Parking minimums prevent developers from free-loading on a commons, that commons being street parking.
So eliminating parking minimums by themselves will create nasty side effects.
But of course the correct answer to tragedy of the commons is pricing -- price the street parking appropriately and it won't be abused so you won't need worse solutions like parking minimums.
Just a note - the parking minimums that are set themselves don’t necessarily correspond to the number of units built in the best way. So by artificially setting them you can windup with, as often seems the case, an oversupply of parking or in more rare cases an undersupply.
But in addition to pricing street parking more appropriately, and some cities are doing so, shifting the load on to the common spaces is kind of what you want to see as a transit user because if it continues to be set at a minimum you just wind up building more parking lots, highways, and cars. But if “the market” decides the market can actually signal to government entities that we do indeed need and want more options.
Like you actually want to see new apartments in urban cores built without parking garages. Theoretically (and perhaps in practice) these new developments should also be cheaper and less theoretically they give sidewalks and bus routes and tram routes more users and thus more funding and support. That then alleviates pressure on existing highways and everybody wins except the obnoxious highway lobby and the revolving door that it operates with existing state departments of highways.
Or just do what the Japanese do - remove unlimited (and overnight) on-street parking in urban areas and require anyone owning a car to prove they have a private parking spot to house it
> Parking minimums prevent developers from free-loading on a commons, that commons being street parking.
Another way of looking at it: parking minimums require developers to encroach upon a commons, that commons being land that could otherwise be used for more productive things than free parking.
Even if on street parking were metered consistently and priced appropriately that's too divorced from the developer & their incentives to solve this. Parking after the building is sold is the definition of not the developer's problem, which is part of the reason we have parking regulations to begin with.
A better solution might be to mandate parking minimums (to ensure the property is actually useful / not encroaching on the street) but not allowing "open air" spots to count to the minimum, meaning an open lot gets you nothing, a 2 level garage counts for half the spots, etc. Maybe tack on some credits for proximity to public transit while we're at it.
Get rid of street parking so drivers can't free load on the commons either, make parking something that you have to buy (with your rent or on your own) because it actually costs something.
Also, you no longer have to worry about kids appearing into the street between parked cars that obscure their presence even near crosswalks (that cars park way too close to because they can't find parking elsewhere). Win-win.
If a developer builds in a way such that the demand for street parking outstrips supply, the street parking still has a cost, that cost is just expressed in time to find a spot, not dollars like you're suggesting. People unwilling to pay that time cost will find paid lots or not have a car (which is basically the dynamic in my building: people either pay $450 a month for a spot or they spend 10-15 minutes looking for a free street spot).
In practice, of course, existing residents feel entitled to "their" street parking and get mad when a new building with new people contending for those spots is built but there's no logical reason to preference residents who have previously lived there. This is where politics rears its head though.
This article goes too far and yet not far enough. By trying to build more buildings that increase parking in yet smaller footprints and then charge for the added expense of all of that, why not just eliminate cars in these districts altogether. Park outside of the city, walk/bike/scooter/mass-transit within the city. Now you aren't trying to extract value from the simple act of wanting to exist in a space leaving more value to core economic goods and services.
In a large metro with an extant, functional, mass transit system, sure. But do this in a cold place with no existing mass transit, and all you'll do is kill off downtown businesses and reduce property values to 0.
This experiment was kind of done in Buffalo in the 70s. They blocked off large swathes of downtown to build the above ground section of metro rail. This encouraged business to close downtown locations and move to suburban malls. That kind of retail never came back to downtown in the roughly 1 decade after completion of the metro. So you had a mass transit system that went effectively from nowhere to nowhere, and managed to kill the downtown retail corridor.
I think someone should try banning absolutely everything but emergency vehicles. No cars, no taxis, no vans, no trucks. Only cargo bikes, hand carts and maybe palanquins. Add some sort of uber type platform where you can hire someone to push wheelchair around. Limit speeds of mopeds and bicycles to say 10 or 15 km/h for pedestrian safety. This should make extremely liveable city if those promoting these things are right.
I mean that's "Park and Ride" which already exists but the problem is that people, kinda rightfully, hate it. All the downsides of a car with all the downsides of a bus.
