16 ms·

In Los Angeles there are ~ 3 parking spaces per car, and < 1 housing unit per person. We mandate a bunch of parking for every new building, but no housing. It

In Los Angeles there are ~ 3 parking spaces per car, and < 1 housing unit per person. We mandate a bunch of parking for every new building, but no housing. Its no wonder that people live in cars.

smt88 3y ago
LA is a disaster for transit and housing, but your numbers aren't a problem on their face. Any car being used will need >1 space at all times: one at home and one wherever it's being parked when its driver has gone somewhere. If you have <=1 space per car, the car is either being unused or it's parking illegally sometimes. We need far more parking spaces per car in LA once we consider the millions of people who are driving in the city and live outside of it. As far as housing, we'd have a 100% fully housed population with <1 house per person because a large percentage of people live with one or more people.
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > LA is a disaster for transit and housing, but your numbers aren't a problem on their face. Any car being used will need >1 space at all times: one at home and one wherever it's being parked when its driver has gone somewhere. Actually, those numbers are a problem on their face. They're an illustration of why cars, and societies that are structured around enabling automobile transit as the primary (or even sole) means of transit, are inherently unsustainable and inefficient.
  - oh_sigh 3y ago
    Why is 3 parking spaces per car inherently unsustainable?
    - huntertwo 3y ago
      If you think about it, three parking spaces take up way less space than 1 housing unit in LA.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        Most housing units will have more than one person, and most of those people have cars. In most cities space dedicated to cars (parking and roads) covers about 50% of all land use. Housing, factories, stores, parks, churches, and the like are the other half. Note that the above is about land area. Housing units are often stacked vertically, while car parking rarely stacked.
        bombcar 3y ago
        Where land is actually precious, parking gets stacked. Where it is not stacked, it’s obviously not that terribly valuable.
        bluGill 3y ago
        Stacking parking is done. However it is so expensive to build that before it is worth stacking parking you are already building less parking than there is demand. The cost to park in stacked parking regularly means the costs to park there are high enough to make most customers look for alternatives. There are places just outside of downtown where the demand for cheap surface lot parking is higher than total parking spaces - but the people who go there would not pay for stacked parking. Thus while stacked parking exists, it is more costly than the value most people consider it to provide. Of course places where stacked parking is even a thought are also places where density is high enough that it isn't hard to run a great transit system and so there is less need for parking at all.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - empyrrhicist 3y ago
      https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/outdoor-living/pave-a-parking-lot/ https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/outdoor-living/pave-a-parki... And that doesn't cover opportunity cost or the knock-on effects of market distortion, or the exponentially higher costs of e.g. parking garages.
      - kube-system 3y ago
        The price to pave a lot is by far the least unsustainable part of the situation. Asphalt is cheap. The opportunity cost of the land use is much higher in all but the most rural of places.
    - stetrain 3y ago
      If everyone needs to have a car to get around that's 3 parking spaces per person. Or 6-12 parking spaces per household. This is nearing the square footage of an apartment to house the same number of people. So for any given unit of housing real estate we need an equivalent or greater amount of parking real estate. When everyone wants to live close together (ie in LA near where they work, socialize, etc. not in middle of Nebraska) that puts a real pressure on space, and drives up the cost for real estate. Even if you want to increase density by building higher buildings, the cost of those condo/apartment towers now must factor in a parking garage pedestal taking up 1/3 of its height, and so must offices, shopping centers, etc. I don't think the ratio of parking spaces per car needs to be reduced. Rather it needs to be recognized, and thus reveal the cost of policies that lead to one car per person. If you can reduce the cars per person ratio, you reduce the number of parking spaces required at a 3x rate.
    - michael1999 3y ago
      3 parking spaces is ~750sqft. A moving car is another 2000sqft. Once population density passes ~3 stories, the geometry stops working. Once drive time exceeds an hour or two, the math stops working. It's the urban rocket equation.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        They’re not additive - a car can’t be parked and moving at the same time.
        michael1999 3y ago
        This is in response to a thread discussing the fact that LA has three parking spots per car, and they must (by counting) be mostly empty.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      It isn't unsustainable. However it is limiting. That is a lot of space that is 2/3rds empty yet not really usable for anything else. Worse, cars are heavy and so it isn't practical to go vertical with parking spaces (we can/do build parking ramps - but they are a lot more expensive and so few want to pay to park there, and even then there seems to be a limit to how tall you can make them) Cities are great because of all the different things you can get to. However cars spread the city out, and in this in turn means you can't do as many things. You can still do a lot, but eventually the distance (distances in cities are measured in time not meters!) is unreasonable and so you can't get someplace in your city. Dense cities enable more things. If you just want to go to walmart - so do everyone else so no problem. However if you have a niche interest you may discover not enough people live within range to support a place for your interest even though across the entire city there are enough people.
      - pandaman 3y ago
        > However if you have a niche interest you may discover not enough people live within range to support a place for your interest even though across the entire city there are enough people. How are the cars limiting here? It's quite the opposite - you can have a special interest shop/venue in a cheap mall in some industrial area and get enough customers who can reach you by car. Without the car ubiquity you'd need to get into expensive real estate in the city center to get potential customers and charge them for your rent, which is fine if you are dealing in, say, collectible wines or artisanal Swiss timepieces and no business if you want to sell Gundam models or knitting sullies.
        bluGill 3y ago
        Cars work best in low density. Eventually the total area of the city is so great that even though in theory you can drive across it, the total time that takes means some trips are unreasonable to do. If that story that sells Gundam models (I have no idea what this is so I assume it is a great example of a rare niche) is on the other side of the city it may be more than an hour drive at off peak times to get there and so for practical purposes it isn't in reach.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - quietbritishjim 3y ago
