Now: If you build a building of this size, you MAY build as many parking spaces as you think you need.
Seems like a strict improvement to me.
Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).
EDIT I am rate-limited so can't reply, but this part:
"If you have 200 cars"
This is only the case if the demand for parking / driving is perfectly inelastic, which would be quite extraordinary. Empirically, when you charge for parking or institute toll roads, traffic tends to fall, in some cases sharply (because many journeys are low value). I repeat: if the parking spaces are still congested, the price should be raised until they're not.
Assuming the number of cars would stay the same is like the lump-of-labour fallacy. Lump of metal fallacy?
Then there's the supply side: guess what, that's not inelastic either! If it's profitable to provide parking, someone will build dedicated facilities for it and charge for their use. This may be an alien concept for some of you, but only because parking minimums cause such oversupply that they can't be run profitably. In cities where parking is priced sanely, it's unremarkable to see this.
"Cars will just overflow into adjacent neighbourhoods" okay, so charge for parking there too, until they don't. Duh.
I don't see why cars should get to sit somewhere rent-free but a human being can't. Urban land is valuable; if you want to occupy it, pay what it costs, ya fuckin welfare queens.
my language is harsh but it's hard not to be when I see so many americans (it's always americans) confidently claiming that life is impossible without free parking. but I live in a city without free parking and things work just fine. I can literally just look out of my window and it disproves all the doomsaying. every commute and trip to the supermarket is uneventful and not ruined in the slightest by a lack of free parking. you pay for parking and it's fine. it's literally just fine. I went to virginia one time, I saw literal acres and acres and acres of empty parking space, oceans of asphalt; nobody seemed to think anything of it but I thought it was mad, like some kind of braindead economic allocation fuckup from a communist country that we'd all laugh about. I wanted to shout: you are being terraformed by asphalt-based lifeforms! why do I have to explain to americans how a free market price mechanism works? on a forum for people to shill their california startups? I shouldn't need to tell you this!
If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously. The overflow ends up clogging the surrounding neighborhoods, on top of the outcome described by OP.
Edit. @pc86, both points you make are valid but neither addresses or fixes the problem being discussed. They are an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion.
Yes. If you own a limited resource it's your right to make money from that. I know we like to pretend people making money from things they own is somehow evil but it's how all of civilization has been built and is an objectively good thing.
> If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously.
No, but is a point where 50 can park simultaneously and nobody who wants to park there and can afford to is denied that ability.
Effectively you'll still have 150 cars that cannot be parked next to the owners' residence, that get dumped on the street elsewhere probably in the next lower cost neighborhood, and with the additional issues OP mentioned.
Put it another way, if you want to solve the housing crisis and I tell you "owners can set whatever price they want for the house to extract maximum value and nobody who can afford that will be denied the house" am I wrong? But did I solve the problem?
That sucks for the people who are denied the ability to park there because they can't afford it though. Telling people that they need to walk miles to get to a doctor or a grocery store and that only the wealthy deserve to have access to 90% of the city doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
There parking minimums drive up housing costs. They’re why that person has to drive longer to get to that place. Perhaps why they need to make a car payment at all.
You can't solve the problem of "I need a car" just by taking away the places people put them at night.
The problem we have is built into the design of our cities from the ground up and it impacts every aspect of how they are structured and used. Eliminating parking spaces while the absolute need for cars continues to exist doesn't solve the problem at all.
This is the kind of move that should be done selectively, and only after alternative options are created, if it's done at all.
There is zero evidence for this. There is evidence for parking minimums raising housing prices.
I’m curious about the overlap between off-street parking minimum requirement advocates and anti-development NIMBYs who don’t believe in supply and demand.
When most people need something, and there is suddenly a much smaller supply of that thing, prices for the now scarce but still needed thing tend to increase. That's basically self-evident.
If you have evidence that shows otherwise please feel free to provide it. I suspect that if examples showing otherwise exist at all they won't be remotely representative of the situation these cities will face.
Yes. We have rising, elastic house and stable, inelastic paid parking prices [1[2]]. Due to these regulations, we cannot substitute limited space away from off-street parking towards e.g. housing.
