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> Without other rules or planning to compensate, it creates a tragedy of the commons where every builder wants to offload their parking needs onto the rest of the neighborhood in order to save money.

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.

I live on the edge of Cambridge, MA. I can leave my house and go east into the city or west into the suburbs. Almost all of my voluntary spend is done to the west because of the dramatically higher convenience.

Parking becoming difficult and/or expensive pushes patrons to places where that's not the case.

Put another way, it will be harder for people in suburbs to reap the benefits of density while being subsidized by it.

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.

Good. Hollowing out the urban core will prevent pollution from busses, trains and bike tires, and subsidize the oil industry.

/s

> Good. Then more people will choose different forms of transportation or internalize their costs.

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.

They’re basically what Soviet intelligence classified as “the shiteaters.” People with money and a good life who inexplicably want to eat shit.

> It was very frustrating that residents could never find a place to park

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 frustration is the solution. Either build yourself private parking, pay for private parking, or ditch the car.

The vast majority of people will choose "(D) None of the above". They'll move out, causing the neighborhood to decay.

> 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.

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.

It is certainly a place to start! Although in this case I never heard of a developer wanting to build a parking structure on their own (and don't know if existing code would have prevented them). It was always the city wanting to build an adjacent parking structure as part of revitalization efforts to extend the success of that neighborhood further down the street.

So part of this is the cart-horse inversion.

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.

The lack of developers building parking garages tells us that the actual value of the parking is not as high as we think it is in most areas - and in fact parking garages are often built more to protect the vehicles than to provide extra parking.

No one is prohibiting Alice from building the 10-story parking structure. The change is she's no longer required to build it.

Alice doesn't want to build it because if she doesn't she can afford to build twice as many housing units on the same lot, which is worth more money even without parking spaces, and the building doesn't need such an expensive foundation if it doesn't have to support a multi-story parking structure in addition to the housing units.

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.

> No one is prohibiting Alice from building the 10-story parking structure. The change is she's no longer required to build it.

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.

Yeah, the local college planners in our city wanted to “discourage” vehicle use, and deliberately had only a few parking lots put in, mostly reserved for faculty of course. What has actually happened is every residential street within 4-5 blocks absolutely choked with vehicles parking on the curbside during the semesters. It’s a shitshow.

The local residents need to retaliate with requiring permits for street parking. Fight fire with fire.

> The local residents need to retaliate with requiring permits for street parking. Fight fire with fire.

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.