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Comment by wtp1saac | Hacker News Reader

Strong Towns has called a good amount of attention to the mandatory parking requirements in many cities (and shockingly, many downtowns). Thankfully, it seems a fair number of cities are removing such restrictions, but hopefully it becomes more widespread.

In general I hope the US can urbanize, the older I get the more I realize it’s not really enjoyable living in this country. I don’t think I want hyper dense, but having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice. More places to meet people too, there’s so few third places. And not needing to drive would be a really big convenience.

(To be clear, I doubt most of the US will urbanize given the rural nature of a lot of it, but I hope at least bigger cities can move in that direction)

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> having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice.

We're at a critical juncture here in the Twin Cities. The state DOT needs to re-build the interstate that cuts right through the entire metro area (I-94) for the first time since it was first built 50 years ago. There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and replace it with a street. This would be amazing, the area around I-94 is, as you'd expect, quite unpleasant to be in. It's noisy, dirty, and dangerous. The interstate is infamous for being one of those roads that was planned to run through and destroy working class and Black neighborhoods in the 50s and 60s[1], and removing it would go some way to regaining what had been room for people to live. I think it's a bit of a longshot, but dang, I would love to see the cities recover that space for the people who actually live here, not just those who are driving through it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I'm really hoping we don't blow it by just rebuilding the stupid thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_94_in_Minnesota#His...

I live in the twin cities and I had no idea that was even on anyone's mind, I love the idea.

Please, please (please) contact everyone you can think of to support the idea. MnDOT has contact info on the Rethinking I-94 page[1], tell your city council rep, your county commissioner, your mayor, your state legislators, the governor. Tell your friends and neighbors. It's so easy to just fall back and do the same thing we've always done; making a change is really hard and we need to show that there is support for it.

[1] https://talk.dot.state.mn.us/rethinking-i94 The official term for the proposal to remove the freeway is "at-grade alternatives".

I will do this thing you say.

> There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and replace it with a street.

I'm afraid that this would wind up like Vancouver, which lacks freeways through the city and has pretty bad traffic as a result. Better maybe to tunnel it under if possible? That works well for Seattle, although we still have I5 to contend with that divides the downtown from Capitol Hill (there is talk of lidding the entire freeway through downtown).

All cities will forever have "bad traffic". Car transport capacity is plain abysmal.

Tokyo's traffic is pretty reasonable, actually. It's quite surprising. I rarely encounter a traffic light where all the cars don't make it through, unless there's construction.

This is probably because train transport capacity is prodigious, and driving is expensive.

That's exactly it. Almost no one actually drives anywhere: most of the cars are taxis, and most of the rest of the vehicles are commercial (e.g. cargo trucks). When most of the people outside are taking a train, walking, or riding a bicycle, there aren't too many cars on the roads and consequently there isn't much traffic. The busiest places I see are near logistics centers, with lots of truck traffic coming and going.

Also, driving isn't expensive in Tokyo at all, it's actually free except on the toll highways. What's expensive is parking: with few places to park, and it being expensive to rent a parking space in your apartment, it's not that affordable or practical to drive. People also aren't allowed to own cars unless they have a place to park them, so we don't have the problem of car owners fighting over scarce street parking like many other cities.

I love that Vancouver doesn't have a freeway through the city - but they've also got a relatively good transit system. IIRC it's the equivalent of 26 lanes for cars.

Vancouver has some horrible stroads to make up for its lack of freeways. I wouldn't call it very nice, more like dystopian.

Creating I-5 was really contentious at the time. It destroyed neighborhoods. My family has lived in the area for several generations and my parents can attest to this.

Lidding it would be great, but removing it would be better. There are loads of people who live in the suburbs north and south of Seattle and expect to be able to drive 20-30 miles each way day-in-day-out to commute. If the city continues to grow, this simply isn't tenable in the long run, because you can't grow highway capacity forever; they would no longer be able to do this, which would be good. Just rip the band-aid off.

The only thing worse than having I5 is not having I5. There really isn't enough north-south corridors to replace it (15th, 99, east/west lake...really that's it), given that I5 is close to the water and a huge hill as it comes in across from UW. It is already non-viable to expect a 20-30 minute commute into the city.

We saw what happened when the Palestine supporters blocked off I5 a few weeks ago...on a weekend without a rush hour, people were stuck in traffic for hours.

Can you articulate a cogent reason why people need to cross the city on such a thoroughfare just to live their lives?

You are located in the north of the city and need to get somewhere south of the city, or vice versa.

You only have a few roads to do that east or west of Lake Washington. In most cases, people aren't going to downtown Seattle, downtown Seattle is just in the way.

Why are those services not available in the north of the city? This is as much a planning issue as traffic is.

I think it has to do with the way the city grew out north and south, with the city itself as a chokepoint (since it is surrounded by water otherwise). Common reasons people need to go from north seattle to south seattle: IKEA, Southcenter, Seatac. I'm sure there are reasons for people to go north as well, but I have a harder time thinking of them (other than that they went south and now have to come back north).

There is some really great African food up north just outside the city. :-D Likewise along the northern parts of Aurora you can get some really great Korean food. (Also not strictly in the city limits).

Parks, lots of parks.

The only decent real "spas" I've found are all up north (Again, Shoreline, just outside of the city)

Ballard and Fremont are both big draws.

UW, kind of a biggie.

Federal Way has good Korean food also (well, along with lots of Koreans). Frankly, you'll find Asian communities south, east and north, with the high end in the east, the middle end in the north, and lots of value in the south.

Schools are better in the north, which is why we chose Ballard rather than Beacon Hill. The reason I don't think about North Seattle so much is because I live here, I guess (and getting places isn't so hard if I'm not crossing Seattle).

It sounds like you are already set up for I-5 getting obliterated.

If you only go to the south end for Ikea, Southcenter, and Seatac, how often do you really need to do those things? It's not like it becomes impossible to drive there, it just takes a little longer. Frankly, traffic in Seattle just isn't that bad compared to other major cities. I just checked the traffic from Ballard to Ikea, and it's 45 minutes on 99... I-5 isn't even the ideal route right now.

Of course I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here, but you also have to weigh this against just how much additional real estate would come available if I-5 was gone. I don't think people's need for driving convenience actually stacks up that strongly against all the other positive considerations.

Whenever I-5 is blocked off, 99 will be a mess, so its not like I can just say "oh, not my problem because I can avoid using it." You have to think about the traffic between Vancouver BC and Portland Oregon, it has to go somewhere, and 405 is even worse than I5 most of the time.

Sure, and those are one reason why those of us who live on the south side might drive though the city to the north side.

Seattle is a narrow city bordered by water on the west and the east, so a lot of its expansion has happened along the north/south axis.

If I want to buy furniture, I need to go either to the far north or far south of the city to a suburb just outside the city limits (cheaper land).

Culturally, lots of food can only be found in certain areas of the city, which means north/south traveling.

In regards to services overall, obscene land prices means that not much new is being built that isn't owned by large corporations, so we are pretty much stuck with what we have, and what we have is rather quickly disappearing.

> I think it has to do with the way the city grew out north and south, with the city itself as a chokepoint (since it is surrounded by water otherwise). Common reasons people need to go from north seattle to south seattle: IKEA, Southcenter, Seatac.

> I'm sure there are reasons for people to go north as well, but I have a harder time thinking of them (other than that they went south and now have to come back north).

@sean To reach UW, northgate (well it's demolished just ice skating for now lol), ballard and fremont; granted this is a bit optional, uvillage is nice to visit as well.

Also I find it a bit interesting you have a harder time thinking of interesting stuff in north seattle, I am actually sometimes annoyed having to drive north past downtown seattle to reach north seattle. I didn't really think about it but yeah ikea/southcenter are relatively easy for me to reach. :)

@uoaei Anyways regarding planning itself. Seattle is actually actively planning their next community plan, one of the items called out is whether to allow more 'urban villages' which have shops and other amenities.

