10 ms·

It’s one thing to ditch parking minimums, but it has to be matched with investment in public transit. Simply eliminating parking spots doesn’t eliminate demand

by voisin 3y ago

It’s one thing to ditch parking minimums, but it has to be matched with investment in public transit. Simply eliminating parking spots doesn’t eliminate demand when there are no other options for getting around. And I suspect the public transit investment will be way more controversial and difficult to implement.

r00fus 3y ago
[flagged]
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > Nothing changes overnight but it allows for denser development esp. around existing public transit lines. The problem is there a barely any decent "existing public transit lines" in Austin. Existing public transit line, singular, perhaps, and in a decade or so we'll get some more. In the meantime it just means traffic gets much shittier with no real alternatives.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    > The problem is there a barely any decent "existing public transit lines" in Austin. Existing public transit line, singular, perhaps, and in a decade or so we'll get some more. In the meantime it just means traffic gets much shittier with no real alternatives. "Let's keep doing the same thing that doesn't work and complain when anyone decides to try something else".
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Except there is no real sane plan to actually do something else. If they were, say, replacing street parking with light rail lines, I'd be onboard. This is basically just ignoring the problem and pretending like "alternative transportation methods" will magically spring up.
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        You are basically saying that markets don't work and we should ignore them. If we let developers decide how much parking they can allocate why would they allocate less than would be needed to sell their properties? By making it less likely that places are further apart for no reason then the need for cars is reduced.
  - the_snooze 3y ago
    I think you're assuming that mass transit is the only lever to improve traffic. Eliminating parking minimums allows businesses to pop up nearer to where people live, where they're accessible by foot or micromobility. If anything, plentiful parking in and of itself causes traffic to be shitty because driving becomes the only safe/comfortable way to get around; housing and businesses come to have huge paved deserts between them, completely hostile to non-car mobility.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      > Eliminating parking minimums allows businesses to pop up nearer to where people live, where they're accessible by foot or micromobility. This is just fantasyland thinking as it applies to Austin TX. These regulations largely impact downtown, which is already dense and already has services downtown.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - r00fus 3y ago
        You're ignoring emergent alternate modes of travel. Two big ones - electric bikes and app-based ride-sharing (Uber) would greatly benefit from a reduced sea of parking while also allowing transport. This code change will pretty much be focused on malls / shopping centers that currently have more parking space than store space. So new malls or changes to existing will result in a more rational balance than the ocean of tarmac we have now.
londons_explore 3y ago
Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further. End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit. Unfortunately, there probably will be transitional years of people fighting for parking spaces at ridiculous prices before the transit gets built.
- DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
  The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Worked for Europe. Everyone there lives in houses perhaps only half the size of a typical US home, and they're happy with it. Most people have the option to go live in the countryside, have a big house and drive a car, all for the same money, yet they choose to have a small city apartment and use public transport.
    - busterarm 3y ago
      Europe was already built before cars existed whereas most cities west of the Mississippi were designed for automobiles save for a tiny downtown core. This is especially true about Austin.
      - brewdad 3y ago
        Paris screwed up their city in the 1970s. They fixed it. The city didn't die. https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/photos-paris-parking-a-ciel-ouvert https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/photos-... There needs to be a will to change.
    - 3y ago
nostrebored 3y ago
This isn’t true. If there is a demand for parking spots in an area, dedicated paid parking can be created — based on market forces rather than minimums. This parking is also often more dense and built upwards. It’s a more efficient use of city space. As is, parking is subsidized by all residents of a city rather than the people who actually consume parking. Much of this space goes unused throughout the day, and the aggregate effect necessarily means sprawl.
coldpie 3y ago
Before: If you build a building of this size, you MUST also build at least X parking spaces. Now: If you build a building of this size, you MAY build as many parking spaces as you think you need. Seems like a strict improvement to me.
- DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
  It’s not. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that did this and it was a nightmare. All street parking filling up by 4pm. Half hour walks to your car. Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. Guests basically just being SOL - you’d literally be unable to have guests over because if you left to pick them up there’d be no spot when you got back, and if they drove themselves they’d never find a spot. Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    It sounds like the parking was underpriced. EDIT I am rate-limited so can't reply, but this part: "If you have 200 cars" This is only the case if the demand for parking / driving is perfectly inelastic, which would be quite extraordinary. Empirically, when you charge for parking or institute toll roads, traffic tends to fall, in some cases sharply (because many journeys are low value). I repeat: if the parking spaces are still congested, the price should be raised until they're not. Assuming the number of cars would stay the same is like the lump-of-labour fallacy. Lump of metal fallacy? Then there's the supply side: guess what, that's not inelastic either! If it's profitable to provide parking, someone will build dedicated facilities for it and charge for their use. This may be an alien concept for some of you, but only because parking minimums cause such oversupply that they can't be run profitably. In cities where parking is priced sanely, it's unremarkable to see this. "Cars will just overflow into adjacent neighbourhoods" okay, so charge for parking there too, until they don't. Duh. I don't see