The solution, which has done in my city to genuinely smashing success is to nationalize the parking garages meaning government builds them, maintains them, and they're free forever. Dot them around a dense mixed use area and quite literally watch the money pour in. Everything is within grandpa walking distance of at least one garage, they're specced to over capacity so each one is never full, and it provides parking to the workers and apartments.
It is not convenient. It's freezing cold and icy, no walk, no bike, no scooter. Use mass-transit, sure, when you don't care about your life, when it's working, when it's coming regularly, when i don't have to exchange stations, but still, walking from home to a station and back, nah, it all sucks.
Imagining sitting in a cosy, warm pod, driving in a tunnel autonomously, point to point, and you have my vote.
> Park outside of the city, walk/bike/scooter/mass-transit within
Very telling how these arguments are always the most ableist shit you've ever heard and yet people seem to think they're Very Progressive for making them.
I lived in Vancouver for years, near the downtown, near the SkyTrain and it was amazing. Back then I thought I would never live anywhere but the downtown of a city.
But, you know what, life changes. I know there’s hardcore folks out there who will cycle miles with their kids, or take them on transit, or even live with them in a 2 bedroom downtown apartment, but it is just too hard to live that way for many people. With a family, most people need more space, and they need to be able to get from their suburban home to some kind of shopping or work, in minimum time so that they can both take care of kids, maintain a career, and have a glimpse of a life for themselves.
We don’t need to have surface lots right in the middle of every downtown, but there needs to be somewhere for people to park.
Some European cities have car-free city centers. I live in one, which serves as the shopping center of roughly 1 million people living in the suburbs. If you want to shop in the city you need to park in one of the big underground parking lots and pay sth like more than 10 Euros/hour. Alternatively you can park just outside the city at a park & ride spot for 10 Euros/day and take the public transport included in the parking price.
It's inconvenient for people, yes. It was inconvenient to drive and park in the narrow streets of a medieval city too. This is unfortunately not easy to implement in North America, as the cities are relatively new. What we have feels very privileged.
Just sounds absolutely miserable to prioritize that way of living that is so car dependent. So many negatives come from it:
- pollution
- traffic deaths
- heat generation from all the infra
- inefficient use of space
- ugly aesthetic of strip malls and parking lots
It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better to build diverse housing in our cities, leverage space at the ground level for businesses, invest in our transit to make it safer and more convenient.
Instead we just go with what's easy and continue to build roads and sprawl.
I don't really buy this argument. I live a happily (nearly) car-free life with 3 kids. It's not hard, it really isn't. I bike them everywhere, we take transit. I even do our weekly grocery shopping by bike. I bike them to school year round (yes, even today when it was 10F this morning). I wouldn't consider myself "hardcore" at all. I'm just your average middle-aged dad.
I use our car approximately once per week. In 2024 I used my car a total of 32 times (I actually tallied it out for the whole year)
It's really just a matter of city design. Do you think there aren't families in Copenhagen who need to get to their job and shops? They manage with much lower car mileage than the average American. American suburbs are car-centric and those cars end up clogging up urban cores where people are trying to live their lives.
Many Americans/Canadians probably cannot even imagine what my life is like. They can't even picture what it means to pick up a week's worth of groceries for a family of 5 on a bike (with a kid!). It just doesn't even register that this is a possibility.
Parking exists in cities that are transit-first. But you are living in a car-dependent city for most things, so obviously it’s not going to be as convenient: the city isn’t built to be livable without a car. More developed countries put the amenities with the transit. IE your kids school has a metro stop named after it, and the grocery store is also the subway station.
It’s unfortunate that NA developed the wrong way because it takes a while to repair stupid planning decisions
Heck, I'm happy just parking close enough to walk to a downtown area, so parking doesn't necessarily have to be in the middle for me to use it, but there's no way I'm taking public transport to get close enough.
Maybe surface parking lots aren't the answer, but I do know that if there are places that I can't easily park at, I just don't go there unless absolutely necessary.
Nice to think, "the people will take trains!" but sometimes it doesn't work that way.
TL;DW: The difference in tax revenue between a surface parking lot and a business with subterranean parking is so vast, that cities can justify using value to underwrite the loans necessary for developers to do the work. (Called "Tax Increment Financing") This model is proving extremely successful with cities that try taking it on.
