I feel really mixed about things like this. I absolutely appreciate the need for additional housing in urban centers, especially if it makes housing more affordable. However, I’m also someone who lives relatively far from an urban center with no reliable public transportation for the sake of having housing that isn’t ridiculously expensive. This means I’m required to drive into the urban center for work where parking is already expensive and difficult to find. The lot where I usually park has months long waiting lists to get a monthly pass.
Again, I totally understand the rationale behind it. It’s just frustrating for those of us who have no better options in the near future.
> This means I’m required to drive into the urban center for work where parking is already expensive and difficult to find.
Do you mean you literally drive into a city centre at rush hour, park there, and go into an office?
It blows my mind that people are even able to do that. It actually says something perversely positive about US roads and cities that it's possible!
I would not attempt to drive into the centre of a city in the UK for any reason at any time of day ever. You would not make it to your office before the day ended and when you got there you'd simply find there was no parking anyway and you'd have to go home again!
There's a bit of hyperbole in your answer. Plenty of people commute into UK cities by car, even in London. That's why there's a rush hour.
Commuting by car into central London would be foolish (I have a colleague that tried it once - it took him an hour and a half from the M25 to Kings Cross). However, there's a lot of cities in which it is feasible (if slow) and a lot of businesses close to the centre of cities which do have parking available (or you could just pay for private parking).
I sometimes drive through Central London in the evenings - it is slow, but it's not that slow. At certain times of day it's no slower than public transport (it really depends where you're going to and from).
US doesn't have nearly the public transport infrastructure that the UK does, unfortunately. I think the issue here may be that cities aren't necessarily building infrastructure to compensate for their reductions of car access.
It actually isn't very expensive when the same country spends more than the next couple of countries on defense contractor salaries^W^W national defense. The hardest thing is a change of mind and priorities, nothing actual or tangible in terms of cost.
Considering that a local government can't just spend the money allocated to "national defense" even if they wanted to, I'd consider that a pretty tenuous argument to make.
It's not that tenuous. Taxpayer dollars go from the fed to military contracts. Instead, the fed could fund local government projects through per project funding schemes or increased budget allocations.
How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?
The fact that money exists they are does not mean that it’s accessible. If it was there wouldn’t be new stories about how the subway system is about to fall apart every 12 months.
SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.
Won't let me reply to you. A tax on housing is different than a tax on business. You've got the priciest real estate in the U.S. If you can afford that, you can afford to pay more in taxes.
It’s where it is because of happenstance. It’s not a city that needs some specific natural resource that’s only produced right there.
There’s nothing stopping Silicon Valley companies from migrating to other areas in California or even other states. I’m sure there are more than enough places that would be willing to throw out ridiculous tax advantages to lure big companies there.
I have a bunch of issues with the VTA light rail. Mostly it’s slow and doesn’t always come at the “right time”. If the choice is not to go somewhere, or take the light rail, I’ll almost always choose not to travel there, or take a taxi. Sitting in a light rail for an hour vs 20 minutes in a taxi just doesn’t make sense.
I mean this is my issue with public transport throughout the Bay Area really, except BART at commute hours. I'm visiting NYC right now and taking the subway, and the difference is night and day.
If only NYC got to keep all that money. NYC is part of NY State so the money largely lines the state coffers where it is used for pork-barrel projects in far flung places most NYC residents will never even visit.
The state is very enthusiastic about taking the money out of the city but not so interested in investing much back into any transportation infrastructure to support its' cash cow.
Norman Mailer once ran for Mayor of NYC and part of his platform was for NYC to secede from NY State:
'New York City would be split off from the rest of New York State, and achieve independent statehood as the 51st State of the U.S. The campaign sought to free the city from the control of "upstate legislators who don't care about the city but control our schools, police, housing, and money."'[1]
And perhaps more topical is that part of that platform was also to ban all cars from Manhattan except Taxis and buses. And this was in 1969 :)
Americans prefer the convenience of owning cars and driving, at least they have for the past several generations though this may be changing.
If you go to cities like Chicago or New York City, many people do use public transport. I did when I lived in Chicago, generally hated it, but it was cheaper and faster than driving downtown for work in that situation. To get anywhere else in the city or suburbs it would be faster and more convenient to drive.
I have a commuter stop within 500ft of my apartment to ride in and out of NYC. I rarely use it because I can beat the train by driving, it's unreliable, I don't have to plan around the schedule, and it's cheaper to drive. On street parking is not a problem for the time and place that I go into the city.