[1] http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PricingParkingByDemand.pdf
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Funnel-plot-for-the-pric...
The idea that developers being responsible for providing adequate parking would mean that we can't have adequate space housing is a new argument, but not a compelling one. Clearly jacking up the prices for on-street parking means we'd have more money and more space for other things, but that doesn't solve the problem of there being too many cars on the road or eliminate the need for people to keep and drive cars.
While the one paper you linked to suggests that higher prices could help reduce the demand for cars and driving, it also explicitly states that price of vehicle ownership is only one of many variables that has an affect those demands. The availability of viable alternatives to car ownership/use is the one being ignored here.
If I will die unless I go to the hospital every week for 6 months for chemo treatment and the only way to get there is by driving, the amount they'll charge me for parking isn't really a factor until it becomes so high that I can't afford to get the treatment I need. The fact that I also can't get to work, the grocery store, the doctor's office, the pharmacy, my kid's school, or the homes of my friends family without a car means that I'm still going to need to own (and still need a place to park) my car even if I could afford to uber my cancer-ridden body to and from the hospital every single week. (this is purely an example, I'm not, to my knowledge, cancer-ridden)
You simply can't solve the problem of people needing to own and park cars by only reducing the number of available parking spaces. Reducing the number of parking spaces is something that should be done only once viable alternatives are established.
On topics like this you can argue from first principles endlessly and never get any closer to the truth. Better to show us some data, I think.
No one is arguing against the idea that eliminating parking requirements increases (in short-run, first-order analysis) the market clearing price of parking spaces.
The contentious part is that the presence of the freedom to build housing without parking requirements (enabling, e.g., housing plus commercial spaces to be built in a space that would otherwise have the same housing plus parking) does nothing to reduce the demand for autos.
Why would it? Without alternatives to cars as a means to get people to where they need to go, people will still require cars. As long as people are required to own and drive cars not having enough available parking does nothing to help reduce the amount of cars being owned/driven. In fact, we know that it increase the number of cars on the road. That's how we end up with statistics like "30% of all traffic in urban areas come from people circling around looking for places to park".
You can't solve the problem of people needing cars by not addressing the reasons people need cars, and only reducing the number of parking spots for the cars people already need.
Because it would both enable and incentivize development patterns where people need cars less.
> Without alternatives to cars as a means to get people to where they need to go, people will still require cars.
Dense mixed-use development puts more of the places people need to go in places that don't require cars to get to them. (It also mass transit to other places more viable.)
Your focussed on alternatives ti cars to get to a fixed set of locations, but a big point of dense mixed-use development is to provide alternative locations.
> You can't solve the problem of people needing cars by not addressing the reasons people need cars
The reason people need cars is that the places they need to be a far away because of development patterns; one of the key features of development patterns that causes this is...the space use created by parking requirements.
As for enabling, nothing stops developers from doing that now. As for incentivizing them, if they can make more money not meeting most people's needs then that's what they'll do. This is also why so many cities have a huge amount of luxury housing available, but a massive lack of affordable housing. What makes developers the most money isn't always what's best for a city.
> Dense mixed-use development puts more of the places people need to go in places that don't require cars to get to them. (It also mass transit to other places more viable.) Your focused on alternatives ti cars to get to a fixed set of locations, but a big point of dense mixed-use development is to provide alternative locations.
I agree with this, but none of these cities are creating mixed-use development or building out their mass transit systems to link them. They're getting rid of parking spaces without any of those things in place.
> The reason people need cars is that the places they need to be a far away because of development patterns; one of the key features of development patterns that causes this is...the space use created by parking requirements.
A reason people need cars is because things are far away. Another reason is that there are no other means to get anywhere else. As long as those things are true, people still need cars. As long as people still need cars, they need places to put them.
The space use created by parking requirements would be a nice problem to solve, but it can't (and shouldn't) be addressed until the requirement of owning cars has been dealt with. When people no longer require cars, we can reduce the amount of space we've set aside for housing them.
Zoning regulations and parking requirements, which in many places exist for for both housing and commercial development, and vastly expabd the footprint of both, often do.
Still, I think it's better to have those costs borne by developers and passed to property owners than have everyone else suffer the negative externalities caused by not having those necessary parking spaces available.
