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Food for thought: A ~450 sqft studio apartment in SF costs about $2k/mo in rent. a ~150 sqft monthly parking spot (as per http://sanfrancisco.bestparking.com

by eqdw 12y ago

Food for thought: A ~450 sqft studio apartment in SF costs about $2k/mo in rent. a ~150 sqft monthly parking spot (as per http://sanfrancisco.bestparking.com/ http://sanfrancisco.bestparking.com/), costs about $400 Three parking spots takes up the same square footage as a studio apartment. It costs a little over half of that. Then consider how much parking in SF is free parking. Just straight up free. Parking lots for stores. Street parking on most residential streets. Driveways and garages. It's fucking insane how much space is wasted on car storage. It's even more fucking insane that so much of this storage is de-facto free (which is implicitly a subsidy from the person providing the space to car owners; in a sense it's a subsidy from renters, since any parking space could be a sorely needed living space instead) I can't wait, I just can't wait until Uber-like on-demand ride tech + self driving cars means we can massively reduce our vehicle stock. Think of all the things that could be more awesome

BrainInAJar 12y ago
> I can't wait, I just can't wait until Uber-like on-demand ride tech + self driving cars means we can massively reduce our vehicle stock. Think of all the things that could be more awesome First, get rid of the zoning laws that require those spots, then they'll disappear. You can cram (depending on building height restrictions) dozens of apartments in to the same 2 dimensional plane as those 3 parking spots.
- Crito 12y ago
  Perhaps all hard limits on building height could be removed, but with the addition of a new rule that requires every new residential building to have 1 level of parking garage for every 3 stories it has (or some other similar ratio). Then, if you wanted to build a 15 story apartment building you would be allowed to, but you'd have to provide enough parking garage to satisfy all of those people. The problem then is parking in commercial districts. Street parking is good for businesses on that street, but a better solution could be more city-run parking garages in good locations, and city streets in commercial areas that are optimized for pedestrians. The best example of this I have ever seen is down-town Silver Spring in Maryland. That was several years ago, I hear they tore a bunch of it up, but it at least used to be great.
  - lmm 12y ago
    If you build more parking space then you bring new more cars onto the street. Here in London new residential buildings are built with zero parking spaces (just a small a shared drop-off/deliveries area). There are already too many cars in the city, and public transport is good enough for most people (of course there are people who for good reasons need cars, but they're the exception rather than the rule).
  - BrainInAJar 12y ago
    That kind of defeats the purpose of removing the parking requirements. If you require every 3 units to have one parking spot, you raise the price of each unit by 30%. Additionally since tenants are paying for the spot anyway, it incentivizes them to buy a car that they might otherwise do without. If there turns out to be a market need for parking spots, I'm sure someone will step in and build a long term parking garage in the neighbourhood, but you aren't mandating every tenant regardless of car ownership desire subsidize the others.
  - TheCoelacanth 12y ago
    Minimum parking requirements subsidize car users at the expense on non-car users.
  - MBlume 12y ago
    Why have a requirement? If the people want garages, let them demand garages, let the market price garages so that they're an efficient use of space and construction resources on the margin.
  - obi-nine 12y ago
    You're close but miss the mark. The solution is simply to change the existing _minimum_ parking requirements to a _maximum_ and then simply let market forces take care of it.
  - math0ne 12y ago
    I believe the city of austin has similar limits on new building downtown, parking must be integrated vertically.
  - 12y ago
Tiktaalik 12y ago
I believe SF is ahead of many cities in not requiring their developers to build excessive parking. Cutting parking requirements in buildings is one of the easiest things a city can do to make building construction cheaper and lower housing costs.
- b_rad 12y ago
  SF is ahead of many cities, but apparently still has "minimum parking requirements" for certain new developments. Good news though, that may be about to change: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/03/02/supervisor-breed-calls-for-removing-some-of-sfs-parking-mandates/ http://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/03/02/supervisor-breed-calls-...
dredmorbius 12y ago
On demand / driverless vehicles don't necessarily reduce vehicle stock. If the use is for standard travel patterns, they barely reduce it at all. That's where land use, encouraging bikes, and transit fill in -- walking, bikes, busses, trolleys, and subways all have vastly greater capacity per unit street area than single-passenger vehicles do. How they deal with complex routes can vary considerably though. What such systems do allow is for vehicle storage to be separated from high-density land-use. A self-driving vehicle can be told to go park itself elsewhere, a dispatched vehicle doesn't need to park while the passenger is otherwise occupied. But both still occupy street space, and require storage space somewhere.