The answer nobody wants to hear, but knows is true. There is propaganda from all sides with big lobbying interests. Media is completely in the pockets of those interests which only further pushes the propaganda model.
Just watch TV around an election. It's complete and total doublespeak and propaganda every few minutes.
In the hundreds of US cities that aren't NY/SF/etc, traffic flow at rush hour is perfectly reasonable. The average speeds are much faster than BART, anyway.
> Ah yes, no one could possibly like driving of their own accord, they must be brainwashed.
To think that you need:
- A 5000 pound machine to take a 200 pound human to work
- Workplace is 60 miles away
- On a road with many other rush hour drowsy 200 pound humans
- Said humans, then spend 30 mins and $30 for parking, in which the 5000 pound machine is just lying around empty
- All the above effort just to bring back the person from work in the evening and leave that car back on the street, lying around?
That doesn't sound insane to you? There's no reason for this for a rich country.
If you want proof that there are better, efficient and human friendly transportation systems, you need to visit HongKong and Singapore. (NYC doesn't count)
Yeah, no thanks. Images of Asian megacities' subway systems at rush hour are nightmare fuel. No opportunity, relationship, or life could possibly be worth spending time in crowding like that every day. Hell is a crush-loaded train.
It's amazing how many people think this. There are metro areas in "the middle" with populations greater than European countries. And Texas, right in the middle, has a population that would put it at #10 in Europe.
#3 Chicago 9.5 million
#4 Dallas 7.4 million
#5 Houston 6.9 million
#14 Detroit 4.3 million
#16 Minneapolis 3.6 million
#19 Denver 2.9 million
#21 St Louis 2.8 million
Let be kind to the GP and assume he meant "space between metro areas" rather than the simplistic "coastal and flyover" meme.
Look at Texas.
200 miles of between Houston and Dallas and Austin. This largely empty triangle itself is half the Texas population. But its barely 10% of the Texas area.
So yes. The US metros are isolated compared to Europe.
Many of these cities were more densely connected by train stations prior to Europe's rail network, yet America's co-dependent dreams of the automobile and of flight derailed that and sold the rail network to the lowest bidder for terrible, slow cargo usage only.
Which absolutely does start to explain the lack of transit inside many of these metros: at the same time the rails were converted to mostly cargo only a lot of the suburban commuter lines were themselves "lost" to time or destroyed. It's utterly depressing to see the old passenger train maps in America and compare to what some of those passenger lines could be serving today if like Europe they'd been kept up/maintained.
A lot more of the suburbs in every American city than people realize were served by trolley and passenger train in their infancy that they grew around, and just because many of the lines have been "lost" over the years doesn't mean that their skeletons don't still show in the overall growth pattern. (Until you get into the entirely car-dependent exurbs and "suburbs of the suburbs", of course.)
America outsourced public transit to the lowest bidders, they got bored serving people directly and went with focusing solely on cargo, and people were too busy driving everywhere to notice what they lost.
> It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.
That is because whites moved out and systematically starved the cities of a tax base and state funding for infrastructure projects that would benefit minorities.
That's basically everyone in all but the top ~5 cities. In a mid-sized metro area, there might be a bus system with hourly or worse frequency as a handout for the destitute. The working poor drive beaters.
Even in New York's non-Manhattan boroughs, 35-75% drive.
Mhh no they don't. Working poors in Europe have vars because they live in suburbs with bad connections and have to work far outside city centers. People without cars are mostly richer households living close to city center and working inside the city or not far around.
I know lots of people who commute by car into the centre of Birmingham every day. My train commute is only 30 minutes door to door, but I'd be quicker driving. Do you live in London?
A parking minimum is good for you, because it creates excess spaces, making prices go below market rates.
Since I live downtown, I'd prefer severely limiting parking. Call it a "parking maximum", reducing congestion at commute times, as parking costs would shoot way above a market price.
The fair solution is to have neither parking minimums nor maximums. Then parking is developed in proportion to expected demand, competing for space against offices and homes, neither subsidized nor penalized. Yes it would cost more than you prefer, and less than I prefer, but probably a fairer situation.
The naive free market analysis doesn't work here, because it's not typically possible for a real estate developer to purchase a random building and convert it to a parking structure if more parking is demanded. Even when it is possible, that kind of project ends up taking years and years to complete.
More likely it's just not profitable, because most people are only willing to spend so much money paying for parking, and often "downtown" land is quite expensive.