For malls, Northgate should have been the north seattle mall but it's currently being redeveloped. There's U village but it's a bit high end. The other alternative of Alderwood mall isn't too bad to get to by driving but during peak traffic can be quite slow.

https://www.seattle.gov/opcd/one-seattle-plan

I live in Ballard, so maybe I just got used to everything up here. We don't usually need to drive unless we go somewhere far away (if anything downtown, just take the D line).

Light Rail to Lynnwood will be open by September of this year, which gets you to within 2 miles of Alderwood Mall. Light Rail to Alderwood? 2040, suckers.

Maybe it doesn't make sense to have duplicated services for the city. I grew up in Tucson. There's a zoo, but it wouldn't really make sense to have 2 zoos. Likewise with the Sonoran Desert Museum. There are also unique locations to visit. There's 1 Titan Missile Museum. There's 1 Old Tucson Studios. There's 1 Biosphere 2. They are spread out on opposite ends of the city. There are a bunch of hiking spots that are all different, and people don't want to go to the same one over and over.

Then you have things like the air force base or the university. They're important for the economy so you may work at or near them, but for the most part you don't really want to live directly adjacent to them. Fighter jets are very, very loud all day long (my mom lived where you could see the runway right behind her house when I was a teenager), and the military is known to dump very nasty chemicals for their training exercises. University students throw parties, and there's more crime in the area. For a few years, I lived a little over 2 miles from the university, and I had my bike stolen out of my backyard. In the further out part of town where I grew up, that was completely unheard of. Some of the downtown parks are mostly full of homeless adults. The parks where I grew up were mostly full of kids/teenagers.

So there's reasons why you might want to live within a ~30 minute drive of a denser area with services or work, but without having to actually live near a dense area. And your day-to-day services are already spread across most of the city, so you don't need to travel for those. I get the impression that many cities have a similar dynamic.

Why does it have to be a 30 minute drive? Why not a 30 minute transit ride? (if transit cannot provide a 30 minute ride that is a fixable problem)

Generally cars are going to be faster (it's point-to-point with no stops to let people on/off), or equivalently, they have greater range for the same time. If your goal is to physically remove yourself from downtown, they let you go a bit further. Also you don't have to deal with someone leaving their mac-and-cheese meal to stink up the bus. Getting away from such unpleasantries is kind of the point.

Once you take in to account traffic, transit can definitely be faster than cars. A subway that bypasses traffic entirely, or even a bus using HOV lanes, can easily outpace a car, especially if it's an express bus (fewer stops) and services are centrally located.

I've worked at places where it could take 20 minutes to get out of the parking garage when a bus stop was less than a 5 minute walk, on-boarding/off-boarding was super fast (a pre-pay kiosk meant people didn't stop to pay when they got on), and I could be all the way home in less than 20 minutes.

Go look at a map of Tucson. Look at where the Titan II missile museum is, then look where Biosphere 2 is. Now tell me how much it would cost to build public transit between those two locations, and how many people would take it.

Trailheads are fundamentally incompatible with transit. They might be philosophical opposites. A trailhead accessible by rail is a trailhead I don't want to be at.

Not everywhere in the world is exactly the same. Stop trying to force a top-down solution that works in Europe on a geographically massive city like Tucson

Totally wrong. Transit != rail. There are amazing trailheads that are easily accessible from downtown Seoul by a reasonably short busride (e.g. Bukhansan national park). The fact that buses run to these trailheads does absolutely nothing to diminish them. In fact, they enhance them, because they make it possible to through-hike! Eat your heart out, personal automobile.

Because nobody knows how to build a train, it's a mystery.

There are no major highways through Manhattan. The city is better for it.

Drive around the lake if you need to get past the city.

I used to commute from westchester county into midtown, and there were definitely parkways in, although I never needed to go all the way down to Manhattan itself. I would usually try to take the train though (often not possible given how westchester county is poorly connected to train stations).

How do you get from the GW bridge to the Cross-Bronx Expressway if there are no major highways through Manhattan?

278 also runs through Manhattan. I assume the previous poster really means something that excludes Randalls Island and the Heights.

Because 405 is already a a crowded route that becomes bogged down during rush hour(s). Your choices are pretty much sound, city, lake, city, or mountains if you are looking for a route through Seattle.

It's actually a bit interesting to see WSDOT's plan for i-5.

For capacity they aren't expanding I-5 directly, but expanding i-405 and sr167 instead for people trying to go past Seattle.

For i-5 within Seattle area, there are some 2030s plans to convert the hov lanes to toll lanes and reconfiguring the reversible express lane system. * I-5 Managed Lanes: SR 16 to Pierce/ King County Line * I-5 Managed Lanes: Pierce/ King County Line to I-405 * I-5 Managed Lanes: I-405 to US 2

https://www.psrc.org/media/4840

I don't see that working out. I405 is often worse than I5, it is just as bottlenecked as I5 is, and there isn't much room to expand it especially when it runs right up next to the water.

I feel sorry for anyone who has to actually do that commute. It was horrible when I was living in Bothell and attending UW 30 years ago.

They are constructing it right now the expansion between bellevue to renton.

https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/search-projects/i...

The bellevue to lynnwood section was already 'expanded' a decade ago though as one can tell, it still has traffic. They're opting to increase the tolls now.

I think Boeing threatened to pull out of Seattle if WSDOT did not improve freeways, some years ago -getting stuff in and out of Everett is really important to them. If I-5 was torn down and only left with surface streets, what's left of Boeing would pull out and go to Kansas or some place.

Honestly, having lived in Vancouver as well as many cities that _do_ have highways running right through town, I didn't miss that in Vancouver at all. Traffic will suck both ways, and at least Vancouver avoids having ugly, loud highways along its waterfront and through most of its downtown.

Definitely, the best case for cars is to have fast highways that bypass the city, but there isn't a lot of room with that given Vancouver's geography, so it's a lesser-of-two-evils. Beyond cars, public transit and cycling provide a better solution in my opinion anyway.

Regardless... the biggest traffic pain point in downtown Vancouver is the 3-lane (total) Lions Gate bridge.

Gotcha covered here in the twin cities -- we already have north and south bypasses in I-494 and I-694. Now we have an opportunity to get I-94 out of the middle of the metro.

One of the reason I passed on a townhome in Wallingford with a really good view was because of the tire noise on the ship canal bridge. I’m not sure the other bridge is any better though. A tunnel under it all would be ideal.

Whenever I visit Vancouver, I find the traffic horrible compared to Seattle. It’s like…no I don’t want to drive here (to be fair, I don’t want to drive downtown Seattle either, but there is so much more going on in downtown Vancouver that it’s hard to avoid).

How does a freeway through a city improve traffic in a city vs building a freeway around a city (no need to bother with the expense of tunnelling under).

Cars on a freeway are either headed to your city as a destination, in which case the speed at which you deliver them into the city doesn’t make much difference, they’re always going to cause traffic when they leave the freeway. Or the cars are headed through the city, in which I would assume most of them would be just as happy to go around the city as go through it.

So if you get to pick between through and around, why would any sane city choose to put the freeway through your city? You’re just bringing noise and pollution into your city, putting a huge great impassable scar through your city, and forcing the people who live to drive everywhere because the freeway slice up the city into segments that you move between in a car.

The highway under Boston has turned out to be one of the better solutions that the area could've had, I think. It doesn't mean that the highway that goes around (I-95) is unused, or even underused, but I-93/the former Central Artery going underground has allowed some really important revitalization of parts of the city while also giving pretty direct and (outside of the worst part of rush hour) quick access to most of Boston and Cambridge by car.

As forward-looking as much of the area is, we weren't getting away with "less car", and I don't think most places will today either.

less car means ebike and scooters which are a viable option these days

I was thinking about this too. I've never lived in Boston, but have visited often enough over the past 20-25 years. While the Big Dig was an awful, wasteful, corrupt project, the results -- IMO -- make it all worth it. Moving all those highways underground made quite a few areas much more livable than before.