    No, those numbers don't show that by themselves. That's because there's nothing about cars per person, only spaces per car. Cars would not be a problem at all if there were even 50 spaces per car... but only a total of 10 cars! I think the implicit attitude that your comment seems to have of one car per person is the real issue.
    - chimeracoder 3y ago
      > No, those numbers don't show that by themselves. That's because there's nothing about cars per person, only spaces per car. Cars would not be a problem at all if there were even 50 spaces per car... but only a total of 10 cars! Okay yes, but we're not talking about a hypothetical city in a hypothetical world in which there are 3 million people who share 10 cars. We're talking about Los Angeles, which everyone reading this thread knows (or can Google) has, in the real world, close to one registered car per person. We're talking about this in a thread about parking minimums in the US, which are almost always found in cities that have approximately one car per person, or at least one car per household. In that sense, no number ever shows anything "by itself" because meaning is always constructed contextually, but at some point we have to all understand context because it's both tedious and Sisyphean to spell everything out every time.
- c22 3y ago
  There are always some cars being driven at any given time, so you could technically get away with even fewer spaces than cars. But the fewer spaces you have the less likely the available ones are near your destination.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    You really can't average a wide area though, parking is a highly localized and cyclical problem set. During the night, most people will be at home, and during the day, most people will be at work. Your city will increase in population during the day as commuters from the suburbs commute to work. Events will happen in your city which will cause huge outliers in the demand for spaces.
    - reaperman 3y ago
      Also, townhome rows typically have little to no street parking available because the driveways are so dense. This makes it impossible for friends to come over and park anywhere.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    That's one thing that self-driving cars would help. And the more often the car is running, the fewer parking spots you need, so shared cars help here too. But neither would beat a well organized hierarchical and capillary mas-transit.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Parking spaces per car is akin to toilets per person. An interesting metric but not definitive and comparable.
  - sgregnt 3y ago
    we do not usually spend all our idle time in toilets, though .
rmbyrro 3y ago
In Brazil there are 3 cars per parking space, so people park in illegal places, traffic becomes caos, and no one can get to their homes with sanity. Don't fool yourselves. There are many ways to reduce housing costs and increase housing supply. Reducing parking spots is lame.
- earthling8118 3y ago
  Right, it is lame alone. They should consider reducing the number of cars as well.
c22 3y ago
Obviously more than one person can occupy a housing unit (where each parking space can accomodate only one car), but this report from 2020[0] seems to indicate that LA has more than enough housing to accomodate its residents, it's just distributed unoptimally. It seems somewhat obvious that you may need more parking spaces than cars since they move to different places throughout the day. [0]: https://www.acceinstitute.org/thevacancyreport https://www.acceinstitute.org/thevacancyreport
- bluejekyll 3y ago
  > since they move to different places throughout the day. The question people are asking is how can cities make it easier both for people to live in them as well as move around them without needing a car to do so. By removing parking minimums, it implies that people will have a harder time driving, which will entice them to use other means to get around. But, the big issue is that cities also need to invest in those other means of getting around. That means making micro-mobility easier with protected infrastructure, more bus service, more light-rail, etc. LA had a light rail service until GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tire organized a shell company to buy out the system and eventually tear it out. They did the same thing to the Key System in the East Bay of the Bay Area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
stetrain 3y ago
The ratio that's the problem here is cars per person, not directly parking spaces per car. Now reducing parking spaces per car might put pressure to reduce cars per person, or implement alternatives to allow fewer cars per person, which would actually improve land usage.
adrr 3y ago
Have you been to neighborhoods that don't have parking mandated parking spots? Anything built in the 60s to 80s. Drive around for 1/2 hour trying to find a parking spot every day, pay hundreds/thousands of dollars a year in fines because you forgot to move you car on street cleaning day. Repeat if you work at place in these old neighborhoods, like Venice or West LA where all the tech companies are located. The issue isn't parking spots, the issue is that construction has had 0 efficiency gains in the last 50 year. Its cheaper to produce a car, grow food, produce computer chips, etc. Its not cheaper to build a building or a parking structure. Make it cheaper to build and it will solve house prices. And its not raw materials that make it expensive. There is no automation. We still pour concrete and frame buildings that same way we did 50 years ago.
- TylerE 3y ago
  It almost certainly DOES cost quite a bit less if you only include the costs that would have been, in, say, 1950 - and control for actually equivalent stuctures. Environmental cleanup? Tectonic studies? Worker safety? What are those? Does the 1950s deck even have an elevator? I bet it doesn't have a modern bank of ADA compliant ones, security cameras and lighting throughout, etc, etc, etc. How about lifespan? I'm sure we could thrown up a hunk of concrete and rebar in the middle of nowhere in area with no environmental regs real cheap, especially if only care if it stands until the check clears.
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  > Have you been to neighborhoods that don't have parking mandated parking spots? I have, I've lived in such a place. I walked to work, about half an hour each way. It was quite pleasant.
- stetrain 3y ago
  Driving and parking my car in a place that was designed in a world where not every household had 2+ cars to drive and park is annoying! To fix this we should bulldoze things and build more room for my car! I have to be able to park my car! What else could I possibly do instead?!
  - 3y ago
up2isomorphism 3y ago
The problem is that the current people generally find the statement like the above convincing because it is "simple and straightforward" even in fact it is boldly misleading. The common daily pain + political language above makes poor people suffer even more as a consequence of being misled. Although it should be unnecessary to point it out, I would nevertheless say this "3 park space for car" is equal to "there are 3 spot for you to stand".

