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Where I live (not in the US) we have parking maximums, not minimums. A new office development will not get planning approval if it has more than 2 parking spac
by StringyBob 7y ago
Where I live (not in the US) we have parking maximums, not minimums.
A new office development will not get planning approval if it has more than 2 parking spaces per 3 employees (based on some obscure measurement of building capacity). This is to reduce congestion and encourage more environmentally friendly methods of transportation.
- chc 7y agoI feel like this would be putting the cart before the horse in the US. Failing to put parking in a place with poor walkability and terrible public transportation doesn't seem like it would encourage much of anything.
- mktmkr 7y agoThe cars are the reason the buses are slow. 22% of LA workers travel to work without a car, which isn't great but it's not zero either. Metro LA added a dedicated bus lane on Flower and they are moving more than one bus per minute in that lane. As soon as you remove the cars everything else gets a lot better. https://twitter.com/metrolosangeles/status/1153807208229957632 https://twitter.com/metrolosangeles/status/11538072082299576...
- gowld 7y agoRemoving parking spaces puts more cars on the road -- circling for spots and parking illegally in traffic lanes. If you want faster buses, evict the cars from the bus travel lanes.
- Johnny555 7y agoIf you want faster buses, evict the cars from the bus travel lanes. That's hard to do without BRT - we have plenty of dedicated bus lanes (the right lane) around here, but they all allow cars for right-hand turns, so buses still get stuck behind a line of cars. Without BRT and center-island boarding, it's harder to reserve anything but the far-right lane since the bus needs to get there to pickup/dropoff passengers.
- SECProto 7y ago> That's hard to do without BRT - we have plenty of dedicated bus lanes (the right lane) around here, but they all allow cars for right-hand turns, so buses still get stuck behind a line of cars. Dedicated bus signalization, no right turn on red, and cars perform right turns from the second lane. Dedicated signal phase can be combined with separated bike lanes to improve safety for other road users, as well.
- mktmkr 7y agoYeah, except no. This is just one of those tropes that motorists use to force cities to subsidize them. Every study on this topic has conclusively shown that parking causes traffic. The construction of parking precedes the worsening of traffic, the amount of parking built is proportional to the amount of traffic observed, and the reverse process is also observed to correct the problem: removing parking alleviates traffic congestion. The case that parking causes traffic congestion is as strong as the case that smoking causes lung cancer.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- scarejunba 7y agoHey, do you have anything handy to support this? I can totally do my own research if it's hard for you to recall your sources. Just hoping for a quick lead or two. If you roughly remember the title of the papers or the names of authors or the regions studied, anything at all, it'll help me search faster and I'd be mega grateful.
- cosmie 7y agoConstruction of parking preceding the worsening of traffic is not the same as parking construction causing traffic congestion. Adding more servers behind a load balancer will also precede congestion on your network. Because you've increased your capacity to service additional throughput, but did not increase your network link to handle that higher throughput. So at some point, it'll start thrashing. Same with parking. You build parking in areas where you anticipate increased demand or already have unmet demand. By building parking, you increase your capacity to meet that demand. If you have unmet demand (i.e. not enough spaces for the volume of vehicles that wish to park in an area), you're limiting the economic throughput of that area. Yes, you're reducing traffic congestion in the process, but at a very real economic cost for those whom were being patronized by that now-gone traffic. Same with anticipating new demand. If you're building in an area, you want to be sure the area has enough parking capacity to absorb the intended volume of people traffic your building will have. If you're building a new skyscraper or mall or big box store, that's likely not true. So you incorporate parking into your project. Once your building (and parking) come online, you'll start attracting a higher volume of individuals to an area. Which, except for the most underutilized or mature transportation networks, will have a corresponding impact on congestion due to the greater throughput of individuals to the area. If you have mature public transportation, then your transportation network likely has the bandwidth to absorb this throughput increase with a lesser impact on congestion than if you're in an area with immature public transportation options. But mature public transportation tends to be very expensive to build and maintain. Which is only likely to happen after growing to the point of having heavy enough congestion to make such expensive and regionally disruptive changes both politically palatable and economically feasible. I do not envy urban and transportation planners.
