechanism works? on a forum for people to shill their california startups? I shouldn't need to tell you this!
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 the problem being discussed. They are an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion.
Yes. If you own a limited resource it's your right to make money from that. I know we like to pretend people making money from things they own is somehow evil but it's how all of civilization has been built and is an objectively good thing.
> If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously.
No, but is a point where 50 can park simultaneously and nobody who wants to park there and can afford to is denied that ability.
Effectively you'll still have 150 cars that cannot be parked next to the owners' residence, that get dumped on the street elsewhere probably in the next lower cost neighborhood, and with the additional issues OP mentioned.
Put it another way, if you want to solve the housing crisis and I tell you "owners can set whatever price they want for the house to extract maximum value and nobody who can afford that will be denied the house" am I wrong? But did I solve the problem?
That sucks for the people who are denied the ability to park there because they can't afford it though. Telling people that they need to walk miles to get to a doctor or a grocery store and that only the wealthy deserve to have access to 90% of the city doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
There parking minimums drive up housing costs. They’re why that person has to drive longer to get to that place. Perhaps why they need to make a car payment at all.
You can't solve the problem of "I need a car" just by taking away the places people put them at night.
The problem we have is built into the design of our cities from the ground up and it impacts every aspect of how they are structured and used. Eliminating parking spaces while the absolute need for cars continues to exist doesn't solve the problem at all.
This is the kind of move that should be done selectively, and only after alternative options are created, if it's done at all.
There is zero evidence for this. There is evidence for parking minimums raising housing prices.
I’m curious about the overlap between off-street parking minimum requirement advocates and anti-development NIMBYs who don’t believe in supply and demand.
When most people need something, and there is suddenly a much smaller supply of that thing, prices for the now scarce but still needed thing tend to increase. That's basically self-evident.
If you have evidence that shows otherwise please feel free to provide it. I suspect that if examples showing otherwise exist at all they won't be remotely representative of the situation these cities will face.
Yes. We have rising, elastic house and stable, inelastic paid parking prices [1[2]]. Due to these regulations, we cannot substitute limited space away from off-street parking towards e.g. housing.
[1] http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PricingParkingByDemand.pdf
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Funnel-plot-for-the-pric...
The idea that developers being responsible for providing adequate parking would mean that we can't have adequate space housing is a new argument, but not a compelling one. Clearly jacking up the prices for on-street parking means we'd have more money and more space for other things, but that doesn't solve the problem of there being too many cars on the road or eliminate the need for people to keep and drive cars.
While the one paper you linked to suggests that higher prices could help reduce the demand for cars and driving, it also explicitly states that price of vehicle ownership is only one of many variables that has an affect those demands. The availability of viable alternatives to car ownership/use is the one being ignored here.
If I will die unless I go to the hospital every week for 6 months for chemo treatment and the only way to get there is by driving, the amount they'll charge me for parking isn't really a factor until it becomes so high that I can't afford to get the treatment I need. The fact that I also can't get to work, the grocery store, the doctor's office, the pharmacy, my kid's school, or the homes of my friends family without a car means that I'm still going to need to own (and still need a place to park) my car even if I could afford to uber my cancer-ridden body to and from the hospital every single week. (this is purely an example, I'm not, to my knowledge, cancer-ridden)
You simply can't solve the problem of people needing to own and park cars by only reducing the number of available parking spaces. Reducing the number of parking spaces is something that should be done only once viable alternatives are established.
On topics like this you can argue from first principles endlessly and never get any closer to the truth. Better to show us some data, I think.
No one is arguing against the idea that eliminating parking requirements increases (in short-run, first-order analysis) the market clearing price of parking spaces.
The contentious part is that the presence of the freedom to build housing without parking requirements (enabling, e.g., housing plus commercial spaces to be built in a space that would otherwise have the same housing plus parking) does nothing to reduce the demand for autos.
Why would it? Without alternatives to cars as a means to get people to where they need to go, people will still require cars. As long as people are required to own and drive cars not having enough available parking does nothing to help reduce the amount of cars being owned/driven. In fact, we know that it increase the number of cars on the road. That's how we end up with statistics like "30% of all traffic in urban areas come from people circling around looking for places to park".
You can't solve the problem of people needing cars by not addressing the reasons people need cars, and only reducing the number of parking spots for the cars people already need.
Because it would both enable and incentivize development patterns where people need cars less.
> Without alternatives to cars as a means to get people to where they need to go, people will still require cars.
Dense mixed-use development puts more of the places people need to go in places that don't require cars to get to them. (It also mass transit to other places more viable.)
Your focussed on alternatives ti cars to get to a fixed set of locations, but a big point of dense mixed-use development is to provide alternative locations.
> You can't solve the problem of people needing cars by not addressing the reasons people need cars
The reason people need cars is that the places they need to be a far away because of development patterns; one of the key features of development patterns that causes this is...the space use created by parking requirements.
As for enabling, nothing stops developers from doing that now. As for incentivizing them, if they can make more money not meeting most people's needs then that's what they'll do. This is also why so many cities have a huge amount of luxury housing available, but a massive lack of affordable housing. What makes developers the most money isn't always what's best for a city.
> Dense mixed-use development puts more of the places people need to go in places that don't require cars to get to them. (It also mass transit to other places more viable.) Your focused on alternatives ti cars to get to a fixed set of locations, but a big point of dense mixed-use development is to provide alternative locations.
I agree with this, but none of these cities are creating mixed-use development or building out their mass transit systems to link them. They're getting rid of parking spaces without any of those things in place.
> The reason people need cars is that the places they need to be a far away because of development patterns; one of the key features of development patterns that causes this is...the space use created by parking requirements.
A reason people need cars is because things are far away. Another reason is that there are no other means to get anywhere else. As long as those things are true, people still need cars. As long as people still need cars, they need places to put them.
The space use created by parking requirements would be a nice problem to solve, but it can't (and shouldn't) be addressed until the requirement of owning cars has been dealt with. When people no longer require cars, we can reduce the amount of space we've set aside for housing them.
Zoning regulations and parking requirements, which in many places exist for for both housing and commercial development, and vastly expabd the footprint of both, often do.
Still, I think it's better to have those costs borne by developers and passed to property owners than have everyone else suffer the negative externalities caused by not having those necessary parking spaces available.
I think we'd agree that ideally, the parking spaces wouldn't be necessary because of good public transportation and city planning, and I think that once those things are in place those parking spaces could be reclaimed and repurposed, I just feel that for as long as the parking spots are needed it's better for the developer to provide for them in their plans.
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 selectively, if at all. If there is sufficient market demand, the requirements will be unnecessary to get developers to include them, if not, then the requirements are most often a harmful constraint that limits housing supply.
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.
No? They park them outside the city centre. Or they rent them. You're speaking as if Austin is the first city in the world--or even America--to do this.
If you live in an apartment complex inside the city centre, parking outside of it won't help you. If you live in an apartment complex outside of it and there's not enough parking spots to leave your car while you sleep you still have the same problem.
> Or they rent them.
Most people can't afford to uber everywhere. Should the poors not be allowed to go to work or the doctors office?
Austin is only one example, but any city without enough parking to meet demand has these same well-documented problems. Please tell me which cities in America have ditched off-street parking while doing nothing else to reduce people's dependence on cars and had no problems as a result.