Sometimes it's completely forbidden for zoning reasons.
Sometimes it's a regulatory risk. If the local residents decide they don't want a parking structure, they won't offer you a fair market price to stop it; they'll just try and get city officials to deny or obstruct all the permits you need. (And a large construction project needs a lot of permits in most jurisdictions.)
Sometimes it's just prohibitively expensive to convert. In order to tear down a typical commercial building, you'd have to either buy out everyone's leases or wait for up to a decade for them to expire. This imposes a huge deadweight cost that wouldn't be there if enough parking had been built in the first place.
Only a tiny portion of most metro area populations can live in the zoned housing capacity of central business districts. Only a handful of cities have remotely passable public transit systems. Everyone else needs parking.
And they and their companies can pay for it. There should be more parking garages and less parking lots and on-street parking. It's important to get make all the costs transparent so people can make good decisions. Maybe the office will move from downtown to somewhere closer to their workers -- reducing congestion and commute time.
>And they and their companies can pay for it. There should be more parking garages and less parking lots and on-street parking.
These statements are contradictory! Making business pay for their own results in on-street parking parking lots and minimum parking requirements. When you centrally plan parking you get parking garages.
>Only a handful of cities have remotely passable public transit systems. Everyone else needs parking.
They don't need parking. They need a solution to enable access to the downtown core. The solution you want is parking, because that's the status quo. Improving public transit is also a solution - It's not actually impossible to build.
Building out acceptable public transit over America's vast <1,000 people/square mile suburbia is probably not economical. First you would need drastically higher densities to become socially acceptable and legal. Then you would need decades of building until most of a metro area's population actually lived at high enough densities. Then public transit that's actually competitive with the status quo for mobility could start to pencil out.
Even when the density is there, the social mission of public transit agencies is to be a lifeline for the very poor. Improving service for professional commuters is at the bottom of their priority list. I can't even argue with that: the middle class can drive as an alternative, without bus service the destitute are just stuck.
The solution I want is unlimited construction of skyscrapers and travel mostly by foot and elevator. But if there's one thing our democracy is great at, it's preventing high rises. For the densities we have, our choices are cars or simply having commutes eat further into our already scarce free time. (No, public transit is not free time, as any vaguely useful train is crush-loaded standing room only).
It would have to get past zoning/etc. when many cities are fighting to get more people to move into downtown removing buildings and putting up parking may be seen as a problem/eyesore.
I think basic profitability is probably the #1 and #2 answers.
I'm aware of a deal where a consortium bought a plot in a downtown area to build a tower, and demand went down so they went into a holding pattern while making money on the parking.
I didn't see a naive free market analysis in progress, but anyway, I have noticed that people build new parking structures around my urban area on a regular basis. It does take a while, but it happens.
I guess my ideal solution would be housing that’s more affordable downtown so that I and other commuters could live there. If I could eliminate my commute or make it much shorter then it would be one of the best changes in my life. Unfortunately even with my decent salary that’s not possible because housing is 3-4x more expensive than where I’m at now.
You can strictly limit parking. That's got some congestion benefits. It also makes driving into the city, especially for work during the day (evening parking is usually not a scarce resource), less attractive. Which in turn makes many employees prefer employers located in industrial parks outside of cities.
Not everyone of course. The (often young) people would often prefer urban living. But your urban office building is going to be unattractive for anyone who needs to drive in.
Strictly limiting parking is unnecessary. Market-oriented policies for parking and traffic (congestion charges) combined with solid support of alternatives (protected bike lanes, protected intersections, bus lanes, light rail/subways) are sufficient to encourage a balanced transportation distribution.
Subsidizing the use of roads by letting people use them for free after spending a great deal of money on building and maintaining them is not "market-oriented". Charging people to use them is the closest you can get to market-oriented if you are already stuck with the roads. The most market-oriented solution would be not to build public roads in the first place, but it's too late for that.
> Which in turn makes many employees prefer employers located in industrial parks outside of cities.
So basically silicon valley which is one of the highest cost of living places these days and has terrible traffic?
I don't live there, but the hub (city) and spoke (suburb) model seems to scale much better than the point to point where jobs and homes are distributed everywhere like silicon valley and thus everyone has to drive.
Park-and-ride is the usual solution. Can you drive in from your home to a large lot where the reliable public transit begins, and then ride from there? That can work pretty well.
We have some of those available, but they would increase my commute time by 30 minutes both ways, and the busses can be unreliable, which means sometimes it can take an hour. It may work for some people, but unfortunately I’m not willing to give up an extra two hours of my day when I can drive in.
