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Comment by vermooten | Hacker News Reader

What are 'parking minimums'?

Sibling comments have good answers about the definition, but just to clarify the motivation a bit, the typical justification I've heard for mandatory parking spaces is to avoid a prisoner's dilemma between building owners, especially when there's street parking in the area.

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).

Most US cities have land use regulations that mandate a minimum amount of car parking for any building type. Things like "at least 1.5 parking spaces per apartment unit" or "1200 sq ft of parking for each 1000 sq ft of retail space" (yes, sometimes they're really that high).

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.

Requiring at least X parking spaces for every Y hundred square feet of floor space in a building. Or based on maximum occupancy or some other metric.

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.

> 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.

I’ve been downtown in some of the cities in the west/midwest of US and you still need a car. Sometimes a bit of walking works in older parts of the cities but it’s still kind of a mess.

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.

>Ever tried walking from a house to a strip mall to run errands?

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).

Parking/car space is also part of why houses are so spread out, too.

I don’t think that’s true. Most houses in San Francisco have their parking in the required setback, basement, or 1st floor. That’s extrmely dense compared to standard suburbia, where space between houses is drastically in excess of car storage needs. America would be ~10x as dense (still suburban, but a very different character) if car storage were the limiting factor.

I'm always bemused by the idea. In London, we have parking maximums - expressed as the number of spaces per housing unit, for various sizes of housing unit (measured in habitable rooms per unit), and various levels of public transport accessibility:

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".

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