You can't build a freeway around Seattle unless you plan to make it float. Well, there is 405, but that is way around (and is its own chokepoint on the east side). Vancouver has much of the same problem with hills and water making it act as a choke point. I'm not sure how the Twin Cities compares.

There’s the trans Canada highway that skirts around Vancouver. It’s the fastest route by far whether you are going into the city or through it.

The I5 meanwhile turns into the 99 on the Canadian side of the border, and goes right through the city. It’s a nightmare since it is officially a highway, but in reality just a surface street in the city.

101 in sf is the same way. it's a highway not a freeway, but it's just a city street that goes across the city.

Bad traffic is a good catalyst for spurring local commercial development, assuming zoning and other bureaucratic measures don't hamper the situation entirely.

I was just driving around in Seattle and couldn't help but notice everywhere I went was just a few miles away but it took 20-30 minutes because there was no highway in between. I have to wonder if that reduces or increases emissions. I suspect it's the latter since you have more cars running longer and stop/starting more often.

I live in Vancouver, and absolutely love how we didn’t go with the freeway idea. And traffic will suck anyways, might as well let the locals enjoy the walks and life instead.

If you search for Stroads, you inevitably bring up Vancouver. You've just swapped one evil for another. I can't imagine walking along a stroad being very nice.

https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2014/03/12/metro-vancouver-str...

Stroads aren't inevitable when you get rid of elevated highways. They're just yet another result of poor urban planning.

Yes, they aren't. But my position is that what Vancouver has (world famous stroads) is worse than if they buried a freeway through town instead.

If someone suggests deleting I5 through Seattle and replacing it with Vancouver-like Stroads, I'm going to vote against them as fast as possible.

Oh, I totally agree about the stroads, I wish we could somehow make them disappear, alas impossible. They’re doing an ok job densifying some parts of them, so it’s less dead at least.

Ah, Sydney, Australia, has the same issue :D specially Parramatta Rd which goes from the CBD to the Western Suburbs[1]... because there were many "influential" people living in that area, they never managed to get a permit to make a freeway there... I didn't know there was a name for that.

https://www.google.se/maps/@-33.8710314,151.1203316,3a,75y,2...

Traffic will suck in a city that isn't designed to discourage people from driving. It doesn't matter if there is an elevated highway running through it or not; traffic is going to suck.

Invest in transit and make it easier for people to get around without cars; that's the only way to solve traffic. Building more roads (and widening existing roads) just induces more demand.

You completely leave out that the trans-Canada highway has a six lane bridge, and a train bridge less than 5 miles east of the downtown peninsula, and there was a conscious decision to not route the freeway through the peninsula.

Any freeway through Vancouver would have to cut through all of east Vancouver and then the downtown core then Stanley park, and they would have to completely rebuild the lionsgate bridge since it is only three lanes total, and then tear out a huge portion of the residential neighborhood on the other side of the bridge.

Why in the world would Vancouver, which is on a much narrower strip of land want to do what Seattle did and divide their city in half so people can get to Whistler 15 minutes faster.

I-81 through Syracuse NY is being torn down. There is already a bypass, I-481 that loops around the city to the East to connect with I-90.

Very similar story - the highway divides Syracuse University from the poor Black neighborhoods. It's a scar through the middle of town.

I'm very excited to see how the city heals around it.

Congrats, that's huge!

I-375, along the northeast of downtown Detroit, MI, is being replaced with a boulevard.

Houston is about to remove the Pierce Elevated, a section of I-45 that separates Downtown from midtown. This is a very big deal.

This article[1] shows multiple cities that have done that, many in the USA. It seems that in every single case, it was always a very good thing for the city.

[1] https://www.archdaily.com/800155/6-cities-that-have-transfor...

I find it interesting to see the words "twin cities" referred to here as if we all know what that is. I can see that this is referring to Minneapolis as per the link, but without that we would be left to guess.

Here's a list of many twin cities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_cities

Tbf I thought it was common knowledge. My home town's sister city is Mishima; I've been there.

I think urbanizing core metro areas is actually key to protecting rural areas.

I was sitting in a coffee shop in a small town and I overheard a conversation next to me. Two elderly men were talking, and one of them made a comment to the effect of, "I like a rural town, so I try to vote to keep it that way." Two or three decades ago, this town really was a small farming town, but the population is growing and the town is changing. It's not becoming a city, though, not by any means! As the city (somewhat) nearby is becoming more expensive, the suburban sprawl is, well sprawling. The small rural town is transforming into a suburb of the city.

I would agree that this is a negative change for the small town, and I would argue that the solution is to urbanize the nearby city. There should be much more housing, and it should be much more affordable to live in the city. As it stands, many people want to live in that city, but find the housing prices unaffordable. So these people make a compromise between how much they are willing to pay on housing vs how long they are willing to travel (almost always by car) into the city. I count myself in this group.

Urban areas and rural areas complement one another, and there's pros and cons to living in either kind of place. However, post-WWII styled suburbs are, in my opinion, a net negative.

> I think urbanizing core metro areas is actually key to protecting rural areas.

It really is. Some subruban and rual places are starting to get this as well. A common theme among the ones that get it is to provide density bonuses (i.e. if you allocate large blocks of conservation space, you can build more densely). The result is that you get the same overall density in an area but the people are living much closer together and not sprawling out and building over the natural environment.

I personally think most of them are too conservative with their approaches (often setting upper limits on density even with the bonuses) but the general approach of "build dense to limit the impact on rural spaces" is progress.

There are some silly culture-war politics which makes reasonable discussions difficult. But also some of the politics problem is that a lot of these decisions are being made at the local town/city level. Small rural towns may try to dig in their heels and and resist urbanization (and the specific tactics involved are usually kind of bad, imo). Meanwhile, big cities often don't have strong incentives to not sprawl, at least in the US. Sprawl moves the costs of housing and transporation onto someone else (either the surrounding towns or the individuals), while the city maintains some portion of a tax base (sales tax and local businesses). Some cities have some political will to fight for these anyway, but even at the best of times, these policies have to make some harmful compromises.

I think the most promising solutions to this problem are policies from state-level governments.

Absolutely. The enemy of rural is suburbia, not urban development. Build moderate density city centers, ideally in the form of several small self-contained villages that happen to abut each other, and leave the surrounding area as legitimately rural as possible.

It should decrease housing costs as well. The rules in my area are two spots per bedroom - mandatory. But my building is in uptown Dallas and the main draw to the area is that people work in the area and walk to work. So many people don't own cars or are only a one home house hold.

And because it's a highrise parking spots are expensive. Like $50k+ each. And that goes directly to the price of housing in rents.

Meanwhile, even at the busiest our garage is more than half empty. What a waste.

D magazine even used a picture of my garage in their article: https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2021/12/the-city-of-da...

> The rules in my area are two spots per bedroom - mandatory

Wait am I reading this right that a 3-bedroom family home would come with space for six cars? How many families have 6 cars that's insane O.O

Sounds like a regulation someone long ago thought would for sure prevent anyone from building anything. No way they actually wanted that much residential parking ...

I don't think there's a good one-size-fits-all rule. A 3 bedroom unit could be 3 couples living together and splitting the rent, or it could be 1 family, or it could just be 1 person who wants an office and a gym. The rule should probably be "1 space for car owned", like when you go to buy a car, you have to prove that you have a place to park it.

Just restrict who can park on the street. Then if people want to park a car, they'll need a residence with a space, and if there's demand for residences with parking spaces, developers will build them, minimums or not. The issue with minimums is that they require building spaces above and beyond demand, but markets should do just fine at making sure demand is met, as long as there are barriers to externalizing it.

In Japan you have to vouch that you have a parking space for your car. I think a similar rule would work for the states. However, it will cause a huge tension between the parking spot haves and parking spot have nots, without adequate equality will be seen (rightfully so) as a move to limit cars among those who can't afford parking spots for them.