Of course it does. You use city transportation systems when in the centre. And you take an Uber or train to your parking lot when you need to drive a bunch.
> Should the poors not be allowed to go to work or the doctors office?
Versus not being able to afford housing?
That's the tradeoff. There is no free lunch. Increasing space dedicated to parking raises the cost of housing. It also reduces density, thereby reducing wealth and increasing transit times.
That's not how it works. Have you ever lived in an area developed without any parking planning? I have, it's miserable.
People will still have the cars because they are necessary for every aspect of life. Making parking difficult does not change that, so they'll still have the car, now it just becomes a neighborhood warzone on where to park and everyone suffers.
The way you change this is not by removing parking, but by removing the need to have a car. Build excellent and affordable public transit first and then.. well there is no step two.
Most people don't really like to drive and don't like car expenses, so if you build excellent public transit a lot of people will give up their cars and the parking problem disappears as a side-effect.
That's not a good situation for anyone except for a very small number of people who will make more money than they have been, and small number of already wealthy people who will find lots of available parking they can easily afford now that they don't have to compete with the poors. Everyone else gets screwed and the problem of people needing cars doesn't change at all.
Right, so now only the most rich can go visit the area (shops, friends).
I know a lot of people have the opinion that only the rich should get to do things but I don't subscribe to that. At least with public street parking the misery is egalitarian, both the Yugo and the Ferrari can circle for hours looking for parking.
Although having enough parking for everyone would be even better.
That's why 90%+ of the people in Singapore use public transportation or carpool. Granted, you would need the public infrastructure for that to be possible. But if you make cars unaffordable for the average person, suddenly there would be A LOT more pressure on local government to get public infrastructure done.
There is a litany of "middlemen"; Drs, Corporations, Hospitals, Insurance, Pharmacies, Drug Companies, marketing, Lawyers ... ALL have a stake in something.
Like it or not, our cities are already built to make cars a necessity and pricing people out of access to the majority of places within a city isn't a solution to the design of public transportation or roads.
How is *not requiring* parking to be provided inducing scarcity artificially?
London for example have buildings which are prohibited of having parking (or getting street permit). Providing an option not pay for parking space when buying an apartment is not that.
While I have a car, and enjoy having one, and have a nice parking space in a heated underground garage, I also work remotely and don't drive all that much. I'm in a privileged position and could afford to uber (within the city anyway).
This is just a bad/non-solution to a very real problem that will do more harm than good.
Parking lots aren't what's keeping people in subdivisions from being miles away from those places. Parking spots aren't what's keeping people in cities from being able to walk to where they're going either. Parking lots are extremely walkable spaces even while being hot and unattractive.
You could get rid of every parking lot in your city and you'd still have highways you can't cross or safely walk/bike along side of, you'd still have housing set miles away from city centers, and you'd still have no access to most places by public transportation. Our cities are built from the ground up with the expectation that people will use cars to get around. That was a mistake, but getting rid of parking spots isn't the cure.
I've been in places like Tokyo where public transportation met all of my needs. We can do it, but you need the infrastructure in place first or you're just hurting people by leaving them with zero alternatives to what you're taking from them.
Two birds, one stone
It'll take a massive increase in public transportation infrastructure, and a long and slow redesign of our cities and how we live to fix the mess the auto-industry has put us in. It's a transition that's long overdue, but the reality of the situation now is that people still need their cars.
Making sure that people have something to fall back on before we take their cars away from them or remove the places they put them at night/charge them should be a priority. What these cities are doing is the opposite of that.
Think for a minute about what it means to be wealthy. Is it having more money? Yes, but... The true meaning of being wealthy is having more options available to you. If some people can park but some people can't park, then by definition it's the wealthy people who can park.
Another way to look at it is, what's the point of accumulating money? It's to buy you more options. Let's say hypothetically that the government gives every individual person a fixed amount of housing, food, a car, and free parking. But it is illegal to trade these commodities in any manner; you are only entitled to exactly your share and no more. In this fantasy world, accumulating money would be meaningless because it doesn't enable you to do any more than your fellow man.
So yes, the fact that once you start restricting driving, then only the wealthy can afford to drive and park - that's a feature, not a bug. It's by design.
The reason people keep buying cars after prices rise 57% in a decade: the extra $10,000 amortized over 10 years is less than living even 1 year near the things you drive to. Things you drive to includes your parking space!
It doesn't make any sense to own a car and live in a dense urban development. What more needs to be said? Live in the suburbs if you have a car.
Fortunately bridge and toll community members are insensitive to these changes. They see no problems with 2 hours of schlepping, $16 of tolls and $25 parking to drink $0.50 of vodka priced at $17 at a downtown bar. If they were sensitive to these issues, that behavior would have ceased much sooner than a pandemic-induced shock to their routines.
That said, I don't see anything wrong with the suburban lifestyle, I am a product of it. Instead of focusing on issues like parking costs, which cities can never beat suburbs at because suburbs have essentially infinite land, cities should fix their education systems, because they can realistically beat suburbs on the concentration of human capital. My community would be far more appreciative of that than bullshit about parking spots.
Public transport can be good but it's never that good. I live in zone 1 (ie very centrally) in London and there are still many journeys where it is quicker and cheaper for me to drive than to take any kind of public transport. This is true for longer journeys (going outside London) especially but surprisingly it's also true for quite a few short journeys (even going a couple of miles) - it depends a lot on the layout of the public transport network and the roads, and this is before considering journeys where I might want to bring bulky or heavy things with me which are basically impossible to do by public transport. I end up driving enough that the cost of car ownership vs short term rentals makes sense in pure economic terms but the convenience difference of ownership vs short-term rental is also pretty big.
Cool. Let's do that, too!
People need to stop being shitty to each other.
> Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).
I don't think this is fair. Fewer parking spaces might mean higher profits for developers on a per-unit basis, but I'd rather them make money and provide more additional housing units that are sorely needed, especially in cities, than build apartment complexes with garages or parking which then necessitate higher taxes and more public spending to support roads, car crashes, and other related externalities.
"But public transit costs money too" yes, just redirect state highway department budgets to transit 1-1 and then you're not spending any more and getting higher ROI.
[EDIT] Incidentally, maybe we shouldn't subsidize truck shipping! But using usage taxes to pay for highways while not shifting the burden such that truck shipping is paying the lion's share of the cost and is no longer (so very much, at least) subsidized, would be making non-commercial drivers subsidize truck shipping (even more than they already are) which subsidy (to some degree) benefits everyone, including non-drivers, which seems like a weird and/or bad move to me.
Rural living would be way more expensive and inconvenient without truck shipping subsidies. Which, maybe making rural living artificially cheap is a good idea and maybe it's not, but that's one big shift that would happen if we made truck shipping pay its way entirely.
[EDIT] For true long-haul, I'm with you, the majority of that's surely only viable because of those subsidies, and we'd be better off pushing that to rail, ship, and barge.
I don’t know how this is the fault of too little parking. Nothing excuses this type of behavior.
Rideshare. Also, this screams market opportunity for paid parking. (Unless, of course, the problem isn’t as consistently dramatic.)
