If you’re renting a city apt. without a car, 16% of your rent pays for parking
qz.com
qz.com
You do all understand that's where the massive wave of articles about changing building codes and zoning rules to get rid of parking, both public and privately owned, is coming from, right? Uber, Lyft, etc would love to make it hard or impossible to use a privately owned car in urban areas.
Getting rid of the requirement to put parking will mostly just lower everyone's quality of life- residents will take up all the street parking, making it harder for shoppers to access stores, restaurants, etc, making brick and mortar stores even further disadvantaged versus online retailers while also causing more headaches as businesses are forced to actively police their parking areas against use by non-customers.
But it'll be great news for ride sharing companies, as millions of people find themselves unable to own a car while living in American cities which are entirely designed to require car travel.
Now that system of transportation is being decommissioned, but we're still stuck with low density.
How many hours of productivity must employers lose to their workers' long commutes? Yet the market has not provided us with anything faster.
The system we had was not in equilibrium because:
1) The cost of maintaining the old system was predicated on a continuous growth which hasn't occurred. This is the "Growth Ponzi Scheme" - https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ .
2) the Baby Boomers are now reaching retirement age. As they get older, they will be less able to drive, making it difficult for them to live in low density areas even if there were no infrastructure problems.
What does mandatory minimum parking have to do with workers' long commutes? Presumably if employee time is important to the employer then the employer will pay for parking spaces even if there were no minimum parking requirements.
You cannot "fix" symptoms like car use without fixing the underlying problems of car dependence.
Living in a car dependent built environment without the ability to use a car is worse than the status quo, is the point. That's the world we're heading for if we remove parking but continue to resist gentrification and upzoning.
If you disagree then this exchange will go nowhere, unless you can convince me otherwise. I think the evidence is overwhelmingly against you.
A current approach to reduce the Ponzi road scheme is to switch to unpaved roads and narrower paved roads. This reduces maintenance cost, though people don't like it because it means they need to go slower. (Which also makes it safer.) It also helps shift the balance between denser housing, vs. the sparse housing available if everyone assume there will be fast transit.
As I pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14801413 , other countries have switched away from car dependency. It's not like it's impossible, nor am I proposing a simple "fix" for car use. Removing or reducing mandatory parking requirements is one one aspect of a much larger systematic rethink that we need.
Your comments about resisting "gentrification and upzoning" seem to be about a different topic. I'm all for upzoning, and 'resist gentrification' is a very broad topic including solutions which have nothing to do with city planning.
Two ways to slow gentrification are to limit the increase in rental rates, and increase the power of the tenant's union to veto changes that the landlord might wish. I don't believe these are typically part of city planning, though I can see how they might be included.
Reducing car dependence requires exactly that. Any policy which prevents or reduces gentrification necessarily preserves sprawl, because that is where would-be gentrifiers currently live.
1) there is rural gentrification
2) part of the gentrification of London is due to foreigners who buy London property as an investment but don't live there, and only visit for 1-2 weeks a year. Nor do they rent it out. A policy which prevents that sort of ownership would reduce gentrification without increasing sprawl. This is what B.C. is attempting with their new tax.
3) Gentrification exists in places like Oslo where migration to the city does not from suburban dwellers but from residents of smaller cities and rural areas.
4) It's more generally applied to "middle class", and not specifically "upper-middle class". Ruth Glass's book which introduced the term specifically says "One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes -- upper and lower."
>It also helps shift the balance between denser housing, vs. the sparse housing available if everyone assume there will be fast transit.
This is a fallacy. The limitations on housing density are driven by residents of the urban core and inner suburbs. It doesn't matter to them how bad transportation is for people who can only afford the outer suburbs. Increasing the pain of living in low-density outer suburbs will not create more housing in the urban core and inner suburbs.
"making it harder for shoppers to access stores"
The density of people walking or on bike is much higher than in a car. Fewer required parking spaces means it's easier to walk from store to store. Remember, most parking lots are empty because they are designed for the busy time of the year. Most parking requirements are per-building, not per-area, so there's even more wasted space.
That wasted space raises rents for brick and mortar stores in a way that online retailers don't have to worry about.
