“It’s not like the government is forcing you to buy a car!”
If you live in a city with parking minimums, yes they fucking are.
I adore how they use mopeds and scooters in Asia
Yes it’s very safe
I was reading about a study that showed how much the climate temperature would rise if every house had solar panels on their roof. I then immediately thought, hey now, what if we had less asphalt everywhere, would that not affect overall temperatures as well?
I live in a country with a propensity for dark cement tiles, i really doubt panels are causing an uptick in heat
What was the conclusion? Asphalt shingles and slate shingles are already dark, so I’d imagine it would impact covered lighter roofing more.
You have a good point there. The study was done using simulation models, so I should look into what they took into account and maybe who funded the study. You can read it here
Just to be really clear, too, they’re looking at local effects (they say “urban microclimate”), not overall climate.
Thanks!
As a European, this is the first time I ever heard about parking minimums. What a horrible concept.
From Germany: huh? Quite common around here and I am sure in other european countries as well, despite having different city building concepts than the US. Lately it is slowly being replaced by bike infrastructure demands (and there was always the public transport demands), but it still exists.
I’m from Germany too. Is it really?! I had never heard of that. It can’t be a thing inside cities though, can it? I honestly can’t even think of a place where it would make any sense. Surely shops that are located outside dense urban areas would try to make sure they have enough parking space anyway.
It is naturally very complicated in Germany, it is Germany after all. Some Bundesländer have globale Vorgaben, others leave it to the Kommunen. But it is normally part of a Bebauungsplan, also in cities. It is oftentimes a flexible concept though. Here a little start into the toppic.
Yes it’s true. Where I live there is even parking space allocated for storage space. For each 100m² one parking space. Which is truly a ridiculous requirement.
This is most likely for businesses, not sure about your exact communal regulations, but it should really be something like 1 per 100m² or 1 per 3 employees. Not that ridiculous. There’s also minimum bicycle parking requirements BTW.
Is it really a horrible concept per se, or do people in reality have cars and need to park them somewher, even in Europe?
people in reality have cars and need to park them somewher
I’ve seen a number of denser developments start burying their parking lots, or stacking them on the roofs. You get denser (and conceivably more walkable) neighborhoods when places are built up this way. But it also drives up the cost of development and is only viable where real estate costs are astronomical. Then you’ve still got these six-to-eight lane Stroads intersecting the city blocks, with relatively little pedestrian infrastructure for crossing safely.
So if I live in a (atrociously overpriced) condo directly next door to a Whole Foods, you’re still stuck hustling across enormous expanses of asphalt in order to make a simple grocery run.
Compare that to a dense urban neighborhood I lived in for a few months in Leeds. Walk downstairs, cross a simple cobbled two lane street, pop into a small grocery / sandwich shop combo, grab lunch plus essentials, then pop home inside 20 minutes. No risk to life or limb and I didn’t even need a bike, much less a car.
You can find spots like this all over Italy, France, and Spain as well. Probably common to the Eastern Bloc, too. I’ve just never been. But the idea that people “need cars” is more predicated on the fact that we’ve created these oceans of asphalt and concrete in the states which are uncross-able without one.
I’ve thought for a while we need to start banning cars in downtown areas. We can use parking structures at the edge to store cars. When you need to take a road trip you just include the mass transit time to your parking structure. With large enough areas designated POV free, and restrictions on commercial vehicles we can reduce road usage to the point of bringing back open air markets and having everything a city dweller needs without leaving the car free area on a daily basis.
@Maggoty @UnderpantsWeevil Melbourne is slowly on it’s journey to banning cars in the CBD. I wish we’d do it with a timeline with less decades in it, but each step towards it is good.
So far 2 of 21 pieces of street have been made car free.
That’s awesome!
This subthread is about europe, people in Europe still have cars that are being parked somewhere. And the number is growing, not shrinking. Seems like this is an unpopular “opinion” to have here though lol.
the number is growing, not shrinking
EU car sales at 3-year low in August, EV sales plunge 44%
From just last month.
Cars are extraordinarily expensive to purchase and maintain. As the European domestic economy struggles under a host of economic headwinds, individuals are finding it more difficult to buy new cars or repair existing ones. This has been complicated by spiking the price of cheaper imports with high tariffs. Also, by the poor funding for domestic infrastructure in Austerity-focused European governments.
Ok, well maybe this year we finally see a downturn for real, there were dips during covid as well, but in general there was still growth, and growth being expected. I would welcome it, that would be great!