For better or worse, the USA has basically made a contract with its people that "you have the right to a car, and because of that, we will provide really sucky public transit." That contract has to change before we start aggressively taking cars out of the system.

You don't have to "vouch" that you have a parking space, you have to prove it. The police will actually come to your home and measure your parking space to make sure it's big enough for the model of car you want to buy.

I can't imagine Americans submitting to a law like this.

> if there's demand for residences with parking spaces, developers will build them

That's somewhat optimistic. In the absence of rules, developers will maximize their profit above all else. Apartment units are far more profitable than parking, so they'll just build the maximum units with no parking.

I lived in such a neighborhood once. Result is 50 unit buildings with 4 parking spots. And the result of that? People driving around the blocks for hours looking for parking, fights breaking out over parking, cars constantly vandalized for taking over "their" spot. It was not fun.

Why isn’t a parking space specifically attached to a residence than bought it? That’s the reason for the fights right there.

Letting the developer maximize profits also lets residents choose residences without parking spots, to save money.

> The rule should probably be "1 space for car owned", like when you go to buy a car, you have to prove that you have a place to park it.

That doesn't provide any guidance to the builder though, so what should they build?

I mean, typically laws do not substitute for the creative process of designing and marketing buildings. What color should the walls be? What kind of kitchen faucet should you have? What should the countertops be made out of? What flooring surface will you use? There is no reason that "how many parking spaces should we build" be the 1 question that the government answers for you. Make an educated guess. If you're wrong and build too many, you leave money on the table. If you build too few, then people will buy some other unit with more parking.

> What color should the walls be? What kind of kitchen faucet should you have? What should the countertops be made out of? What flooring surface will you use?

All of these can very easily be changed by future buyers if they prefer something different.

But if the developers builds a 50 unit apartment building with just 4 parking spots, that building is now there for many generations and there is no practical way to change that decision.

Mandatory parking minimums in American are insane.

The rules for them are a joke and just made up at random with little justification for them other than trust us bro.

Climatetown has a good, if long, video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8

> Meanwhile, even at the busiest our garage is more than half empty.

Unfortunately, that sounds like the spaces are close to being properly priced in the market?

Getting more utilization would require the price come down, and the price decrease may not increase the overall revenue immediately.

You would need cheaper nearby parking in order to force the price down. If there is no cheaper parking nearby, then the market is at the clearing price.

The price of a car itself is significant, there may well be zero utilization in an area where residents simply don’t own cars.

Fayetteville Arkansas was one of the first towns to remove the mandatory parking restrictions and a ton of abandoned downtown buildings quickly became restaurants. They were absolutely right.

My jaw hit the floor when I learned that some cities actually apply parking minimums to redevelopment of downtown properties and not just stuff like new surburban strip malls, to the point that some projects have bought adjacent buildings and demolished them in favor of parking lots. Maybe it's true that the r/fuckcars crowd likes to throw the term "carbrain" around a little too freely, but this kind of ass-backward policy makes me think we really do suffer from a self-destructive mind virus.

It's not always ass-backward.

People forget that one of the reasons why the malls became so popular and helped collapse the old downtowns was, you guessed it, lack of free parking.

With malls, you could come into a boundary and spend a significant amount of time in a walkable arena with lots of different stores. You knew there would always be parking except possibly at Christmas.

Downtown? Not so much. And you probably had to pay for parking. And carry quarters for the meter. And risk getting parking tickets. etc.

Malls were what all the anti-car people supposedly promise will happen when you remove cars. And yet, I know of no malls that ever gained residence areas within walking distance. Which seemingly, would have prevented the malls from collapsing.

The anti-car brigade has yet to demonstrate why that should be different today.

But, in turn, "within walking distance" is exactly what is rendered impossible by a system in which every significant center of economic activity is required to have square miles of parking around it. It's sort of like a social form of obesity; it's clearly not quite as poisonous as the most vocal detractors say, but the sheer bulk does make it harder to move in what we might consider an optimal way.

Also, for what it's worth, you're citing "carry quarters" as some kind of dystopic microaggression to an elder millennial who was absolutely fucking thrilled to share a roll of quarters with his dad when we went to the local game store and crushed Sengoku on the nearest Neo Geo cabinet.

> Also, for what it's worth, you're citing "carry quarters" as some kind of dystopic microaggression

Uh, yeah, it actually WAS. Quarters were a non-trivial amount of currency (a little under a gallon of gas) back when downtowns still existed and parking meters took them.

There is a reason why "meter maids" were hated so much.

The youngest person who was able to drive when gas was a quarter dollar a gallon is now in their early nineties.

Absolutely not, I’m at least 1/2 that age and remember has being $0.35/gal around when I started driving.

There are 100 cents in a dollar fyi.

> Malls were what all the anti-car people supposedly promise will happen when you remove cars. And yet, I know of no malls that ever gained residence areas within walking distance.

One of the malls near me, about 5 years ago they tore up a good chunk (like a third) of its massive parking lot and turned it into an apartment complex. It now butts up almost directly against the mall.

So at least there's one.

The mall in Voorhees, NJ (a Philadelphia suburb) added some housing and support businesses within a close radius, and it turned a near-dead mall into a thriving space.

There is a failing mall (A larger mall was built not very far away so there is no reason for this one to exist anymore) near me that proposed to do that, but the city refused to make the needed zoning change.

> People forget that one of the reasons why the malls became so popular and helped collapse the old downtowns was, you guessed it, lack of free parking.

Yes, I witnessed this first-hand in the neighborhood where I went to school.

Very vibrant walkable downtown full of shops and restaurants but also tons of street parking. Then one year government wanted more money so they put up parking meters and pushed up the rates to a point most people couldn't afford it (it was a low income area).

Now ~20 years later? The whole downtown is boarded up abandoned shops, just a couple liquor stores remain open. Very sad. All the shops that could move, moved to the malls.

> Which seemingly, would have prevented the malls from collapsing.

I don't think nearby residence areas would have prevented malls from collapsing.

Online shopping made them largely obsolete as a place to actually shop, with many going bankrupt and others hanging on by a thread. Then a global pandemic cut some of the remaining threads.

This is a common narrative, but malls are overall doing just fine. A few are failing all the time - enough that you can cherry pick many examples to make it appear the case. Most failing malls though are close to some other mall that is doing okay - or in some cases both malls are doing bad as there never was a reason for the second to be built.

> Online shopping made them largely obsolete

Eh, after some lost packages, dealing with USPS for claims, wanting to touch the product before purchasing, and easier returns, I find myself returning to brick and mortar lately.

Seems that you're in the extreme minority in this one. I find that most items that are in brick in mortar stores are just junk, and I can have a wider selection online. Generally I don't return things because I was selective before purchasing. I've never had a lost package but I'm pretty convinced that I'd get a free replacement. Returns are simple.

>And yet, I know of no malls that ever gained residence areas within walking distance

How is that even possible?

Here in the Greater Toronto Area, practically every large mall has at least a few high rises. Some malls are even constructing residential units directly on top of the mall. Even a larger strip mall will generally have some medium sized apartment buildings nearby.

Downtown Mississauga has dozens of high rises up now right next to its biggest mall. Those buildings have completely changed the city's skyline.

I'm so torn as to what I want my future living situation to be.

I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey and Maryland, spent a little time in my 20s in the denser-than-suburbs suburbia of the Bay Area, and then the past 14 years in San Francisco proper. More recently I've been spending 1-1.5 months at a time living out in "rural" parts of Truckee, CA.

I just don't know anymore. In San Francisco I live within a few minutes' walk of two dozen or so useful businesses (corner store, grocery, bakery, butcher, restaurants, bars, etc.), and everything I need to live I can get by walking no more than a half hour. I hate driving and love this.