I think we'd agree that ideally, the parking spaces wouldn't be necessary because of good public transportation and city planning, and I think that once those things are in place those parking spaces could be reclaimed and repurposed, I just feel that for as long as the parking spots are needed it's better for the developer to provide for them in their plans.
If they have no place to put them, they won't have them, and if they don't have them, then either (1) they won't live there at all, or (2) they don't actually need them.
> This is the kind of move that should be done selectively
No, having parking requirements should be done selectively, if at all. If there is sufficient market demand, the requirements will be unnecessary to get developers to include them, if not, then the requirements are most often a harmful constraint that limits housing supply.
This is demonstrably false. People still need cars to get to where they need to go, like work, or their doctor's office, or the grocery store. There are no alternatives. Public transportation doesn't get them there. Ubering everywhere is more expensive than owning a car. Until alternatives exist, not having a car isn't an option.
If you've been to cities where there isn't enough street parking to meet demand you'd know that even when people have no place to park their cars they still keep cars. They just go to extremes to find/keep/make parking wherever and whenever they can and often have to spend long periods of time driving on streets/circling blocks to find a spot. They block traffic to wait for someone they think might be leaving soon, they walk great distances to get from where to park to where they need to be, they park in illegal or dangerous places.
There are many negative consequences to this behavior which impact everyone around them, but people can't help but do it because they're left with no alternatives. Examples of this abound. I've seen statistics like 30% of all traffic in urban areas are just people looking for places to park. (some studies have found that number to be as high as 75%!) or that the average amount of time drivers spend per year looking for place to park is 17 hours!
> No, having parking requirements should be done selectively, if at all.
That means the same thing.
> If there is sufficient market demand, the requirements will be unnecessary to get developers to include them
That's not how markets work. If it will make developers more money to not give people the amount of parking they need, then developers will not give people enough parking. All other negative externalities be damned. None of it means there will be fewer cars on the road.
No? They park them outside the city centre. Or they rent them. You're speaking as if Austin is the first city in the world--or even America--to do this.
If you live in an apartment complex inside the city centre, parking outside of it won't help you. If you live in an apartment complex outside of it and there's not enough parking spots to leave your car while you sleep you still have the same problem.
> Or they rent them.
Most people can't afford to uber everywhere. Should the poors not be allowed to go to work or the doctors office?
Austin is only one example, but any city without enough parking to meet demand has these same well-documented problems. Please tell me which cities in America have ditched off-street parking while doing nothing else to reduce people's dependence on cars and had no problems as a result.
Of course it does. You use city transportation systems when in the centre. And you take an Uber or train to your parking lot when you need to drive a bunch.
> Should the poors not be allowed to go to work or the doctors office?
Versus not being able to afford housing?
That's the tradeoff. There is no free lunch. Increasing space dedicated to parking raises the cost of housing. It also reduces density, thereby reducing wealth and increasing transit times.
That's not how it works. Have you ever lived in an area developed without any parking planning? I have, it's miserable.
People will still have the cars because they are necessary for every aspect of life. Making parking difficult does not change that, so they'll still have the car, now it just becomes a neighborhood warzone on where to park and everyone suffers.
The way you change this is not by removing parking, but by removing the need to have a car. Build excellent and affordable public transit first and then.. well there is no step two.
Most people don't really like to drive and don't like car expenses, so if you build excellent public transit a lot of people will give up their cars and the parking problem disappears as a side-effect.
That's not a good situation for anyone except for a very small number of people who will make more money than they have been, and small number of already wealthy people who will find lots of available parking they can easily afford now that they don't have to compete with the poors. Everyone else gets screwed and the problem of people needing cars doesn't change at all.
Right, so now only the most rich can go visit the area (shops, friends).
I know a lot of people have the opinion that only the rich should get to do things but I don't subscribe to that. At least with public street parking the misery is egalitarian, both the Yugo and the Ferrari can circle for hours looking for parking.
Although having enough parking for everyone would be even better.
That's why 90%+ of the people in Singapore use public transportation or carpool. Granted, you would need the public infrastructure for that to be possible. But if you make cars unaffordable for the average person, suddenly there would be A LOT more pressure on local government to get public infrastructure done.
