U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

Parking won't fix any of that realistically. You can push minority poverty to the suburbs, which for example is what France does, however it doesn't solve anything about the bombed out look, it merely redistributes the problem to somewhere else. You can gentrify the cities and push poor minorities to the suburbs and inverse how it's arranged in the US now, it will make the suburbs look bombed out - until you fix the minority poverty problem.

Actually, those numbers are a problem on their face. They're an illustration of why cars, and societies that are structured around enabling automobile transit as the primary (or even sole) means of transit, are inherently unsustainable and inefficient.

An interesting metric but not definitive and comparable.

The question people are asking is how can cities make it easier both for people to live in them as well as move around them without needing a car to do so. By removing parking minimums, it implies that people will have a harder time driving, which will entice them to use other means to get around. But, the big issue is that cities also need to invest in those other means of getting around. That means making micro-mobility easier with protected infrastructure, more bus service, more light-rail, etc. LA had a light rail service until GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tire organized a shell company to buy out the system and eventually tear it out. They did the same thing to the Key System in the East Bay of the Bay Area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines

I'm sure we could thrown up a hunk of concrete and rebar in the middle of nowhere in area with no environmental regs real cheap, especially if only care if it stands until the check clears.

I have, I've lived in such a place. I walked to work, about half an hour each way. It was quite pleasant.

To fix this we should bulldoze things and build more room for my car!

I have to be able to park my car! What else could I possibly do instead?!

I rode BART out of Oakland for years. I don’t agree with NIMBYs but it’s not like they are making it up.

I assure you, it is indeed full of insane people, homeless, the trains are nasty and smell like urine, frequently break down or get stopped because people regularly suicide themselves on the tracks. I’m sure in Asian countries the trains are fantastic but here people aren’t adults and ruin it for everyone.

Because statistically that’s very true almost everywhere in America. Even flagship cities like NYC have pathetic trains/subways compared to Europe/Asia and 90% of the population has never been that far abroad to see what’s possible. I’ve tried the express busses and “train”(can you call it that with only two cars!) in Austin and gave up because they waste much more time and are less comfortable than driving. Never saw rich professionals on them, but plenty of mentally ill, drug addicted, and unbathed(not that we should avoid the homeless as much as we do now) persons.

My family takes transit all the time; I have 3 teens old enough to get their licenses and none of them have put much effort into learning how to drive because they can get around well enough using transit.

If you talk to our Baby Boomer neighbors, though, you'd think that the second you step foot on a bus or train you'll immediately be assaulted by violent junkies. We do have a big unhoused problem here (like everywhere) but my neighbors seem to think transit is only for the poor; it's sad, really, as many of them are getting to the age where they really shouldn't be driving.

because the only way to get around in a city is by driving, right?

In an extreme case, imagine that your typical, currently congested highway gained another 6 lanes in each direction, and we raise speed limits to 100 mph. First, the right of way is now way bigger, so we need to wreck a lot of buildings for this infrastructure. It makes being able to travel near that highway really nice for a while: Minimal congestion! A straight out windfall by people owning land near it. But that also means that the area redevelops, as farmland that was in the middle of nowhere is now a reasonable commute downtown! But as the development continues, the highway will fill up. And since downtown streets were not changed, it's the area downtown near the highway that is now a congested mess, as the limitation is getting from there to buildings.

And again, a subsidy for you can be a harm for me: If every street is 8 lanes wide, it's very hard to cross. Every pedestrian crossing added is also infrastructure, but it slows down traffic. Every bit of lawn you use is another bit of distance I have to wade through to get to my destination, vs an area with the same number of houses, but without lawns.

One can like one tradeoff more than the other, but the fact that infrastructure means subsidy, and that urbanism choices are picking some people's interests over others is just factual.

This is both blindingly obvious and incredibly frequently overlooked.

Here's the 5-step plan for improving our city:

  1. Remove parking spots.
  2-5. We'll figure it out later; I promise.

Apparently not that much, since that's the point of the article.

> If you let the free market decide the answer will be "a lot"

I'm sure there will still be a lot of parking, but at least it will be

   1. Allocated more optimally in space (businesses who don't need it won't build it)

   2. Paid for by those who use it, not subsidized by those who don't

   3. Built more vertically, thereby taking up less real estate

   4. Not in the perfect spot for a bike lane or sidewalk

Wait, you say it doesn’t end up that way? Strange.

Over time the suburban big-box retailers will lose as fewer people will drive cars.

More seriously though I do think there are benefits to city living if that's a lifestyle you want, but saving money is almost never one of them unless you have a job where you can make a LOT more living in the city, which sort of by definition means you're not going to be working remotely.

Having space for your hobbies is nice so if your priority is hobbies that need space living out of the city is nice. If your priority is going out for things it is probably better to live in the city.

It might be "nice", but it's not possible without a very restricted definition of "every amenity" and even then there's an assumption that amenities are fungible and you're ignoring efficiency.

If there's a grocery store every five minute walk, it's relatively small, which means that it has a crap selection AND it's expensive to run because it doesn't have any economies of scale. (Compare NYC's bodegas with even a crap Walmart and god help you if you're not the dominant community near your bodega.)

The number of places to eat/drink within a five minute walk is limited and/or they're tiny. Again, crap selection and no economies of scale.

Then consider our musician friends. Do you really think that NYC supports enough instrument stores to have one, let alone a good one, every five minute walk? (Remember, you need guitars, flutes, pianos, etc.)

And, musicians aren't special here - the same is true of any interest, such as books.