I used to take a train, but it took 50-60 minutes, and any delay meant I missed a connection or transfer which then added even more time. As much as I want to do it and support it’s just not feasible.
Closer to work where? To a close-in suburb that doesn't want apartment buildings ruining their detached home values and neighborhood character? Or to an urban neighborhood that doesn't want to be gentrified and displaced?
Without solving zoning, "move closer to work" is zero sum advice. All you can do is switch places with someone poorer than you.
Or, as many do today, companies will keep much of their office space in the suburbs both because of rent prices and because it’s where most of their employees including execs want to live.
I commutes into the relatively nearby city both by rail and car at one point. Wouldn’t have done it long term and probably wouldn’t again without buying a small property in the city for during the week.
Added: Companies will do whatever makes business sense. But potential employees who would find commuting into a city location a nightmare is a factor. As of course is new grads who insist on a location they can get to without a car.
Hopefully that dream will be the self driving car bringing you to kiss-and-ride and then going home, not bringing you all the way downtown. Otherwise everyone's congestion problems just got 2x as bad (and that's before you account for the current mass transit users who may suddenly decide that personal automobile use is more attractive now that you can pay for your empty car to drive off to cheap/free parking instead of paying for a downtown spot).
What you describe would be a temporary problem - tolls for entering the city would appear out of necessity (see London for a present day example). Life would go on as before except for a bunch of now outraged self driving car owners, mass transit would still be terrible (this is the US after all), and the bickering over parking minimums, zoning, gentrification, etc would continue unaffected with no end in sight (the same as at present).
Or perhaps we'd finally get our act together and build out functional mass transit, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
There is an easy solution to this that has been around for a long time. What most people do is park on the outskirts of town, where there tend to be lots of park and ride lots, then take public transit downtown.
So, in your case, you drive your car until you get to the outskirts of whatever large metropolitan area you are visiting, then take public transit.
When we lived in the UK, we frequently drove to a car park near the Hammersmith Station and then took the tube from there to central London.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a dearth of reserved parking at the BART Park n Rides. You can show up to the Park n Ride super early and pay the daily rate for a spot, and you can get on a long waiting list (sometimes more than a year long) to purchase monthly parking (still expensive, but not as bad as daily parking). There is also likelihood of getting stuck in traffic on the way to parking lots. There's no great option, just a choice between different last-mile options with pros and cons, including driving a car, driving a motorcycle, bicycles (electric and otherwise), electric scooters and skateboards, Uber/Lyft, and shuttles (I used Emery Go Round a fair bit). All have to deal with traffic to get to the park-n-rides. The cars and busses have to go single-file in their lanes, but others can go past them. Unlike most other states, California allows motorcycles to split lanes. http://lanesplittingislegal.com/
My favorites were taking the Emery-Go-Round while I was living in Emeryville, and walking two miles each way every single day while I was living in Redwood City while listening to podcasts/audiobooks.
It's not hard to find parking in BART stations at the ends of the line. The problem is, people want to use as little public transportation as possible, so parking lots fill up in a spoke like fashion from the downtown SF area.
If you live in the suburbs but don't live at the end of the line, it's going to be unpalatable to drive all the way to the end of the line. The gap between stations near the end of the line can be big, too. It's about 10 miles from Orinda to Concord. Orinda seemed like it would be hard to find parking. Walnut Creek wasn't bad though. Point taken though. The tone of the article seemed to be about the lifestyle of some place like Liverpool or Vallejo, which might have a decent park and ride situation (I think it would be a supercommute and traffic would be bad, so that wouldn't be a pleasant commute overall).
By the way some of the hardest commuting problems to solve are couples or people who otherwise really want to live together who have jobs at different parts of the Bay Area. They could be making a combined $400K but no amount of money will make their commute reasonable. I'm surprised telepresence robots like AnyBots haven't gained more traction.
Yup, it sucks but is ultimately necessary. Having parking minimums is a big part of why there are no good alternatives much of the time, after all: why even build alternatives where abundant parking
everywhere is legally mandated?
Just sounds to me like the price of parking is artificial low for some reason. That garage should never have a waiting list. Is it run by morons? Is ever other garage, or is there something else going on?
If there hadn’t been minimum parking requirements in the past, cities would have been forced to develop better transit. These requirements were a direct subsidy to car owners, which most people were not conscious of.
