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Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

Most of the commenters on this thread don't appear to have lived in a country with the opposite problem. Consider what happens when development and car ownership expands in a country without adequate government parking mandates.

You routinely find at least two road lanes blocked by parked traffic because buildings don't have adequate parking. This leads to very slow bumper to bumper traffic (try Bangalore, Mumbai, Cairo, Manila), higher air pollution leading to a public health crisis, waste of time, higher green house emissions etc. When calculating "rental increases", articles like these conveniently forget externalities that would result from jot providing for parking.

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I'm afraid that you are comparing pears and oranges.

If you want to be fair, compare American cities with European cities. In Barcelona or the center of Copenhagen, there are not free parking spaces. And I can assure you that there are not the traffic issues that you are mentioning in your comment... It's quite on the contrary, actually.

Well if you want to compare that way to the cities mentioned in the list, the only appropriate comparisons in Europe are London and Paris which definitely have parking, traffic and pollution issues (or had till they started banning vehicles in the center of the cities). Paris even considered banning diesel altogether contrary to the rest of Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_agglomerations_by_po...

Barcelona and Copenhagen arr about an order of magnitude smaller and likely don't even make it into the top 100 cities. In India in casual conversations we would call places with such populations "small towns" :-)

Parking and traffic issues aren't issues if you're not driving, and most people in those places aren't.

I mean, flying a helicopter around the city sounds like great fun but that doesn't mean everyone else should be forced to build places for me to store said helicopter.

I have to disagree here. I spent some time in Dhaka recently and they have some of the worst traffic problems on the planet, through a combination of incredible population density, lack-of-infrastructure, and partisan-political strong-arming.

Everyone suffers because of it, whether they are actively utilising the roads or not - because the people who are using the roads are their customers/staff/suppliers/whatever. If half of my staff can't get to work on time, my business suffers. If my customers can't get to me, or don't feel the time investment is worth it (I've done 3km in 3 hours in Dhaka), my business suffers.

Losses from Dhaka's traffic nightmare: http://print.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/old/more.php?news_id...

https://newrepublic.com/article/118416/what-dhaka-bangladesh...

> Barcelona and Copenhagen arr about an order of magnitude smaller and likely don't even make it into the top 100 cities.

Barcelona makes it into spot #92, actually. It's really not that small, the metro area is a bit over 5 million people.

> Barcelona and Copenhagen arr about an order of magnitude smaller and likely don't even make it into the top 100 cities.

Barcelona is not an order of magnitude smaller than any US city, unless you can think of a city in the states with a metro pop of 50 million.

You don't even need to live in another country to see that problem. That happens right here in the USA.

In Michigan, lots of new buildings are exempt from parking minimums, as part of pretend initiatives to be "transit-oriented". But there's no actual public transit, everyone still has to drive. So, for businesses/residents in these buildings, people now just park their cars anywhere

Along both sides of streets? Cars. On top of sidewalks and bicycle lanes? Cars. In other people's front yards? Cars. If you live in the neighborhood, your struggling to get in and out of your own property because other people's cars now block you in -- cars from buildings that were supposedly so "transit-oriented" that they didn't need their own parking.

"But that's illegal" you say. Sure, absolutely. But that stops no one -- your still required to drive to go anywhere or get anything done, so it still happens, regardless of how strict enforcement gets.

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Parking minimums aren't some evil plot to waste land or sell cars. Parking minimums are an attempt to prevent buildings from shoving their parking costs onto other citizens -- which is what happens in 95% of America without those rules.

It's not hard to enforce the rule "don't park on places marked as not-for-parking". In fact it's quite easy. The problem is mainly that nobody tries actually enforcing them with sufficient strength, because they get pushback. In my city, they were having huge problems with parking on the sidewalk, in bike lanes, during no-street-parking times, etcetera. How'd they solve it? First they started giving out $120 tickets. Then they started doing immediate towings on the arterial streets. Amazingly, people suddenly learned not to park on the street when and where they weren't supposed to.

A factor rarely mentioned is heat.

People in tropical climate do not enjoy walking even relatively short distance because of its hot and humid weather during most of the year. Middle-class people in dense tropical cities with traffic problems still buy a car as soon as they can afford it. Coupled with barebone funding for and low quality of public transportation, the traffic problem gets worse and worse as people become more affluent and cities get denser.

Bangkok was a legendary example, where its skytrain only recently helped mitigate the problems for those rich enough to afford a place to stay close to one of its stops.

It works the other way around too. In countries where the temperatures drop down to -20C, you really don't want to be standing outside waiting for a bus or a tram, even if it's "only" 30 minutes. Any shitty old car is better than waiting outside.

Here in Berlin most buses run every 5-10 minutes.

Blocking lanes to park cars is illegal. It's just a problem of enforcing the rules.

Yes it's tempting to say that but it doesn't solve the underlying problem which is the development didn't create sufficient parking space. It didn't create because the government didn't mandate. A parking lot is not a high value salable area for a property developer and so unless he is building it for the 1% who value and pay a premium for such, there is no incentive fir him to do so. So as people become wealthier and buy vehicles, they park on the street and impose negative externalities on the society.

The article appears to argues that Government mandates of parking space per bedroom etc. are wasteful and should be avoided. I'm pointing out what happens when these mandates are not put in place.

But you said it yourself - the way to solve the externality is to forbid them from parking on the street. How is that so difficult? Rather than the government trying to plan the optimal amount of parking for every possible time and use and density, they can just say, "don't park on the street. Figure out your own parking requirements."

Let me refer you to this part of my comment: "A parking lot is not a high value salable area for a property developer and so unless he is building it for the 1% who value and pay a premium for such, there is no incentive for him to do so"

You appear to be commenting from the POV of the US or Canada where land is plentiful and people build independent houses in towns and suburbs.

In the cities I mention, owning an independent house means your wealth is in tens of millions of dollars (mere millionaires would struggle to afford independent houses). The average middle class person is very much dependent on developers constructing multi storey apartments - and it's not in their economic interests to solve for parking requirements unless compelled as I explain above.

I live in a metro area of 6.5 million people. The level of condo/apartment tower construction is huge, and is the majority of housing growth in the region. Developers demonstrably do construct parking - even expensive-to-build underground parking - but generally they do not demand to build more than they need. Recently a tower was finished, directly above a subway station, without any dedicated parking for 400+ units. All the units sold, no problem, because those buyers don't have or want cars. Other towers are built with parking, but frequently the minimum required. Indicating that it's not in high demand for that tower.

The cost of building a parking space doesn't evaporate just because it's required by the government. And builders will include parking if it's in sufficient demand, just as they include any other amenity in their buildings.

This is anecdotal (though Im sure I could find some supporting evidence if I wasn't lazy), but Thailand is an example of a country that is shifting to a car culture without the infrastructure.

I first went to Thailand in 2005 and I saw a lot of people on motorbikes in Bangkok. Which is great because the streets are narrow and there is not a lot of traffic. It was quick to get around Bangkok on a bike or Tuktuk.

I went back in 2012 and 2014 and I notice a lot more cars on the road and a lot less bikes. It appears that as the country has become more wealthy, more people can afford a small Corolla-type sedan. However, it does not appear infrastructure has been built to support all these new car owner so traffic is considerably worse in Bangkok.

Ok stopped getting lazy... the number of registered cars has doubled since 2009, probably quadrupled since 2005 according to the trend line. Only 37% of new registrations are for bikes these days.

[0]http://bk.asia-city.com/city-living/article/bad-bad-drivers-...

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