They've also seen ZipCar type services where short-term rental vehicles are just abandoned. Once, I woke up to find a luxury Alfa Romeo sedan that had taken a joy-ride across the border and was abandoned in front of our place.
The main street there dead-ends, and so the highest traffic is from lost motorists vainly attempting to hook up to the freeway.
My parents jealously guard their prime parking spots, I mean insanely: they love to walk but if they need to tote cargo more than 1 yard out of the way, we never hear the end of their moaning, and I live hundreds of miles away. They participate in Neighborhood Watch and won't hesitate to get cars tagged, inspected and towed if someone tries to mess with their "public street parking" spots. (Recently renovated "garage" is full of junk.)
As a holder of a driver's license who hasn't owned a car since 1997, I also never hear the end of their moaning about rude cyclists, oblivious pedestrians, City-sponsored transit lanes, or repainted roads to encourage sharing with pedestrians and multi-modal transport.
Around here, most of the moaning and screaming is directed at light rail, without considering for a moment how it takes drunks and inept drivers off the road and completely out of their way.
You have to take away cars (parking) first so that they start demanding public transportation.
For something to be available it has to be required by building codes.
Old world cities can have great public transit because they were dense long before cars existed and have hundreds of years worth of civil projects designed to get people from A to B.
We better get started right away then, huh.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express
Most of the housing and most of the population was obliterated in the late-1930s through the mid-1940s, as you might recall. Two-thirds of the city's population had fled before the German invasion started even.
No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them.
Cities like Austin have regulated themselves into a housing-cost crisis. It’s almost a miracle that rational economic policy is being given space by voters.
Parking is.
Until parking spaces cost more than apartments do, developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred.
And even if this does drive up parking costs to match rents, is that such a bad thing? Why should we legally mandate that developers subsidize parking?
We have an abundance of parking required by law and not enough housing units - removing the requirement should encourage more money to be invested into anything but parking no?
Seems like letting businesses decide whether or not it's worth opening a business with the available parking would cause one of two things to happen:
1. We wind up with the actual correct amount of parking required for a given set of businesses - instead of some arbitrary amount dictated by legislatures decades ago. 2. Everyone is tired of the lack of parking and votes to increase public transit funding.
Once we have apartments with and without parking on the market, we'll see how much more people are willing to pay to get parking, and future developers can build accordingly.
Queens NY has this problem pretty severely. Zoning requires parking past 7 stories in building height, so every building is 7 floors at maximum density with no parking. Residents often find themselves circling their neighborhoods for hours looking for parking. Living without a car and being fully-dependent on public transit absolutely sucks in most of the borough.
I live in small (2,000ish households) New England town with some streets that predate automobiles. Nobody is really space constrained. The housing 3 miles a way is at least half the cost of my town.
The public transportation is poor and it took about 25 years to build less than 3 miles of bike path.
Should my town ditch off-street parking minimums in an attempt to increase housing supplies?
Clearly the answer is no then.
That doesn't make space-constrained Austin's answer an automatic yes either though. The city is very car-dependent. The starting point isn't "take away peoples' ability to have a car". It should be "make it more attractive not to have a car".
Changing parking minimums comes far down that road.
Ironically, I still share your opinion about over regulation, but we can’t ignore the other argument.
"Follow the money" always works.
Builders want (reasonably enough) to increase profit. Marble countertops add a few thousand in cost but now you can sell these as luxury units for tens of thousands more! So it's profitable, so it happens.
Building parking space instead of additional units is not profitable, so it won't happen unless required.
Not all square footage is created equal!
Snow management can be done in other ways but that is a cost analysis exercise.
In snowy areas the piles can grow quite large and take up a sizable amount of parking lot space. These large piles then take considerably longer to melt away than snow in surrounding areas, sometimes lasting well into Spring.
Can you see the design conversations going, "let's provide for practically no parking spots, so we can get less foot traffic and nobody will want to come shop here!"
In areas that support public transit and promote multi-modal, the businesses which thrive there are ones which cater to folks who eschew private vehicles. And that's a distinctly different crowd! So I think it'll work out great.
If the cost to provide (guaranteed, protected) parking spots ends up being higher than people are willing to pay for them, maybe they're not actually worth what we're currently paying for them.
There are very few countries out there that would see such behavior flying, when facing a wealthy developer (it used to be the biggest company in this village/small town) who gives a lot of local work, for just parking spots that are anyway completely hidden under the building.
It didn't help that the urbanism activists in our area seem to consider parking garages to be a tool of the devil and protested any plans to build one in the area. To me they are an ideal compromise/stop-gap solution. They allow you to build dense walkable neighborhoods today even when most people will be driving. And once public transit has improved to the point where less parking is needed, you just have a few buildings to tear down instead of entire areas to redevelop.
Edit: And to be clear I think the "best practices" that most of the country used for the past 50 years to set parking minimums were massively inflated, and created many problems. I'm absolutely in favor of revising them, but I firmly reject swinging around to the other extreme of "to solve the public transit chicken-egg problem, we must make car use intolerable".
This is the original tragedy of the commons though: a bunch of people assuming they can just park on the street. The frustration is the solution. Either build yourself private parking, pay for private parking, or ditch the car. Or enjoy the frustration.
The vast majority of people will choose "(D) None of the above". They'll move out, causing the neighborhood to decay.
So Alice wants to build a high-density housing tower without having to build a ten-story parking structure beneath it, and we prohibit Alice from doing that, even though Bob wants to build a ten-story parking structure right next to it, because we prohibit Bob from doing that.
I feel like these could both be solved in the same way.
We have minimum parking requirements that produce an oversupply of parking, therefore parking is cheap, therefore building parking garages is unprofitable. If you don't mandate them, the cost of parking will increase until building parking garages is profitable, and then people will build parking garages (or have fewer cars, in places where that's practical).
This doesn't even increase costs. Right now someone is paying $3000/month for a $2500 apartment and a $500 parking space. Without the parking requirements you could get a $2500 apartment for $2500 and choose whether you want to pay the extra $500 for the parking space.
Not only that, this would make it cheaper to build more apartments, so then the $2500 apartment drops to $2250 from lower scarcity, which reduces the cost of apartment+parking space as well by not force-allocating a parking space to someone who can do without a car and leaving more for the people who can't.
Bob wants to build it on the next lot over once he sees these new buildings going up and is willing to bet that the new residents will generate demand for parking, and can choose how many stories to make it based on the local demand for parking, which is based on numerous hyper-local conditions that are best evaluated by the owner of that specific lot and not just based on how many housing units are in each building.
Alice is a smart capitalist and will build two apartment buildings instead, maximizing profit from selling the units.
By the time the buildings are completed, the mortgages signed and the people start moving in and fighting for parking, Alice is long gone, moved on to the next project in some other city.
This is the problem parking minimums were intended to help reduce.
Good. Then more people will choose different forms of transportation or internalize their costs. If parking becomes scarce, providing parking will become more profitable and people will pay the actual (enormous) cost of temporary car storage downtown.
Parking becoming difficult and/or expensive pushes patrons to places where that's not the case.
/s
And the 'spend' from people driving in from the suburbs to go shopping will easily be overshadowed by greater economic activity resulting from a denser urban core.
That's not really how it goes. This assumes that if you make it painful for people to do what you don't like (park), they'll stay and live the way you want.