by eqdw 12y ago

BrainInAJar 12y ago

> I can't wait, I just can't wait until Uber-like on-demand ride tech + self driving cars means we can massively reduce our vehicle stock. Think of all the things that could be more awesome First, get rid of the zoning laws that require those spots, then they'll disappear. You can cram (depending on building height restrictions) dozens of apartments in to the same 2 dimensional plane as those 3 parking spots.

Crito 12y ago
Perhaps all hard limits on building height could be removed, but with the addition of a new rule that requires every new residential building to have 1 level of parking garage for every 3 stories it has (or some other similar ratio). Then, if you wanted to build a 15 story apartment building you would be allowed to, but you'd have to provide enough parking garage to satisfy all of those people. The problem then is parking in commercial districts. Street parking is good for businesses on that street, but a better solution could be more city-run parking garages in good locations, and city streets in commercial areas that are optimized for pedestrians. The best example of this I have ever seen is down-town Silver Spring in Maryland. That was several years ago, I hear they tore a bunch of it up, but it at least used to be great.
- lmm 12y ago
  If you build more parking space then you bring new more cars onto the street. Here in London new residential buildings are built with zero parking spaces (just a small a shared drop-off/deliveries area). There are already too many cars in the city, and public transport is good enough for most people (of course there are people who for good reasons need cars, but they're the exception rather than the rule).
- BrainInAJar 12y ago
  That kind of defeats the purpose of removing the parking requirements. If you require every 3 units to have one parking spot, you raise the price of each unit by 30%. Additionally since tenants are paying for the spot anyway, it incentivizes them to buy a car that they might otherwise do without. If there turns out to be a market need for parking spots, I'm sure someone will step in and build a long term parking garage in the neighbourhood, but you aren't mandating every tenant regardless of car ownership desire subsidize the others.
- TheCoelacanth 12y ago
  Minimum parking requirements subsidize car users at the expense on non-car users.
- MBlume 12y ago
  Why have a requirement? If the people want garages, let them demand garages, let the market price garages so that they're an efficient use of space and construction resources on the margin.
- obi-nine 12y ago
  You're close but miss the mark. The solution is simply to change the existing _minimum_ parking requirements to a _maximum_ and then simply let market forces take care of it.
- math0ne 12y ago
  I believe the city of austin has similar limits on new building downtown, parking must be integrated vertically.
- 12y ago

Tiktaalik 12y ago

I believe SF is ahead of many cities in not requiring their developers to build excessive parking. Cutting parking requirements in buildings is one of the easiest things a city can do to make building construction cheaper and lower housing costs.

b_rad 12y ago
SF is ahead of many cities, but apparently still has "minimum parking requirements" for certain new developments. Good news though, that may be about to change: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/03/02/supervisor-breed-calls-for-removing-some-of-sfs-parking-mandates/ http://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/03/02/supervisor-breed-calls-...

dredmorbius 12y ago

On demand / driverless vehicles don't necessarily reduce vehicle stock. If the use is for standard travel patterns, they barely reduce it at all. That's where land use, encouraging bikes, and transit fill in -- walking, bikes, busses, trolleys, and subways all have vastly greater capacity per unit street area than single-passenger vehicles do. How they deal with complex routes can vary considerably though. What such systems do allow is for vehicle storage to be separated from high-density land-use. A self-driving vehicle can be told to go park itself elsewhere, a dispatched vehicle doesn't need to park while the passenger is otherwise occupied. But both still occupy street space, and require storage space somewhere.