But when a developer in my neighbourhood develops new housing, on a previously industrial barren area, they need to build parking space for their expected demand, because there is no space for cars left elsewhere, and people buying appartments usually do have (money for) cars. The fact that there is now a free parking lot wherever the people who move here moved away from, does not help the situation here.
I would guess that the rate right where i live would end up at around 0.6 slots per appartment (including appartments for families with 2-3 kids), as a regulatory requirement. To me this seems to be reasonable regulation, although it is most likely too low for the actual demand, at least if the appartments are being sold. Of course it will be underound parking in a dense area like this.
If the business chooses to accommodate cars, that should be up to them and to do so at whatever level they feel is optimal. A government mandated requirement only forces it on them without then being able to consider what’s best for their business. Some businesses would do better with no parking, or just less parking. They’re still required to pay for the land to sit empty just because the government forced them to. How is that a reasonable concept?
The problem with this line of thought is that oftentimes cars then will just be parked wildly (or on adjacent areas) and that can lead to large problems. A traffic concept is almost always a basic neccesity. I agree that this must not necessarily be a car optimized one (and in these times probably shouldn’t be).
But leaving it to the business owners is a road to utter chaos and will in most cases lead to very unpleasant and potentially dangerous situations. Also keep in mind that if the public hand takes care of the resulting problems this will come out of tax money and thus will cofinance the business owners profits, taking it from the general public. This is also oftentimes not desirable (unless you are a business owner).
While that does seem to make sense, in my opinion it really just gives people more incentive to use a car. If you ban wild parking completely, that might be a different story. But just creating more and more space for cars is not going to solve the problem. The problem is that there are too many cars in the first place.
You mean if wild parking was banned completely, it would be a different story if you’d still need regulation in those places. There i’d agree. But in general street parking is not banned in Germany, and illegal street parking is widely tolerated by lots of communes. Where i live the street parking capacity is being used at around 150-200% lol (numbers from a few years ago).
As I said before, different concepts are possible. Nowadays e.g. the trend in Germany goes towards central parking (Quartiersgarage) and an otherwise completly car free neighbourhood (the central parking then gets financed over the plots), combined with public transport and bikeways. Even less car-friendly concepts are possible. But you defintly need a concept. Just “let the plot owners decide themselves” will almost always lead to desaster.
I did not claim that every parking regulation anywhere is reasonable and good.
Yes it is. If you’re travelling by car, go to places that accomodate cars.
Don’t expect all places to accomodate cars. If you want to go to place with no parking, use other means of transport.
You know, it does not need to be a one size fits all regulation, and at least where I live it isn’t. You get all kinds of exceptions for lowering the amount, like how good is the object connected to public transit, you can swap car parking for additional bicycle parking etc the actual location plays a big role in how much car parking is required in the first place.
The regulators rightfully expect a certain amount of people having cars and place the burden of finding the space and money for it on the developer.
generally in Europe people will either:
- Live somewhere walkable
- Go to an out of town supermarket with parking
- Park on the edge of town and walk in
not every business needs parking right outside
What is it, left and right of those walkable streets? Parked cars on public space.
Also i did not claim that every business needs parking right outside, and they don’t, not necessarily.
Is it really horrible to make the businesses / developers of housing complexes to pay for and build the expected parking?
The car owners pay for that parking with their road taxes or via parking meters - the small extra cost also serves to discourage those with the choice from driving while not strongly adversely affecting those without a choice
Yes, as this increases housing costs a lot, especially when underground parking is required, with little to no benefit for most people.
There are tons of regulations that increase housing costs a lot. Doesn’t mean they all don’t make any sense whatsoever.
Car / inhabitant rate is about 58% in Germany, if you like it or not, and the rate is still getting slightly bigger, so no, most people have a car. Also the parking lots are usually being sold / rented out as an extra, that should at least in theory compensate the price for people without the need somewhat.
Underground parking is more expensive to build, but it’s not being built to blow up the prices, usually it is the only way to reasonably accommodate the parking necessary, also from a financial POV. I hope you are not proposing atrocious ground level parking for urban settings.
Urban fabric is when everything’s a building, meaning you can’t go anywhere unless they’ve got the door open for you.
sorry what? I can’t understand what you’re trying to say about the door part
what the fuck were u even attempting to say
“Dark urban alleyways are the scariest parts of a city”, I say as I dart across twelve lanes of traffic on foot.
Are you proposing a society where we never leave our cars and every business is a drive thru? Even if you drive to a wal mart today, they still have to have the door open for you to shop there.
And our current urban fabric is everything is a road, you can’t go anywhere unless you drive a car. Can’t afford a car? Too young to drive? Have a health condition that prevents you from driving? Want to choose a car free life? Too bad.