But no, people will simply abandon the area due to inconvenience. The area I mentioned above (previous post) went from a nice affluent residential area to a dilapidated area where only the poor and university students (also poor) lived. Everyone who could afford to leave, left.
Humans will always look for a better solution for themselves unless you impose a complete dictatorship. It is not possible to advance a cause (whether it be less cars or more public transit or better EV support or better bike paths, etc) by simply making the status quo inconvenient. People will simply avoid it.
You advance a cause by making the new alternative actually more attractive, then the majority of people will happily adopt it.
This is what happens, and exactly what happened near here. All neighborhoods within a mile or so of the university require permits for street parking.
But here's the thing, fighting fire with fire does not lead to a nice society. Now it's a huge pain to visit any friends within that zone because they have to shuffle their cars (with resident permits) to the street so guests can park on their driveway to avoid being ticketed. When you fight fire with fire you also get burned. Lose-lose.
We have so many subsidies for cars baked into the system, but hardly anything for other forms of transit, and then we complain endlessly about how expensive transit is to run and have to cut service to make ends meet, which of course discourages people from taking transit.
"Impact fees" are just a way to discourage new development.
Remember who is doing the planning and building. It is a developer who only has a short-term interest in the site. They want to build something, extract the maximum profit per sqft they can, sell it off and move on. They won't be involved by the time everyone moves in and starts living in that area.
You could blame the people moving in that they should've thought of parking before buying, and that's true. But people can be too optimistic when they like a place and just hope it works out. It doesn't work out, then they spend a lot of time driving around hoping to park somewhere. Early in my adult life I lived in an area like that, it was a nightmare.
The developer who decided to build a 6 story (24 apartment) building with just 8 parking spots? Long gone, not their problem.
then they get carried forward as precedent because people hear "eliminate parking minimums" as "eliminate parking spots" and fight against it, but they don't make any sense.
Parking minimums are simply a requirement that if you build an apartment building with N apartments, you need to include a number of parking spots that is a function of N. The idea being that if you're building a number of places for people to live, the vast majority of them (especially in Austin) will need a place to park, and it's not really fair for you to externalize that need onto public streets just so you can make more money by adding more apartments with no parking.
That's the argument anyway, and it makes sense. The counter argument is that it also keeps us as a car-dependent city, and makes it harder to build affordable housing.
I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least in Austin. Public transportation (or, basically any transportation) is notoriously bad in Austin, and for decades we've basically had the stance "if you don't build it, they won't come", but that hasn't quite worked out.
Well, since what you have been doing hasn't worked, maybe let's try the other tactic.
Your claim is that 'getting rid of parking' is what is being pushed, when it is getting rid of mandatory, arbitrary parking minimums.
If there is needed parking it will be built because developers don't like building tenancies that don't get sold because no one can live there.
Besides, the argument isn't "let's look at the calculation for required number of spots and tweak it if necessary", it's "let's get rid of parking altogether and pretend like people won't just still drive and park on the street."
I mean, you seem to be adamantly opposed. I assume for good reason (at least in your mind). Why not make an argument that actually relates to the proposal? At least I would give your opinion more weight that way
If anything doing this is a way for cities to implicitly get citizens on board for investing more in public transit. All of the new apartment buildings in the hip parts of town don't have any parking for your cars, so you're forced onto public transportation more, which you might think stinks, so you now care more about voting for infrastructure improvement.
True. But only to a limited extent as long as demand remains significantly higher relative to supply. e.g. if you're moving to a city due to work etc. and and have limited you're much more willing to compromise (use street parking, private lots some distance away etc,).
Nixing parking minimums for businesses in already-walkable, transit-connected downtown cores is overdue, and areas close to that density can easily become new downtown cores when infill is allowed to cover their parking lots.
Nixing parking minimums for downtown apartments, to your point, is a terrible idea (outside the densest areas of NYC at least, where parking minimums are already effectively nil) because most transit systems in the US are designed to bring suburban commuters into the city, so even if said apartment is situated directly above a multi-modal mass transit hub, it might not necessarily connect its residents to much more than a handful of giant parking decks clustered around a freeway.
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.
Our transit centers are literally hosted by shopping malls, more often than not, until they are significant enough to be freestanding or independent of such malls. The routes are carefully planned to get people from one major retail center to another; the stops stop in front of stores, restaurants, and venues; it's all quite transparently consumer-focused.
The transit system here would look significantly different if they concentrated on moving workers to places of business. Transit riders work in certain areas which simply aren't served at all by transit. Take call centers, for example: a call center is usually situated in a business park or industrial zone. This will not have bus stops. I worked in a call center where I'd take my bicycle every day to ride the last mile, quite literally.
I regularly negotiate with recruiters about commute distance, and it's always my chore to explain how distance means a different thing to a transit rider: I can ride the train a long ways and it's a short, easy commute; if I need to transfer 2 buses it's a huge pain, 3 hours each way, even if it's 1/3rd of the distance of that single train ride.
Transit systems which serve upper-middle-class workers in downtown hubs do it because those workers find it impractical to park downtown, not because they can't afford private vehicle ownership. I took advantage of Caltrain in the Bay Area, just so I didn't put so many miles on my car.
Transit systems like mine don't actually serve the proletariat nor support our commuting needs; they're fundamentally here to encourage consumerism and stimulate retail economies, and that's how they score such massive subsidies that they hardly even need people to pay fares.
Yet every public transit measure is jet with the same tired dogma of “it’ll raise our taxes” or “it will run at a loss”. Street parking tons at a loss. Why is this never brought up?
Significant money is spent by the likes of the remaining Koch brothers to fight public transit infrastructure in every city.
Yet taking drivers off the road will make driving better and faster.
The shortsightedness of this is bewildering.
Parking minimums are a start, particularly for building more affordable housing but it’s barely scratching the surface and even this small gesture will often be met with fierce opposition.
You know who wants tons of parking spots? Those people with their Suburbans and 6 kids who only come downtown for a sports game once every 3 months but complain about how scary and stressful being downtown is.
If you want a concrete example of this- when Austin caused Uber/Lyft to exit the market in 2016 (iirc) based on them "not fingerprinting drivers" one of the big arguments for letting them leave from one of (or the most) important council members was some comment along the lines of, "Well I've never needed an Uber/Lyft before in my life. Why can't you use cabs?" Ironically this person lives in Clarksville (or Tarrytown) which is one of the most expensive suburbs right outside of downtown and they probably never NEED an Uber. I bartended back in 2016 when this was going on and it SUCKED when they left. We had already gotten them into Austin WAY later than most other cities and it finally felt like I could travel around without a headache and the bullshit that yellow cabs bring with it ("Sorry sir, my credit card is not working tonight! Cash only but we're here already, so you must find ATM!")
People who actually go out and do things and didn't want to have to go back to cabs not showing up, potentially getting a dwi/dui, etc were angry beyond belief at the council.
https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2016-05-14/dear-m...
I rode BART out of Oakland for years. I don’t agree with NIMBYs but it’s not like they are making it up.
I assure you, it is indeed full of insane people, homeless, the trains are nasty and smell like urine, frequently break down or get stopped because people regularly suicide themselves on the tracks. I’m sure in Asian countries the trains are fantastic but here people aren’t adults and ruin it for everyone.