why cars should get to sit somewhere rent-free but a human being can't. Urban land is valuable; if you want to occupy it, pay what it costs, ya fuckin welfare queens. my language is harsh but it's hard not to be when I see so many americans (it's always americans) confidently claiming that life is impossible without free parking. but I live in a city without free parking and things work just fine. I can literally just look out of my window and it disproves all the doomsaying. every commute and trip to the supermarket is uneventful and not ruined in the slightest by a lack of free parking. you pay for parking and it's fine. it's literally just fine. I went to virginia one time, I saw literal acres and acres and acres of empty parking space, oceans of asphalt; nobody seemed to think anything of it but I thought it was mad, like some kind of braindead economic allocation fuckup from a communist country that we'd all laugh about. I wanted to shout: you are being terraformed by asphalt-based lifeforms! why do I have to explain to americans how a free market price mechanism works? on a forum for people to shill their california startups? I shouldn't need to tell you this!
notatoad 3y ago
this doesn't eliminate parking spots. they're eliminating parking minimums, which in most cases are not backed by any sort of science or study - parking minimums get set mostly randomly, as a roadblock for development that people don't want in their neighbourhood. there's no good reason for most of these parking minimums, and they're not necessarily parking spots in places where there is any demand. steet parking, parking garages, and parking lots will continue to exist. then they get carried forward as precedent because people hear "eliminate parking minimums" as "eliminate parking spots" and fight against it, but they don't make any sense.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Your comment is completely wrong, at least as it applies to Austin as explained in the article. Parking minimums are simply a requirement that if you build an apartment building with N apartments, you need to include a number of parking spots that is a function of N. The idea being that if you're building a number of places for people to live, the vast majority of them (especially in Austin) will need a place to park, and it's not really fair for you to externalize that need onto public streets just so you can make more money by adding more apartments with no parking. That's the argument anyway, and it makes sense. The counter argument is that it also keeps us as a car-dependent city, and makes it harder to build affordable housing. I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least in Austin. Public transportation (or, basically any transportation) is notoriously bad in Austin, and for decades we've basically had the stance "if you don't build it, they won't come", but that hasn't quite worked out.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    > I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least it Austin. Public transportation (or, basically any transportation) is notoriously bad in Austin, and for decades we've basically had the stance "if you don't build it, they won't come", but that hasn't quite worked out. Well, since what you have been doing hasn't worked, maybe let's try the other tactic.
    - 3y ago
CYR1X 3y ago
If there are truly no other options, then the developers are going to have to severely reduce the price of their real estate or choose not to build there. This is simply taking an implicit approach to things, which may or may not work. If anything doing this is a way for cities to implicitly get citizens on board for investing more in public transit. All of the new apartment buildings in the hip parts of town don't have any parking for your cars, so you're forced onto public transportation more, which you might think stinks, so you now care more about voting for infrastructure improvement.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > If there are truly no other options, then the developers are going to have to severely reduce the price of their real estate or choose not to build there. This is simply taking an implicit approach to things, which may or may not work. True. But only to a limited extent as long as demand remains significantly higher relative to supply. e.g. if you're moving to a city due to work etc. and and have limited you're much more willing to compromise (use street parking, private lots some distance away etc,).
- TexanFeller 3y ago
  I think people will just take the path of least resistance which is voting for building more parking again. They won’t punish themselves in the short term so that the neighborhood they live in is more affordable and walkable in 20 years, when they won’t even live there anymore by then.
letitbeirie 3y ago
I wish they'd be a little less one-size-fits-all. Nixing parking minimums for businesses in already-walkable, transit-connected downtown cores is overdue, and areas close to that density can easily become new downtown cores when infill is allowed to cover their parking lots. Nixing parking minimums for downtown apartments, to your point, is a terrible idea (outside the densest areas of NYC at least, where parking minimums are already effectively nil) because most transit systems in the US are designed to bring suburban commuters into the city, so even if said apartment is situated directly above a multi-modal mass transit hub, it might not necessarily connect its residents to much more than a handful of giant parking decks clustered around a freeway.
- jadengeller 3y ago
  If downtown apartments are not sufficiently desirable without parking, developers will build parking.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    What I will guess happens is that they are still desirable, they will not be cheaper. And there will be parking problems...
    - brewdad 3y ago
      My adult child lives in an area of Seattle where parking minimums have been eliminated. Their building, built 3 years ago, has about 65 adult residents. There are 10 parking spaces on site and the street the building sits on has zero street parking. Renting a parking space adds about 10% to the cost of renting. Currently there is still one spot available if a resident wants to pay for it. If they had built 60 parking spaces and let residents park for free, I feel confident there would be at least 50 spots in regular use based on how nearby buildings with larger parking lots are utilized. Since the parking is underground, the most expensive type of parking to build, I also feel confident that rents would be at least 10% and probably 20% higher with "free" parking.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
chung8123 3y ago
In theory it will eliminate the demand because it will be so much of a hassle people won't demand it. When there are no other options for getting around people will have to move to be closer to where they need to be and that increase in price will be weighed against the increase in the price of owning a car.

