California begins to decouple parking from new residential construction | Hacker News Reader

California begins to decouple parking from new residential construction

motherjones.com

29 pointsvwoolf17 comments

This is a huge win! It would be nice if it would also apply to commercial properties too. I highly recommend "the high cost of free parking" if you have not read it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking

There is also a good Econtalk episode on it, https://www.econtalk.org/donald-shoup-on-the-economics-of-pa...

Donald Shoup, who the article credits in large part for this change, has given many talks about parking. Some are available on YouTube [1]. Well worth a listen.

[1] https://youtu.be/r0gokb4rPik

It's been half amusing and half depressing to watch so many people espousing the freedom of cars, and the moment the government says it won't force homebuilders to include parking spaces, they are all up in arms decrying the loss of their perceived freedom.

What does freedom even mean here?

California forgot it doesn't have any usable public transit.

Doesn’t matter. It’ll fix itself based on demand.

Nah it will just create a new style of poverty and rob poor people if even more time

Agreed, good public transport is never profitable. Where I live it's great but very subsidized.

Which is not a problem to me considering it helps solve many societal problems for everyone, like climate change, too much traffic in the city, air quality etc.

But the US is very conceptually opposed to subsidization so I don't think it would work there. And leaving it to the free market just won't make for good enough transport.

That's great, now build the transit and walkable neighbourhoods people will need so they can live there.

One depends on the other. There’s no area with tons of parking that’s walkable.

I agree, I just think that right now there is a risk no one will actually provide a working alternative. They will either change nothing, or squeeze more plots in and when the whole place grinds to a halt for lack of space they will have moved on already.

I really think the problem with lack of walkable (liveable really) neighbourhoods is that it needs both state planning AND developers to be properly incentivised. That is why no one has managed it yet, there is very little overlap between those groups.

Thanks for listening to my ted talk!

A standard suburban indoor mall has tons of parking and is walkable.

It's gonna be really fun trying to convince people to live in neighborhoods that you can't get in or out of because the nearest parking space is 2 miles away.

The law doesn't say you can't build parking spaces with the dwelling(s) nor does it make it harder to include parking in the proposal for the dwelling(s).

How much is housing in Soho, Central London, and Tokyo again?

Must be cheap based on this metric. Remember that soho has one pretty crappy subway station, so it’s not particularly transit rich.

People will buy there because it is slightly cheaper. And then it will all fail, because the limited parking will be filled with cars and everyone will complain.

Seems like a great way for housing developers to increase their margins.

This just sounds awful, nobody wants this. It's imposed from "on high."

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