This will be a painful transition for people who depend on the status quo. But you have to pull the band-aid off sometime, and waiting longer won’t make it any better.
Considering that “cars owners” in America represent 88%, maybe it’s just an alignment of interests. Maybe alternatives are rejected not because of these subtle systemic issues, but rather because a supermajority of Americans own cars and don’t want the alternatives? Talking about “car owners” like that isn’t synonymous with “most Americans” is a very particular way to frame the issue that makes it seem like a top-down structure when it isn’t.
I own a car, a bike, shoes, and a transit card. Most people where I live have at least 3 of these. Saying that "car owners" are 88% is exactly the kind of superficial statistic that got us to where we are today. How about having an appropriate policy for each area according to local circumstances?
Many of the people I work with own cars but will choose to cycle, walk, or take the bus (researchers who have money and are well educated). Just because they drive frequently, doesn't mean they are doing it to commute to work. They probably don't benefit much from more parking spaces.
The funny thing in Palo Alto is that new buildings near the train station end up with permanently empty parking spaces, thanks to the parking minimum & employees taking the train.
The problem is, everyone driving and parking a car in dense urban areas is not sustainable past a certain level of density. This results in heavy traffic and a large amount of land dedicated to parking which could be better used as anything else.
This is a top-down structure that was intentionally designed by urban planners after WWII and it is reaching its scalability limit.
Limitations on density are put there by popular demand. Most American's don't want that level of density either. I think they're wrong, but they're the majority.
By their actions, Americans show they want density. Otherwise, why are more Americans moving into big cities than moving out of them? Why do they clog up the freeways by driving to work in the same cities at the same time?
People might say they don't want density, but every current trend is toward more density, because of the actions people are taking.
Someone migrating to a big city generally wants to the last one in the door. People are much more interested in consuming density personally than in in allowing developers to produce more of it.
It’s a giant country, and despite what people in the Silicon Valley bubble think, there are a lot of cities with a lot of space. This is an insoluble problem if everyone demands acces to a spot in one or two major cities, because that’s where VC money is concentrated. That’s not a problem for most people though, who frankly don’t care about housing problems or traffic problems for techies. They’ll switch over to EV’s, but good luck trying to get them to embrace trains and busses.
The article is about Cincinnati, not Silicon Valley. And clearly there is a problem in Cincinnati or steps to roll back mandatory parking minimums would not have been taken.
In private conversations with the local city mobility department (which covers public transport and parking), there is a lot of tension building up due to the expectation of autonomous vehicles coming online within a decade. Floating a 20 year bond to build new parking structures used to be a safe investment but there is now a widespread expectation that personal vehicles will not require parking facilities well before that bond could be paid off. It is forcing a re-evaluation of the traditional regulatory, zoning, and financial instruments historically employed by cities to address these problems, and nobody is certain of the answer.
Those cars still need to go somewhere. Maybe there's more sharing from the outskirts? But if you assume that cars will just drop off and then drive out to some vaguely defined area outside of the city where parking is plentiful, you're going to massively increase congestion.
I've heard that a surprising percentage of trip time in the downtown core is spent looking for nearby parking. Having the car drop people off and drive away to park somewhere where parking is less scarce might not actually increase time on road.
You could also greatly increase parking density in parkcades if all vehicles had autonomous parking. For example, it would be no problem to box cars in if vehicles could move on their own to let them out. I bet you could easily double parking density.
Plus some sort of vertical parking elevator starts to become much more reasonable. They already exist but when the whole thing is 100% automated including the car you could get more parking out of the vertical space then you do with a current garage.
It'll be possible to pack them way, way more tightly if a) the structure itself is able to move the cars around at will, and b) you can give it an estimate of what time you'll be back (or 30 mins notice for the "standby" option).
At that point, it's less of a parking structure and more of an automated valet service. You get out of your car and only your car enters.
Taken to the limit of the idea, the whole parking structure could be entirely sealed to the outside, and maybe even evacuated or filled with a non-oxygenated medium (e.g. nitrogen) to prevent car fires and reduce rusting from long-term storage. Sort of like a modern grain silo.
My line of thought started from, "what would the world be like if every vehicle had a built-in valet?" I think the design of commercial areas would change dramatically within a couple decades, even just from the effect on parking.
How much would such a system cost to build and maintain, and how safe would it be re: vagrants, children? You’d be able to handle more customers of course, but would it compensate for the costs?
> For example, it would be no problem to box cars in if vehicles could move on their own to let them out.