- chc 7y agoAre they? It's always seemed to me that frequent stops, circuitous routes and long travel distances are the reason the buses are slow relative to cars. After all, cars have to deal with other cars as well. And for comparison, to the south, San Diego has much better traffic than LA, but the buses are still quite slow (e.g. I recently considered taking the bus rather than a 15-minute drive in San Diego, but it would have been over an hour by bus).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SECProto 7y agoBuses have to stop to be useful. Any theoretical bus route will be circuituous for some subset of users. The solution to these issues is to provide bus signalization, dedicated lanes, and/or queue jumping opportunities. These changes minimally inconvenience cars while significantly speeding up buses. It makes it so that a bus route, while longer, can be time-competitive with driving (or rather, closer enough that it overcomes the inconvenience of walking to/from stops and sometimes having to wait for your bus)
- gamblor956 7y agoYou guys are both right. Removing cars from a bus lane makes the buses go faster. And having frequent stops makes buses go slower. Traveling long distances doesn't make the bus any slower; it just limits the frequency you can revisit a stop on the route without increasing the number of buses on that route.
- chc 7y agoI didn't mean long travel distances make buses go slower, I meant they amplify the disadvantages of buses, and America tends to have a lot of distance between things. If a trip would take one minute and it takes four instead, that's probably fine. If a trip would take 15 minutes and it takes an hour, that's a bigger problem, even though it's the same relative slowdown.
- 7y ago
- BubRoss 7y agoShouldn't the busses themselves end up removing cars from the road?
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago>Failing to put parking in a place with poor walkability and terrible public transportation doesn't seem like it would encourage much of anything. The glass half full answer is that it incentivizes economic activity to happen elsewhere.
- bhupy 7y agoIf such a thing were to happen in the US, given the current state of infrastructure, optimistic scenario would be increased demand for UberPool / Lyft Line and carpooling in general. At least in the short term.
- mayneack 7y agoNot in DTLA. There's plenty of public transit options that exist and more being built, so it seems like the right time to stop building new buildings with tons of parking. I live in Santa Monica and most people I know making a commute between Santa Monica and DTLA are already doing so carless.
- joelx 7y agoI agree with this comment, I also live in Los Angeles and there is tons of transportation options ranging from bus to light rail to Uber to lyft. We should be pushing people to get rid of their cars instead of keeping them.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoIt's just lifting a requirement, for know. Presumably, there are currently cases where you have to build a parking lot even though it's the headquarters for Fundamentalist Cyclists International and situated right next to public transport. After that, it's chicken-and-egg more than cart-and-whores. With surface parking lots taking up easily half the space in many US business districts, eliminating them could double density and thereby cut average distances in half, making other modes of transportation much more feasible. Essentially, the US at one point chose cars as the dominant mode of transportation and got trapped in that decision. Anybody who has seen alternatives knows this is a tremendous burden on quality of life, yet any change will, in the short term, also hurt in different ways.
- nier 7y agoCart-and-what?
- Rebelgecko 7y agoWho else are you supposed to hire to pull your carts around?
- jessaustin 7y agoWow that is some demented autocorrect right there...
- andys627 7y agoWe've been digging the "cars first" hole for 75-100 years, so it is going to be painful for a while to get out. Less accommodation for cars is necessary for people to really consider alternatives.
- rtkwe 7y agoIt's kind of a chicken and egg problem. As long as there's requirements to provide loads of parking space there's not going to be much pressure for proper walkable and public transit accessible locations and without locations being built around these ideas there's not pressure to make them accessible by non-car traffic.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoPlaners require parking to stop on street parking causing congestion.
- adrianN 7y agoPlaces have poor walkability because parking wastes so much space.
- nostromo 7y agoHere’s a crazy idea: let the property owner and developer decide the correct amount of parking to provide. And the size of the apartments. And the number of floors to build. The regulations here should be based around things like structural integrity, egress, and safety. Not views, not density, not what size of apartment is “too big” or “too small.” All of those are things the market can sort out.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoIsn’t that basically just the libertarian mindset? Ie let individuals optimize for their own interests, even when the t as the detriment of the community? Markets are definitely efficient in sorting out short term individual goals, but not much beyond that.
- paulgb 7y agoI agree that markets can't solve everything, especially within the tight networks of externalities that exist in high-density cities. But with parking, I think the problem is the opposite: car owners create a negative externality (use of limited city-provided parking) that ends up costing non-car-owners because cities then require buildings to build parking.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI agree that cities can screw this up, but the idea of leaving parking policy completely up to the free market is also unappealing. Parking mins are dumb, but parking maxes can make a lot of sense.
- obelos 7y agoIt's crazy because it doesn't work. All of those factors rely upon the use of common, municipal resources, and those municipal resources, especially streets, often can't be expanded.