There is a litany of "middlemen"; Drs, Corporations, Hospitals, Insurance, Pharmacies, Drug Companies, marketing, Lawyers ... ALL have a stake in something.
Like it or not, our cities are already built to make cars a necessity and pricing people out of access to the majority of places within a city isn't a solution to the design of public transportation or roads.
How is *not requiring* parking to be provided inducing scarcity artificially?
London for example have buildings which are prohibited of having parking (or getting street permit). Providing an option not pay for parking space when buying an apartment is not that.
While I have a car, and enjoy having one, and have a nice parking space in a heated underground garage, I also work remotely and don't drive all that much. I'm in a privileged position and could afford to uber (within the city anyway).
This is just a bad/non-solution to a very real problem that will do more harm than good.
Parking lots aren't what's keeping people in subdivisions from being miles away from those places. Parking spots aren't what's keeping people in cities from being able to walk to where they're going either. Parking lots are extremely walkable spaces even while being hot and unattractive.
You could get rid of every parking lot in your city and you'd still have highways you can't cross or safely walk/bike along side of, you'd still have housing set miles away from city centers, and you'd still have no access to most places by public transportation. Our cities are built from the ground up with the expectation that people will use cars to get around. That was a mistake, but getting rid of parking spots isn't the cure.
I've been in places like Tokyo where public transportation met all of my needs. We can do it, but you need the infrastructure in place first or you're just hurting people by leaving them with zero alternatives to what you're taking from them.
Two birds, one stone
It'll take a massive increase in public transportation infrastructure, and a long and slow redesign of our cities and how we live to fix the mess the auto-industry has put us in. It's a transition that's long overdue, but the reality of the situation now is that people still need their cars.
Making sure that people have something to fall back on before we take their cars away from them or remove the places they put them at night/charge them should be a priority. What these cities are doing is the opposite of that.
Think for a minute about what it means to be wealthy. Is it having more money? Yes, but... The true meaning of being wealthy is having more options available to you. If some people can park but some people can't park, then by definition it's the wealthy people who can park.
Another way to look at it is, what's the point of accumulating money? It's to buy you more options. Let's say hypothetically that the government gives every individual person a fixed amount of housing, food, a car, and free parking. But it is illegal to trade these commodities in any manner; you are only entitled to exactly your share and no more. In this fantasy world, accumulating money would be meaningless because it doesn't enable you to do any more than your fellow man.
So yes, the fact that once you start restricting driving, then only the wealthy can afford to drive and park - that's a feature, not a bug. It's by design.
The reason people keep buying cars after prices rise 57% in a decade: the extra $10,000 amortized over 10 years is less than living even 1 year near the things you drive to. Things you drive to includes your parking space!
It doesn't make any sense to own a car and live in a dense urban development. What more needs to be said? Live in the suburbs if you have a car.
Fortunately bridge and toll community members are insensitive to these changes. They see no problems with 2 hours of schlepping, $16 of tolls and $25 parking to drink $0.50 of vodka priced at $17 at a downtown bar. If they were sensitive to these issues, that behavior would have ceased much sooner than a pandemic-induced shock to their routines.
That said, I don't see anything wrong with the suburban lifestyle, I am a product of it. Instead of focusing on issues like parking costs, which cities can never beat suburbs at because suburbs have essentially infinite land, cities should fix their education systems, because they can realistically beat suburbs on the concentration of human capital. My community would be far more appreciative of that than bullshit about parking spots.
Public transport can be good but it's never that good. I live in zone 1 (ie very centrally) in London and there are still many journeys where it is quicker and cheaper for me to drive than to take any kind of public transport. This is true for longer journeys (going outside London) especially but surprisingly it's also true for quite a few short journeys (even going a couple of miles) - it depends a lot on the layout of the public transport network and the roads, and this is before considering journeys where I might want to bring bulky or heavy things with me which are basically impossible to do by public transport. I end up driving enough that the cost of car ownership vs short term rentals makes sense in pure economic terms but the convenience difference of ownership vs short-term rental is also pretty big.
Cool. Let's do that, too!
People need to stop being shitty to each other.
> Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).
I don't think this is fair. Fewer parking spaces might mean higher profits for developers on a per-unit basis, but I'd rather them make money and provide more additional housing units that are sorely needed, especially in cities, than build apartment complexes with garages or parking which then necessitate higher taxes and more public spending to support roads, car crashes, and other related externalities.
"But public transit costs money too" yes, just redirect state highway department budgets to transit 1-1 and then you're not spending any more and getting higher ROI.
[EDIT] Incidentally, maybe we shouldn't subsidize truck shipping! But using usage taxes to pay for highways while not shifting the burden such that truck shipping is paying the lion's share of the cost and is no longer (so very much, at least) subsidized, would be making non-commercial drivers subsidize truck shipping (even more than they already are) which subsidy (to some degree) benefits everyone, including non-drivers, which seems like a weird and/or bad move to me.
Rural living would be way more expensive and inconvenient without truck shipping subsidies. Which, maybe making rural living artificially cheap is a good idea and maybe it's not, but that's one big shift that would happen if we made truck shipping pay its way entirely.
[EDIT] For true long-haul, I'm with you, the majority of that's surely only viable because of those subsidies, and we'd be better off pushing that to rail, ship, and barge.
I don’t know how this is the fault of too little parking. Nothing excuses this type of behavior.
Rideshare. Also, this screams market opportunity for paid parking. (Unless, of course, the problem isn’t as consistently dramatic.)
They've also seen ZipCar type services where short-term rental vehicles are just abandoned. Once, I woke up to find a luxury Alfa Romeo sedan that had taken a joy-ride across the border and was abandoned in front of our place.
The main street there dead-ends, and so the highest traffic is from lost motorists vainly attempting to hook up to the freeway.
My parents jealously guard their prime parking spots, I mean insanely: they love to walk but if they need to tote cargo more than 1 yard out of the way, we never hear the end of their moaning, and I live hundreds of miles away. They participate in Neighborhood Watch and won't hesitate to get cars tagged, inspected and towed if someone tries to mess with their "public street parking" spots. (Recently renovated "garage" is full of junk.)
As a holder of a driver's license who hasn't owned a car since 1997, I also never hear the end of their moaning about rude cyclists, oblivious pedestrians, City-sponsored transit lanes, or repainted roads to encourage sharing with pedestrians and multi-modal transport.
Around here, most of the moaning and screaming is directed at light rail, without considering for a moment how it takes drunks and inept drivers off the road and completely out of their way.
You have to take away cars (parking) first so that they start demanding public transportation.
For something to be available it has to be required by building codes.
Old world cities can have great public transit because they were dense long before cars existed and have hundreds of years worth of civil projects designed to get people from A to B.
We better get started right away then, huh.
Most of the housing and most of the population was obliterated in the late-1930s through the mid-1940s, as you might recall. Two-thirds of the city's population had fled before the German invasion started even.
No code requires marble countertops. Yet they get installed because buyers want them.
Cities like Austin have regulated themselves into a housing-cost crisis. It’s almost a miracle that rational economic policy is being given space by voters.
Parking is.
Until parking spaces cost more than apartments do, developers are going to favor building apartments over parking one hundreds times out of one hundred.
And even if this does drive up parking costs to match rents, is that such a bad thing? Why should we legally mandate that developers subsidize parking?
We have an abundance of parking required by law and not enough housing units - removing the requirement should encourage more money to be invested into anything but parking no?
Seems like letting businesses decide whether or not it's worth opening a business with the available parking would cause one of two things to happen:
1. We wind up with the actual correct amount of parking required for a given set of businesses - instead of some arbitrary amount dictated by legislatures decades ago. 2. Everyone is tired of the lack of parking and votes to increase public transit funding.
Once we have apartments with and without parking on the market, we'll see how much more people are willing to pay to get parking, and future developers can build accordingly.
Queens NY has this problem pretty severely. Zoning requires parking past 7 stories in building height, so every building is 7 floors at maximum density with no parking. Residents often find themselves circling their neighborhoods for hours looking for parking. Living without a car and being fully-dependent on public transit absolutely sucks in most of the borough.
