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Why parking minimums almost destroyed my town and how we repealed them (2017)
- shard972 8y agoI'm not sure why a bank building a 3 story building can't accomodate some underground/roof parking? Or just make the carpark space the bank would have made multi level. I don't see why the only solution was to go horizontal, for a bank of all companies!
- slyall 8y agoBallpark construction costs: Surface parking $3,000 per space Multistory $20,000 per space Underground $30,000 per space
- sschueller 8y agoDon't let them decide on cost. It's the cities job to put regulations in place to require underground parking when building certain structures. It is also their job to calculate in the additional toll on traffic as well as public transport in order to plan future expansion.
- slyall 8y agoSo you are saying that the town (8000 people) should have required the bank to put in 200 "additional" underground parking spaces? A town with a regulation like that won't spend much time planning future expansion.
- Arnt 8y agoWe have that kind of regulation where I live, including a requirement for off-street parking per apartments that pushes builders strongly towards underground parking. Now people complain about the rents, because of course the added construction cost ends up increasing the rent, and about a lack of new affordable housing. You see the same thing in the original story — some popular restaurant decided not to expand because of the cost of parking. Mandating expensive extras sucks, one way or another.
- varjag 8y agoThat's not extras, that's paying for the externalities you otherwise incur upon others.
- Arnt 8y agoAbout half the residents in such apartments have no car.
- varjag 8y agoInteresting, because here nearly everyone wealthy enough to buy a central, newly commissioned apartment (ballpark of million dollars) does own a car.
- TomMarius 8y agoNot in Europe. Cars aren't really practical anywhere near city centres.
- varjag 8y agoI am in Norway, not even in the capital.
- TomMarius 8y agoOwning a car in city such as Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Prague, Brno... is significant pain, and it costs you a lot to even keep that car on the street (if you can find a place - you can't). As a result, people in many historical cities with compact greater city centres (where there simply is not enough land to even theoretically accommodate 1 car per household) simply don't own a car, because why. Probably more than half of the people living in the building where I do don't have a car, many of my coworkers don't...
- varjag 8y ago
- CalRobert 8y agoWhat basis, exactly, should they decide on? For a bank of all places they will know what an absurd waste an underground parking garage is. Here's an analysis showing how absurdly expensive it is to make build built little houses for cars that are empty most of the time any time we want to do anything. https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062
- xte 8y agoUnderground parking may pose many problems for instance if you are in a flood-frequent area, if the ground is not so easy to modify etc. Sometimes maybe an option but not always.
- kachurovskiy 8y agoNot only that, it can run up to $500 or more per underground parking spot in maintenance per year for electricity, physical space and entrance maintenance, fire safety systems and obligatory insurances. Additionally, you might not be allowed to store anything except a car in your space and not allowed to perform any activities there except driving in or out (no small car repairs!). What if you're alone with a baby and shopping bags and there's no elevator? Compare this to an outside parking space: none of that applies. I'd love to hide all the cars away from the street but I didn't realize all these differences until I got myself an underground spot.
- MRD85 8y agoIn a small town, it's cheaper to go horizontal. Maybe in SF it makes sense to go vertical but not in a place where land is cheap.
- CalRobert 8y agoThe trouble is that requiring the parking is a big part of what makes places impossible or unpleasant to walk in in the first place. That bank would have been part of a nice walkable street but (if required to build all the parking) would be part of just another American asphalt hellscape. And who wants to walk in that?
- MRD85 8y agoI agree but I was commenting on economics. Western cities seemed to be planned around cars as opposed to walking and public transport. In my country we have the ideal of a large suburban house with a yard. This takes up space, which causes cities to spread out and cars become the norm.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoA parking garage in sandpoint sounds a bit excessive. It isn’t Spokane.
- burfog 8y agoEvery business would prefer to have customers swipe parking provided by every other business. That way, the other businesses pay the cost of land for parking. It's a freeloader problem. Parking minimums exist to fix this. You don't need parking minimums in the middle of nowhere, with businesses too far apart for swiping each other's parking spaces. Customers really do go elsewhere if there are no spaces, but a business can't affordably provide the spaces if they will mostly be swiped by customers of other businesses.