I'm somewhat uncomfortable with parking infrastructure that assumes that all the cars are working and "gassed up." If the car boxing mine in is left to sit in the parking garage for a few months (as might happen in, say, an airport's long-term parking lot), its battery will likely go flat and it'll be incapable of getting out of my way.
Even having automatic standardized charger coupling for every parking space wouldn't really work, since the car boxing mine in could have just plain rusted.
Current infrastructure doesn't have this problem: if the car beside mine can't get out of the garage on its own, that's between the garage and a tow truck, but is no problem of mine.
That’s presuming individual private ownership of those vehicles. Detroit seems convinced that a fleet approach (think Uber without the driver) is the most likely outcome. In this case, the fleet moves around as needs require, generating revenue as riders are hailing then moving to an inexpensive staging area when demand decreases.
It's really not clear how that works. If people keep commuting on a regular schedule, most of the demand is at certain times of day. Now, it's reasonable to ask whether this might not be a forcing function for more varied work schedules as pricing would presumably favor off-peak commuting. But, then, one is inclined to ask, why not the obvious next step--at least part-time work from home--which we can (and many do) today?
What would probably happen is that the price of a car would go up, which means more people will share a car (this would be feaseable with autonomous cars because you can still leave pretty much whenever you need to, and go pretty much where you need to, because you only need to coordinate with any other group of people who happen to need to leave at that time, rather than select the people you want to share a car with and then coordinate when you need to leave).
There is also the alternative that people will move further away from their work, because they can use the commute time -- essentially then, they would leave their homes at the same time, start working and then leave their offices so that they are home again at the same time, which means (assuming everybody lives at different distances from their workplace) that you automatically get a stackering effect.
Autonomous electric fleets can bring cars in before the predictable peak hours occur, reducing congestion. Autonomous fleets are also not vehicle size limited. You can bring in autonomous buses that go point to point (mostly) because there is high enough demand to fill such specific routes. Autonmous fleets are also not wandering streets looking for parking, which is a major part of congestion.
Autonomous fleets can also be parked in towers, because a robot car doesn't care if it takes 10 minutes to get out of a tower, as long as the throughput is high enough.
Eventually you will need heavy rail to increase throughput for dense enough places, but that's still a separate problem today.
I do not expect individual ownership of vehicles to decline much. People trash vehicles they don’t own. Fleet-shared driverless cars will be filled with bad smells, weird stains, cigarette butts, and leftover fast food wrappers. Anyone who can afford to buy a car for themselves will do it.
The stain theory would depend on control and management.
That said, only a percentage of people would want to just discard the car they've spent considerable money on.
Self-driving fares can never be as cheap as regular driving seems. With regular driving, you are silently depreciating the value of your vehicle whereas a self-driving car would have to include depreciation in each ride.
That assumes a typical daily usage pattern, though, for which yeah owning, fuelling, maintaining, and insuring your own vehicle will probably always make the most sense.
However, for people who do (or plan to) use bicycles or mass transit a significant proportion of the time, being able to fall back on an hailed autonomous car in case of rain, haste, whatever is very appealing. It just depends on being able to look at a monthly bill of $200 (or whatever) in on-demand rides and see it as a huge step forward from what you used to pay in all the fixed costs of car ownership whether you used it or not.
The real trick will be having a workable solution for families with kids— that's an area where current taxis/rideshare have a gap, since they're not willing to supply their own carseats for liability reasons.
Sure, switching to an autonomous taxi would be an easy call for some people and would not appeal for others.
But when you have that, you double or multiply by N, the road usage. Which is going to produce multiple problems for everyone.
People imagine that once autonomous vehicles reach a certain level, they'll just morph to provide all the benefits of a well-planned public transit system. But I'm doubting common good can just fall out of more chaos.
And hey, the private automobile itself was thrown onto society with effectively no consideration of externalities and brought us to our current heaven/hell of urbanism. So it's quite possible that, despite some talk of planning, autonomous vehicles will just appear, make a hash of things and all the clean-up will happen later, if at all.
The problem then becomes: what do you do with the carseat[s] when you are shopping, at a venue, etc...
If I own/rent the car, I can just leave them in while I'm doing whatever. If I'm doing Lyft, I'm stuck carrying around baby seats between rides. Which is not appealing.
Where do you live because I have used zipcar, rental cars, uber, and lyft extensively in the USA and never experienced any of those things. I don't see how people could negatively abuse it that much when the next rider/owning company/video cameras in self-driving cars can easily report the bad actors and ban them from the system.