I live in small (2,000ish households) New England town with some streets that predate automobiles. Nobody is really space constrained. The housing 3 miles a way is at least half the cost of my town.
The public transportation is poor and it took about 25 years to build less than 3 miles of bike path.
Should my town ditch off-street parking minimums in an attempt to increase housing supplies?
Clearly the answer is no then.
That doesn't make space-constrained Austin's answer an automatic yes either though. The city is very car-dependent. The starting point isn't "take away peoples' ability to have a car". It should be "make it more attractive not to have a car".
Changing parking minimums comes far down that road.
Ironically, I still share your opinion about over regulation, but we can’t ignore the other argument.
"Follow the money" always works.
Builders want (reasonably enough) to increase profit. Marble countertops add a few thousand in cost but now you can sell these as luxury units for tens of thousands more! So it's profitable, so it happens.
Building parking space instead of additional units is not profitable, so it won't happen unless required.
Not all square footage is created equal!
Snow management can be done in other ways but that is a cost analysis exercise.
In snowy areas the piles can grow quite large and take up a sizable amount of parking lot space. These large piles then take considerably longer to melt away than snow in surrounding areas, sometimes lasting well into Spring.
Can you see the design conversations going, "let's provide for practically no parking spots, so we can get less foot traffic and nobody will want to come shop here!"
In areas that support public transit and promote multi-modal, the businesses which thrive there are ones which cater to folks who eschew private vehicles. And that's a distinctly different crowd! So I think it'll work out great.
If the cost to provide (guaranteed, protected) parking spots ends up being higher than people are willing to pay for them, maybe they're not actually worth what we're currently paying for them.
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".
This is the original tragedy of the commons though: a bunch of people assuming they can just park on the street. The frustration is the solution. Either build yourself private parking, pay for private parking, or ditch the car. Or enjoy the frustration.
The vast majority of people will choose "(D) None of the above". They'll move out, causing the neighborhood to decay.
So Alice wants to build a high-density housing tower without having to build a ten-story parking structure beneath it, and we prohibit Alice from doing that, even though Bob wants to build a ten-story parking structure right next to it, because we prohibit Bob from doing that.
I feel like these could both be solved in the same way.
We have minimum parking requirements that produce an oversupply of parking, therefore parking is cheap, therefore building parking garages is unprofitable. If you don't mandate them, the cost of parking will increase until building parking garages is profitable, and then people will build parking garages (or have fewer cars, in places where that's practical).
This doesn't even increase costs. Right now someone is paying $3000/month for a $2500 apartment and a $500 parking space. Without the parking requirements you could get a $2500 apartment for $2500 and choose whether you want to pay the extra $500 for the parking space.
Not only that, this would make it cheaper to build more apartments, so then the $2500 apartment drops to $2250 from lower scarcity, which reduces the cost of apartment+parking space as well by not force-allocating a parking space to someone who can do without a car and leaving more for the people who can't.
Bob wants to build it on the next lot over once he sees these new buildings going up and is willing to bet that the new residents will generate demand for parking, and can choose how many stories to make it based on the local demand for parking, which is based on numerous hyper-local conditions that are best evaluated by the owner of that specific lot and not just based on how many housing units are in each building.
Alice is a smart capitalist and will build two apartment buildings instead, maximizing profit from selling the units.
By the time the buildings are completed, the mortgages signed and the people start moving in and fighting for parking, Alice is long gone, moved on to the next project in some other city.
This is the problem parking minimums were intended to help reduce.
Good. Then more people will choose different forms of transportation or internalize their costs. If parking becomes scarce, providing parking will become more profitable and people will pay the actual (enormous) cost of temporary car storage downtown.
Parking becoming difficult and/or expensive pushes patrons to places where that's not the case.
/s
And the 'spend' from people driving in from the suburbs to go shopping will easily be overshadowed by greater economic activity resulting from a denser urban core.
That's not really how it goes. This assumes that if you make it painful for people to do what you don't like (park), they'll stay and live the way you want.
But no, people will simply abandon the area due to inconvenience. The area I mentioned above (previous post) went from a nice affluent residential area to a dilapidated area where only the poor and university students (also poor) lived. Everyone who could afford to leave, left.
