Cincinnati Joins the List of Cities Saying ‘No’ to Parking Minimums
nextcity.org
nextcity.org
Again, I totally understand the rationale behind it. It’s just frustrating for those of us who have no better options in the near future.
Do you mean you literally drive into a city centre at rush hour, park there, and go into an office?
It blows my mind that people are even able to do that. It actually says something perversely positive about US roads and cities that it's possible!
I would not attempt to drive into the centre of a city in the UK for any reason at any time of day ever. You would not make it to your office before the day ended and when you got there you'd simply find there was no parking anyway and you'd have to go home again!
Commuting by car into central London would be foolish (I have a colleague that tried it once - it took him an hour and a half from the M25 to Kings Cross). However, there's a lot of cities in which it is feasible (if slow) and a lot of businesses close to the centre of cities which do have parking available (or you could just pay for private parking).
I sometimes drive through Central London in the evenings - it is slow, but it's not that slow. At certain times of day it's no slower than public transport (it really depends where you're going to and from).
Also? We’re not good at infrastructure spending, it’s not sexy enough. And many cities are having trouble just keeping people living/working there.
A very expensive 15-20 year project that may help with that can be a VERY hard sell.
And it’s only to build a few miles of something, so just a tiny piece of what’s needed.
Or you’re NYC and already have an existing subway. But instead of 10s of millions it needs HUNDREDS of millions (or more) to ‘fix’, minimum.
How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?
part of the justification for building it was national defense.
Remind me how much money is in NYC?
SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.
They should. All that would be required is raising municipal taxes.
There’s nothing stopping Silicon Valley companies from migrating to other areas in California or even other states. I’m sure there are more than enough places that would be willing to throw out ridiculous tax advantages to lure big companies there.
The state is very enthusiastic about taking the money out of the city but not so interested in investing much back into any transportation infrastructure to support its' cash cow.
Norman Mailer once ran for Mayor of NYC and part of his platform was for NYC to secede from NY State:
'New York City would be split off from the rest of New York State, and achieve independent statehood as the 51st State of the U.S. The campaign sought to free the city from the control of "upstate legislators who don't care about the city but control our schools, police, housing, and money."'[1]
And perhaps more topical is that part of that platform was also to ban all cars from Manhattan except Taxis and buses. And this was in 1969 :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City:_the_51st_State
If you go to cities like Chicago or New York City, many people do use public transport. I did when I lived in Chicago, generally hated it, but it was cheaper and faster than driving downtown for work in that situation. To get anywhere else in the city or suburbs it would be faster and more convenient to drive.
Adding a bike lane or adjusting road speed to reduce car-pedestrian fatalities is enough to get city council members unelected the next cycle.
Car lobby, brainwashed citizens.
Just watch TV around an election. It's complete and total doublespeak and propaganda every few minutes.
That's what weekend cruising and trackdays are for.
Sitting in commuter traffic is to driving as being a passenger on a low-cost airline is to flying.
To think that you need:
- A 5000 pound machine to take a 200 pound human to work
- Workplace is 60 miles away
- On a road with many other rush hour drowsy 200 pound humans
- Said humans, then spend 30 mins and $30 for parking, in which the 5000 pound machine is just lying around empty
- All the above effort just to bring back the person from work in the evening and leave that car back on the street, lying around?
That doesn't sound insane to you? There's no reason for this for a rich country.
If you want proof that there are better, efficient and human friendly transportation systems, you need to visit HongKong and Singapore. (NYC doesn't count)
It's amazing how many people think this. There are metro areas in "the middle" with populations greater than European countries. And Texas, right in the middle, has a population that would put it at #10 in Europe.
#3 Chicago 9.5 million
#4 Dallas 7.4 million
#5 Houston 6.9 million
#14 Detroit 4.3 million
#16 Minneapolis 3.6 million
#19 Denver 2.9 million
#21 St Louis 2.8 million
The Chicago metro would be the 20th largest country in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Look at Texas. 200 miles of between Houston and Dallas and Austin. This largely empty triangle itself is half the Texas population. But its barely 10% of the Texas area.
So yes. The US metros are isolated compared to Europe.
It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.
Metro population density is far more important.
