As much as everyone here hates cars, the unfortunate fact is we currently need them. If I could snap my fingers and be able to afford a $1.2M "starter home" within walking distance to work, trust me, I would do it in a heartbeat. If there were any politicians serious about building useful public transit, I'd vote for them. But, for now, at least in most metro areas (where the jobs are), most people can only afford to live in places where you need a car to get anywhere.
I live in a country where very little parking is required and whatever parking is built is either free-for-all or come at a huge price. People cheap out, but still expect to drive.
The end result is parking in grey-legal spots, parking in too narrow streets making it dangerous, parking in ex-greenery-now-sandy-parking-lot and whatnot. And lots of bad blood between neighbours who took whose spot :) Yes, there're rules to fine such behaviour. But it'd be political suicide to enforce those rules because everybody breaks them.
There was some of that where I lived in Italy, very little in Austria, and it was all much better than having vast, empty parking lots sitting there while house prices climb and climb.
I don't think a parking lot in rural Bend (or any rural American town) is the best example to use. People in Bend are going to rely on cars a lot more than people in downtown Portland and property is likely cheaper + regulated less.
Here's the first lot I found in Portland... nice, waterfront parking!
Average house prices are north of 400K in "rural" Bend (which is actually closing in on 100K people - not big, but not tiny, either).
And of course people use cars a lot to get around here. That doesn't mean the government has to require it: any business that depends on car-dependent people is going to want to provide some parking. There's no reason for the government to get involved in it.
Also: part of the reason people need cars to get around is because we fill land up with useless BS like that, rather than housing or businesses or commercial - empty space stretches everything else out so that more trips require a car.
Government not requiring it encourages freeloading on neighbours. In my post-soviet country, there's a lot of pressure on government to require ample parking. Otherwise both residential and commercial buildings tend to freeride on their neighbours and use their parking.
What is interesting, this evolved despite OK public transit and very little cars in the early 90s.
I don't know how things work in your country, but in the US, Austria and Italy, there are street parking spots that are public. They do not belong to anyone. If it's a problem that they're always full all the time, you can adopt strategies to create some turnover.
This is far superior to the government dictating X parking spots per house (2 in the city I live in), and Y per type of business.
In most cases each apartment block have it's own parking lot off the street. Wether it's 5, 50 or 100 years old. Many streets are too narrow for parking on both sides. Tiny lots either cause spill over to other parking lots nearby or illegal parking on the greenery or in the street (illegal because street is too narrow for parking).
A recent example.. There was a mall with a parking lot, not too small not too big. A new apartment building was built. One of their selling points was huge free parking nearby. Mall was pissed off that their parking lot is full and customers can't find a spot and installed barriers to prevent overnight parking (2 or 4h free, longer - €€€). Now people who bought apartments are pissed because they were told the parking lot was public (= gov-owned). Mall customers are pissed because barriers is inconvenience. Mall is pissed because operating barriers cost them extra money. City is pissed because suddenly they have a load of cars on narrow street nearby. The only ones who won are the sleazy developers.
Another issue is small apartment blocks built in single-family houses quarters. Tiny streets over there can easily take a car or two in front of each house. Then suddenly a 6-apartment building comes up and there're 10 cars in front of a property that'd otherwise have 1 or 2 cars. This happens in rather remote suburbs mind you.
"adopt strategies to create some turnover" is a very polite way of saying fine people and tow their cars, ruining their days and sometimes their lives.
Uh, yeah, it's pretty normal in cities the world over, though. You don't just get to park in front of the fire hydrant or not pay for parking in an area where it's required, or any number of other regulations.
Oh, I'm definitely not advocating for such massive parking lots. Just saying that having little parking lots sucks too. I'm talking about soviet times bloks with parking for 0.2 car/apartment or so.
By the way, over there housing costs climb regardless of little parking required. Apartments in central locations (= walkable/bikable to most offices) cost a shitload of money compared to houses in suburbs. Especially once you step in family-sized market.
This is a bit false. It assumes that the cost of living is driven solely by housing. There have been numerous studies done that show that the total cost of living doesn't change much between city and suburbs. Housing costs are higher in the city, but they're largely balanced out by lower transportation costs and house upkeep costs (apartments are cheaper to heat/cool than houses, for example).
My transportation costs (including the purchase price of the car, all gas and maintenance) are an order of magnitude less than the home price delta between where I currently live and where I'd have to live in order to give up my car.
This cannot be stressed enough. Too many people on HN seem baffled by car culture, or think it's some kind of conspiracy, but the answer is right here. Savings on land prices for getting far from the center are massive, the costs of manufactured goods like cars are tiny, and the solution that urbanism offers is is only to raise the price on the latter.
> the solution that urbanism offers is is only to raise the price on the latter
The solution that urbanism offers is to stop massively subsidizing the latter. Let car culture live or die on its own merits, not because of government subsidies.
Without a corresponding subsidy to lower the cost of urban living, most people will be worse off (maybe the rich in urban centers will save more in taxes than they lose in mobility, doubtful anyone else will).
Subsidizing infrastructure that increases quality of life and lowers cost of living is kind of the point of government.
The intrinsic cost of urban living is much less than the intrinsic cost living in car focused suburbs. It is only more expensive now because of an under supply of urban areas caused by decades of subsidization of car focused suburbs. The ROI of spending on urban infrastructure is much higher than spending on car focused suburban development.
What? The rent in cities is vastly depressed by all the demand that the suburbs soak up. Limit the effective radius of the city to walking distance and it will skyrocket as the same number of people clamor to fit into less space.
Who is talking about getting rid of suburbs or limiting things to walking distance? That would be crazy.
There were suburbs before cars existed and there can be suburbs that don't require cars for every single trip. Before the widespread adoption of cars, suburbs were often served by streetcars that let people travel into the city. They also were walkable for trips within the suburb. Unlike modern suburbs, they also allowed low nuisance commercial properties to be interspersed with residential properties so that many of people's basic errands could be accomplished without traveling large distances.
Cars are part and parcel of modern life and they won't be going away any time soon, and I don't think more than a few extremists really want that anyway.
What a lot of people do is to rebalance things so we have more of a 'right tool for the job' culture in the US. Cars for some things, bikes or walking for closer trips (enabled by legalizing things like corner stores or neighborhood barbers again), public transportation for other things.
As much as everyone here hates cars, the unfortunate fact is we currently need them. If I could snap my fingers and be able to afford a $1.2M "starter home" within walking distance to work, trust me, I would do it in a heartbeat. If there were any politicians serious about building useful public transit, I'd vote for them. But, for now, at least in most metro areas (where the jobs are), most people can only afford to live in places where you need a car to get anywhere.