Public transportation doesn’t work since people are super spread out, all commercial activity is miles away, your work is probably 20-60 min away by car.
Abolishing parking minimums or generally discouraging cars in isolation just makes everyone worse off. You have to make the area livable without a vehicle first.
But instead, we're seeing their case load actually stay fairly reasonable compared to NYC or Berlin, where there's more car usage.
People are just trying to live their lives. Inconveniencing vehicle users won’t actually change anything because they have zero power over the “vision” of their area and zoning. The change has to come from the city planners first.
I would love love love to not need a car. And my area is pouring millions in mixed use land projects to make it happen. It’s a decades long project.
There are plenty of people who don't drive and currently have to pay a slight premium for a parking space they don't use. The market currently cannot efficiently serve those people. I am one of those people. Removing parking minimums helps people like me, and honestly doesn't effect people like you. Just because such a change wouldn't do anything in particular to help vehicle owners doesn't mean it's going to hurt them either.
This is called 'displaced parking' and it's a pretty well known problem among parking planners. You'll get the same thing if, for example, the college campus starts charging $5 to park when students can park for free on nearby streets and walk.
You can get around this with parking permits and towing everywhere in walking distance - but you can't be timid and imagine the new street won't interact with other parking locally.
The flip side to this is that it doesn't work in the context of on street parking. Or at least it allows some freeloaders to overwhelm the public resource.
But that's kind of the point for them. The goal is to make cars unviable so that people are forced to use public transportation.
That's why you need regulations like minimum parking, otherwise companies would completely forgo parking if they could get away with it.
So it really does mean that they won't build parking.
Developers would weigh the cost of building parking against the benefit it provides. Some would still build lots of parking but others might not.
Consider the following scenario: Walmart builds a new store with lots of parking, and across the road a Target opens and they gamble on having no parking since the Walmart lot is just across the street. Target saves a lot of money this way, so they're incentivised to not build parking.
Imagine that Walmart knows this might happen, and so they choose not to build the parking because they don't want to subsidize Target's parking. Now two huge stores go up with no or minimal parking. It's a prisoner's dilemma brought on by lack of regulation.
Target would have to weigh the costs/benefits and decide if they wanted their own lot. In some locations that decision might be no or a small lot. But they can't choose that because it's against the law.
Nobody is talking about price controls.
Biking on a hot day with a nice hat at a leisure pace is fine. Specially if you provide safe environment.
On lower speed roads with frequent intersections, that infrastructure causes more problems than it's worth because it makes intersection navigation far more hazardous than just using the roadway like any other vehicle.
A lot of bike lanes, in my experience, are of substandard width and, as a consequence, result in closer passes/overtakes by cars in the adjacent general purpose lane because of the lack of sufficient width in the bike lane and the fact that motorists tend to drift from side to side within their lane during the normal course of driving (especially when the road has a curve).
So, riding in the bike lane actually makes things worse for the cyclist in terms of dealing with overtaking traffic compared to riding in the center of the general purpose lane.
My personal experience (over the last 15 years) has been that the vast majority of drivers will treat it as a non-event and just change lanes to pass/overtake. The real danger is a motorist who doesn't notice you until it's too late to avoid a collision. If someone uses their horn or shouts at you, then at least you know they've seen you.
Like if you can afford to live downtown in my city you’re either really well off because $/sq ft. is astronomical or are some combination of young, single, and childless so you can put up with living in a studio/small 1 bedroom.