Not sure why you would turn an obviously systemic problem into one of personal responsibility. Do you think there are no mentally disabled or homeless people in other countries?
This attitude seems startlingly common in the US. It's like the pessimistic side of American Exceptionalism - "This problem, which many other countries have tackled successfully, cannot be fixed here".
Because statistically that’s very true almost everywhere in America. Even flagship cities like NYC have pathetic trains/subways compared to Europe/Asia and 90% of the population has never been that far abroad to see what’s possible. I’ve tried the express busses and “train”(can you call it that with only two cars!) in Austin and gave up because they waste much more time and are less comfortable than driving. Never saw rich professionals on them, but plenty of mentally ill, drug addicted, and unbathed(not that we should avoid the homeless as much as we do now) persons.
Nobody said addicts, etc aren't on trains. I said people think that is who is only on it. My software engineer dad-friends absolutely took the train every single day and so did a TON of people who worked downtown. They constantly complained that the trains were full and I remember them changing schedules based on how full they were.
They all said they took the train because it was faster and they didn't have to sit in traffic.
I've also taken tons of buses. I lived off the drag and worked on 2nd. I always took a bus by UT down Congress to get to downtown. A bus is a bus. Every city bus has bus issues like you mentioned. Yawn. It's even worse here in Denver.
My family takes transit all the time; I have 3 teens old enough to get their licenses and none of them have put much effort into learning how to drive because they can get around well enough using transit.
If you talk to our Baby Boomer neighbors, though, you'd think that the second you step foot on a bus or train you'll immediately be assaulted by violent junkies. We do have a big unhoused problem here (like everywhere) but my neighbors seem to think transit is only for the poor; it's sad, really, as many of them are getting to the age where they really shouldn't be driving.
But really, your whole life is sustained by providers driving. Taxes in the city comes from humans being able to physically move their bodies to the right location.
I mean, wouldn't it be ideal to get all the benefits of a complex industrial society without a complex industry? It sure would.
because the only way to get around in a city is by driving, right?
In an extreme case, imagine that your typical, currently congested highway gained another 6 lanes in each direction, and we raise speed limits to 100 mph. First, the right of way is now way bigger, so we need to wreck a lot of buildings for this infrastructure. It makes being able to travel near that highway really nice for a while: Minimal congestion! A straight out windfall by people owning land near it. But that also means that the area redevelops, as farmland that was in the middle of nowhere is now a reasonable commute downtown! But as the development continues, the highway will fill up. And since downtown streets were not changed, it's the area downtown near the highway that is now a congested mess, as the limitation is getting from there to buildings.
And again, a subsidy for you can be a harm for me: If every street is 8 lanes wide, it's very hard to cross. Every pedestrian crossing added is also infrastructure, but it slows down traffic. Every bit of lawn you use is another bit of distance I have to wade through to get to my destination, vs an area with the same number of houses, but without lawns.
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 possible and cities with infrastructure outcompete them.
Only way to make this work is if you outright ban infrastructure and then make competition impossible in that domain.
> There are some remarkable things to note right off the top. When we added up the replacement cost of all of the city's infrastructure—an expense we would anticipate them cumulatively experiencing roughly once a generation—it came to $32 billion. When we added up the entire tax base of the city, all of the private wealth sustained by that infrastructure, it came to just $16 billion. This is fatal.
> It's obvious to me why this is fatal, but for those of you for whom it is less clear, let me elaborate.
> The median house in Lafayette costs roughly $150,000. A family living in this house would currently pay about $1,500 per year in taxes to the local government of which 10%, approximately $150, goes to maintenance of infrastructure (more is paid to the schools and regional government). A fraction of that $150—it varies by year—is spent on actual pavement.
> To maintain just the roads and drainage systems that have already been built, the family in that median house would need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year. That assumes no new roads are built and existing roadways are not widened or substantively improved. That is $3,300 in additional local taxes just to tread water.
> That does not include underground utilities (sewer and water) or major facilities such as treatment plants, water towers and public buildings. Using ratios we’ve experienced from other communities, it is likely that the total infrastructure revenue gap for that median home is closer to $8,000 per year.
Hint: the cost to build something is not the cost to maintain 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.
Car free areas also raise objections about accessibility for the disabled. How do you get your wheelchair to the middle of that car free area half a mile from the public transit stop closes to where you want to go.
As for disabled: improvements to walkability and bikeability are also improvements to disabled accessibility in almost all cases. Not all disabilities are visible, and some even preclude driving at all. And when car parking is a hard requirement, there are dedicated disabled-parking zones.
EDIT: "X was built for walkability but Y was built for the car" you always hear this but it's just a lazy BS excuse not to do anything or think critically about the built environment. many of the cities people tout as "obviously this was built to be walkable" used to be clogged with cars (including Paris). it has wide boulevards! and many cities people think "oh this is obviously built for cars so we shouldn't bother" used to be totally walkable and had world-beating public transport (Los Angeles). it's ahistorical, learned helplessness, never backed by any rigorous comparisons, just vibes.
BRT is similarly quick to implement, if a little more expensive. Remove 1 lane of parking from major downtown roads & replace with a painted BRT lane. Order about 50 buses to run in 1 way loops around the downtown area. Have high frequency BRT between the out-of-downtown parking area <-> downtown core.
Either should be doable under 1 year.
The blockers are all political.
The biggest issue with bike infrastructure is that the people responsible for infrastructure genuinely believe this. The end result is usually a scattered bunch of stupidly dangerous "bike lanes" which aren't of use to basically anyone.
You need a separate biking network, which interfaces with car traffic as little as possible. This means you're essentially building "cycling highways" through car-free or car-minimal residential streets. Doing this properly means re-engineering those streets and intersections basically from the ground up, not just putting some paint on a highway gutter.
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 bite the bullet and remove parking, better public transit will come. If you never remove parking, you will never have better transit.
By another measure, removing parking mandates is a very immediate success because it lowers rents by several hundred dollars a month: https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/11/126192-parking-refor...
One would assume you would wheel your wheelchair there. You know, the same way people walk their feet there.
> Car free areas also raise objections about accessibility for the disabled.
What about all the people with disabilities that make driving dangerous or impossible, would love to know how we’re making driving accessible for the blind. There are far more people with disabilities that makes car travel difficult, than there are people for whom direct point-to-point car travel is an absolute necessity (short of someone being rushed to a hospital, I’m not sure what people would need regular, direct, point-to-point car travel).
The “modern city” or at least the US’s version of a “modern city” is the first time humans have ever lived so far apart at such scale. Enabled only because the car has conditioned so many people to think that driving 30mins to get anywhere interesting is “normal” or “natural”.
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 going to be working remotely.
You haven't specified where you live, but from the details you've written, we can narrow it down far enough to safely conclude that you're not living in a place that's designed to support a car-free lifestyle.
I have lived for over fifteen years without a car. Not only do I not miss it, but I'd pay to be able to live like this. I can rent a car whenever I need it (something like once or twice a year) and the total annual cost is a fraction of what a monthly car payment would be almost anywhere in the country: gas, financing, repairs, fees, other expenses, etc. all add up to way more than people realize[0].