Self-driving cars technically wouldn't have to go anywhere besides the roads - except maybe periodically to charging and a repair station. Of course, by 3 am, it might be cheaper to have them parked. But there's a lot of parking currently available at 3 am.
Of course, these cars occupy space, which means the road they'd be on would be a good deal more occupied. But remember, parking and traffic aren't static per-car, it's all a matter of rates.
It's reasonable to be tentative given the uncertainty.
Is it possible to build a mixed use structure with parking at the lower levels that are designed with enough use flexibility that they could be converted into regular occupancy use if (when) parking demand is reduced?
You don't need atonomous vehicles to make this work. A good public transit system within the city, decent bike lanes and some park and ride options for getting in from the outskirts could be enough to make up for the reduced parking options.
While I appreciate the wisdom of this approach, the concept of mass transit isn’t new, and for large parts of the US has never worked out for one reason or the other. There are obvious exceptions in high density urban centers, but your typical mid sized midwestern city has never seemed to make mass transit take hold. For better or worse (mostly worse), people by and large continue to prefer private automobiles as their primary (or only) mode of transportation.
Sure, but the parking requiments mentioned above only really an issue in high density cities. I don't think requiring adequate parking is an issue in the lower density areas.
Hopefully this will encourage people to consider other options if parking becomes to difficult or expensive.
>>> "The Seattle bill required commercial and residential buildings to charge residents for parking only if they actually had a car."
They did this in my old hometown. (North Shore, Vancouver.) They allowed all sorts of condos to be built on the assumption that they would be rented by retired/rich people. Retired people don't drive. Rich people don't have jobs. So the buildings went ahead without associated infrastructure/transport improvements. Now the nurses coming to take care of the elderly residents have to part at the local mall (Park Royal) which is now debating payed parking. Visiting grandchildren (minivans) fight for street space. And the city is becoming grayer and grayer.
I've since moved out of vancouver, to a much younger and more vibrant city. I cannot remember the last time I paid for parking.
I saw this exact situation happen at a previous employer. Three large high-end apartment buildings were built in an area where a large percentage of the residential population are older wealthy people. The three buildings have minimal parking and are located right across the street from a mall. Within two years of the first building being completed, the mall implemented paid parking.
I’ve noticed sometimes the parking minimum is essentially just used as a source of power for the zoning board. They don’t actually want places to build the required large amounts of parking, but they don’t want to have to rubber stamp developments that they don’t like. So they waive the parking requirements of people that make the changes that they want.
Apparently Cincinnati. Great by the measure of livability as demonstrated by many European cities (high density core and mixed land use make cities better suited to walking, biking, community).
It seems to me it would put pressure on other issues (investing in public transit) which may not followed up on, thus leaving you with a dysfunctional urban infrastructure.
This makes sense for Cincinnati's urban core, since it once had a population density similar to New York. The neighborhoods referenced in the article are incredibly walkable and the city has already invested in a streetcar system to move between neighborhoods. Overall, Cincinnati's neighborhoods within 10 miles of downtown are filled with dense, pre-war construction centered around public squares connected by public transit. The city is already laid out to function without cars (streetcars were abundant here in the 1800s).
That seems a really weird move for a place where almost everybody has a car. It would be reasonable if the public transport system was well-developed, growing rapidly and meant to be the main means for the people to travel the city but isn't the USA (with exception of a small number of places) primarily a car country?
Parking minimums are based on a handbook full of pseudoscience. When city engineers crack open the ITE handbook, it’s the equivalent of a doctor cracking open some old medieval text about humours.
Sibling comments have good answers about the definition, but just to clarify the motivation a bit, the typical justification I've heard for mandatory parking spaces is to avoid a prisoner's dilemma between building owners, especially when there's street parking in the area.
Let's say you have 10 buildings in an area, all of which provide some parking, plus there's some street parking. Any one of those buildings could decide to convert its parking into more homes or stores or whatever would make them more money, and just tell their customers/residents to use the other parking nearby. If everyone did this, nobody would have anywhere to park (especially not visitors), and building owners would have relatively little incentive to provide their own parking (they don't want to be the sucker). By forcing everyone to provide some amount of parking, you're overriding the bad incentives and getting people to cooperate for the greater good. At least theoretically, it's a good example of the government stepping in and making things better for everyone.
I think that rationale holds up less well with dedicated parking, pay-to-park, and parking garages, but certainly there are areas where free parking is the norm.