In Los Angeles there are ~ 3 parking spaces per car, and < 1 housing unit per person. We mandate a bunch of parking for every new building, but no housing. Its no wonder that people live in cars.

smt88 3y ago

LA is a disaster for transit and housing, but your numbers aren't a problem on their face. Any car being used will need >1 space at all times: one at home and one wherever it's being parked when its driver has gone somewhere. If you have <=1 space per car, the car is either being unused or it's parking illegally sometimes. We need far more parking spaces per car in LA once we consider the millions of people who are driving in the city and live outside of it. As far as housing, we'd have a 100% fully housed population with <1 house per person because a large percentage of people live with one or more people.

chimeracoder 3y ago
> LA is a disaster for transit and housing, but your numbers aren't a problem on their face. Any car being used will need >1 space at all times: one at home and one wherever it's being parked when its driver has gone somewhere. Actually, those numbers are a problem on their face. They're an illustration of why cars, and societies that are structured around enabling automobile transit as the primary (or even sole) means of transit, are inherently unsustainable and inefficient.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  Why is 3 parking spaces per car inherently unsustainable?
  - huntertwo 3y ago
    If you think about it, three parking spaces take up way less space than 1 housing unit in LA.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Most housing units will have more than one person, and most of those people have cars. In most cities space dedicated to cars (parking and roads) covers about 50% of all land use. Housing, factories, stores, parks, churches, and the like are the other half. Note that the above is about land area. Housing units are often stacked vertically, while car parking rarely stacked.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Where land is actually precious, parking gets stacked. Where it is not stacked, it’s obviously not that terribly valuable.
        bluGill 3y ago
        Stacking parking is done. However it is so expensive to build that before it is worth stacking parking you are already building less parking than there is demand. The cost to park in stacked parking regularly means the costs to park there are high enough to make most customers look for alternatives. There are places just outside of downtown where the demand for cheap surface lot parking is higher than total parking spaces - but the people who go there would not pay for stacked parking. Thus while stacked parking exists, it is more costly than the value most people consider it to provide. Of course places where stacked parking is even a thought are also places where density is high enough that it isn't hard to run a great transit system and so there is less need for parking at all.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - empyrrhicist 3y ago
    https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/outdoor-living/pave-a-parking-lot/ https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/outdoor-living/pave-a-parki... And that doesn't cover opportunity cost or the knock-on effects of market distortion, or the exponentially higher costs of e.g. parking garages.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      The price to pave a lot is by far the least unsustainable part of the situation. Asphalt is cheap. The opportunity cost of the land use is much higher in all but the most rural of places.
  - stetrain 3y ago
    If everyone needs to have a car to get around that's 3 parking spaces per person. Or 6-12 parking spaces per household. This is nearing the square footage of an apartment to house the same number of people. So for any given unit of housing real estate we need an equivalent or greater amount of parking real estate. When everyone wants to live close together (ie in LA near where they work, socialize, etc. not in middle of Nebraska) that puts a real pressure on space, and drives up the cost for real estate. Even if you want to increase density by building higher buildings, the cost of those condo/apartment towers now must factor in a parking garage pedestal taking up 1/3 of its height, and so must offices, shopping centers, etc. I don't think the ratio of parking spaces per car needs to be reduced. Rather it needs to be recognized, and thus reveal the cost of policies that lead to one car per person. If you can reduce the cars per person ratio, you reduce the number of parking spaces required at a 3x rate.
  - michael1999 3y ago
    3 parking spaces is ~750sqft. A moving car is another 2000sqft. Once population density passes ~3 stories, the geometry stops working. Once drive time exceeds an hour or two, the math stops working. It's the urban rocket equation.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      They’re not additive - a car can’t be parked and moving at the same time.
      - michael1999 3y ago