Which absolutely does start to explain the lack of transit inside many of these metros: at the same time the rails were converted to mostly cargo only a lot of the suburban commuter lines were themselves "lost" to time or destroyed. It's utterly depressing to see the old passenger train maps in America and compare to what some of those passenger lines could be serving today if like Europe they'd been kept up/maintained.
A lot more of the suburbs in every American city than people realize were served by trolley and passenger train in their infancy that they grew around, and just because many of the lines have been "lost" over the years doesn't mean that their skeletons don't still show in the overall growth pattern. (Until you get into the entirely car-dependent exurbs and "suburbs of the suburbs", of course.)
America outsourced public transit to the lowest bidders, they got bored serving people directly and went with focusing solely on cargo, and people were too busy driving everywhere to notice what they lost.
That is because whites moved out and systematically starved the cities of a tax base and state funding for infrastructure projects that would benefit minorities.
That's a positive for public transport, you can cover more people cheaper because almost everyone live in big cities.
Even in New York's non-Manhattan boroughs, 35-75% drive.
South east was worse, at night is drive through the mall and grafalger square on the way home, took an hour or so. Again 2 hours in morning.
Not everyone is based in the centre of London. Not everyone works 9-5.
So are there any cars in the city and where do they park? Or is it mostly taxi cabs and city buses?
Since I live downtown, I'd prefer severely limiting parking. Call it a "parking maximum", reducing congestion at commute times, as parking costs would shoot way above a market price.
The fair solution is to have neither parking minimums nor maximums. Then parking is developed in proportion to expected demand, competing for space against offices and homes, neither subsidized nor penalized. Yes it would cost more than you prefer, and less than I prefer, but probably a fairer situation.
More likely it's just not profitable, because most people are only willing to spend so much money paying for parking, and often "downtown" land is quite expensive.
Sometimes it's a regulatory risk. If the local residents decide they don't want a parking structure, they won't offer you a fair market price to stop it; they'll just try and get city officials to deny or obstruct all the permits you need. (And a large construction project needs a lot of permits in most jurisdictions.)
Sometimes it's just prohibitively expensive to convert. In order to tear down a typical commercial building, you'd have to either buy out everyone's leases or wait for up to a decade for them to expire. This imposes a huge deadweight cost that wouldn't be there if enough parking had been built in the first place.
These statements are contradictory! Making business pay for their own results in on-street parking parking lots and minimum parking requirements. When you centrally plan parking you get parking garages.
> Only a handful of cities have remotely passable public transit systems.
> Only a tiny portion of most metro area populations can live in the zoned housing capacity of central business districts
They don't need parking. They need a solution to enable access to the downtown core. The solution you want is parking, because that's the status quo. Improving public transit is also a solution - It's not actually impossible to build.
Even when the density is there, the social mission of public transit agencies is to be a lifeline for the very poor. Improving service for professional commuters is at the bottom of their priority list. I can't even argue with that: the middle class can drive as an alternative, without bus service the destitute are just stuck.
The solution I want is unlimited construction of skyscrapers and travel mostly by foot and elevator. But if there's one thing our democracy is great at, it's preventing high rises. For the densities we have, our choices are cars or simply having commutes eat further into our already scarce free time. (No, public transit is not free time, as any vaguely useful train is crush-loaded standing room only).
I think basic profitability is probably the #1 and #2 answers.
Not everyone of course. The (often young) people would often prefer urban living. But your urban office building is going to be unattractive for anyone who needs to drive in.
Congestion charges are taxes, and therefore abominable; alternative transport is socialist, ditto.
Since conservatives control the majority of state governments, neither policy can make progress in the current environment.
So basically silicon valley which is one of the highest cost of living places these days and has terrible traffic?
I don't live there, but the hub (city) and spoke (suburb) model seems to scale much better than the point to point where jobs and homes are distributed everywhere like silicon valley and thus everyone has to drive.
I used to take a train, but it took 50-60 minutes, and any delay meant I missed a connection or transfer which then added even more time. As much as I want to do it and support it’s just not feasible.
Right, and that's a convenience and you pay extra for that. People renting downtown pay more for a smaller unit compared to units not in downtown.
Right. But in the future you won't be able to drive in. So move closer to work, I guess.
Without solving zoning, "move closer to work" is zero sum advice. All you can do is switch places with someone poorer than you.