by voisin 3y ago

r00fus 3y ago

[flagged]

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> Nothing changes overnight but it allows for denser development esp. around existing public transit lines. The problem is there a barely any decent "existing public transit lines" in Austin. Existing public transit line, singular, perhaps, and in a decade or so we'll get some more. In the meantime it just means traffic gets much shittier with no real alternatives.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > The problem is there a barely any decent "existing public transit lines" in Austin. Existing public transit line, singular, perhaps, and in a decade or so we'll get some more. In the meantime it just means traffic gets much shittier with no real alternatives. "Let's keep doing the same thing that doesn't work and complain when anyone decides to try something else".
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Except there is no real sane plan to actually do something else. If they were, say, replacing street parking with light rail lines, I'd be onboard. This is basically just ignoring the problem and pretending like "alternative transportation methods" will magically spring up.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      You are basically saying that markets don't work and we should ignore them. If we let developers decide how much parking they can allocate why would they allocate less than would be needed to sell their properties? By making it less likely that places are further apart for no reason then the need for cars is reduced.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  I think you're assuming that mass transit is the only lever to improve traffic. Eliminating parking minimums allows businesses to pop up nearer to where people live, where they're accessible by foot or micromobility. If anything, plentiful parking in and of itself causes traffic to be shitty because driving becomes the only safe/comfortable way to get around; housing and businesses come to have huge paved deserts between them, completely hostile to non-car mobility.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > Eliminating parking minimums allows businesses to pop up nearer to where people live, where they're accessible by foot or micromobility. This is just fantasyland thinking as it applies to Austin TX. These regulations largely impact downtown, which is already dense and already has services downtown.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - r00fus 3y ago
      You're ignoring emergent alternate modes of travel. Two big ones - electric bikes and app-based ride-sharing (Uber) would greatly benefit from a reduced sea of parking while also allowing transport. This code change will pretty much be focused on malls / shopping centers that currently have more parking space than store space. So new malls or changes to existing will result in a more rational balance than the ocean of tarmac we have now.

londons_explore 3y ago

Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further. End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit. Unfortunately, there probably will be transitional years of people fighting for parking spaces at ridiculous prices before the transit gets built.

DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Worked for Europe. Everyone there lives in houses perhaps only half the size of a typical US home, and they're happy with it. Most people have the option to go live in the countryside, have a big house and drive a car, all for the same money, yet they choose to have a small city apartment and use public transport.
  - busterarm 3y ago
    Europe was already built before cars existed whereas most cities west of the Mississippi were designed for automobiles save for a tiny downtown core. This is especially true about Austin.
    - brewdad 3y ago
      Paris screwed up their city in the 1970s. They fixed it. The city didn't die. https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/photos-paris-parking-a-ciel-ouvert https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/photos-... There needs to be a will to change.
  - 3y ago

nostrebored 3y ago

This isn’t true. If there is a demand for parking spots in an area, dedicated paid parking can be created — based on market forces rather than minimums. This parking is also often more dense and built upwards. It’s a more efficient use of city space. As is, parking is subsidized by all residents of a city rather than the people who actually consume parking. Much of this space goes unused throughout the day, and the aggregate effect necessarily means sprawl.

coldpie 3y ago

Before: If you build a building of this size, you MUST also build at least X parking spaces. Now: If you build a building of this size, you MAY build as many parking spaces as you think you need. Seems like a strict improvement to me.

DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
It’s not. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that did this and it was a nightmare. All street parking filling up by 4pm. Half hour walks to your car. Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. Guests basically just being SOL - you’d literally be unable to have guests over because if you left to pick them up there’d be no spot when you got back, and if they drove themselves they’d never find a spot. Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).
- _dain_ 3y ago
  It sounds like the parking was underpriced. EDIT I am rate-limited so can't reply, but this part: "If you have 200 cars" This is only the case if the demand for parking / driving is perfectly inelastic, which would be quite extraordinary. Empirically, when you charge for parking or institute toll roads, traffic tends to fall, in some cases sharply (because many journeys are low value). I repeat: if the parking spaces are still congested, the price should be raised until they're not. Assuming the number of cars would stay the same is like the lump-of-labour fallacy. Lump of metal fallacy? Then there's the supply side: guess what, that's not inelastic either! If it's profitable to provide parking, someone will build dedicated facilities for it and charge for their use. This may be an alien concept for some of you, but only because parking minimums cause such oversupply that they can't be run profitably. In cities where parking is priced sanely, it's unremarkable to see this. "Cars will just overflow into adjacent neighbourhoods" okay, so charge for parking there too, until they don't. Duh. I don't see why cars should get to sit somewhere rent-free but a human being can't. Urban land is valuable; if you want to occupy it, pay what it costs, ya fuckin welfare queens. my language is harsh but it's hard not to be when I see so many americans (it's always americans) confidently claiming that life is impossible without free parking. but I live in a city without free parking and things work just fine. I can literally just look out of my window and it disproves all the doomsaying. every commute and trip to the supermarket is uneventful and not ruined in the slightest by a lack of free parking. you pay for parking and it's fine. it's literally just fine. I went to virginia one time, I saw literal acres and acres and acres of empty parking space, oceans of asphalt; nobody seemed to think anything of it but I thought it was mad, like some kind of braindead economic allocation fuckup from a communist country that we'd all laugh about. I wanted to shout: you are being terraformed by asphalt-based lifeforms! why do I have to explain to americans how a free market price mechanism works? on a forum for people to shill their california startups? I shouldn't need to tell you this!

