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Between the Lines: LA parking spaces
- byoung2 15y agoThe garage—designed to serve the public good—instantly made the Metro immaterial to concertgoers, placed several thousand cars on the road every week, and pumped a few hundred tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. I'm an LA native, and this is what I hate most about my city. There are sections of the building code that literally mandate a minimum number of parking spaces when you build a new building. When every building has plenty of parking, everyone is expected to drive everywhere. As long as this is the case, there is no incentive to improve public transportation.
- mturmon 15y agoHere's another good quote: "Single-car garages, hidden in backyards and alleyways in the early 20th century, doubled in size by the 1970s and moved onto the front lawn once cities began to require two residential spaces for every house." The LA city requirement that new houses must have parking for two cars, side-by-side, has pretty much made the only possible home layout like this: http://image.americanhomeguides.com/cgi-bin/imagemgr/get_image?image=832bed1e1f4626ee5de7cee343be8dfe http://image.americanhomeguides.com/cgi-bin/imagemgr/get_ima... i.e., driveway straight up to garage, which is in front of house. This means the front yard is half concrete, and every (new) house front is dominated by the garage. Even relaxing the requirement to allow tandem parking would be an improvement.