Switch from a culture of car use to walking, biking and public transport (buses, trams, light rail). And if people outside the city are coming in by car - let them park outside the town center and continue with public transport from there (while public transport is developed further afield; after that they would only drive their cars as far as the nearest train station, or even bike there).
If you don't like parking you need to start with cars: give people a reasonable alternative. Too many are looking at this from a standpoint of "lets just get rid of parking" - without asking what people will do instead. All too often the answer is they will drive someplace in the suburbs instead where they get free parking.
If you want your downtowns to not have parking you need an alternative. In most cases that means you need to improve your transit in the entire city so people can get there.
Nary a mention of parking garages / underground parking?
Austrian cities have way more parking than one would expect, but it's nearly all underground and costs €
The benefits are huge, you have have dense commerical areas where you drive in, park underground, pay for some hours, then walk between the shops to do all your business.
"That is, how much value a parcel creates for the community compared to how much value it consumes simply by existing as land. Think of it like this:
Net Contribution=(Economic Output in $)−(Land Value in $)"
This calculation is shady. Land value fluctuates and already "bakes in" the predicted economic output... but multiplied across decades. Not to mention, land doesn't consume value by existing. the value never goes anywhere. Its opportunity cost, not a decrease in actual value.
Yes, there is value "missed out on", but it hasn't been destroyed. Because it never existed. And that value wouldn't have appeared out of nowhere. it would've required using up other resources that the parking lot wasn't.
Cambridge MA was rezoned in the mid-20th century to suburban standards, in a city where land in a mid-range neighborhood now costs $350-$400 per square foot. Besides putting in floor area ratio requirements that required most of the existing housing to be grandfathered, they added a requirement of one parking spot per unit.
If it's a traditional 1-car driveway that's about $70K worth of land, although in the end it's zero-sum because it takes away an on-street spot. Parking garages for larger developments probably cost as much or more per parking space - they use less land, but they're expensive to build.
It's insane, and they're trying to fix it, and approving special permits left and right to omit the spots.
looking at the pictures.....Syracuse looks a lot like my home town... did, old buildings, low rise high rise, muddled look, sortof stuck, was a good place till the land bankers bought up stuff and waited, and now Halifax ,NS is the second fastest growing city in NA, and there is a forest of cranes
and older sections of town are under the wrecking ball, 9 billion $ hospital going up, and some days my phone blows up for no particular reason, other than I suppose, everyone else has stopped answering there's.
I have no idea what all the many tens of thousands of new residents are going to do, but here they are re-building my home town into a mini megalopolis.
So, the comonality is the land banking parking lots, literaly, parking money, as an
asset, that will beat holding costs and inflation, untill, BOOM!
The secondary type is to by up lots, right at highway exits within 30 min circle of an area like this, cant loose.
>> Our property tax policy punishes buildings and does not inflict enough cost on underutilized land. The result is a system that rewards holding valuable sites idle while penalizing those who invest, build, and contribute to the city’s productivity.
This is the exact reasoning for cutting taxes on the rich and let the upper middle class pay the highest percentages.
Maybe the family who has owned that lot for 80 years doesnt have the money to upgrade it for the "highest and best use" by someone else's standards, but the revenue allows them to live a little better.
I've never understood why constant growth is so often a priority. The world is headed for population decline so governments better figure out how to shrink instead of growing.
Im not against city planning, but this whole piece stinks of telling people what to do.
Here's the thing - if I can't easily park somewhere, I won't go there. There is no public transit, but even if there was, I am not going to use it if it's anything like the NYC subway. You have to solve the problem of mentally ill people causing problems on the public transit, socially ill people blasting music from a bluetooth speaker, etc before anyone I know would ever consider using the public transit. It's just so much less pleasant than driving.
In effect, reducing parking reduces economic activity. Even if you increase public transit use, those users are overwhelmingly poor and don't contribute greatly to the economic activity where they go.
Solar panels is the answer. It keeps the people dry in the rain and the power can go right back to the city. Yes, it's not possible for all lots. For a vast majority of them, it's a net win.