notatoad 3y ago

this doesn't eliminate parking spots. they're eliminating parking minimums, which in most cases are not backed by any sort of science or study - parking minimums get set mostly randomly, as a roadblock for development that people don't want in their neighbourhood. there's no good reason for most of these parking minimums, and they're not necessarily parking spots in places where there is any demand. steet parking, parking garages, and parking lots will continue to exist. then they get carried forward as precedent because people hear "eliminate parking minimums" as "eliminate parking spots" and fight against it, but they don't make any sense.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Your comment is completely wrong, at least as it applies to Austin as explained in the article. Parking minimums are simply a requirement that if you build an apartment building with N apartments, you need to include a number of parking spots that is a function of N. The idea being that if you're building a number of places for people to live, the vast majority of them (especially in Austin) will need a place to park, and it's not really fair for you to externalize that need onto public streets just so you can make more money by adding more apartments with no parking. That's the argument anyway, and it makes sense. The counter argument is that it also keeps us as a car-dependent city, and makes it harder to build affordable housing. I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least in Austin. Public transportation (or, basically any transportation) is notoriously bad in Austin, and for decades we've basically had the stance "if you don't build it, they won't come", but that hasn't quite worked out.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > I'm not really convinced of the counter argument, at least it Austin. Public transportation (or, basically any transportation) is notoriously bad in Austin, and for decades we've basically had the stance "if you don't build it, they won't come", but that hasn't quite worked out. Well, since what you have been doing hasn't worked, maybe let's try the other tactic.
  - 3y ago

CYR1X 3y ago

If there are truly no other options, then the developers are going to have to severely reduce the price of their real estate or choose not to build there. This is simply taking an implicit approach to things, which may or may not work. If anything doing this is a way for cities to implicitly get citizens on board for investing more in public transit. All of the new apartment buildings in the hip parts of town don't have any parking for your cars, so you're forced onto public transportation more, which you might think stinks, so you now care more about voting for infrastructure improvement.

qwytw 3y ago
> If there are truly no other options, then the developers are going to have to severely reduce the price of their real estate or choose not to build there. This is simply taking an implicit approach to things, which may or may not work. True. But only to a limited extent as long as demand remains significantly higher relative to supply. e.g. if you're moving to a city due to work etc. and and have limited you're much more willing to compromise (use street parking, private lots some distance away etc,).
TexanFeller 3y ago
I think people will just take the path of least resistance which is voting for building more parking again. They won’t punish themselves in the short term so that the neighborhood they live in is more affordable and walkable in 20 years, when they won’t even live there anymore by then.

letitbeirie 3y ago

I wish they'd be a little less one-size-fits-all. Nixing parking minimums for businesses in already-walkable, transit-connected downtown cores is overdue, and areas close to that density can easily become new downtown cores when infill is allowed to cover their parking lots. Nixing parking minimums for downtown apartments, to your point, is a terrible idea (outside the densest areas of NYC at least, where parking minimums are already effectively nil) because most transit systems in the US are designed to bring suburban commuters into the city, so even if said apartment is situated directly above a multi-modal mass transit hub, it might not necessarily connect its residents to much more than a handful of giant parking decks clustered around a freeway.

jadengeller 3y ago
If downtown apartments are not sufficiently desirable without parking, developers will build parking.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  What I will guess happens is that they are still desirable, they will not be cheaper. And there will be parking problems...
  - brewdad 3y ago
    My adult child lives in an area of Seattle where parking minimums have been eliminated. Their building, built 3 years ago, has about 65 adult residents. There are 10 parking spaces on site and the street the building sits on has zero street parking. Renting a parking space adds about 10% to the cost of renting. Currently there is still one spot available if a resident wants to pay for it. If they had built 60 parking spaces and let residents park for free, I feel confident there would be at least 50 spots in regular use based on how nearby buildings with larger parking lots are utilized. Since the parking is underground, the most expensive type of parking to build, I also feel confident that rents would be at least 10% and probably 20% higher with "free" parking.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

chung8123 3y ago

In theory it will eliminate the demand because it will be so much of a hassle people won't demand it. When there are no other options for getting around people will have to move to be closer to where they need to be and that increase in price will be weighed against the increase in the price of owning a car.