What's a parking minimum?
https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/plaincity/latest/plain...
Codes like these are the secret sauce of America's asphalt deserts, in which you'll find - by international standards - comparatively large restaurants and stores. Walkable cities tend to gravitate towards smaller equivalents, and more of them.
Usually parking minimums are WAY too high in required parking spaces to make sense in most cases. Which leads to stuff like a arena having 5x the land area be parking than what is taken up by the arena itself. [1]
0: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/harrison/latest/harris... (this is for harrison, ohio, just happened to be the first result I found. it's under commercial -> "Tavern, bar, club, lodge, and dance hall.")
How do people do this in practice? Just drink and drive and hope they don't crash / get fined? Or does everybody bring 1 friend who sips colas the whole night?
You can see people taxi/uber into a place if they are definitely planning to get blathered.
This, they are making the mistake that all the people on /r/askamerican do over on reddit. Laws like this mostly aren't nationwide or even statewide, they are decided on a very local level.
That hasn't been my experience. Anytime I've wanted to go somewhere halfway popular the lot is usually full or nearly full. On the flipside, the lots are often empty during times when the business is closed, but reducing the size of the lot would exacerbate the issue of not being able to park nearby when the business is open. You aren't going to stop the US from being car centric, so you either have to dictate that businesses maintain a reasonable amount of parking or you have to have the municipality maintain several large parking structures throughout the city. Most cities would rather have the businesses that need the parking pay for the parking and most people would rather park near the businesses that they frequent.
I think this isn't true. The same way suburbia spread out from cities, I think walkability can spread outwards too in baby steps.
For example, SF is relatively walkable/has public transit. The next step would be slowly removing parking minimums and making the areas surrounding SF more walkable. And then over time as people in those surrounding areas start using their cars less (not getting rid of them but at least trying to do short journeys on foot/bike/transit).
Over time that spreads outwards because half the community served by an area no longer needs a car for their daily travel and the envelope of walkability spreads further.