Solar panels do not solve the problem of parking lots being community dead zones. You can put solar panels on anything - it'd be better if it were housing, a store, a pub, etc. than a parking lot.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|1 month ago|reply
So eliminating parking minimums by themselves will create nasty side effects.
But of course the correct answer to tragedy of the commons is pricing -- price the street parking appropriately and it won't be abused so you won't need worse solutions like parking minimums.
[+] [-] ericmay|1 month ago|reply
But in addition to pricing street parking more appropriately, and some cities are doing so, shifting the load on to the common spaces is kind of what you want to see as a transit user because if it continues to be set at a minimum you just wind up building more parking lots, highways, and cars. But if “the market” decides the market can actually signal to government entities that we do indeed need and want more options.
Like you actually want to see new apartments in urban cores built without parking garages. Theoretically (and perhaps in practice) these new developments should also be cheaper and less theoretically they give sidewalks and bus routes and tram routes more users and thus more funding and support. That then alleviates pressure on existing highways and everybody wins except the obnoxious highway lobby and the revolving door that it operates with existing state departments of highways.
[+] [-] twelvechairs|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] jakelazaroff|1 month ago|reply
Another way of looking at it: parking minimums require developers to encroach upon a commons, that commons being land that could otherwise be used for more productive things than free parking.
[+] [-] kec|1 month ago|reply
A better solution might be to mandate parking minimums (to ensure the property is actually useful / not encroaching on the street) but not allowing "open air" spots to count to the minimum, meaning an open lot gets you nothing, a 2 level garage counts for half the spots, etc. Maybe tack on some credits for proximity to public transit while we're at it.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|1 month ago|reply
Also, you no longer have to worry about kids appearing into the street between parked cars that obscure their presence even near crosswalks (that cars park way too close to because they can't find parking elsewhere). Win-win.
[+] [-] benced|1 month ago|reply
In practice, of course, existing residents feel entitled to "their" street parking and get mad when a new building with new people contending for those spots is built but there's no logical reason to preference residents who have previously lived there. This is where politics rears its head though.
[+] [-] newsclues|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] rimbo789|1 month ago|reply
The High Cost of Free Parking is an incredible book that shows exactly how awful parking has been for society.
[+] [-] imoverclocked|1 month ago|reply
We need to attack The Modern Moloch (99pi).
[+] [-] drewg123|1 month ago|reply
This experiment was kind of done in Buffalo in the 70s. They blocked off large swathes of downtown to build the above ground section of metro rail. This encouraged business to close downtown locations and move to suburban malls. That kind of retail never came back to downtown in the roughly 1 decade after completion of the metro. So you had a mass transit system that went effectively from nowhere to nowhere, and managed to kill the downtown retail corridor.
[+] [-] Ekaros|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Spivak|1 month ago|reply
The solution, which has done in my city to genuinely smashing success is to nationalize the parking garages meaning government builds them, maintains them, and they're free forever. Dot them around a dense mixed use area and quite literally watch the money pour in. Everything is within grandpa walking distance of at least one garage, they're specced to over capacity so each one is never full, and it provides parking to the workers and apartments.
[+] [-] okr|1 month ago|reply
Imagining sitting in a cosy, warm pod, driving in a tunnel autonomously, point to point, and you have my vote.
[+] [-] Lammy|1 month ago|reply
Very telling how these arguments are always the most ableist shit you've ever heard and yet people seem to think they're Very Progressive for making them.
[+] [-] clickety_clack|1 month ago|reply
But, you know what, life changes. I know there’s hardcore folks out there who will cycle miles with their kids, or take them on transit, or even live with them in a 2 bedroom downtown apartment, but it is just too hard to live that way for many people. With a family, most people need more space, and they need to be able to get from their suburban home to some kind of shopping or work, in minimum time so that they can both take care of kids, maintain a career, and have a glimpse of a life for themselves.
We don’t need to have surface lots right in the middle of every downtown, but there needs to be somewhere for people to park.
[+] [-] bgnn|1 month ago|reply
It's inconvenient for people, yes. It was inconvenient to drive and park in the narrow streets of a medieval city too. This is unfortunately not easy to implement in North America, as the cities are relatively new. What we have feels very privileged.