- setr 8y agoEvery business will prefer someone else to handle parking. No business will survive if parking is not handled. Eventually, someone will pay for it, else no business will survive. And since we know businesses survive without parking minimums, we must therefore also know that a solution to your freeloading problem can be found without the requirement. Also, parking minimums can omly make sense in the middle of nowhere. In a dense location, each business cannot be reasonably expected to build parking.. because the location is dense. Unless you spread out the buildings, to make it sparse enough to support each building owning x spaced... but I don’t think anyone wants to take a city and pretend its the middle of nowhere. Parking minimums are neither a good solution, nor the only solution. I don’t know what the best solution is, but as above, alternative solutions obviously exist. My opinion: city-owned street parking + private lots offer a good setup; businesses shouldn’t be directly involved in parking lots, except as a worst case scenario (ikea/walmart 40 minutes out of the city proper)
- ghaff 8y agoA lot of people on here are big on just eliminating or drastically reducing parking in cities. That works fine if you live and work downtown and don't need a car otherwise. But I pretty much guarantee you that the vibrancy of your downtown is sustained to a large degree by people who don't live there coming in. I was just in the local city for dinner and a play last night. I can guarantee you that, to the degree traffic and parking make that too much of a chore (and, believe me, it's getting there) I'll just fire up a movie at home instead. ADDED: Some cities (e.g. New York, London, various other European cores don't really lend themselves to driving in--though many people still do in the evenings--but that presupposes public transit that can comfortably substitute for driving in terms of convenience and cost).
- enriquto 8y agoFrom an European standpoint, this text reads like a nightmarish dystopia. I find solace in the trend towards banning cars altogether inside the cities.
- tbarbugli 8y agoPerhaps you are from NL, Denmark, Germany or Sweden. Traffic management in Italy, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Greece is insane (and you can't even take a right when it's red!)
- Oletros 8y agoAnd exactly why is insane in Spain?
- chopin 8y agoYou can't in Germany, either.
- varjag 8y agoYou can't anywhere in continental Europe it seems.
- fxmc 8y agoNot generally allowed, but there are signs allowing it almost everywhere.
- Semaphor 8y agoMaybe 50% or less where I live. Never counted but certainly not even close to "almost everywhere"
- majewsky 8y agoThe Grünpfeil (green arrow) traffic sign that allows right turns through a red light was actually invented in the GDR, so it's more common in East Germany. Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%BCnpfeil https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%BCnpfeil
- pjc50 8y agoHow could a bank possibly require two hundred parking spaces? For a branch in a small town? There's only about 9,000 people in Sandpoint! Edit: ah, it's a multistorey office building, so that's presumably 1:1 employee parking, not a branch with customer parking? I was trying to work out how this would play in the UK, and in the first instance it's most likely the bank would shut: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/caroline-flint-small-town-britain-suffers-as-bank-branch-closures-continue-1-8914883 https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/caroline-flint-... (Thorne has a population of 16k and no bank branch). There is always a back-and-forth about parking availability, charges, and business taxes in relation to the UK high street. But the usual model is either a small amount of on-street parking or a charged-for public or private car park.
- maxsilver 8y ago(According to local news articles) It's a 90,000 sqft building, in a small village with zero alternative transportation. 200 parking spaces is actually a conservative low requirement, all things considered. The building, if some day fully occupied, would have over 400 employees daily in it. In my city, they'd probably push closer to 450+ employees into there.
- nicoburns 8y agoI in the UK a lot of multi-story office building have carparks underneath them. That said, it's less of a problem because for buildings in the centres of towns a lot of people will prefer to take public transport or cycle anyway.
- xte 8y agoI do not know how parking/constructions are ruled in the USA however here (France) and in my origin country (Italy) it was common to have minimum park space for any new building in cities simply because we are out of parking space, going from A to B in a city often take far less than orbiting around B looking for a parking lot... IMO the problem reside in city concept itself: in the past we need cities because we need to be together around water, together to have services, to being able to defend ourselves etc now those needs are substantially disappear or marginal but space need it start to be a super-serious problem. Basically we can't evolve a city simply because we are so dense that we can't reach agreements to destroy something old to build something new or even if we can reach such agreements costs are so high that no one face them looking for other options. IMO the sole thing we can and should and must do is start to limit population like "only one child per capita" incentives to child-less peoples etc and start to create distributed place to live make easier work from remote as much as possible, make ease to travel around the country but without "concentrated place" except for factories, official buildings etc that need a small scale concentration.
- ginko 8y agoI disagree. High density cities are more energy efficient and ecological than sprawling ones. The solution to this is public transport, not density restrictions. No one living in a city should have to own a car in the first place.
- xte 8y agoTry to compute how much energy you need to build and maintain a dense city than a sprawling suburb. Try to compute evolution possibilities of a dense area than a sparse one. Try to compute the magnitude of any disaster from natural phenomenon to human-made ones on a dense area than the countryside. I have lived in a dense and modern big European city, now I'm living on mountains: cost, quality of life, energy efficiency etc are far superior here than in a city. No matter how developed is public transportation that's it's regularly inefficient because to handle peak time it work at a very bad efficiency for the rest of the year and you can't reduce it without hurting people freedom.
