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Comment by travoc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I doubt that.

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