- CalRobert 7y ago
- jandrese 7y agoMy building in the suburbs outside of DC had the same requirement put on them by the county. They weren't allowed to build enough parking to accommodate a full building in order to encourage people to use alternative transportation. This is something of a problem because one of the features of the building is a large conference center where we can hold events. Luckily the older buildings on campus all over overbuilt parking so it's not a completely unworkable issue, but it does mean people who come for the conference need to walk over from the neighboring building. I actually use the relatively convenient metro stop most days, but sometimes I have to drive and it is always a crapshoot if the underground parking will be full. The funny thing is my building is in one of the least walkable suburbs in the world. The suburb was completely built around cars and plans to make it even a little walkable are at least a decade way from completion (have not even started yet).
- jayd16 7y agoMaybe that's good long term, but the short and medium term is that existing business and residents that rely on street parking will be pushed out.
- yesand 7y agoYes, that’s the point.
- jayd16 7y agoDo you see how the existing businesses and residents (ie. the constituents) would not push for such legislation? Hacker news loves to talk about solutions to zoning problems that only benefit people who don't live there.
- DocTomoe 7y agoGreat way to kill a city's economy. Instead of the bookstore I go to (which often requires me to come twice for a given book), I will now order online. I will not window-shop, and I will not find that cool-looking sweater in the store next to the bookstore. I will also not have a coffee at he cafe on the way to the garage. My monies will no longer benefit these businesses, and if enough people stay away, they will eventually have to shut down. Storefronts will be boarded up, meanwhile, somewhere next to an interstate, another Amazon Warehouse grows. This trend has already started, especially in small-to mid-sized European cities (large ones seem to hang on a bit longer, mostly because their public transit systems were heavily updated in the late 20th century). But even in Berlin, or Munich, or Paris I start noticing storefront rot - increasingly more shops, often specialized ones (which served as focal points for customers from afar who might then use that day to do secondary purchases) go out of business. In the end, you will have very dense city centers filled with large-brand stores, next to major traffic hubs, and slums around it. Cities will lose their one major advantage: the desirability of living there.
- yesand 7y agoSomeone tell Amsterdam and New York that they’re dead because they probably aren’t aware.
- tdxgx 7y agoThat's sounds insane for here in the US
- Reason077 7y agoIn London, councils (and TfL, who are responsible for transport and roads) will often fight against developers who want to include excessive parking, or expand existing parking. Getting planning permission for new developments is significantly easier if they're car-free.
- bartread 7y ago> This is to reduce congestion and encourage more environmentally friendly methods of transportation. A similar policy operates here in the UK, except that the parking allowance is significantly less generous. I find it utterly asinine because it is not paired with the necessary corollary: you can't "encourage" more environmentally friendly methods of transportation, you have to actually - you know - take action and build the infrastructure. Example: I live about 10 miles from the office and would cheerfully cycle into work come rain or shine because it would be great exercise, but there is no safe cycle route, so I'm forced to use some form of motorised transport (I have a car but usually ride a motorcycle). Buses are available but they're once an hour, take too long, are often tardy, and don't run late enough into the evening. Depending on where you live there are better options available (guided busway paired with a cycleway, or the train) but there's no joined up thinking when it comes to more sustainable transportation. The result is that vast swathes of the area around Cambridge (UK) are either inadequately served, or not served at all.
- hrktb 7y ago> I find it utterly asinine because it is not paired with the necessary corollary Doesn't it self-regulate though ? If it's not viable to build in a place for a specific use, developers will go to greener fields. It happens in a lot of heavily congested cities. Making whole areas unfit for heavy traffic moved the office building elsewhere, generally in places that where more welcoming to them.
- bartread 7y ago> Doesn't it self-regulate though ? Possibly in an ideal world, but not in this one (or certainly not on any timescale that I'd regard as acceptable - human lifetimes, and working lifetimes especially, aren't that long in the grand scheme of things and I'm already at least half way through on both fronts).
- C1sc0cat 7y agoI have a similar problem also in the UK (next door in Bedford) - That is the problem a lot of proponents of public transport don't want to address. If you do want to get rich middle class people to use busses - you will have to accept that the services will have to have a lot more investment and increase in cost and be partially rebalanced away from servicing pensioners and to be blunt poorer workers. The problem is local councils prioritise bus service in order to cater to the urban users who are mostly pensioners "granny farming"
- C1sc0cat 7y agoOr bullying employees aka the little people