In Truckee, the closest convenience store is a 40-minute walk, and all the other necessities are at least a 10-minute drive. On the other hand, I'm a light sleeper, and the intense darkness (moonlight, at most, only!) and quiet in Truckee was wonderful for restfulness. In SF we live near a Muni bus depot, where they clean buses well past midnight every night. I can mostly -- but not entirely -- get darkness with blackout blinds, but it's really not the same.

I definitely don't want to go back to the suburbs, but that sort of thing -- with much better city planning than most (all?) US suburbs have -- has potential to give me quiet and darkness, but the ability to walk everywhere I need to go.

Ultimately, though, what drives where I want to live is where my friends are. As I get older, I find it harder and harder to make new, close friends. Moving to a new place where I don't know anyone sounds like torture to me.

This is what bothers me the most with the car-centric mindset so many people have. You have to choose in-between being car free in a very dense area or car dependent in a rural area. In reality small towns can be just compact enough to allow many small businesses to thrive, as it's the case in other developed countries. Malls are the main source of problems...

Small towns don’t typically have malls. Small towns are more on the order of “oh we just got a walmart”. I think you’re conflating small towns with mid to large towns or small cities.

Where you live is a compromise. If we had Star Trek style teleportation I might be interested in living on the moon, or Mars. Like you I find that friends (and family!) are the biggest reason to not move - I can make new friends but it is hard.

There are advantage and disadvantages to living everywhere in the world. You soon learn to enjoy the things that are possible where you are and not get into the things difficult/impossible.

The US is urbanized...if you want it. There are plenty of places where people that enjoy living in urban areas can do so. However, to me, that sounds like an unenjoyable hellscape. Been there, done that. The beauty of the US is that people have choices, and aren't pigeonholed into someone else's idea of "enjoyable".

I think you got it backwards. Cities now only build these subury sfh highway parking lot hellscapes and ban anything remotely dense

So everyone is pigeonholed into something you want

density can be hugely detrimental to climate change if the city isn’t built in a green way, which no US city currently is and will likely not be in your lifetime. under the guise that your desire to live in a highly dense climate wasteland, by 2035 we should require either everybody move away from city centers, or require cities be zero emission.

your decisions are affecting me, isn’t that the norm now?

If we can't make the more efficient cities sustainable, why in the world would it be possible to do the same thing with everyone spread out?

There really are not plenty of places in the US where you can live a good, urban, non-car-oriented life, and you can tell that is true because the ones which do exist tend to be very expensive, showing that they are in high demand. You clearly do not desire an urban lifestyle, and I won't try to change your mind about that, but those of us who do want urban living generally don't find that our choices are either plentiful or affordable.

I think it's because urbanites keep getting suckered into letting builders do "condensed affordable housing" under the false premise that more housing means cheaper housing. Obviously that would only be true if the units were owned by competitors. Where one contractor owns all the units they set the prices, and they have no reason to make them "affordable." Just condensed.

> they have no reason to make them "affordable."

The money they make is {rent} × {units rented}. The reason they don't set rent to $1billion is that they will rent zero of them. I think this shows that they do have a reason to lower prices, at least at some range.

Sure so long as the assumption is that they aren't cheating. But apparently Congress thinks they are. Hence the lawsuits.

Supply and demand would like to have a word with you.

Congress would like to have a word with contractors about "supply and demand."

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-and-w...

For the downvoters, nice of you to hope I'm wrong but unfortunately: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-and-w...

Honestly who is downvoting this anyway? Do you work for big contractors or just like unaffordable housing as long as it's condensed? Evil much?

This is entirely unrelated to the presence or lack of housing in urban areas.

If anything, a monopolistic landlord would like to expand and build more apartments, to extract a higher volume of above-market rent.

You appear to be paraphrasing me. Did you get a bunch of downvotes? Or was this not related to my comment?

You shouldn’t worry about downvotes on HN, many here are biased and are looking for reconfirmation of their beliefs rather than discourse.

I'd like to not worry about it, but it then prevents me from posting. The suggestion is to then stop posting and move on, which I fear allows the washing of dialogue and kindles political approaches that further the damage we're doing to society and the environment through corporate influence. If you, as a developer, feel good about your job helping corporations inflate rent prices, you're not going to look for another job. If you can clearly see that your employer is destroying society, you're very much likely not going to be willing to stick around. Maybe that's doesn't matter in most cases, but clearly big tech employees have influenced government contracts, etc.

I did not downvote your comment but I certainly thought about it; between your contemptuous attitude toward people whose preferences differ from your own, and the way your ire over the scandal you're alluding to has blinded you to basic principles of economics, your remark added more noise than signal to the discussion.

Which part of my commentary is contemptuous? I pointed out why I think housing is expensive in the city, based on my experience voting against it.

Well since you didn't answer, I'll give you my thoughts for your benefit. Reading back, I think you're projecting. I welcome you to reflect on your behavior as it well meets your own criticisms. Here are examples:

>contemptuous attitude toward people whose preferences differ from your own

I appear to be welcoming the dialogue, and as I read back, you appear to be downvoting to ensure others won't see the dialogue (downvoting prevents people from replying). This is worse than name calling. It's literally contemptuous. And worse, you're accusing me of your crime.

>and the way your ire over the scandal

I hope you can cite where I did that, otherwise this also is contemptuous. How would you know if I'm angry? Is it because you hear my words in your head in an angry voice? There's a rule about that on HN.

>blinded you to basic principles of economics

Me and Congress? It sounds like you might be missing something that Congress and I are aware of. Can you admit that or would that require you to have a better attitude toward people with a differing preference from your own?

>Remark added more noise than signal to the discussion

Is that because it doesn't align with your world view? If that's not why I'll be glad to consider your defense to this point. I hope it will include some honest reason for not wanting to hear other people's opinion, so much so that you would downvote them for sharing it.

Overall, the irony in just this one comment is largely incriminating in regard to HN rules, and in regard to your own aspirations of yourself, I would assume, given the strict expectations you've set out for me.

> between your contemptuous attitude toward people whose preferences differ from your own

it would be great if everybody on HN felt the same, unfortunately this is quite commonplace. read threads on any EV post for instance.

Not to mention safe urban areas. Most US urban areas are relatively high crime, and even if you don't encounter actual crime you are made to feel unsafe by a bunch of drug addicts in hoodies who yell racial slurs and other creepy dudes who approach you unsolicited, in contrast to urban areas of e.g. East Asia which tend to be extremely safe.

Boston is about the only city in the US that I feel mildly safe walking around the downtown at night.

> relatively high crime

You mention crime in regards to safety within a city, but there is a study floating around Twitter that factors in traffic fatalities in suburban and rural areas, and the dangers of cars make suburbs and rural areas MORE dangerous that urban areas! Take a look at this article detailing urban vs rural deaths: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-rural-a...

well that’s clearly flawed. i certainly don’t buy SF being safer than literally any rural area.

> The beauty of the US is that people have choices

This is backwards, you’ve got no choices in a lot of US cities other than to drive.

Do you have experience living in any variety of urban areas in first world countries outside of the US? Have you been to many cities in the US? I don’t think you can possibly have done either of these and still think the US has any urbanism. And literally all most moderate urbanists ask for is “please lower regulations so that the free market can build what some of us want and I can actually have a choice.”

>Do you have experience living in any variety of urban areas in first world countries outside of the US?

The vast, vast majority of Americans have never even been outside the US (except maybe to Canada, and possibly Mexican tourist spots), let alone lived outside the US in a first-world country, and this includes the OP and most people on HN. It's why reading comments on urbanism on forums like this is both entertaining (because it's so wrong and US-centric) and depressing.

Most Americans on hackernews have never been outside of the US? That strikes me as a near impossibility. Evidence?

There are only 160 million US passports in circulation (out of a population of 330 million. So roughly half. Of course HN people tend to be middle class or higher so they'd more likely be in that 50%. But still, the US is huge (roughly the size of Europe (Europe is approximately 10,180,000 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km). There's plenty of places to go in the US without needing to go elsewhere. And look at the tiny passport numbers in the 1990s! That's because before 9/11 you didn't need one to go to Canada or Mexico if you had other identification (like a driver's license) showing you were from the US. I've heard that you can still go to Canada that way if you drive rather than fly, but I haven't tried it.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...