- Faaak 8y agoMeanwhile, in Geneva, some new buildings are forbidden to build an underground parking in order to discourage the use of cars. It's interesting how cities react to cars differently
- lolc 8y agoYeah, Geneva is already clogged and just doesn't have the space to build more roads. Driving is curable, as they say.
- Eric_WVGG 8y agoI just learned that this is a problem we somehow have in New York City, a place that desperately needs to reduce the number of cars on the road. :\
- saiya-jin 8y agoSo they decided to build a completely new subway just to incentivize french daily commuters to drive less into the city. Project costing billions, making ton of mess all over the city for last 10 years, planned either by incredibly stupid people or as outright fraud. If you look at the map, it won't help in transport practically any Geneva inhabitant, since there are only 4 stops altogether (1 is in so called ugliest town in France just across the border, Annemasse), and moving between those 3 within Geneva will be faster by existing bus system (ie Eaux-Vives -> train station, takes 12 mins). That's not how you build a city subway. What a fail... Add to that the fact that french commuters would have to drive to centre of border french town (which has its own traffic jams every day and no infrastructure to handle extra commuters) and somehow park (expensively) there - it will take them +-same time to just go to centre of Geneva. The problem would be solvable very easily without any digging and spending billions and pissing off everybody - just change legislation to make parking to non-swiss (or non-Geneva) cars more restrictive (blue zones) or more expensive (white zones, inner city parkings). And make the border huge parkings really cheap, the prices now are ridiculously high for what they are supposed to do (and waiting times for a slot are 6-12 months). It would also bring more revenue to city without having to build more parking spaces for which there is simply no space. I suspect huge bribery from companies involved (mainly construction) to push this through, because this really doesn't make any sense. Yet another example of Geneva not really being Swiss in anything but location - more like 50% French with their mess, inefficiency and corruption, and 50% somehow Swiss (but its really smaller half, they just have tons of money from all the companies due to low corporate taxes).
- Gobd 8y agoI used to live in Sandpoint, and the large city parking is full very often forcing people to park on the street where it's a 3 hour or so limit. I always rode my bike (yes even in the winter) but it's challenging for tourists visiting the beach or shopping in the summer to find parking. Also very few people ride their bike in the winter with all the snow & ice, and that's when there are the fewest parking spots since the snow piled up cuts the size of the city lot in half. I always thought a park and ride would do well there so tourists could park out of downtown and take a bus to downtown or the beach. It's not a big problem, but I couldn't imagine the city having less parking.
- jnty 8y agoWithout wishing to sound flippant, as a society we've developed a mechanism to control the allocation of scarce resources - pricing. It sounds a lot like the parking you're describing is extremely underpriced, both in the demand/supply sense (demand is outstripping supply) and in the externalities sense (impacts to tourism, issues like air quality caused by traffic hunting for a space, walkability death spiral etc.) For such a capitalist country as the US, the die-hard attachment to free or overcheap parking is really odd.
- barrow-rider 8y agoEveryone notices the pay parking in the US because everyone drives.
- CalRobert 8y ago1) Not everyone drives. 2) They notice it because they're used to getting it for free. Do people notice pay-renting in the US because everyone needs to sleep somewhere? Or do we just understand that using land comes with a cost? It shouldn't cost less to give a place to sleep to a car than to a person.
- EpicEng 8y ago>It shouldn't cost less to give a place to sleep to a car than to a person Really? It shouldn't? Beyond the obvious fact that people in the US _need_ cars (it's not an option for most), parking space costs far less to build and maintain than does a home.
- ineedasername 8y agoThe articles seems to setup a false choice between having minimums and not having them. In fact from reading the article, the problem wasn't the minimums per se, it was the fact that they were excessive and didn't account for parking factors that varied across different parts of the town. It's a classic bit of over regulation with backlash shown by the author that "regulation bad", when in reality it's just that regulation was still needed, it just needed to be more nuanced.
- wstuartcl 8y agoSeems like a reasonable requirement to have a certain number of parking spots for new construction. If anything it needed to be modified to apply pain for making the choice to build parking at street level (vs underground or multi level parking) by applying a penalty against the sq foot footprint of parking installations that feeds back into the cost equation for the buildings. IE, if the requirement is to have 200 spots for a specific building adding those spots by buying blocks of land for flat parking increase the requirement count by a ratio of the land used to supply the spots. Given a properly sized ratio the builders will have a choice of a cheaper underground/multilevel parking system or a much more "expensive" flat parking lot.
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- logfromblammo 8y agoParking facilities are like hash tables. They get less efficient (time) as they get more full. But they are also less efficient (space) when nearly empty. Unfortunately for city planners, doubling the size of a lot when it becomes 80% full is not a cheap operation.