[+] [-] webdood90|1 month ago|reply
- pollution
- traffic deaths
- heat generation from all the infra
- inefficient use of space
- ugly aesthetic of strip malls and parking lots
It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better to build diverse housing in our cities, leverage space at the ground level for businesses, invest in our transit to make it safer and more convenient.
Instead we just go with what's easy and continue to build roads and sprawl.
[+] [-] scottious|1 month ago|reply
I use our car approximately once per week. In 2024 I used my car a total of 32 times (I actually tallied it out for the whole year)
It's really just a matter of city design. Do you think there aren't families in Copenhagen who need to get to their job and shops? They manage with much lower car mileage than the average American. American suburbs are car-centric and those cars end up clogging up urban cores where people are trying to live their lives.
Many Americans/Canadians probably cannot even imagine what my life is like. They can't even picture what it means to pick up a week's worth of groceries for a family of 5 on a bike (with a kid!). It just doesn't even register that this is a possibility.
[+] [-] danny_codes|1 month ago|reply
It’s unfortunate that NA developed the wrong way because it takes a while to repair stupid planning decisions
[+] [-] spankalee|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] stronglikedan|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] qq66|1 month ago|reply
Nice to think, "the people will take trains!" but sometimes it doesn't work that way.
[+] [-] legitster|1 month ago|reply
TL;DW: The difference in tax revenue between a surface parking lot and a business with subterranean parking is so vast, that cities can justify using value to underwrite the loans necessary for developers to do the work. (Called "Tax Increment Financing") This model is proving extremely successful with cities that try taking it on.
[+] [-] fwip|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] davidrhunt|1 month ago|reply
It's a great group of advocates that are making impactful changes across the US and internationally.
[+] [-] einpoklum|1 month ago|reply
Switch from a culture of car use to walking, biking and public transport (buses, trams, light rail). And if people outside the city are coming in by car - let them park outside the town center and continue with public transport from there (while public transport is developed further afield; after that they would only drive their cars as far as the nearest train station, or even bike there).
[+] [-] bluGill|1 month ago|reply
If you want your downtowns to not have parking you need an alternative. In most cases that means you need to improve your transit in the entire city so people can get there.
[+] [-] advisedwang|1 month ago|reply
[1] https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/2...
[+] [-] ramblurr|1 month ago|reply
Austrian cities have way more parking than one would expect, but it's nearly all underground and costs €
The benefits are huge, you have have dense commerical areas where you drive in, park underground, pay for some hours, then walk between the shops to do all your business.
[+] [-] dbvn|1 month ago|reply
Net Contribution=(Economic Output in $)−(Land Value in $)"
This calculation is shady. Land value fluctuates and already "bakes in" the predicted economic output... but multiplied across decades. Not to mention, land doesn't consume value by existing. the value never goes anywhere. Its opportunity cost, not a decrease in actual value.
Yes, there is value "missed out on", but it hasn't been destroyed. Because it never existed. And that value wouldn't have appeared out of nowhere. it would've required using up other resources that the parking lot wasn't.
[+] [-] pjdesno|1 month ago|reply
If it's a traditional 1-car driveway that's about $70K worth of land, although in the end it's zero-sum because it takes away an on-street spot. Parking garages for larger developments probably cost as much or more per parking space - they use less land, but they're expensive to build.
It's insane, and they're trying to fix it, and approving special permits left and right to omit the spots.
[+] [-] metalman|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|1 month ago|reply
This is the exact reasoning for cutting taxes on the rich and let the upper middle class pay the highest percentages.
Maybe the family who has owned that lot for 80 years doesnt have the money to upgrade it for the "highest and best use" by someone else's standards, but the revenue allows them to live a little better.
I've never understood why constant growth is so often a priority. The world is headed for population decline so governments better figure out how to shrink instead of growing.
Im not against city planning, but this whole piece stinks of telling people what to do.
[+] [-] eudamoniac|1 month ago|reply
In effect, reducing parking reduces economic activity. Even if you increase public transit use, those users are overwhelmingly poor and don't contribute greatly to the economic activity where they go.
[+] [-] xvokcarts|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] spankalee|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] scld|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] trgn|1 month ago|reply