There's a great reddit thread exploring much the same issues at https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar...
Turns out, requiring little houses for cars be added on to every house for people gets expensive.
Turns out, requiring little houses for cars be added on to every house for people gets expensive.
Unsurprisingly, whether it’s public housing or public transportation, there really is no way around investing in public infrastructure if you want to have a healthy society.
I.e. having a light or heavy rail stop within 2 miles gives an X credit, having a grocery or mixed use commercial (food and services) within 2 miles gives a Y credit, having bike storage and lanes gives a Z credit
Essentially, attempt to quantify the holistic experience of residents, when talking about parking requirements.
If we make the kind of housing / communities we'd like to see cheaper, developers will start building it naturally.
Edit: From the linked Reddit post: "In January 2013, LA enacted its first major parking reduction, essentially giving developers the option of replacing up to 15% of their required residential parking with bike parking if they are within 1500ft of a major light rail or metro station. However, these bike spaces must be “long term” spaces, which require locked cages, a dedicated bike servicing area." (But also notes some requirements around the bike spaces that increase the cost of making that trade-off)
Most developers would have no problem building two apartment buildings right next to each other, on every foot of available space, with no parking, selling everything, and then never giving their futures a second thought.
Zoning exists precisely because all building parties involved in are absolutely mercenary, and yet the city has to deal with the mess in the subsequent decades.
The entire parking requirement was created because previously developers had overburden street spaces without care.
So what's going on with the developer's counterparty in this transaction? I'd be happy to buy a property without parking because I don't drive a car and I find that all the extra asphalt in a neighborhood dedicated to cars actively makes it worse.
I'll grant that removing any parking requirement creates short-term chaos in places where developers under-judge the amount of parking necessary, but I also think that people systematically over-estimate how much parking a place actually needs, and that over-building parking necessarily induces demand for cars because it forces the built environment to become spread out and less walkable. I also think that if the right incentive structures are in place that it's a problem that sorts itself out in fairly short order. In this case if you build a dense housing development with very little parking and no nearby shops then a grocery store on the corner is pretty much risk-free profit since you have a large customer base in close proximity with no competition selling essential goods. If you strip out parking requirements and zoning then you also clear out a lot of the red tape that makes such store difficult or outright illegal to build.
> Zoning exists precisely because all building parties involved in are absolutely mercenary, and yet the city has to deal with the mess in the subsequent decades.
> The entire parking requirement was created because previously developers had overburden street spaces without care.
Zoning is precisely what created communities that have such hopelessly ingrained car dependence and therefore demand huge amounts of dedicated asphalt just for basic transportation.
The "streetcar suburbs" in North America, which were built before modern zoning and before car ownership became an explicit assumption of developmental policy, are still in high demand even with the streetcars ripped out because the lower setback requirements, reduced/nonexistent driveway space, narrower streets, and corner shops make it a more livable and friendly environment.
Where, once you've removed all the parking footprint that existed before? Do you have any idea how expensive it is to retrofit underground parking under an existing structure?
Are people in those neighborhoods willing to forgo the hundreds of vehicle trips a month that they will create via their Uber/Lyft/cab trips and Instacart, Amazon, Chewy, Doordash, and Uber Eats orders? Simply outsourcing those car trips to someone else, and leaving them nowhere to stop in the process, is a hypocritical pipe dream.
Walkable neighborhoods existed for millennia before these apps were invented. People just walked to a shop a block away for the things they needed. Not sure why you think that you have to "outsource those car trips to someone else" when many neighborhoods already don't need car trips at all.
I live car-free in the DC metro area. I ride a bicycle with a rack on the rear for attaching bags, I have a collapsible shopping cart that I can take on the bus, and I have a dolly for moving heavy objects short distances. I've gotten a lot done with them.
Those days are gone because no small "shop a block away" can compete with the behemoths of Amazon, Instacart or major supermarket chains that deliver, or cloud kitchens with DoorDash or UberEats, not unlike how American fast food chains and Starbucks crowded out a lot of former native mom-and-pop cafes and restaurants.
What "existed for millennia" only had to compete with nearest such other small business in each direction. Now, they're competing with the world's supply chain.
Just look at a traffic cam in any "walkable city" where vehicles still run and count the brand names crowding the streets doing trips that just didn't happen even 20 years ago.
There's a whole host of problems strongly linked to American car-dependent development for which the solutions already exist and have been in use for some time elsewhere. Air quality, street congestion, traffic fatalities, obesity, high cost-of-living, poor accessibility for the disabled, children growing up with little independence or hobbies outside the home, housing shortage, and the general unhappiness of people who have no choice but to drive everywhere to do anything in a congested suburban town.
The obstacles are not technological and have not been for some time. It's fully a social and political problem.
You can have a healthy society with private transportation and private housing, it just needs to be a rich society.
Population density in the US is 34.05 people per square kilometer.
Granted, a huge amount of the US should probably be discounted for a more realistic comparison (e.g. unlivable regions, BLM / park / national forest, and massive amount of farmland), which would bump the number up.
But we're still probably going to need some adjustments going from a country you can drive across in about 4 hours, to one where it would take 40+ hours.
If your “quality of life” is so compelling, why do you need to outlaw everything else, comrade?
“Tear down this wall, Mr Gorbachev”
Your city council is the People’s Central Planning Committee that runs the construction economy in your city. They decide what is produced and they decide who does it. Construction in your city is a planned economy - every bit as much as the Soviet Union or pre-Deng China.
And like every planned economy, it sucks and fails in just about every way.
It's not like a city exists in some impermeable bubble from the surrounding area. A great deal is shipped into a city through the suburbs and other surrounding area. Many workers commute in from suburbs which are often cheaper than the city even though they may have better school systems (even though the per student costs are often lower). Food comes in from generally more rural areas.
Cities and especially their denser and more walkable areas are dependent on the surrounding area in many ways. More dependent than the suburbs are on the city except perhaps for employment.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that while San Francisco was the original primary catalyst for development in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley (which is effectively suburban sprawl) would be just fine without the city at all. The same would have been true of the Boston area to a large degree especially 20 years or so ago, except perhaps for the universities.
If you want to consider the entire thing one unit (suburbs + downtown = unit), you still have to figure out how to pay for all the services. The more spread out everything is the more those services cost.
So it still comes down to the same thing. If you want, blame it on the government zoning downtown for no residents and only zoning for single family housing and therefore leading to the only affordable thing being the suburbs. But, to maintain those suburbs they're going to have to raise taxes 4x to 8x on everyone in that unit.
When in reality, the productivity of an acre (and therefore its tax revenue) depends on that acre + all its inputs (people, services, etc).
Downtowns (aka central business districts) look wildly productive, but they're fueled by people who live... not there.
From this perspective, it's really more of a call for mixed use development [0], which is able to supply more of its own requirements AND benefit from locality.
For an extra level of irony, where do wealthy Angelenos go for vacation? Paris, for its great, walkable neighborhoods that allow exactly what their city rabidly bans.