And even then you might be quite restricted as similar stores seem to clump together.

It’s really nice not to share walls with 4 different neighbors and be able to have a yard and let your kids play outside your house.

Residential density is worse in every way for most of the population.

Those are suburbs. There's a park even, and no highrises in sight based on streetview.

With the roads Austin has, public transit is expensive to maintain and slow. Expanding the system won't change that, but only exacerbate the current problems.

Also, far more tax revenue (from making land more productive) makes public transit more affordable for the city.

Not necessarily true. In the situation where infrastructure building is almost impossible, the only net result for this is the pubic transit will become more and more expensive.

Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).

For something to be available it has to be required by building codes.

There are very few countries out there that would see such behavior flying, when facing a wealthy developer (it used to be the biggest company in this village/small town) who gives a lot of local work, for just parking spots that are anyway completely hidden under the building.

It didn't help that the urbanism activists in our area seem to consider parking garages to be a tool of the devil and protested any plans to build one in the area. To me they are an ideal compromise/stop-gap solution. They allow you to build dense walkable neighborhoods today even when most people will be driving. And once public transit has improved to the point where less parking is needed, you just have a few buildings to tear down instead of entire areas to redevelop.

Edit: And to be clear I think the "best practices" that most of the country used for the past 50 years to set parking minimums were massively inflated, and created many problems. I'm absolutely in favor of revising them, but I firmly reject swinging around to the other extreme of "to solve the public transit chicken-egg problem, we must make car use intolerable".

We have so many subsidies for cars baked into the system, but hardly anything for other forms of transit, and then we complain endlessly about how expensive transit is to run and have to cut service to make ends meet, which of course discourages people from taking transit.

Remember who is doing the planning and building. It is a developer who only has a short-term interest in the site. They want to build something, extract the maximum profit per sqft they can, sell it off and move on. They won't be involved by the time everyone moves in and starts living in that area.

You could blame the people moving in that they should've thought of parking before buying, and that's true. But people can be too optimistic when they like a place and just hope it works out. It doesn't work out, then they spend a lot of time driving around hoping to park somewhere. Early in my adult life I lived in an area like that, it was a nightmare.

The developer who decided to build a 6 story (24 apartment) building with just 8 parking spots? Long gone, not their problem.

Parking minimums are simply a requirement that if you build an apartment building with N apartments, you need to include a number of parking spots that is a function of N. The idea being that if you're building a number of places for people to live, the vast majority of them (especially in Austin) will need a place to park, and it's not really fair for you to externalize that need onto public streets just so you can make more money by adding more apartments with no parking.

That's the argument anyway, and it makes sense. The counter argument is that it also keeps us as a car-dependent city, and makes it harder to build affordable housing.

I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least in Austin. Public transportation (or, basically any transportation) is notoriously bad in Austin, and for decades we've basically had the stance "if you don't build it, they won't come", but that hasn't quite worked out.

True. But only to a limited extent as long as demand remains significantly higher relative to supply. e.g. if you're moving to a city due to work etc. and and have limited you're much more willing to compromise (use street parking, private lots some distance away etc,).

Our transit centers are literally hosted by shopping malls, more often than not, until they are significant enough to be freestanding or independent of such malls. The routes are carefully planned to get people from one major retail center to another; the stops stop in front of stores, restaurants, and venues; it's all quite transparently consumer-focused.

The transit system here would look significantly different if they concentrated on moving workers to places of business. Transit riders work in certain areas which simply aren't served at all by transit. Take call centers, for example: a call center is usually situated in a business park or industrial zone. This will not have bus stops. I worked in a call center where I'd take my bicycle every day to ride the last mile, quite literally.

I regularly negotiate with recruiters about commute distance, and it's always my chore to explain how distance means a different thing to a transit rider: I can ride the train a long ways and it's a short, easy commute; if I need to transfer 2 buses it's a huge pain, 3 hours each way, even if it's 1/3rd of the distance of that single train ride.

Transit systems which serve upper-middle-class workers in downtown hubs do it because those workers find it impractical to park downtown, not because they can't afford private vehicle ownership. I took advantage of Caltrain in the Bay Area, just so I didn't put so many miles on my car.

Transit systems like mine don't actually serve the proletariat nor support our commuting needs; they're fundamentally here to encourage consumerism and stimulate retail economies, and that's how they score such massive subsidies that they hardly even need people to pay fares.

The biggest issue with bike infrastructure is that the people responsible for infrastructure genuinely believe this. The end result is usually a scattered bunch of stupidly dangerous "bike lanes" which aren't of use to basically anyone.

You need a separate biking network, which interfaces with car traffic as little as possible. This means you're essentially building "cycling highways" through car-free or car-minimal residential streets. Doing this properly means re-engineering those streets and intersections basically from the ground up, not just putting some paint on a highway gutter.

Citation needed. Maybe a month of actual painting time once you've done all of the planning, but planning the routes and going through all of the approvals and meetings is absolutely not possible in a single month. Not even a single year.

Almost all new high rise construction just has a couple of floors of parking garage, and handles it well. I can't see buildings without that being commercially successful, especially since much of the work that attracts people who like downtown is out in the burbs (sometimes not even in the same county).

They embrace mixed zoning, where homes and apartments mix with low density commercial, even in the same building. You can own a single family house if you need that, walkable to grocery and restaurants. Portland does this at a greater scale and it’s fantastic, unfortunately zoning and public transit won’t fix the other problems the city has.

(It is very hard to have a transit system that handles capacity at load and still provides short enough head times as to not be annoying off-peak.)