From Austin to Anchorage, U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
From Austin to Anchorage, U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums
Around the country, cities are throwing out their own parking requirements, hoping to end up with less parking – and more affordable housing, better transit, and walkable neighborhoods.
The city council in Austin, Texas recently proposed something that could seem like political Kryptonite: getting rid of parking minimums.
Those are the rules that dictate how much off-street parking developers must provide — as in, a certain number of spaces for every apartment and business.
Around the country, cities are throwing out their own parking requirements – hoping to end up with less parking, more affordable housing, better transit, and walkable neighborhoods.
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I think in some ways this will further separate the urban from the rural. Basically everyone I know works hard to avoid businesses in cities that don't have easy parking when you have to drive in 30 miles or more to get to them. But then again, maybe for much larger cities it works, at the cost of there being different shopping and eating locations for people who live in the city within walking distance and those who need to drive. Not sure how much the "social mixing" actually helps cohesion given existing rural / urban divides, but I can see this leading to people who basically are even more in 2 completely different countries. Of course, IDK how you fix this - NYC has park and ride set up, but the vast majority of third tier cities do not, or run one bus (that no one who can possibly avoid it wants to ride) twice a day, one in and one out.
its addressing sprawl problems. Not only is parking an expensive use of space to store a vehicle but its the tip of the iceberg: the access roads become a barrier to other transportation thats quieter, less polluting and most importantly more space efficient.
the other thing that needs to happen is exceptions need to be made to zoning laws for groceries and restaurants so they can be located in residential areas.
That's great in theory but I bet it's just lobbying by builders who don't want to make interested garages
It's great in practice, too. I live in Madison, WI, where the city rescinded parking minimums several years ago. Yes, many developers were for it, exactly because they don't want to waste space in their developments on unprofitable car storage.
However, the result has been great for everybody. One example is a restaurant that opened in my old neighborhood in a spot that would have been impossible under the old rules. It is super-popular, and often stuffed to the gills on Friday nights. Several affordable housing projects have been able to go forward as a result of lower costs from less parking, and the city passed a Transit Oriented Development zoning overlay district to encourage more. There has been some moaning from neighborhood associations about the pressure on street parking, but city studies (and my own observations) find that the street parking occupancy is very low.
Not everything that developers and corporations want is bad, and we shouldn't condemn policies just because they want them.
I'm not saying don't try things. I'm saying better effort would be spent on building tram or buslines or whatever. Build the alternative and things will sort out.
It sounds like in the restaurant example they just externalized the problem, and street parking is dispersed, even if you aren't noticing it. That's fine in one occurrence, but if all places had this policy, and no alternative transit is implemented, then street parking will be a nightmare and no one has really benefited but the builder.
The restaurant is near a popular bike path, and nestled in a neighborhood in walking distance of hundreds of houses. The city also redesigned its bus routes over this past summer to improve service. It's also building BRT lines, which will open next year. But even if that were not the case, street parking isn't a problem that needs to be mitigated, no? It's a public resource deliberately built for that purpose, using tax money. If anything, more parking on the street means better utilizing existing city infrastructure. (Else, why did we build it?)
This isn't setting a parking maximum. It just says you don't have to build more parking than you feel like paying for. Businesses trying to attract people who drive will still be allowed to build enough parking for all their customers. However they won't have to pay for even more than they need which is often the case now. Many parking lots are half full on the busy days, so they can replace part of that lot with another business and better use that space and save money.
Of course businesses near downtown will probably decide most customers are not driving already (traffic is bad and parking is hard to find) so why not get rid of their parking lots completely to better serve their customers. However for every rural customer (who has to drive at least part way) lost several urban customers are gained so this is worth it for them.
Right, my point isn't that the businesses will die because there's no rural or suburban customers, it's that urban customers will less and less run into rural or suburban customers, leading to potentially way less interactions between different ways of life. I guess it probably doesn't matter if rural and suburban people shop at Wal-Mart and never see a bodega and the reverse is true for urbanites, but if you never meet in a bar or whatever it means even more social bubbles than we already have. I'm not sure the idea of off street parking minimums were a smart policy though.
But a lot of rural and suburban places make themselves actively hostile to anyone that doesn't have a car as a policy choice.
I'm not sure the rural places are actively hostile to people without a car - they're as accessible as they were in the 1800s if you don't have a car - a lot of hoofing miles to get somewhere. It's a lot more practical there with a car, but I see plenty of people walking and biking where I live though usually for exercise. I'd like to see more uber / lyft but I have to guess they don't proliferate for the same reason busses don't go out there - not enough people using them to make it cost effective. Things like Casino complexes out in the boonies with enough draw do run special busses from cities.
Suburban is actually much worse - I've never seen people walking in a lot of places because that would be a death wish, same with bicycles. While I personally think Suburban is kind of the worst of both worlds, for some reason a large number of people like it but that is indeed enabled by cars.I imagine a lot of suburbanites would move to the city if cars were to go away. At least if the city was affordable.
An interesting read on the topic is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. The TL;DR is that an absolutely gobsmacking portion of the reason that a lot of people like the suburbs is that they were made artificially cheap and financed by government-backed loans to white people, by government policy explicitly formulated to keep minority groups out.
A lot of the rural roads have been made to allow for faster driving speeds, making these roads more dangerous for pedestrians. You also have the removal of mass transit linking these communities to cities, further cutting them off.
This is a change that needs to happen in junction with mixed use zoning, investments in public transit, and better development patterns in both urban and suburban environments to incentivise and allow people to comfortably make those trips without a car.
I do acknowledge that there will still be those who either insist on driving or don't currently have a reasonable alternative but don't think that our cities should be catering to them as much as they do right now with parking minimums.
don’t think that our cities should be catering to them as much as they do right now with parking minimums.
I actually agree with this in general. I'd just like to see some more park and ride or nicer big parking garages in the small cities to acknowledge that anyone from the surrounding communities has to drive to get to the city and then needs to put that car somewhere while shopping, eating, whatever. Though for the park and ride we'd need a lot more bus service from there to the city, which I guess is hard to fund.
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If you look at the context of my point - this is basically saying to my reading "Hell yea, we should have no contact between us righteous city dwellers and those outsiders".
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You'll get stores closer to you once it becomes impractical to drive to the center of a major urban area and park there
The same stores that closed when you built too many roads and incentivized everybody to drive 15 miles to a store
Yes, that's a slight rewording of what I said in the beginning. Though what I would suggest is likely to happen is just less and less physical stores and more Amazon deliveries, because many small physical stores closed because they cost too much and could not price match the bigger stores or online sellers.
This will help reduce housing costs, and generally help traffic, as well as pave the way for public transport.