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Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

> Houston does mandate off-street parking

This is a terrible thing that cities badly need to get away from.

Going further cities need to get away from mandating parking period.

There's a 400+ unit condo building that was approved in my town in 2014 and it's still under construction because of course every unit needs parking and they're building a massive underground parking lot. The fact that this building is on a major bus corridor, less than a 10 minute walk from existing rapid transit and it's adjacent to a future site for rapid transit expansion is ignored. There's honestly no reason to build so much parking here and yet the rules mandate that we must add parking everywhere. This increases the costs of housing as well and people must pay for this regardless of whether they use it or not.

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You are clearly not from Texas. Nothing is 10 minutes away. Public transit is a joke. I realize this is a chicken/egg situation, but it's probably not changing anytime soon here.

Honestly, it's not an issue (in Houston) at all. I like driving and the fact that everywhere has parking is perfect. If I'm going out I just pay for the uber and call it a night. It's cheap enough down here anyways.

That's great you like driving, but what's upsetting is you demanding everyone else pay for your free parking.

Nobody is saying parking should be illegal, just that people shouldn't be forced to build it if they don't want it.

Edit: People more informed than myself have studied how forcing everyone to build parking makes housing less affordable.

http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062

First, we have some of the cheapest housing in the US.

Second, the law will Have to change in the next 10 years.

Third, if we do it right, Houston can become the city with the most green space in the country if we require that 1/2 of any replaced parking lot just become semi-public green space.

That's cool, but making people travel through lots of green space still has the net effect of reducing the ability of transit to serve customers and forcing longer commutes.

I'm glad housing is apparently affordable there. My views are probably affected by my experience growing up in California.

It's hard for coastal people to understand how cheap land and housing is in the interior of the U.S. What constitutes a down payment for a tiny home on the coasts will buy a virtual mansion with a ranch just outside of Houston. There's almost zero economic and social pressure to create the kind of cities we're used to on the coasts (or in Europe or Asia for that matter).

The point is that you're pretty much forced to partake in automobile ownership because everyone else decided buildings should have to be spaced ridiculously far apart. This is either directly, through density maximums, or indirectly, through zoning and parking requirements. Houston may have cheap housing, but it also appears to have much higher commute costs than most US cities.

http://cityobservatory.org/introducing-the-sprawl-tax/

Anyway, I don't think we even disagree, really. I like green space too. I just hate laws that pretty much force everyone to have a horrible commute because living close enough to your job to walk or cycle, or having enough people in the same space to support transit, is almost illegal.

It's really hard to reconcile the differences between dense walkable cities where streets were laid down long before the car existed and living and Houston where land is (dirt) cheap, the city didn't really begin growing quickly until the 1960's when A/C made life bearable and after a series of hurricanes in the preceding decades made the port of Galveston less and less attractive idea, the shifting of oil companies from Lake Charles to Houston, a constant stream of low cost workers from Mexico, international oil money. Houston is as unique as Silicon Valley.

People who talk about making Houston walkable or changing the setbacks and lot requirements are just fooling themselves. Houston has a character and plenty of people like it. They get offended that you might want to make it any more like Boston, NY, Chicago or DC.

I'm personally glad to be leaving Houston for one of those dense walkable cities, but I'm giving up a nice big house that was very inexpensive, the ability to be lazy and drive anywhere, the discretionary income to own a nice car, and great food. What I gain is personal but having grown up in Texas I do not expect people there to want anything but what Houston is. It didn't get to be like it is because people hated it. Keep in mind, all those neighborhoods, stores, and office parks are there because individuals and businesses voted with their dollars and they continue to do so.

To be honest on-street parking is even worse. It's dangerous and often less efficient in practice.

I think it would be nice in some cities to have every second north-south going street reserved for pedestrians and bicycles and every second for cars. Same for west-east going streets. Notice the pattern here? There are some very limited examples of this in Helsinki and Oulu.

http://ospace.fi/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_1387.jpg

http://www.sci.fi/~idean/kuvat/hietahami/rotuar.jpg

Usually pedestrians, restaurants and cyclist just love it. Car people don't mind, as it can curb down traffic in the morning. Less cross sections is often less traffic jams.

But if there is on street parking, this will never happen. You simply need every possible way for traffic as all roads are decimated into part time parking lots.

> It's dangerous and often less efficient in practice.

Do you have a cite that says it's particularly dangerous on an absolute scale (rather than just "more dangerous")? On-street parking is almost always more efficient because the road does double-duty as an access path, whereas parking lots need empty lanes to access cars.

>Do you have a cite that says it's particularly dangerous on an absolute scale (rather than just "more dangerous")?

I don't have source. Just a reasoning. Kid might run to the street from behind a parked car. Also cyclist sometimes bump into someone coming out of parked car.

> On-street parking is almost always more efficient because the road does double-duty as an access path, whereas parking lots need empty lanes to access cars.

Car needs about one 1,5 car lenghts behind to back away form a lot. That doubles as 1,5 car lengts for the opposite car and as access path.

Theoretically on-steet parking only needs 0,5 car lenght in front and 0,5 car lenght in back. But this rarely happens as there are no marked lots. In practice the empty space between cars ranges from 0,3 to 1,4 and tends towards bigger. Because people want to park loose when there are not much cars and when the street fills it doesn't even out.

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