I commutes into the relatively nearby city both by rail and car at one point. Wouldn’t have done it long term and probably wouldn’t again without buying a small property in the city for during the week.
Added: Companies will do whatever makes business sense. But potential employees who would find commuting into a city location a nightmare is a factor. As of course is new grads who insist on a location they can get to without a car.
Or perhaps we'd finally get our act together and build out functional mass transit, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
What are you basing this on?
So, in your case, you drive your car until you get to the outskirts of whatever large metropolitan area you are visiting, then take public transit.
When we lived in the UK, we frequently drove to a car park near the Hammersmith Station and then took the tube from there to central London.
My favorites were taking the Emery-Go-Round while I was living in Emeryville, and walking two miles each way every single day while I was living in Redwood City while listening to podcasts/audiobooks.
By the way some of the hardest commuting problems to solve are couples or people who otherwise really want to live together who have jobs at different parts of the Bay Area. They could be making a combined $400K but no amount of money will make their commute reasonable. I'm surprised telepresence robots like AnyBots haven't gained more traction.
This will be a painful transition for people who depend on the status quo. But you have to pull the band-aid off sometime, and waiting longer won’t make it any better.
This is a top-down structure that was intentionally designed by urban planners after WWII and it is reaching its scalability limit.
People might say they don't want density, but every current trend is toward more density, because of the actions people are taking.
You could also greatly increase parking density in parkcades if all vehicles had autonomous parking. For example, it would be no problem to box cars in if vehicles could move on their own to let them out. I bet you could easily double parking density.
Taken to the limit of the idea, the whole parking structure could be entirely sealed to the outside, and maybe even evacuated or filled with a non-oxygenated medium (e.g. nitrogen) to prevent car fires and reduce rusting from long-term storage. Sort of like a modern grain silo.
I'm somewhat uncomfortable with parking infrastructure that assumes that all the cars are working and "gassed up." If the car boxing mine in is left to sit in the parking garage for a few months (as might happen in, say, an airport's long-term parking lot), its battery will likely go flat and it'll be incapable of getting out of my way.
Even having automatic standardized charger coupling for every parking space wouldn't really work, since the car boxing mine in could have just plain rusted.
Current infrastructure doesn't have this problem: if the car beside mine can't get out of the garage on its own, that's between the garage and a tow truck, but is no problem of mine.
There is also the alternative that people will move further away from their work, because they can use the commute time -- essentially then, they would leave their homes at the same time, start working and then leave their offices so that they are home again at the same time, which means (assuming everybody lives at different distances from their workplace) that you automatically get a stackering effect.
Autonomous fleets can also be parked in towers, because a robot car doesn't care if it takes 10 minutes to get out of a tower, as long as the throughput is high enough.
Eventually you will need heavy rail to increase throughput for dense enough places, but that's still a separate problem today.
That said, only a percentage of people would want to just discard the car they've spent considerable money on.
Self-driving fares can never be as cheap as regular driving seems. With regular driving, you are silently depreciating the value of your vehicle whereas a self-driving car would have to include depreciation in each ride.
However, for people who do (or plan to) use bicycles or mass transit a significant proportion of the time, being able to fall back on an hailed autonomous car in case of rain, haste, whatever is very appealing. It just depends on being able to look at a monthly bill of $200 (or whatever) in on-demand rides and see it as a huge step forward from what you used to pay in all the fixed costs of car ownership whether you used it or not.
The real trick will be having a workable solution for families with kids— that's an area where current taxis/rideshare have a gap, since they're not willing to supply their own carseats for liability reasons.
But when you have that, you double or multiply by N, the road usage. Which is going to produce multiple problems for everyone.
People imagine that once autonomous vehicles reach a certain level, they'll just morph to provide all the benefits of a well-planned public transit system. But I'm doubting common good can just fall out of more chaos.
And hey, the private automobile itself was thrown onto society with effectively no consideration of externalities and brought us to our current heaven/hell of urbanism. So it's quite possible that, despite some talk of planning, autonomous vehicles will just appear, make a hash of things and all the clean-up will happen later, if at all.
The carseat thing is a real missing piece in the puzzle though.
If I own/rent the car, I can just leave them in while I'm doing whatever. If I'm doing Lyft, I'm stuck carrying around baby seats between rides. Which is not appealing.