Until about 20 years ago you didn't need a passport to travel to Mexico or Canada. And passports only last 10 years so it is possible some have traveled outside the US in the past, but no longer have a passport.

> There are only 160 million US passports in circulation (out of a population of 330 million. So roughly half

> vast, vast majority have never left the US

how does 1/2 of the population having a passport equate to the “vast, vast majority” having never traveled? How does this logic connect?

> because it's so wrong and US-centric

I'm reading these threads from my walkable town in western Europe for the same reason ;D

> The vast, vast majority of Americans have never even been outside the US (except maybe to Canada, and possibly Mexican tourist spots)

That sounds made up on the spot, and borderline xenophobic. Data please.

The most common criticism I hear against cities is that they are loud. Cities aren't loud; cars are loud.

You experienced a bad compromise of having high density of a city and the high car ownership of suburbia. Like a "stroad," a road that is trying to be a street, it doesn't work.

Try to spend a week in a place with walkable density and no cars: Amsterdam, Oslo, or closer to US, Disney Land.

Cars aren't that loud. Trucks, buses, and trains are loud, and that is what you have a lot of in urban areas.

Thing is, we can build better buildings that are more resistant to noise pollution, regardless of the source. If I can't hear my neighbors, then I can totally ignore them. Which makes it livable.

The problem with this is that it reinforces the notion that you "live" inside and only go outside when you need to get somewhere. How are you ever going to enjoy a nice street-side cup of coffee in peace? Or take a walk around your neighborhood? Or engage in any outdoor social activity?

If you allow the outside to be unpleasant, then people are increasingly going to stay inside which has negative societal ramifications.

I think we can agree that not being woken up by your neighbors drunkenly blasting music at 3am is preferable to the alternative. But people should be able to live their lives and if they want to celebrate a big win at work or whatever, as long as it doesn't bother me, who am I to say they shouldn't at 3am on a Wednesday? Yes the outside needs to be nice as well, but we have to live together, and the best way is for me to be unable to hear them.

The outside needs to be nice, but making inside unpleasant doesn't accomplish that.

> The outside needs to be nice, but making inside unpleasant doesn't accomplish that.

ignoring the problem outside exacerbates the issue and eventually leads to an undesirable outside. don’t live with broken windows.

Unless they're made badly, trains are very quiet! They sneak up on you. Cars, trucks, motorbikes, and construction sites are loud.

Diesel trains are loud and shake the ground. electric trains are quiet and can sneak up on you.

Have you ever lived near the "el" in Chicago?

Cities were loud long before cars. See

https://www.medievalists.net/2016/02/the-noisy-middle-ages/

https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-noise/

https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/a-19th-cen...

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.64.5....

Practically none of those sources of noise pollution apply to modern urban areas. How many blacksmiths do you have working on your street today?

We've driven out nature, we don't have livestock or any animals other than rats and a few birds, we don't transport cargo on carts with wood & metal wheels, we don't live in industrial areas that produce noise pollution, we have laws governing loud music and such.

Above all, we have high quality windows now which block out almost everything but the loudest noises, usually those produced by cars.

I stayed in a hotel in a city recently. I wish the cars were the loudest thing. There was an ice-skating rink blasting music until after midnight and then a jackhammer at 6am. Needless to say, I didn't sleep well.

I get that, there are always going to be outliers, but "cars" are the right answer to the noise pollution question for the vast majority of the population. Construction is a valid one too, but that one is unavoidable except for all the car infrastructure.

I used to travel to SF regularly, including after the removal of cars from market street. Additionally, i stayed on market street because of the ease of access to the offices i needed to go to. if cars are in fact the problem, how come market street is still loud enough today, with no cars, at 2 AM, to bleed enough sound through a double pane window with dense curtains?

cars are not the problem. anybody with any experience in life knows the more stuff and people you cram in a small area, the more noise (an heat for all you climate changers)

It might be better to differentiate between chronic and acute sources of noise. Traffic contributes mostly to chronic noise.

Maybe for you but I’ve stayed in plenty of extremely urban areas in the US and abroad. The traffic noise was at worst a light background noise, white noise if you will.

The noises that bothered me were the live music from downstairs blasting into my room after midnight, people making a ruckus in the halls outside my room, people yelling on the street, loud emergency services vehicles.

Just like in an airplane it isn’t the sound of the aircraft that is annoying to me but the guy two rows in front talking to his bros.

The nice thing is I live in the suburbs and don’t hear any of the above and I also don’t hear traffic noise. The worst I hear is an occasional landscaping crew or circular saw but those don’t happen at 1 am.

> Cities aren't loud; cars are loud

Here's the Not Just Bikes video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

> The beauty of the US is that people have choices, and aren't pigeonholed into someone else's idea of "enjoyable".

For now, not to long ago the left seemed adamant about forcing everyone into sprawling concrete jungles. I give it a few more years at most before they’re back at it pushing to cancel cars and force people to move to high rises.

Parking minimums are required by cities because underparked development projects dump their parking problems on the surrounding neighborhoods. These types of externalities shouldn't just be hand-waved away in the name of "urbanization." The lack of parking creates real problems for residents, police and businesses in growing cities every day.

The market is better at solving this problem than central planning.

Not when it comes to ADA requirements...

Oddly enough, the ADA laws were written in a way to use the free market. The government can't force you to be ADA compliant. Instead, it relies on lawyers and their disabled clients to sue you into compliance. An entire cottage industry of law firms who specialize in ADA compliance have sprung up since the law's inception.

ADA requirements are outside of the planning sphere though.

In fact, that ADA requirements came from laws from the federal government rather than from urban planning is pretty good evidence that the market (ie democratic legislation) is better at this than centralized planners of urban areas.

Having a few ADA parking spots is fine and a drop in the bucket compared to the wasted space from all that mandated parking.

Also, people with disabilities tend to drive less than those without them.

This is the stated justification but it doesn't really correspond with reality. The specific values chosen for parking requirements are based on nothing at all, literally just copypasted from other cities or made up out of thin air. They are overestimates in almost all cases.

Besides, even if you mandate parking, it's an absurdity to mandate free parking.

I doubt that.

Major European cities with no such minimum parking requirements do fine. They have public transport and bike infrastructure, so many people in dense urban areas don't need cars.

I bet no one in major European cities requires to bike like ten miles each way. The point is the size of American cities is vastly different to European ones, so what works that side of Atlantic rarely translates "as-is" here.

(I am disappointed about this oft thrown around comparison, since my city reduced one lane on several major roads and created bike paths. Sadly, we now have major traffic jams and hardly any utilization of the bike path. Turns out someone on the city council wanted to turn it into Denmark)

> I bet no one in major European cities requires to bike like ten miles each way.

I am in Amsterdam, and lots of people bike 15km each way, including many students at the high schools my children attend.

Part of the problem is in america if you want to bike that far, you probably have to take some route designed for cars. It’s very stressful and in many cases very risky.

Local climate is a problem, too. It’s not fun to bike to work some days when it’s very hot and humid, and then in the other half of the year, deal with freezing rain.

This is a valid comment. Many times, when the US makes "cycling infrastructure" (scare-quotes intended), it's just awful: painted lines on a busy, dangerous road, or at best a path immediately parallel to such a monstrosity. Little wonder people don't want to ride a bike next to a bunch of giant SUVs speeding at 75mph.

And it is true the weather in many US cities tends to be less mild than in Amsterdam, but that can be worked around with proper clothing.

I am vehemently on the side against cars, but I will wholeheartedly refute that our summer weather can be worked around with clothing. It's far too hot and humid for that to do anything.