Humans will always look for a better solution for themselves unless you impose a complete dictatorship. It is not possible to advance a cause (whether it be less cars or more public transit or better EV support or better bike paths, etc) by simply making the status quo inconvenient. People will simply avoid it.
You advance a cause by making the new alternative actually more attractive, then the majority of people will happily adopt it.
This is what happens, and exactly what happened near here. All neighborhoods within a mile or so of the university require permits for street parking.
But here's the thing, fighting fire with fire does not lead to a nice society. Now it's a huge pain to visit any friends within that zone because they have to shuffle their cars (with resident permits) to the street so guests can park on their driveway to avoid being ticketed. When you fight fire with fire you also get burned. Lose-lose.
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.
"Impact fees" are just a way to discourage new development.
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.
If anything doing this is a way for cities to implicitly get citizens on board for investing more in public transit. All of the new apartment buildings in the hip parts of town don't have any parking for your cars, so you're forced onto public transportation more, which you might think stinks, so you now care more about voting for infrastructure improvement.
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,).
then they get carried forward as precedent because people hear "eliminate parking minimums" as "eliminate parking spots" and fight against it, but they don't make any sense.
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.
Well, since what you have been doing hasn't worked, maybe let's try the other tactic.
Your claim is that 'getting rid of parking' is what is being pushed, when it is getting rid of mandatory, arbitrary parking minimums.
If there is needed parking it will be built because developers don't like building tenancies that don't get sold because no one can live there.
Besides, the argument isn't "let's look at the calculation for required number of spots and tweak it if necessary", it's "let's get rid of parking altogether and pretend like people won't just still drive and park on the street."
I mean, you seem to be adamantly opposed. I assume for good reason (at least in your mind). Why not make an argument that actually relates to the proposal? At least I would give your opinion more weight that way
End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit.
Unfortunately, there probably will be transitional years of people fighting for parking spaces at ridiculous prices before the transit gets built.
This is especially true about Austin.
https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/photos-...
There needs to be a will to change.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/france/motor-vehicle-ownership-p...
Overall, the change has been small, and most people still have a car. And the metro network was very advanced by 1939 (unlike some US cities, these lines stayed):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro#/media/File:M...
That's in one of the densest and most famously walkable cities in the world. Most cities in the United States aren't going to be Paris anytime soon, and that's before we consider the dismal state of regional transport (particularly around the West Coast) which was also already extensive in France prior to 2000.
There is just no real basis for claiming that Europe restricted cars prior to building good transit. You might find it in one or two cities, but certainly not most -- in Europe, socialist and communist parties held significant sway until the late '70s in many countries (in a few they've hung on), and pushed for transit the whole time.
America needs to CHOOSE to build transit. The carrot approach hasn't worked, so it's time for the stick.
So do you propose we lift all bans on drunk driving as to make life slightly more enjoyable for a subset of society?
At some level all laws trade off “making life shittier” for some to “make life better” for society. You can argue against particular laws but categorically being against it reduces your argument as asking for anarchism.
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.
If there is a demand for parking spots in an area, dedicated paid parking can be created — based on market forces rather than minimums. This parking is also often more dense and built upwards. It’s a more efficient use of city space.
As is, parking is subsidized by all residents of a city rather than the people who actually consume parking. Much of this space goes unused throughout the day, and the aggregate effect necessarily means sprawl.
Nixing parking minimums for businesses in already-walkable, transit-connected downtown cores is overdue, and areas close to that density can easily become new downtown cores when infill is allowed to cover their parking lots.
Nixing parking minimums for downtown apartments, to your point, is a terrible idea (outside the densest areas of NYC at least, where parking minimums are already effectively nil) because most transit systems in the US are designed to bring suburban commuters into the city, so even if said apartment is situated directly above a multi-modal mass transit hub, it might not necessarily connect its residents to much more than a handful of giant parking decks clustered around a freeway.
If they had built 60 parking spaces and let residents park for free, I feel confident there would be at least 50 spots in regular use based on how nearby buildings with larger parking lots are utilized. Since the parking is underground, the most expensive type of parking to build, I also feel confident that rents would be at least 10% and probably 20% higher with "free" parking.
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.