When you're living in a place that's designed with cars in mind, it's hard to imagine living comfortably without it, but when you're living in a place that's designed for other means of transportation, it's hard to imagine ever going back to cars.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/07/business/car-...
Being born in a place is a lottery with random chance deciding the rules for you. Sure, as an adult, you can potentially choose to leave for the less green pasture and live in an urban environment of city designed for other means of transpo if you're one that doesn't mind moving away from their entire familial support structure. Not say it can't be done, but people just assume these decisions are something people are willing to make just because they did. It's nonsensical.
Nobody in this subthread is saying anything to that effect. This thread was prompted by someone asking why anyone would want to live in a [car-free] urban environment in the first place. The ability to do so is implied by the question, not something being prescribed by edict.
Do you have on-demand car sharing in your city? Like Zipcar or similar? You could go on a heck of a lot of hardware store trips in one of these cars for the price of a car payment + parking + insurance + taxes + maintenance.
I think you're replying to the wrong person. I do use Zipcar on the rare occasion that I need a car. It's way cheaper than car ownership (not even including parking).
I love how those not wanting the city life is just looked down upon by those that are. But that's okay, I think those that live in the city are kind of just weird for similarly petty things
[0] https://www.redfin.com/MN/Minneapolis/1235-Yale-Pl-55403/uni...
[1] https://www.redfin.com/MN/Minneapolis/1920-S-1st-St-55454/un...
[2] https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/222-2nd-St...
[3] https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/100-3rd-Av...
[4] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1420-E-Pine-St-UNIT-E310-...
Okay, so there are 10 buildings (out of several thousand) with woodworking in Minneapolis, but how many of them also support what my spouse likes to do?
This is a case where you don't want it in the building, which gets us to the "there's not enough space within a 5 minute walk for a wide range of `want to do's."
And if this was true, why would it have to be? We shouldn't lock ourselves into that kind of world. There's no reason that people shouldn't be able to have access to workspaces just because they don't want to live in unsustainable car centric areas.
I've lived in a high-rise in a city and on acres in a rural area. I vastly prefer the latter. Right now, I live on about 1/5 acre in the edge of a proper city, which is a pretty good compromise to get the kids what will benefit them and still have some space and not have neighbors right up my ass every time I turn around.
I think this is obviously the crux of the issue. It depends on what you do and what your love. I would be renting a car/truck 2-3x a week based on my interests and passions.
I would like not having to drive to work, but would rather give up those 1.5 hours a day than everything else my vehicle lets me do.
that said, i support letting people chose for themselves.
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.
Try $1000/mo on average:
* https://money.com/owning-new-car-cost-total-2023/
If you're making >$100K that may not sound like that much, but the average/median US salary is lower.
(That probably doesn't include externalities either: health, climate change, commute times when you do have to go into the office, etc.)
Cars can be convenient, but it'd be better if they were option for living your life rather than a necessity.
And even using the $1k/mo number, you're still paying thousands more in rent to save that.
You can also get higher payments with money down if you have no to low credit ratings. Been there, done that. You play the game using the online calculators that dealers provide on how much your payment can change based on credit score and down payment, and the credit score will dramatically change compared to the down payment.
The average monthly payment for a used car is $500/mo, and $700/mo for a new car:
* https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/average-...
Then add maintenance, insurance, depreciation, fuel. And that's just the stuff that shows up on a spreadsheet (of which depreciation most folks don't really think about).
Your balance sheet would factor in only your interest payments and depreciation, the principal on your loan is irrelevant there because it's being realized as equity.
The average monthly payment for a used car being $500 does not mean that somebody on a low income has to pay $500 to own a car. I'd imagine that the average price paid for a cup of coffee is around $5, but that doesn't mean that that's what coffe costs. It just means that a lot of people pay way more than neccessary for coffee. Similarly- lots of people drive cars that are bigger, faster, newer, more luxurious, and more capable then necessary.
The bare minimum cost to own a vehicle is not $500 a month by any means- my 5000 dollar car has lasted me 6 years now as an example. Even if we consider it is now worth half of it's original value, that comes in at about $70 a month in depreciation. Hardly unaffordable
Somehow poor people can afford these cars that cost way more than they make.
Average isn't a very interesting number here. I know a guy with a $15K/month car payment, I'm sure people like him push the average up.
If you're trying to save money, don't go for average. Buy a cheap used car, ideally in cash, and your operating costs will be minimal.
The sky is the limit how much you can spend on a car if you wanted to splurge(waste), but you can also a fully functional car for very cheap if you care to save money.
> it'd be better if they were option for living your life rather than a necessity
I totally agree with that. I 100% support other people having the option to own or not own a car and accept the tradeoffs that result from their choice.
If you're rich and money is no object, do what makes you happy.
But if money is tight enough that you care about cost, it is very silly to look into an expensive new car. Buy an older efficient Honda/Mazda/Toyota for less than $10K, insurance will be cheaper, operating costs very low.
You must have one of those magical cars that runs on air, never needs to be filled up, never needs to be taxed, never needs to be insured and never breaks down. Wish I could have one of those cars.
In the meantime I’ll settle for using my feet and my bike. Never needed to fill them up with fuel, pay insurance, or tax. And my feet, at least, have never broken down.
All these numbers are from 2019.
Without car we pay about 300 euros per month for all transport needs, an extra 100 euros per month are direct subsidies. I would guess we would pay at least 800 euros per month for a car, probably more.
[1] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2023/08/annual-new-car-ownership-co...
The average vehicle on the road is 12 years old.
Probably 20 restaurants, 20 small shops, coffee shops, ups, usps, fedex, hardware stores, museums, parks etc etc all within 10 minutes walk.
It’s nice not having to drive for everyday errands. driving and parking is soul draining and causes suburbs to be ugly, not to mention freeways. Those are ugly as sin.
Having space for your hobbies is nice so if your priority is hobbies that need space living out of the city is nice. If your priority is going out for things it is probably better to live in the city.
That should be up to individuals, not central planners.
Are you sure you live in a suburb?
I was born, raised, lived in many, and will likely die in a city - but I just wanted to chime in to say that not all suburbs are awful.
It might be "nice", but it's not possible without a very restricted definition of "every amenity" and even then there's an assumption that amenities are fungible and you're ignoring efficiency.
If there's a grocery store every five minute walk, it's relatively small, which means that it has a crap selection AND it's expensive to run because it doesn't have any economies of scale. (Compare NYC's bodegas with even a crap Walmart and god help you if you're not the dominant community near your bodega.)
The number of places to eat/drink within a five minute walk is limited and/or they're tiny. Again, crap selection and no economies of scale.
Then consider our musician friends. Do you really think that NYC supports enough instrument stores to have one, let alone a good one, every five minute walk? (Remember, you need guitars, flutes, pianos, etc.)
And, musicians aren't special here - the same is true of any interest, such as books.
A 10min walk/transit window can span 20-40 city blocks depending on the location and transit options.
All of your assertions are plain wrong.
Move those goal posts. The original claim was "easy walking distance I.e 5-10 minutes walk."
> can span 20-40 city blocks
20 NYC blocks is a mile, which is 20 minutes walking.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/average-walking-sp...
> convenient (but high costs) parts of Manhattan.
If it's so efficient and/or desirable, why only a fraction of NYC?
The answer is that those areas are a luxury good, with, as you put it, "high cost".