        This is in response to a thread discussing the fact that LA has three parking spots per car, and they must (by counting) be mostly empty.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    It isn't unsustainable. However it is limiting. That is a lot of space that is 2/3rds empty yet not really usable for anything else. Worse, cars are heavy and so it isn't practical to go vertical with parking spaces (we can/do build parking ramps - but they are a lot more expensive and so few want to pay to park there, and even then there seems to be a limit to how tall you can make them) Cities are great because of all the different things you can get to. However cars spread the city out, and in this in turn means you can't do as many things. You can still do a lot, but eventually the distance (distances in cities are measured in time not meters!) is unreasonable and so you can't get someplace in your city. Dense cities enable more things. If you just want to go to walmart - so do everyone else so no problem. However if you have a niche interest you may discover not enough people live within range to support a place for your interest even though across the entire city there are enough people.
    - pandaman 3y ago
      > However if you have a niche interest you may discover not enough people live within range to support a place for your interest even though across the entire city there are enough people. How are the cars limiting here? It's quite the opposite - you can have a special interest shop/venue in a cheap mall in some industrial area and get enough customers who can reach you by car. Without the car ubiquity you'd need to get into expensive real estate in the city center to get potential customers and charge them for your rent, which is fine if you are dealing in, say, collectible wines or artisanal Swiss timepieces and no business if you want to sell Gundam models or knitting sullies.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        Cars work best in low density. Eventually the total area of the city is so great that even though in theory you can drive across it, the total time that takes means some trips are unreasonable to do. If that story that sells Gundam models (I have no idea what this is so I assume it is a great example of a rare niche) is on the other side of the city it may be more than an hour drive at off peak times to get there and so for practical purposes it isn't in reach.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- quietbritishjim 3y ago
  No, those numbers don't show that by themselves. That's because there's nothing about cars per person, only spaces per car. Cars would not be a problem at all if there were even 50 spaces per car... but only a total of 10 cars! I think the implicit attitude that your comment seems to have of one car per person is the real issue.
  - chimeracoder 3y ago
    > No, those numbers don't show that by themselves. That's because there's nothing about cars per person, only spaces per car. Cars would not be a problem at all if there were even 50 spaces per car... but only a total of 10 cars! Okay yes, but we're not talking about a hypothetical city in a hypothetical world in which there are 3 million people who share 10 cars. We're talking about Los Angeles, which everyone reading this thread knows (or can Google) has, in the real world, close to one registered car per person. We're talking about this in a thread about parking minimums in the US, which are almost always found in cities that have approximately one car per person, or at least one car per household. In that sense, no number ever shows anything "by itself" because meaning is always constructed contextually, but at some point we have to all understand context because it's both tedious and Sisyphean to spell everything out every time.
c22 3y ago
There are always some cars being driven at any given time, so you could technically get away with even fewer spaces than cars. But the fewer spaces you have the less likely the available ones are near your destination.
- kube-system 3y ago
  You really can't average a wide area though, parking is a highly localized and cyclical problem set. During the night, most people will be at home, and during the day, most people will be at work. Your city will increase in population during the day as commuters from the suburbs commute to work. Events will happen in your city which will cause huge outliers in the demand for spaces.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Also, townhome rows typically have little to no street parking available because the driveways are so dense. This makes it impossible for friends to come over and park anywhere.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  That's one thing that self-driving cars would help. And the more often the car is running, the fewer parking spots you need, so shared cars help here too. But neither would beat a well organized hierarchical and capillary mas-transit.
bombcar 3y ago
Parking spaces per car is akin to toilets per person. An interesting metric but not definitive and comparable.
- sgregnt 3y ago
  we do not usually spend all our idle time in toilets, though .

