http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21720269-dont-let-peo...
> For a fast-food restaurant, the city demands one space for every three seats; for a bowling alley, seven spaces per lane plus one for every worker.
I've read a bunch of articles about the negative externalities of minimum parking requirements, but haven't really seen one explore the why behind these rules. What does it matter to the city if a bowling alley doesn't have enough parking spaces? Wouldn't that just be bad for the bowling alley's business? If it's about ensuring the supply of street parking why not just install meters to make the city money when the bowling alley fails to build sufficient parking?
I'm usually the first to mock this kind of trite 'invisible hand' supply-and-demand explanation, but this really seems like something that would be very well left to the business to figure out.
Most mall parking lots are sized for the demand of the busiest day of the Christmas shopping season, and are consequently underused for most of the year.
Keep in mind, the US had 200 million fewer people in 1945. More of America has been built since WWII than existed during it.
Public transit in the city was underfunded so it was only realistic for certain commutes within the city.
I have no idea why suburban Cupertino would be worried about this risk; it sounds like an underhanded way to limit occupancy and capacity (you build a 1000-person office instead of 2000, because you had to have extra space for parking).
This is a solved problem: Charge for parking and the shortage goes away. Meter technology is decades old and well understood. https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...
In the meantime, what sane city council member is going to tell residents they need to pay for parking in front of their own townhouses?
There's a similar mechanism to what you proposed, resident-only parking permits. This pits the business owners against the residents. It also means that a resident can't have their friends come to visit without risking a ticket.
The knee-jerk HN-ism of quick fixes doesn't work here.
The only actual solution is the long-term dual-pronged approach: parking structures in the interim, while improving public transit coverage overall.
Washington State also makes some zoning decisions and targets some growth targets at the state level (see http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a..., although I can't find a better piece off the top of my head), which helps matters.
The only actual solution is the long-term dual-pronged approach: parking structures in the interim, while improving public transit coverage overall.
The actual solution is people paying for what they use, i.e. markets: If people want parking structures, they'll pay for them. I'd really suggest that you look at the link in the comment I posted above.
Your Japan link is not applicable to this conversation (though I love that article, it comes up whenever NIMBY stuff is discussed on HN). I consider that arguing in bad faith.
Zoning isn't going to magically help residents get parking, nor is it going to provide a place for paying customers to put their cars while eating and drinking.
> They'll pay for them
Who? The customers would all love to pay for parking, but there wasn't a structure. You're arguing against some point you think I'm making but I'm not.
People who live there can park for free, anyone else has to pay a meter.
This solves the issues.
Problem solved.
And that’s how my city got $1/min parking spots.
In urban planning, one has to be careful to solve the correct problem. The problem is not too many cars parked on a residential street. The problem is getting customers to businesses with minimal bad side effects.
Any "parking solution" that kills the businesses to fix the parking is not actually a solution.
The problem is getting people to different places, without them using too much space within the city. This means as little car usage as possible.
The example I mentioned – combined with cheap public transit – is very effective.
Parking meters are just one way to get people to use it, and not a very good one: by the time people find out there are meters (when trying to park), it's too late to take the transit!
The money it cost to install meters would have been better spent on a marketing campaign to raise awareness of the transit option, or subsidizing the transit prices.
Veeery cheap compared to actual meters.
And no, no marketing campaign or subsidy can be as effective as the parking costs. As long as parking isn't at least twice or thrice as expensive as transit no one will use transit. Its a serious issue IRL here. For a while they even did free transit, ads on every single billboard, bus and train, and still people rather parked for 10$ a 30min in the cuty, or even parked illegally.
And this enables apps where you basically press [start parking] and [stop parking] and you won't even need to walk.
Second, if urban planning is done properly, residential streets don't experience parking problems. That's the whole point of this thread.
And if urban planning is not done well, then it doesn't matter where businesses move--they'll still run into problems.
Oh, and if they all leave, then the neighbors will have a nice blighted block with empty buildings next door. Problem solved?
Parking meters do not magically create more parking spots. They create an incentive to use an alternative, but first there needs to be a good alternative.
If urban planning is done properly, there are no residential streets. Every street mixes residential, offices, and commercial properties.
Cupertino demands it because businesses have abused public streets before (e.g. relying on public parking for business purposes); if Apple had gone to Cupertino with an actual plan, they may have allowed fewer spaces, but since Apple didn't and just accepted the requirement it is because Apple has no plans to reduce it.
... the idea that Comcast couldn't possibly have any influence over municipal policies is laughable.
it's like thinking Microsoft can't make things done in Redmond or Google in Palo alto
wow, you got me there, sure the other option would be much worse... let's strictly follow dumb rules instead of trying to change them for people benefit
it's not about business dictating rules, it's about 9000 parking spots for 12000 people, which sounds for someone from Europe completely insane
You're not even trying.
that's like saying that chain of nonsmoking restaurant is bad bad company if they try to push stricter local nonsmoking laws. that brand of electric vehicles is bad bad company if they try to push ban on old polluting cars. that bike company is bad bad for trying to influence city to build more roads
I fail to see what's wrong with anyone trying to influence local policies for better. Company is not some imaginative entity, in the end it's people after all.
it doesn't even need to be exception, you can change rules for everyone if it's good idea, no mater who is proposing change
In Bay Area any new development faces all kinds of criticism from the city & residents. Most of the world would love to have all the tech companies in the backyard but in Bay Area they are more treated with contempt.
In someways I'm even surprised they managed to build this mostly in a way they wanted.