Note that the streets, which is the whole of "planning for autos", don't have any effect on what's in the streetfronts. And, since the high cost areas were also "planned for autos" ...
You are misinformed. It is only part of NYC and rare in other cities across the US because of the planning which generally supports cars, including rules like the article, parking minimums. That makes it a luxury good. Build more walkable areas then it won't be a luxury anymore.
And even then you might be quite restricted as similar stores seem to clump together.
And stores of a kind clumping together is a suburban phenomenon, not an urban one. You're not usually going to find two hardware stores next to each other in a big city, or two UPS stores. Even fast food, which is almost always "clumped" in the suburbs, gets pretty evenly distributed in cities. A McDonald's will just be on a random corner, not as part of a row next to Burger King and KFC.
I have all of that (except the museum) within 10 minutes walk in a very suburban (almost rural, but still suburb) area.
This myth that you must live in the densest cities (Manhattan or SF) to be able to walk to shops, restaurants and other daily useful things is just a myth.
Walkable suburbs in the US are by far the exception. They are great though!
It’s really nice not to share walls with 4 different neighbors and be able to have a yard and let your kids play outside your house.
Residential density is worse in every way for most of the population.
Actually nearby it’s the street with more car traffic that has the most empty store fronts because everyone hates walking on it.
The main issue with the walkable cities is the housing is expensive.
The reason for that is demand exceeds supply. People love the cities judging by the absurd house prices in them. It’s just that we don’t have enough of them.
A main reason for that is single family zoning and parking minimums.
They want to visit friends, go to a museum, join a sports club, check out a book from the library, go shopping, visit a restaurant - there's way more of those in a city than in the countryside.
Define "small". Here are some examples houses in an urban area with front yards, back yards, and garages (attached to lanes):
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON
A little less square footage:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (mistaken) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks, which is certainly not the case:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E
Plenty of that was build pre-WW2 in ways that didn't depend on cars:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=1m8s
Suburban design is the worst of both worlds: lacking the density of the urban so infrastructure is inefficient and so is transportation, and basically bulldozing what makes more rural living nice (closeness to nature).
Those are suburbs. There's a park even, and no highrises in sight based on streetview.
We've had about 3 years of (ubiquitous) remote work; that's nowhere near enough to call "a generation", nor to bring about a sea change in attitudes. Even then, this entire time there's been a steady chorus of voices admonishing us that if we think remote work is better, it's just because we're slacking off; we don't recognize the real, important benefits of ad-hoc in-person communication; this is just a fad that will end any day now. Aaaaany day now...
This sounds like a comment from someone who lives in a city and doesn’t get out. There is an incredible, vast, mind-boggling amount of empty space in the US. I have flown and driven across the country many times. City dwellers are occupying a fraction of 1% of the space available.
The idea that we must live in hyper-dense cities is utter nonsense. If you like that lifestyle, great, but it’s not reasonable to force it on everyone else.
Almost all new high rise construction just has a couple of floors of parking garage, and handles it well. I can't see buildings without that being commercially successful, especially since much of the work that attracts people who like downtown is out in the burbs (sometimes not even in the same county).
There is no parking ban being enacted. It is a removal of an arbitrary parking minimum. If they can't sell the properties without it why would they remove parking?
The US has been building a lot of low-quality low-density suburban neighborhoods. They are actively hostile to the people living there, as there are both no amenities within a human distance from your home and there is no space for recreation. Life is constantly being strangled by a forced dependency on car travel.
In cities everything is a stone's throw away, and you can get there either walking or by bike. In rural areas there's plenty of space for outdoor hobbies and for children to play. The suburbs are a worst-of-both-worlds scenario.
They embrace mixed zoning, where homes and apartments mix with low density commercial, even in the same building. You can own a single family house if you need that, walkable to grocery and restaurants. Portland does this at a greater scale and it’s fantastic, unfortunately zoning and public transit won’t fix the other problems the city has.
The idea that we must live between enormously huge parking lots is nonsense. If you like that lifestyle, great, but it’s not reasonable to force it on everyone else.
I think this is likely to happen. Also, as a potential customer, when I look at a business, if I see that the parking is going to be a hassle, I will pick another location even if it means it is further away. So this has potential to make the business situation worse as well.
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 <=1 space per car, the car is either being unused or it's parking illegally sometimes.
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 housed population with <1 house per person because a large percentage of people live with one or more people.
Actually, those numbers are a problem on their face. They're an illustration of why cars, and societies that are structured around enabling automobile transit as the primary (or even sole) means of transit, are inherently unsustainable and inefficient.
Note that the above is about land area. Housing units are often stacked vertically, while car parking rarely stacked.
Where it is not stacked, it’s obviously not that terribly valuable.
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.
And that doesn't cover opportunity cost or the knock-on effects of market distortion, or the exponentially higher costs of e.g. parking garages.
This is nearing the square footage of an apartment to house the same number of people. So for any given unit of housing real estate we need an equivalent or greater amount of parking real estate.
When everyone wants to live close together (ie in LA near where they work, socialize, etc. not in middle of Nebraska) that puts a real pressure on space, and drives up the cost for real estate.
Even if you want to increase density by building higher buildings, the cost of those condo/apartment towers now must factor in a parking garage pedestal taking up 1/3 of its height, and so must offices, shopping centers, etc.
I don't think the ratio of parking spaces per car needs to be reduced. Rather it needs to be recognized, and thus reveal the cost of policies that lead to one car per person. If you can reduce the cars per person ratio, you reduce the number of parking spaces required at a 3x rate.
Cities are great because of all the different things you can get to. However cars spread the city out, and in this in turn means you can't do as many things. You can still do a lot, but eventually the distance (distances in cities are measured in time not meters!) is unreasonable and so you can't get someplace in your city. Dense cities enable more things. If you just want to go to walmart - so do everyone else so no problem. However if you have a niche interest you may discover not enough people live within range to support a place for your interest even though across the entire city there are enough people.
How are the cars limiting here? It's quite the opposite - you can have a special interest shop/venue in a cheap mall in some industrial area and get enough customers who can reach you by car. Without the car ubiquity you'd need to get into expensive real estate in the city center to get potential customers and charge them for your rent, which is fine if you are dealing in, say, collectible wines or artisanal Swiss timepieces and no business if you want to sell Gundam models or knitting sullies.
I think the implicit attitude that your comment seems to have of one car per person is the real issue.
Okay yes, but we're not talking about a hypothetical city in a hypothetical world in which there are 3 million people who share 10 cars. We're talking about Los Angeles, which everyone reading this thread knows (or can Google) has, in the real world, close to one registered car per person. We're talking about this in a thread about parking minimums in the US, which are almost always found in cities that have approximately one car per person, or at least one car per household.
In that sense, no number ever shows anything "by itself" because meaning is always constructed contextually, but at some point we have to all understand context because it's both tedious and Sisyphean to spell everything out every time.
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.
An interesting metric but not definitive and comparable.
Don't fool yourselves. There are many ways to reduce housing costs and increase housing supply.
Reducing parking spots is lame.
It seems somewhat obvious that you may need more parking spaces than cars since they move to different places throughout the day.