When I lived in a hot American city, the saving grace was that at both office jobs there was a shower available. After breakfast I'd stuff my work clothes in a backpack, bike to work in shorts, take a quick shower, and arrive at my desk the most clean and refreshed person in the department.

Doesn't Amsterdam have pretty mild winters though? Or does the ground become covered in glass ice with large amounts of snow regularly?

I think winter makes a huge difference in how bikeable a city can really be. Western Europe tends to be mild on that front.

> I bet no one in major European cities requires to bike like ten miles each way.

15km is on the outer edge of normal (my bike commute was 11km). But yeah, we can build more densely because we don't require massive amounts of car storage everywhere in the city. The best time to start densifying was 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now.

> my city reduced one lane on several major roads and created bike paths. Sadly, we now have major traffic jams and hardly any utilization of the bike path.

Try counting how many humans use the traffic lane and the bike path per hour. You might be surprised.

If it's too far to bike or the weather is lousy you can always take public transport. Bikeable cities are easy to cover with public transport.

The idea is that most of the time you don’t need travel 10 miles and if you have to, public transport will cover you. I live in Amsterdam, and I can do all basic errands within a 10 min walk and in around 10 min cycling I have access to endless amount of shops, restaurants and museums.

You're talking about city owned and maintained on-street parking.

I think we can agree that the sane thing to do is charge for it and let the market set the price. If home owners or developers want to build their own on-site parking, they're welcome to. Personally, I'm sick of having four parking spots in my garage tacked to my rent despite being a one car household.

Or did I misunderstand, and you feel on-street free parking should be paid for by tax payers? I have to disagree. I pay for my own parking. And people like me generate more tax revenue for the city because it costs less to service density, so I'm also funding on-street parking. I don't think that's fair. We should not be subsidizing car dependency. If you want to drive, pay for it yourself.

If your neighborhood or development is the one with no parking and you are not in a walk-able city, you are trading dollars for the stressful situation of trying to figure out where to park, getting in to conflicts with neighbors over parking, and getting your car crashed in to or vandalized. I tried it, I didn't like it.

So how do you get from a non-walkable city to a walkable city? We can't remove parking minimums because everyone needs a car because it's not walkable. But we can't take out the parking lots, because no one walks, because there's too many parking lots between the places people want to go. And we can't put in dedicated bus lanes, because that would reduce parking, which we need because buses are too slow. How do we break the cycle?

Pretty much sums up the problem imho.

For me, it was pretty simple: I packed up and moved to a walkable city (which meant leaving the US). The only way you're going to get a walkable city out of a non-walkable US city is to completely change the zoning laws, eliminate the free parking and making driving horribly inconvenient and expensive, then go through a cycle of death and rebirth as the city largely dies out and then gets revitalized a couple decades later. I don't want to wait for this process, and I don't even see any serious action this way anywhere yet; I'll be dead of old age before there's a decent number of walkable cities in the US.

Here is what I see taking shape across a number of cities:

1. A big micromobility boom. This describes a number of phenomena: the e-bikes are perhaps the most visible since they add a lot of power to a bike commute and make it easier to justify doing big distances by bike. But equally, the docked bikeshares have found a foothold in many places big and small, and those help extend transit range quite a bit while creating an institutional platform for bike-friendly streets: the bikeshare services will always lobby for whatever makes them the best option.

2. The "unbundled car". This is something Tony Seba uses in his discussions on disruption: the car bundled a large number of services into one solution: "get in the car and drive." Many of those solutions have transitioned to online, delivery, etc. So the car's raison d'etre is diminished today and diminishing further as we develop more alternatives.

3. The future rebundling of transport as a service. The first step in this was the reshuffling of taxi/delivery drivers to gig economy labor. This was probably too early and too reliant on zero interest rates, but one of the things that always courted investment in these businesses was that robotics could take over and perform self-driving. And while it's still not an evenly distributed phenomenon, Waymo exists. I have it on my phone. Waymo itself may not be the last word in how self-driving tech is deployed, but the tech will increasingly realign "cars" with "transit" by lowering the cost of professional vehicle operation. In the current US market, there's been a shortage of bus drivers, and scheduling them is a large pain point for deploying transit. You can't drop driver quality because of the liability involved in operating huge vehicles. Private autos have gotten away with a legal hack that normalizes poor driving by making the individual an owner-operator and blaming them for their inevitable failures. So the economics will work out that cars and fixed-route mass transit are still competitive, but you will get more mobility per dollar invested by adding self-drive to your transit system, because then high-quality driving and scheduling scales and you can flood the streets with both big and small transit vehicles. Therefore, in the future, city buses will run more frequently on more routes and at later hours.

You can slowly, gradually reduce parking minimums.

It doesn't need to be slow. Private developers are not stupid - they know when their customers arrive by car and thus demand parking so they have incentive to figure out how much parking they need. As people switch to other modes of arriving they will decide that the parking isn't needed and eventually worth tearing up for something else. (but this assumes you provide those other options - if transit remains terrible people will drive and need the parking)

Everything you are describing can be solved by paying for parking. Even in the busiest areas of a downtown American city, you can find a monthly parking lot that will rent you a secure parking spot that is truly yours.

Of course, it won't be free -- it will cost what it should cost, market rate.

Vastly outweighed by the problems of parking minimums:

* Increased housing costs

* Decreased housing supply

* Increased air pollution

* Increased traffic

* Increased noise pollution

* Increased water pollution, stormwater usage

* Decrease in community and neighborhood cohesion

If a person feels they need parking, they can pay for it. They don't need society to force parking to be made available to everyone, whether they want it or not.

This is solvable with parking permit programs. Make street parking in those surrounding neighborhoods resident-only. And then people considering living in the "underparked" neighborhood who need parking will have no alternative but to select units that include parking, or live in another neighborhood (and if enough people opt not to live there, developers will include more parking to satisfy demand). This is a problem regular markets can fix: governments don't need to require developers to meet (or often, exceed!) what people actually want.

Where do guests park when they come to visit?

Where I’ve lived it’s usually been solved by letting anyone park there for a higher fee. Residents get to park at a big discount or for free.

Or you can hand out guest passes to residents.

So then the city has to issue parking passes plus guest passes, and then actually enforce them. Seems totally impractical for all but the densest cities.

Sure there's some administration but it can be mostly handled digitally nowadays. I've seen it work in many cities that are not particularly dense by European standards.

The enforcement are handled by the same people that do normal parking enforcement. They scan the plates, see if there's a valid permit/ticket and write a ticket otherwise.

Which "people" do normal parking enforcement? Most cities do zero parking enforcement in residential neighborhoods unless someone specifically complains.

Where I saw this, households would generally pay for a 2hr guest permit (maximum one per household, or maybe two) that they lend visitors to display in their windshield, and if someone needs to stay longer, then you pay for a temporary two-day guest permit at the parking office. Either way, the permit is used for street parking. Finding a spot can be a minor adventure but is usually doable. You may have to walk a block. If someone is visiting for longer then they probably need to pay for a spot in a parking garage, or just -- fly in and leave the car at home.

They don't. It so simple. Or they walk or bike whole distance.

I think after we have fixed the car parking, we really should start looking into those bikes and ban them from street parking.

That comment is so ridiculously out of touch. Most of my guests are coming from outside of biking distance.

> Where do guests park when they come to visit?

This is indeed one of the biggest problems with such parking permit scheme.

What happens is the resident needs to move their car to the street (possibly driving around for a long while to find a spot) so the guest can park on their driveway. It's a pain for everyone involved. And you better never have a party where more than a couple people visit at once.

> (and if enough people opt not to live there, developers will include more parking to satisfy demand)

Factories that produce widgets can pretty quickly adjust the specs to changing demand. Houses don't work on that schedule.

If enough people want to buy a house but they need parking but those units don't exist, there is no way for developers to just change what's there to satisfy demand. That'll be a multi-decade effort.

I’ve lived in areas with this parking problem in multiple cities for over a decade now.