That's the problem with these kind of engagements. Companies and cities generally don't care to work together on something like this. When they do, however, it usually results in something pretty good.
A proper urbanist would have put the HQ on top of a hub of subway or tram lines, and you bet the managers' houses would be sorted by rank along the stations, the cleaning contractor being at the last station, as opposed to the current situation (richest farthest in the outback).
Of course, if you want happy productive employees within walking distance of their office, you don't build a centralized 15,000-job building with no residential area intersticed, so whoever signed off for such a building wouldn't understand walking distances, tram lines or subways.
And would certainly die from cancer.
Yes, it would be great if people didn't have to drive. But we don't live in that world yet, and it would be foolish and stupid to impose that on your employees.
Even if a fire service has ladder trucks, the existing ladder trucks may be berthed outside the area served by the local fire station and therefore the fire service cannot provide an appropriate response time and needs another ladder truck. Because ladder trucks are big, this may mean that the local fire station needs to be expanded to house the ladder truck.
Providing a ladder truck and possibly funds may, in some cases, remove the reasons for the height restrictions...with the premise that height restrictions are occasionally the result of careful consideration rather than or in addition to nimbyism.
If you just "bribe" the organization, there's no conflict of interest. "We want to build this" "we dont want you to" "heres some money" "ok".
Its a bit like negotiating with the CEO vs. bribing a lone DBA about getting access to proprietary data.
Silicon Valley has chosen to preserve its form of single-family suburban sprawl forever, at the cost of any human with a reasonable income being able to move there.
The south SF bay(and most of the bay, really) is similar to Chicago in the run up to the Civil War; it's expanded out as much as possible, the only direction left is up. The gentrifying is pricing families out of the area; you can measure progress with BART, and how it's snaking it's way into the heart of the south bay.
Well over 10x what Silicon Valley has experienced during another world-historical boom: http://siliconvalleyindicators.org/special-reports/populatio...
At least if you wanna drive, you can, if you wanna ride the bike, no one's stopping you.
Could cars be more environmentally sound? Yes and we are on our way to making that happen.
I live in a state that appropriately funds it's freeways, so we don't have a cluster fuck. I seldom ever have to drive below 75 on the freeway.
(directed at both Fricken and valuearb)
For example, having people pay directly for their road and mass transit use is an excellent easy solution, the hard part is addressing air pollution externalities. So toll roads, private mass transit and carbon/pollution caps/market.
If you want to inexpensively "fully engage" in society, go head and live in an apartment downtown or on a bus/train line. But don't restrict my ability to raise my kids in a home with a yard.
Do you think 70 years of federal subsidies and social engineering designed to put (initially white) middle class families in single-family homes is a state of nature?
Apple, like many other big Bay Area tech companies, has dozens of buses and shuttles that ship people around daily (even all the way up to places like Berkeley).
I assume on the Apple campus most of the parking is multi-level & underground. In that case, what's the issue?
Cupertino and Apple are doing nothing to change this status quo. With the status quo maintained, car use is mandatory for Apple workers in Cupertino and traffic will continue to increase.
Bay area taxpayers can look forward to paying more for new road expansion projects to attempt (and fail) to alleviate congestion.
Driving is the single most dangerous thing most people will do at any time. It is a ridiculous, barbaric thing to do.
Auto fatalities per million miles driven have dropped by 95% since the 1920s, 86% since 1950, and over 50% since the 1980s.
If people don't drive, all those million miles of transport will be taken up by Buses, Trains, Bikes, Walking, etc, all of which have their own death rates per million miles. It's unlikely the death rate will decline in any noticeable way even if we banned cars.
And we are on the verge of eliminating the vast majority of accidents, not just self driving cars, but even simpler existing mechanisms such as automatic brakes and lane change monitors will make massive reductions in accident rates as they continue to become more common.
> we are on the verge of eliminating the vast majority of accidents
That is purely speculative; in fact motor vehicle accident deaths are going up, not down, in the past couple years [1].
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/business/highway-traffic-...
We had a spike in 2015 & 2016, and one in 2012, and every other year over the last decade the death rate has declined. The article you linked to emphasized the increase in deaths, and downplayed the increased number of miles driven, which is misleading. Deaths per mile only increased 3%.
And we've seen these spikes before, about one or two per decade and they don't change long term trends. In 1961-63 they spiked 6% per mile driven and 4% in 1965-66, since then death rates have declined 80%.
2015 was the 5th safest year ever for US auto travel. It's death per million miles was 1.12, in the 2000-2009 the death rate averaged 1.41 per million miles, meaning they've still declined 20% over the last decade, even with the recent spike.
Self driving cars aren't very speculative any more, it's not a question of if, just when. But automatic braking systems and lane safety systems exist today. Honda offers "Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS™)" as an option on most of it's cars already.
https://techinfo.honda.com/rjanisis/pubs/om/JA0606/JA0606O00...
Honda also offers a collision warning feature, lane keeping assist system, road departure mitigation, lane departure warning, and adaptive cruise control with low speed follow. All of these systems exist today, and are offered by most manufacturers as options. They haven't had a big impact yet because they are options, and haven't been offered for very long so they are on a minuscule portion of the cars on the road.
But as their costs drop, just like ABS and other safety features, they will become standard equipment and after another decade or so it will be difficult to find a car that doesn't have them.
You can always find ways to save lives by making living suck more.
Btw, my argument was that people want a car because that's what has been made the most convenient. I think the correlation is that way.
Still, not being able to find a parking spot in the morning is going to irritate a lot of people, and tank productivity.
Apple might argue that their futuristic parking garage is the future - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/technology/apple-self-dri...