[0]: https://www.acceinstitute.org/thevacancyreport
The question people are asking is how can cities make it easier both for people to live in them as well as move around them without needing a car to do so. By removing parking minimums, it implies that people will have a harder time driving, which will entice them to use other means to get around. But, the big issue is that cities also need to invest in those other means of getting around. That means making micro-mobility easier with protected infrastructure, more bus service, more light-rail, etc. LA had a light rail service until GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tire organized a shell company to buy out the system and eventually tear it out. They did the same thing to the Key System in the East Bay of the Bay Area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines
Now reducing parking spaces per car might put pressure to reduce cars per person, or implement alternatives to allow fewer cars per person, which would actually improve land usage.
The issue isn't parking spots, the issue is that construction has had 0 efficiency gains in the last 50 year. Its cheaper to produce a car, grow food, produce computer chips, etc. Its not cheaper to build a building or a parking structure. Make it cheaper to build and it will solve house prices. And its not raw materials that make it expensive. There is no automation. We still pour concrete and frame buildings that same way we did 50 years ago.
I'm sure we could thrown up a hunk of concrete and rebar in the middle of nowhere in area with no environmental regs real cheap, especially if only care if it stands until the check clears.
I have, I've lived in such a place. I walked to work, about half an hour each way. It was quite pleasant.
To fix this we should bulldoze things and build more room for my car!
I have to be able to park my car! What else could I possibly do instead?!
Although it should be unnecessary to point it out, I would nevertheless say this "3 park space for car" is equal to "there are 3 spot for you to stand".
BTW, I lived in China and Europe for many years and exclusively ride bicycles for a long time, it was not the same experience. If you believe what current US politician is getting you one step closer to that, you are just deluding yourself.
Given that, beyond say SimCity, has anyone developed simulations of how these new regulations / incentives would actually affect housing?
It allows plots of land to be smaller, but is the extra space taken up by housing or businesses? Is the housing single family or high density? How do wider economic trends interact with developers' interest in building/not building? I would think interest rates interact with developers' willingness to build and what they want to build.
Those factors feel very subjective to me.
Not to mention that if a model existed that could accurately predict this, I would eat my hat if the model wasn't immediately bought out by a fintech firm for some absurdly large sum. Being able to accurately predict the housing market is a blank check for printing money.
The results appear to be a full bus, the whole sale replacement of one and 2 story buildings along the bus line and a general consensus in the city that it worked pretty well.
We just approved ending parking minimums and by right auxiliary housing units, read anyone can put in an apartment over their garage, this summer so the jury is out on it as yet city wide.
At the same time, they cry about city centers (with their traditional shopping miles) dying out.
Go figure.
You can't get rid of parking on its own. If there's plenty of mixed-use development around so people can walk/bike/transit to their destination, then things will be fine. If you're getting rid of parking AND the nearest residence is a mile away AND the only way to get around is by car AND you're not building anything new, then yes, it's silly.
Whereas the cost of a bus line usually has as a yearly maintenance/labor a significant portion.
Instead of public transit, cities should encourage Uber/Lyft. Car payments + insurance + gas + repairs/maintenance + parking might be close to $800 - $1000/month for most people. Thats probably just the amount that works for ditching car and just use Uber.
(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.)
No way in hell could you get me to agree to give up my car and use rentals/Uber/Lyft for everything. As a home owner, Uber and Lyft would fit my need about 50% of the time, maybe less, as I can’t run to Home Depot to pick up a load of rock/mulch/etc in an Uber. Sure, I could rent one of their trucks, but now I’m paying for an Uber both ways, and the rental truck, just to do a quick run to Home Depot.
I understand this may work for people in densely populated areas. But for the vast majority of everyone in the US, this would not be possible.
The city's mass-transit is intensely effective, and if you have to grab a car from point A to point B, there's never a taxi far away. It turns out if you don't have parking, a professional driver class can afford to make a living on being ever-moving luxury transit for people (and I bet most cities can rought-out a mass transit solution with a clever combination of buses and closing roads to cars / replacing them with delivery-only vehicle access, otherwise open-walkable).
Here's a map from 2015: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/11/18/a-map-of-citi...
And one updated as of 2021: https://parkingreform.org/resources/mandates-map/
> Austin removed parking requirements for its downtown area a decade ago
Here’s an article from 2024 :) https://www.npr.org/2024/01/02/1221366173/u-s-cities-drop-pa...
Oregon sounds like it is setting a pace, I’m glad Austin managed to end single family zoning last year alongside it. I hope Seattle, and every single other major city government in the US will manage to one day remove citywide parking mandates alongside the unusually car dependent laggards in Austin.
Parking minimums are one of those things that are a huge PITA when you hit edge cases but when you go to city council meetings residents and business owners ask for more and cheaper parking because it draws in business and keeps street parking available for residents.
You can't remove parking in isolation, I genuinely wish you could. You have to fix the reason people want it in the first place. And high density public transportation is unfortunately a double-edged sword because it means you need a government blessing to make an area a new hot spot and drives business and residential rents way up in the spots people can get to easily.
This is both blindingly obvious and incredibly frequently overlooked.
Here's the 5-step plan for improving our city:
What happened? People stopped going to the small shops in the old downtown and went to the mall instead (free parking). The small shops slowly all died off and the old charming downtown is a boarded up ghost town. Yeah, great first step.
Apparently not that much, since that's the point of the article.
> If you let the free market decide the answer will be "a lot"
I'm sure there will still be a lot of parking, but at least it will be
Furthermore, semi-urban neighborhoods and alleys will enter a battlefield between tow trucks and illegally parked cars.
Wait, you say it doesn’t end up that way? Strange.
Over time the suburban big-box retailers will lose as fewer people will drive cars.
No, the downtown core will lose when the shopping traffic shifts to the mall as I noted in comment above.
I had a SO whose family owned one of those small shops in the old downtown when parking became restricted, so I've seen first hand what happens to downtowns when parking goes away (all those shops are gone now).
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/11/126192-parking-refor...
Parking spaces are outrageously expensive. By allowing housing to be built without far more parking than is needed, the cost of rent is lower by several hundred dollars (read: $200-$1000) a month because of how expensive land is, and how much land/space is required for cars.
Fine if you don't like density, but the whole pseudo-science `Dense urbanization is detrimental to health, physical and mental` is just mental.
When I lived in FL you had to drive everywhere. I’d rather be walking. We literally evolved to walk long distances, and cars don’t seem to be making our lives better with all the externalities getting ignored (air pollution, microplastics, and noise pollution).
I don’t mind if people want to drive, but they should be paying the true cost and not keep a massively subsidized lifestyle that can’t exist without massive federal funds.
How do you propose she visit me without a car and available parking?
Uber would cost her more than an hour of her workday.
GP is damn right the opposition to parking is detrimental to health physical and mental as well as wealth.
And with a medium density, less car-centric neighborhood, people can reasonably walk or bike to work, the grocery store, etc., meaning a car is optional and it's easy to get exercise. Right now we drive everywhere, spend loads of money on cars and roads, and wonder why we are so fat! It is not cheap, healthy, or sustainable to base our communities on the idea that everyone must buy a 3-5 bedroom house on a quarter acre in the suburbs and commute 30 minutes in a Jeep.
People are not leaving California because it's too dense, they're leaving because it stopped building homes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8