I can confidently say, I don’t care about this problem at all. Parking further up the street from my house is a small, small, small price to pay for the benefits of being walking distance from interesting things.

Exactly. Pretty much every argument I see against removing parking boils down to 'The city gets denser with more nice things to the point I can't drive my SUV there any more!' A lack of parking is a symptom of a thriving location, not a problem. A real solution is more transit and more transit oriented development. Removing parking is a start through.

> A lack of parking is a symptom of a thriving location, not a problem.

This is false. I've seen many downtowns that are not thriving and lack parking. They do okay for the midday luck crowd, but they are empty by 6pm as everyone has gone to the suburbs.

Lack of parking is a feature of thriving locations as well, but it isn't an indicator.

Parking lot requirements make sense in areas where cars are the only viable means of transportation. Removing those requirements only makes sense when other forms of transportation are provided to reduce the number of cars required to get people to the places of business.

Near me, the city is talking about removing a big parking lot and strip mall and turning it into a mixed use space, but as far as I’ve read there has been no talk of transportation. The area sits at the intersection of two stroads. It’s technically walkable, but it’s not a pleasant walk. It’s technically can be biked, but not without competing with cars for space on the road. There might be buses, but they are very infrequent and slow. Everyone I know would want to drive, as the alternatives are significantly worse than driving. If people can’t park, they simply won’t go.

I’d love to get rid of my car, but that requires the city, and region, make significant investments in public transit infrastructure. The non-car option can’t just be available for those who are willing to put in a lot of effort to avoid using a car. The non-car options need to be better than the car option. Easier, cheaper, safer, and more pleasant.

Removing parking lots makes driving worse, but doesn’t make the alternatives better.

requirements don't make sense, numbers are pulled from thin air in the regulations so even in this case requirements should be elliminated

The parking lot requirements are a large part of what makes cars the only viable transport option in an area. They do need to go. And yes, other means of transport need to be provided.

The problem I have with the thinking in this article most of the parking lots are privately owned so saying 'tear them up and plant trees' is not something that can be implemented by the government.

If mandatory parking requirements did go down, and zoning was increased, then the people who own it would willingly put forth the effort to make the space more useful. It would also help sort out what is considered "unused" - which right now is a nebulous concept.

It's easy, just charge all property owners for sales surface area. It messes with lots of things, water table, flooding, generates heat. All things that create cost for a community. That's how Berlin decided to tackle the issue.

I also assume Berlin does not have high parking requirements.

For instance, this ordinance in NC says you need one parking space for every 300 sq feet of a store. So the average 30,000 sq foot grocery store would need 100 spots, at least.

Without getting rid of requirements like these the stores will not be able to remove spaces if they wanted. I very much like land value tax (which sounds similar in effect to what you are proposing) but you need the zoning flexibility first.

https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/swansboro/latest/swans...

I don’t think I want hyper dense, but having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice. More places to meet people too, there’s so few third places. And not needing to drive would be a really big convenience.

What does hyper dense mean? And how is that detrimental? Tokyo meets all of your requirements, for example, but you would call that hyper dense for sure, right? The article is "about" Baltimore, MD. Does that city meet your threshold of hyper dense?

As with most things, a lot of this comes down to money. The more dense an area, the more use the things you want are used, and the more money they make, they more likely they are to thrive. The more dense an area, the bigger the tax base, the more money there is for nice things that maybe don't make money on their own.

maybe they talk about russian style hyper dense blocks but with 0 infra that looks like hell...

I've long suspected that this model is meant for cities to make money on DUIs. They close the public transit before the bars in almost every city across the country, and they ensure the bars are far enough away and restrictive enough that you have to drive. Then they tax the hell out of taxi services to ensure that there aren't enough cabs to take you home and rides can exceed $100 (which is a lot in most of the country by area, not population). It's zoned this way where bars and restaurants aren't near houses, in summary.

If they did it like Spain, for example, where you can just walk out of your home, sit on the street at any restaurant, and drink wine with your friends, we'd have exactly what you're describing.

But then they wouldn't be able to rake in DUI profits.

A city does not want drunk people crashing cars into infrastructure or murdering its inhabitants. They don't want to support injured people who are unable to work. They don't want these types of cases taking up the court's time. All this stuff costs a city money & they aren't inviting people to do it just in case they get caught (because the type of person who can't afford a cab home probably also can't afford to replace a downed traffic light).

Save the conspiracies for red light cameras or speed traps.

The above makes me think we're overestimating how much damage to infrastructure and human life is really being caused. As much as I wish you were right, the solutions are nearly free and they are right in front of our faces and being actively selected against by municipalities across the country. I'd love to hear the explanation for that.

you don't necessarily need to urbanize. just make things more walkable. Instead of having 1 large library or grocery store the size of a theme park, have 10 smaller ones in walking distance instead.

I prefer the metric is an 8 year old should be able to get to the library alone. I don't are if they take the bus, walk, or ride a bike - but they need to be able to get there alone. This is a proxy for safety of various transport modes, available routes, and community attitude toward kids being out alone.

That's what functional urbanization looks like! From where I live in central Seattle, there are four grocery stores within ten minutes' walk. They all have parking lots, but I rarely use them; instead of buying a lot of groceries at once, it's easier to pop on by every day or two and just carry a bag home. There are no skyscrapers here, it's all townhouses and low-rise apartment buildings, but that's all we need - if we could fill the city limits with neighborhoods like this, there'd be no need for any more sprawl.

Without sufficient density, these things don't make money (or the municipality doesn't have the tax revenue to keep them open). You can't "just" make things more walkable. You also need enough people to raise money to maintain sidewalks, buy stuff at stores, work in the area, etc.

The grid life in the US with large roads and few commercial streets really suck imo. I dream of going back to Europe but can’t unfortunately…

Have you considered moving to an urban area?

Have you considered paying the full cost of living in a non-urban area via taxes?

I haven't considered that. Do you have any data surrounding tax increase on urbanites caused by suburbanites? (If I understand your point.)

Here's an infographic from Sustainable Prosperity: https://i.imgur.com/2rgkaOZ.jpeg

That's just one area in Halifax, but the idea is that higher population densities require less infrastructure per person. Less road, power line, water/sewer pipe, etc. However, low density houses usually pay less in property taxes per unit area than high density, meaning that increased infrastructure cost is coupled with a considerable tax break.

The problem is that the removal of parking requirements typically doesn't address the parking-lot scenario depicted here. It's often a developer handout that results in a degraded standard of living for existing residents in the neighborhood around a new development.

Let's say a developer builds a bigger, taller building than what was there previously and adds residents. If they're not required to include sufficient parking, the new cars will flood the surrounding neighborhood, and existing residents will now have no place to park. This depends on the type of neighborhood, of course, but it happened in mine in Chicago. Not being able to just come home and go inside, but rather have to drive around and around in ever-larger circles (in the winter) to look for a parking spot because some alderman got paid off by a developer to screw his constituents... that's the reality.

We're seeing this in L.A. too, where local politicians will sell out to developers and publicly excuse it by pretending that parking creates cars and cars = bad. L.A. is a giant county masquerading as a city, and it's never going to be Amsterdam (you hear this asinine comparison all the time). Pretending that people aren't going to bring cars to their residence is absurd and damaging.

But big vacant parking lots growing weeds? Hell yeah, we have those all over the place, around dying malls and boarded-up Macy's. But what did CA politicians do? Pass laws that allow developers to destroy one single-family home and build 10 units there, overriding any local zoning or review and without local ability to prevent it.

So now we're going to pave over even MORE ground and cut down MORE trees, while said malls are still sitting there. As if the place isn't hot, barren, drought-stricken, and depressing enough.

Anyway, that's what I think of when I hear "get rid of parking requirements:" corrupt sellouts.

A few developers will do that. However people who need to drive will soon catch on that parking is hard in those buildings and so they will go elsewhere. This is a self correcting problem if you let it run its course.

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