"businesses are forced to actively police their parking areas against use by non-customers"
Nonsense. Get rid of the parking requirement and those businesses which don't want to police their parking areas simply won't have a parking area. While if there's really demand, parking lots and parking garages are a way to shift the costs to those who do want to police their parking arenas.
"while living in American cities which are entirely designed to require car travel"
That is true. But the cities can't change if the current parking restrictions stay. Let the market decide who pays - not some central planning committee.
As often pops up here, The Netherlands up until the 1970s was also increasingly designed around cars. With deliberate effort, and over time, that's changed. "Nijmegen’s center city wasn’t always car-free—cue grainy footage of midcentury sedans cruising past charming steepled rooftops. “The main square used to be a parking lot,” Sjors Van Duren, the program director of Velo-City, tells Clarence Eckerson, the film’s director. But since the 1970s, the city has replaced the downtown’s auto-centric streets with pedestrian pathways and bike lanes." - https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/it-takes-more...
> You do all understand that's where the massive wave of articles about changing building codes and zoning rules to get rid of parking, both public and privately owned, is coming from, right?
Some of it, sure. But I think you are making too big of a claim there. There are a lot of other groups and individuals that would like to see fewer cars in densely populated areas.
I felt all kinds of shit all over. Parking spaces should be extra or people without cars should get a discount.
There is all kinds of stuff wrong with this statement.
A) It was the only apartment complex that met my needs.
B) I don't think there were any apartment complexes where a parking space was optional.
C) As I said above: I had a car when I rented the place. I gave it up later. That was not in my plans at the time that I rented the place.
Without commenting on (A) or (B), surely (C) is not a reasonable complaint? If you rent a 2-bedroom, but then your roommate moves out, then certainly it was not in your plans at the time that you rented, but just as certainly you wouldn't expect your rent to go down. (I recognise that it's a different situation, since no-one can readily use the other bedroom, whereas someone can use the parking space; but what I mean is that "That was not in my plans" is not in itself a justification for a rent abatement.)
Ive got a 2 bedroom upper level duplex in Minneapolis with a 1 stall garage and 1 additional off street parking space, located on a block with ample street parking, and is only 1 block away from a bus stop on a major bus line that i take to work, all for $1100 a month.
These kinds of rules are usually enacted by people who have lived in a city for a long time and always parked on the street for free. There's some new development and all of the sudden they can't find a space. So they push through rules that force new development to include parking.
I'm sure you have come to some other arrangement but holy shit that would be a lot of time spent travelling each week. It's worth working out how much time you need to spend at work to pay for the fuel, maintenance, and depreciation involved because that is essentially also 'travel time'.
edit: Even assuming an average speed of 50km/h that is about 16.5 hours each week. Including time spent earning the money to cover the associated costs it's going to be over 20 hours.
My average highway speed while commuting is 75 MPH. 90% of my commute is on the highway.
Commuting also means i can afford a home in a one third acre lot, with plenty of backyard for my kids and their dog to play in.
The other thing the more sinister thing about the talk of removing these regulations is the fact that what it would really serve to do is move everyone except the ultra rich away from having the ability to own their own cars. Part of that is a new profit model for the auto industry, part of it is social engineering to better be able to control when and where people travel at any given time and limit our freedoms. It might seem a bit far fetched but I would bet damn near anything that is the dystopian future we're careening towards. And I'm not a libertarian but I do have a pretty strong belief in people being able to exercise their personal freedoms. And if a little bit of regulation when it comes to parking requirements helps protect our (larger) freedom to choose our modes of transportation, the ability to come and go on our own schedules and manage our own lives, to take a road trip at random because it's Saturday and it's beautiful out and not be charged by the minute for it, and to actually keep ownership of our cars for just a little bit longer, then I consider that a win for personal liberties. Because we still would have the choice.
I use a bike for 90% of my travel time and I have a (smallish) libertarian streak too. It galls me that there's such enormous subsidies to vehicle drivers, with a simultaneous refusal from government to invest even 1-2% of that amount towards safe cycling infrastructure. And I say invest (rather than spend), because said infrastructure has been shown every time to generate a profit once you include the health benefits, etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving...