against parking requirements

[mindstalk]

A new article! https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/parking-drives-housing-prices/618910/

"The right to access every building in a city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city." -- Lewis Mumford, _The City in History_

'A train drops a passenger off and keeps going. A driver drops a car off and keeps going. Thus most trains are mostly moving, while most cars are parked most of the time. The price of the car’s convenience, then, is the space it consumes when it isn’t in motion, and indeed even when it isn’t there. Cities designed for cars must set aside space: space to wait for cars, and space to hold them while they wait for their drivers to come back.'

'In downtown L.A., parking usually costs developers more than $50,000 per space to build. Walt Disney Concert Hall, a cultural landmark that is home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, cost $274 million to build. Of that total, the underground parking structure, which is not a cultural landmark (it’s an underground parking structure), accounted for $100 million.'

'Large portions of New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, if they burned down tomorrow, couldn’t be rebuilt, because according to modern zoning, their buildings don’t have “enough” parking. Brownstone Brooklyn, after all, is largely devoid of parking; so is Boston’s famed North End.'

'There are promising signs of reform. Buffalo, New York, recently abolished its parking requirements. Minneapolis has done the same. San Diego and San Francisco have scaled them back, and California may be on the cusp of rolling them back statewide.'

Comments

[ndrosen]

Are you familiar with Professor Donald Shoup’s “The High Cost of Free Parking”? I once heard him give a talk on the subject at a Georgist conference. People should pay for the land they occupy, and that includes parking spaces, which should be rented out at market-clearing prices.

[mindstalk]

Look at the post tag. :)

[contrarianarchon]

the other side of this is that a city needs to actually pay for decent public transport if they want to get rid of cars; Adelaide always tries to make the city centre less hospitable to cars and it just makes everyone's lives worse because there isn't useful public transport to funge into for lots of people, so people just spend longer in traffic jams each day.

(I say as someone who takes the bus every time I go into town; it's a pain. The bus-stop nearest to my house runs four times a day (At times oriented to people who are working 9-5 in town; that's four inwards busses in the morning and four outwards in the evening, and if I need to be in town to that schedule then I can ride in with my father, who also works in town but we need to be in town for nearly entirely non-overlapping periods of time) and the next-nearest line (note: Not very near) is just-barely-not-so-invariably-that-I-can-adjust-my-schedule 10 minutes late.)

[mindstalk]

True!

(Well, with proper density many local trips are walking and biking, and also with that density private bus service and even trains can be feasible. I'm not libertarian on this, but they are real options.)

I didn't go to Adelaide, and what you describe sounds worse than the four cities I did visit, but going from Japan to Australia wasn't a beneficial contrast for Australian transit. Though I believe I'd already seen mode share data show Adelaide to be much more car-centric than the cities I did visit.

(To be fair, the only Japanese bus I took was in Nara, which was quite nice; my impression of Osaka bus frequencies was not good. kchoze had a blog post arguing that between bikes and trains, buses don't have much point[1] in big Japanese cities, except for the mobility-challenged, and Japan's surprisingly ruthless in expecting transit to pay its own way. Granted that attitude also keeps cars in check.)

[1] I.e. there's no distance at which you'd be faster taking a bus. Maybe a narrow range of distances favoring buses over walking and trains, and then biking kills even that.

[contrarianarchon]

Australia is to my understanding strongly anti-density as a mindset and broadly speaking kinda bad at it when they try. It's frustrating! Land prices go up and part of that is [misc. issues like bad-faith investors who refuse to use land in the centre of the city for the fear of reducing it's value], but also a huge chunk of it is also the extreme faith that a Proper Home needs to be bigger than the population/land ratio can stand and corresponding NIMBYs. It's not that I'm unsympathetic (I do in fact like living in a large house with a large garden in a green city as well) I'd just like to see the people complaining for the government to do something about rising land prices not immediately turn around and call any land development which doesn't have a large garden a slum, y'know?