rmbyrro 3y ago

In Brazil there are 3 cars per parking space, so people park in illegal places, traffic becomes caos, and no one can get to their homes with sanity. Don't fool yourselves. There are many ways to reduce housing costs and increase housing supply. Reducing parking spots is lame.

earthling8118 3y ago
Right, it is lame alone. They should consider reducing the number of cars as well.

c22 3y ago

Obviously more than one person can occupy a housing unit (where each parking space can accomodate only one car), but this report from 2020[0] seems to indicate that LA has more than enough housing to accomodate its residents, it's just distributed unoptimally. It seems somewhat obvious that you may need more parking spaces than cars since they move to different places throughout the day. [0]: https://www.acceinstitute.org/thevacancyreport https://www.acceinstitute.org/thevacancyreport

bluejekyll 3y ago
> since they move to different places throughout the day. The question people are asking is how can cities make it easier both for people to live in them as well as move around them without needing a car to do so. By removing parking minimums, it implies that people will have a harder time driving, which will entice them to use other means to get around. But, the big issue is that cities also need to invest in those other means of getting around. That means making micro-mobility easier with protected infrastructure, more bus service, more light-rail, etc. LA had a light rail service until GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tire organized a shell company to buy out the system and eventually tear it out. They did the same thing to the Key System in the East Bay of the Bay Area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

stetrain 3y ago

The ratio that's the problem here is cars per person, not directly parking spaces per car. Now reducing parking spaces per car might put pressure to reduce cars per person, or implement alternatives to allow fewer cars per person, which would actually improve land usage.

adrr 3y ago

Have you been to neighborhoods that don't have parking mandated parking spots? Anything built in the 60s to 80s. Drive around for 1/2 hour trying to find a parking spot every day, pay hundreds/thousands of dollars a year in fines because you forgot to move you car on street cleaning day. Repeat if you work at place in these old neighborhoods, like Venice or West LA where all the tech companies are located. The issue isn't parking spots, the issue is that construction has had 0 efficiency gains in the last 50 year. Its cheaper to produce a car, grow food, produce computer chips, etc. Its not cheaper to build a building or a parking structure. Make it cheaper to build and it will solve house prices. And its not raw materials that make it expensive. There is no automation. We still pour concrete and frame buildings that same way we did 50 years ago.

TylerE 3y ago
It almost certainly DOES cost quite a bit less if you only include the costs that would have been, in, say, 1950 - and control for actually equivalent stuctures. Environmental cleanup? Tectonic studies? Worker safety? What are those? Does the 1950s deck even have an elevator? I bet it doesn't have a modern bank of ADA compliant ones, security cameras and lighting throughout, etc, etc, etc. How about lifespan? I'm sure we could thrown up a hunk of concrete and rebar in the middle of nowhere in area with no environmental regs real cheap, especially if only care if it stands until the check clears.
ryukafalz 3y ago
> Have you been to neighborhoods that don't have parking mandated parking spots? I have, I've lived in such a place. I walked to work, about half an hour each way. It was quite pleasant.
stetrain 3y ago
Driving and parking my car in a place that was designed in a world where not every household had 2+ cars to drive and park is annoying! To fix this we should bulldoze things and build more room for my car! I have to be able to park my car! What else could I possibly do instead?!
- 3y ago

up2isomorphism 3y ago

The problem is that the current people generally find the statement like the above convincing because it is "simple and straightforward" even in fact it is boldly misleading. The common daily pain + political language above makes poor people suffer even more as a consequence of being misled. Although it should be unnecessary to point it out, I would nevertheless say this "3 park space for car" is equal to "there are 3 spot for you to stand".