That's the theory (I think), though it has plenty of downsides. I'm not interested in owning a car, so the last four places I've lived have provided a parking space that went unused, and have had absurdly high rents due to the Bay Area's housing shortage (which might be alleviated by replacing parking spaces with housing).
Most US cities have land use regulations that mandate a minimum amount of car parking for any building type. Things like "at least 1.5 parking spaces per apartment unit" or "1200 sq ft of parking for each 1000 sq ft of retail space" (yes, sometimes they're really that high).
This guarantee subsidizes car parking at the expense of other modes of transportation, whose users are indirectly paying for the cost of that parking, and who suffer disproportionately from how spread out that extra parking makes everything in a city.
Requiring at least X parking spaces for every Y hundred square feet of floor space in a building. Or based on maximum occupancy or some other metric.
It’s why you see small niche businesses in strip malls with large and always empty parking lots. They’re REQUIRED to have lots that big if they don’t/can’t get a variance.
And it can be a lot of wasted space, and a deterrent to using public transit. After all, there is always easy parking.
> And it can be a lot of wasted space, and a deterrent to using public transit. After all, there is always easy parking.
It's not just that it makes driving better. It makes everything else worse, too. Ever tried walking from a house to a strip mall to run errands? Now compare that to walking for errands in a European or Japanese city.
The difference is enormous; I've lived in several parts of the US, currently live in Germany and have traveled around a decent amount, most US cities are just terrible for anything other than driving.
I’ve been downtown in some of the cities in the west/midwest of US and you still need a car. Sometimes a bit of walking works in older parts of the cities but it’s still kind of a mess.
But I’ve been to the downtown area is on the East Coast from before cars were common and everything is packed close together. You can actually walk from place to place and live without needing a car. It’s so incredibly different.
Which is to say nothing of the suburbs which are basically impossible to walk and often dangerous or atleast totally unsuitable for bikes.
>Ever tried walking from a house to a strip mall to run errands?
Absolutely. Mostly the problem is the absurd amount of space between houses, because "not everyone wants to live packed in like sardines on top of each other" (quote from a zoning meeting where the outlawed ADUs).
I don’t think that’s true. Most houses in San Francisco have their parking in the required setback, basement, or 1st floor. That’s extrmely dense compared to standard suburbia, where space between houses is drastically in excess of car storage needs. America would be ~10x as dense (still suburban, but a very different character) if car storage were the limiting factor.
I'm always bemused by the idea. In London, we have parking maximums - expressed as the number of spaces per housing unit, for various sizes of housing unit (measured in habitable rooms per unit), and various levels of public transport accessibility:
At one extreme, a three-bedroom house in an area of the suburbs with poor public transport could have two parking spaces. At the other, a five-bedroom house in an urban area with excellent public transport could only have one parking space. Even then, "all developments in areas of good public transport accessibility (in all parts of London) should aim for significantly less than 1 space per unit".
> “Unbundling makes parking more transparent,” a researcher from Sightline told Next City at the time. “When people realize they’re paying $200 a month for parking they might opt out or get by with one car instead of two, then the market builds less of it which is what we want.”
What is "it" in this sentence? Parking? Why do you want less parking?
Maybe it's more a general complaint about cars. If the city has been requiring free parking spaces then it has been effectively paying for people to own cars.
In general I can see why certain leaderships would wish for less cars for broader reasons. Cars are wasteful and consume precious resources. They kill people, both directly, and indirectly. They discourage people from walking and cycling - both are good ways to increase livability and safety of a community. Finally, cars contribute to the damage we are doing to the planet. Some leaders care about the environment, or at least pretend to for votes.
Which burbs, the burbs are usually the definition of artificial scarcity. Setbacks, minimum lot sizes, FAR restrictions are all a suburban concept for the most part.
Yes, in parts of Seattle and SF for example, the "suburbs" would really be at least 4 floor multifamily residences (some a lot taller) if not for "artificial scarcity induced by petty local politics"
Requiring housing to be accompanied by parking yields more parking but also less housing, as the additional cost takes projects on the margin below profitability and the space occupied by parking can't be used for more units (without expensive underground garages).
Parking requirements are artificial surplus. Letting businesses decide how much parking they want to build is not artificial scarcity, but just the free market at work.
If the majority of people are like you, businesses will be incentivized by market forces build enough parking to accommodate them. So what are you worried about?
Again, I totally understand the rationale behind it. It’s just frustrating for those of us who have no better options in the near future.