Of course, these cars occupy space, which means the road they'd be on would be a good deal more occupied. But remember, parking and traffic aren't static per-car, it's all a matter of rates.
It would ironic if an expectation of autonomous vehicles actually forced cities to create public transit if they failed to appear.
Is it possible to build a mixed use structure with parking at the lower levels that are designed with enough use flexibility that they could be converted into regular occupancy use if (when) parking demand is reduced?
Hopefully this will encourage people to consider other options if parking becomes to difficult or expensive.
They did this in my old hometown. (North Shore, Vancouver.) They allowed all sorts of condos to be built on the assumption that they would be rented by retired/rich people. Retired people don't drive. Rich people don't have jobs. So the buildings went ahead without associated infrastructure/transport improvements. Now the nurses coming to take care of the elderly residents have to part at the local mall (Park Royal) which is now debating payed parking. Visiting grandchildren (minivans) fight for street space. And the city is becoming grayer and grayer.
I've since moved out of vancouver, to a much younger and more vibrant city. I cannot remember the last time I paid for parking.
It seems to me it would put pressure on other issues (investing in public transit) which may not followed up on, thus leaving you with a dysfunctional urban infrastructure.
Let's say you have 10 buildings in an area, all of which provide some parking, plus there's some street parking. Any one of those buildings could decide to convert its parking into more homes or stores or whatever would make them more money, and just tell their customers/residents to use the other parking nearby. If everyone did this, nobody would have anywhere to park (especially not visitors), and building owners would have relatively little incentive to provide their own parking (they don't want to be the sucker). By forcing everyone to provide some amount of parking, you're overriding the bad incentives and getting people to cooperate for the greater good. At least theoretically, it's a good example of the government stepping in and making things better for everyone.
I think that rationale holds up less well with dedicated parking, pay-to-park, and parking garages, but certainly there are areas where free parking is the norm.
That's the theory (I think), though it has plenty of downsides. I'm not interested in owning a car, so the last four places I've lived have provided a parking space that went unused, and have had absurdly high rents due to the Bay Area's housing shortage (which might be alleviated by replacing parking spaces with housing).
This guarantee subsidizes car parking at the expense of other modes of transportation, whose users are indirectly paying for the cost of that parking, and who suffer disproportionately from how spread out that extra parking makes everything in a city.
It’s why you see small niche businesses in strip malls with large and always empty parking lots. They’re REQUIRED to have lots that big if they don’t/can’t get a variance.
And it can be a lot of wasted space, and a deterrent to using public transit. After all, there is always easy parking.
It's not just that it makes driving better. It makes everything else worse, too. Ever tried walking from a house to a strip mall to run errands? Now compare that to walking for errands in a European or Japanese city.
The difference is enormous; I've lived in several parts of the US, currently live in Germany and have traveled around a decent amount, most US cities are just terrible for anything other than driving.
But I’ve been to the downtown area is on the East Coast from before cars were common and everything is packed close together. You can actually walk from place to place and live without needing a car. It’s so incredibly different.
Which is to say nothing of the suburbs which are basically impossible to walk and often dangerous or atleast totally unsuitable for bikes.
Absolutely. Mostly the problem is the absurd amount of space between houses, because "not everyone wants to live packed in like sardines on top of each other" (quote from a zoning meeting where the outlawed ADUs).
https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/parking_standa...
At one extreme, a three-bedroom house in an area of the suburbs with poor public transport could have two parking spaces. At the other, a five-bedroom house in an urban area with excellent public transport could only have one parking space. Even then, "all developments in areas of good public transport accessibility (in all parts of London) should aim for significantly less than 1 space per unit".
What is "it" in this sentence? Parking? Why do you want less parking?
In general I can see why certain leaderships would wish for less cars for broader reasons. Cars are wasteful and consume precious resources. They kill people, both directly, and indirectly. They discourage people from walking and cycling - both are good ways to increase livability and safety of a community. Finally, cars contribute to the damage we are doing to the planet. Some leaders care about the environment, or at least pretend to for votes.
There's petty politics everywhere, of course, but worrying about where to park my car? No really something I have time for.
If the majority of people are like you, businesses will be incentivized by market forces build enough parking to accommodate them. So what are you worried about?
(The whole lecture is pretty good)