- nqzero 8y agobeautiful writing and a beautiful approach to building consensus
- frankus 8y agoI have noticed a weird left-right political reversal around parking in the US. Or maybe it's not entirely left-right but wonk-populist. The voices that most loudly condemn socialism and regulation suddenly become advocates for government-run parking and against deregulation of private-sector parking. (For example: https://twitter.com/KCGOP/status/1067502185099841536 https://twitter.com/KCGOP/status/1067502185099841536)
- jsight 8y agoI feel like I have misunderstood your post. I'm assuming by "voices that most loudly condemn socialism and regulation", you mean the GOP? But the article linked doesn't seem to complain about deregulation of private-sector parking, but rather to complain about giving over parking to bike lanes and government run buses. Where is the part where they want government run parking and regulations on private sector parking?
- frankus 8y agoMaybe it really is more about shifting priorities away from cars and towards more green uses like bike lanes and buses. That specific example doesn't touch on parking minimums, and maybe deregulating those are less of a political hot button, but the fact that they remain pretty much ubiquitous in the US suggests that there is still some opposition. But there also seems to be a lack of faith that the private sector will step in a replace the public sector spots that have been converted to other uses, as well as opposition to charging a market-clearing price for the remaining government-run spots.
- jimmaswell 8y agoThere's an area with a bunch of businesses all served only by street parking in the town by me. I never go there because I hate street parking. If they had parking lots I'd go there. I wonder how many other potential customers feel this way.
- sethhochberg 8y agoA town nearby where my parents live recently experimented with zoning some of their parking lots for development and expanding street parking in the (small) downtown core, an area full of small shops and restaurants, mostly. The street parking had meters, which were very cheap (I think the maximum you could spend was something like $3 a day). The local residents revolted, business owners claimed their income was taking a hit, etc. At the time, I wondered how in the world this seemingly thriving, walkable little downtown was so dependent on giant free parking lots behind the main strip... it seemed crazy to me that someone would stop going to a restaurant they enjoyed because their $50 bill for dinner turned into a $51.50 night out with parking fees. I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike street parking, its just such a foreign concept to me that someone would avoid an entire otherwise-nice area because there is plentiful parking that doesn't suit their tastes. Kind of weird to see it written out like that.
- jimmaswell 8y agoIt's not just the meter fee, but getting into the space (if a space is between two cars I'll just go farther to find an easier space), having to watch for a safe moment to get out of the car, getting out of the space (especially if traffic is busy or people came up too close in front of or behind me), and the meters themselves can be a source of annoyance here because they take their time authorizing the credit card charge. With all that, I find it more convenient to mostly just go to the grocery store which has a parking lot, and order in. As a side note, I also hate street parking as just a driver passing through because it so often makes the street suffocatingly narrow and I have to watch out for people coming and going.
- pxeboot 8y agoSame concept with free shipping. People really like it, even if the total cost is higher.
- jpm_sd 8y agoI live in a small city (Alameda, CA) that has a couple of concentrated "downtown" areas with limited parking. The construction of a 6-story municipal parking garage as part of a large renovation of the old movie theater complex in 2008 was beneficial to all of the surrounding businesses. It seems like this is a pretty good general strategy, it just requires a large up-front investment by the city. More details: http://www.alamedatheatres.com/historic-theatre/ http://www.alamedatheatres.com/historic-theatre/ https://www.overaa.com/projects/alameda-historic-theatre-restoration-civic-center-parking-garage https://www.overaa.com/projects/alameda-historic-theatre-res...
- iso1337 8y agoWhat would have been even better is investment in a BART line that runs to Alameda. Getting on and off the island is horrible due to there being only 3-4 bridges/tunnels (IIRC). Of course, that would have been a larger up-front investment but one that they're now looking at. http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/May-2018/BART-in-Alameda/ http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/May-2018/BART-in-Alameda/
- jpm_sd 8y agoThe theater/parking renovations totaled around $37 million. Bringing BART to Alameda is, according to your link, a 12 to 15 BILLION dollar project. That's 300 to 400 times more expensive.
- mercutio2 8y agoThat is an uncharitable comparison. 12 to 15 billion is the cost to build an entirely new transbay tube. The cost to tunnel BART from Oakland to Alameda would be a small fraction of that. I’d certainly shop in Alameda vastly more frequently if it had a BART station. Heck, my wife would probably insist we move there, the reason we don’t live there is I insist that we live near a BART station.
- aeharding 8y agoAn interesting city to look at parking is Madison, WI. Because the heart of downtown is physically restricted by an isthmus, there are many public parking ramps. https://www.cityofmadison.com/parking-utility/garages-lots https://www.cityofmadison.com/parking-utility/garages-lots