The horrible AI slop looks so bad if you look at it for longer than a second. Do better yall.
Thing is: you don’t need to look at it longer than a second to understand what is meant to be conveyed. So no, goal achieved, good use of resources instead of overspending on one useless metric (=making it realistic)
I doubt the AI is getting the proportions right. And none of these look like actual places even for one second
@Wrufieotnak @hobovision stock images would have worked fine. Or google earth.
In this thread: A lot of misconceptions and more than a few poorly thought out comments.
Also in this thread: Identifying the need to restructure the current standard before car usage can be realistically reduced by large amounts.
So move out of the city 🤷
Public transport is famously existent in the countryside.
Is this sarcasm, or satire, or a stroke?
It’s someone who doesn’t know what sub they’re in; this sub is for those living in NYC, LA, SF, and Chicago only. I’m guessing they live in the tiny sliver of the United States that isn’t one of those four cities, hence their confusion.
No it’s not. It sounds like you guys are having some sort of inside joke.
blerf
One of the funniest things about American car culture is that Americans probably walk the same distance from their parking spot to the store as I walk from my home.
And they’re walking in car infrastructure. Some of the most unpleasant, not made for humans places, not to mention dangerous. Compared to walking in what a city should feel like.
AI slop graphic.
Actually you’re right. Didn’t see that at first.
It still conveys the point pretty effectively regardless
I wonder how accurate it is though.
Yeah, I didn’t notice right away, but even after I did, I still think it gets the point across pretty clearly.
I’d probably want it to be human-drawn if it was going to be, for instance, posted up physically outside somewhere, but for something some random person on the internet can do to get a point across, I’d say it’s pretty valid for what it is.
It’s not just oppression against “other forms of transport;” it’s literally classist and (to the extent that race corresponds to class, which is a lot and on purpose) racist. A lot of these zoning laws about minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes date back to a time when United States government policy was explicitly designed to perpetuate segregation, and forcing every new parcel and development to be large and expensive enough to be unaffordable to most black people (because they were, and still are, poorer on average because of other institutional racism) was a part of that.
lets not forget its also oppression against people with disabilities since they are significantly more likely to use public transport and pedestrian infrastructure.
You’re not wrong in the long term. But in the short term, people will park anywhere possible close to the shop, blocking everywhere near with cars.
complete bullshit, but even IF drivers were so fucking brain dead, irresponsible, and incapable of being civil, the solution is not to cede to their entirely unreasonable demand that they be allowed to go to some of the most densest places on earth with a fucking couch 2 arm chairs, big chest for all their loot and a whole ass climate control system, if they cant behave they simply shouldn’t have licenses.
@Username @HiddenLayer555 no, the store will just have local customers. And yes there are plenty of those when you can replace the carpark with apartments.
Parking tickets
Those lots are horribly inefficient, aisle-less parking would make more sense for businesses of that size
They may be horribly ineffecient but that seems to be the standard design. Plus compared to pretty much any other land use, even the most optimized surface level parking lot is an ineffecient use of land.
“No parking required”, with 2 cars parked in front of the building. 😂
Places without off-street parking mandates still usually have on-street and even off-street parking
I work in planning. We removed parking requirements in our downtown districts and a bunch of companies came in to buy the old abandoned buildings and expanded them into the old parking areas.
Every single retail business that moved in over the following 3 years failed because there wasn’t anywhere for the customers to park. They just went to businesses that had parking avaialbe.
Probably would be better off with relatively minor adjustments to overarching standards over time, much akin to parking requirements, but probably that would look more like parking-protected bike lanes downtown, mixed-use zoning, making missing middle housing more available by getting rid of lots of zoning requirements on housing, or, like japan, making them much more comprehensive. None of that costs you anything economically. Parking protected bike lanes just require paint, and you can do that when you need to repave and repaint the main high traffic roads downtown. Eventually you may be able to justify an upgrade to a totally separated bike lane, or you might be able to justify shutting down main street to through traffic and routing things around.
Then you don’t really have to shell out for anything in terms of city transit, you’re just changing some regulations around, and people can walk or bike 2 to 3 minutes to the grocery store on their street corner, from their apartment, which is above a pizza place or whatever the fuck. Bike 3 minutes from the edge of downtown in their rowhome into main downtown where they can pick up groceries. Those people can also have jobs and be economically productive with the higher job density that such a development provides, and this all provides a much healthier and more stable tax base for the city since the utilities cost per person and per business is going to be much less. Course, you’re not gonna get heavy industry like that, but I haven’t really cooked up a solid approach to that sort of commute to a factory or industrial district that doesn’t involve a bus or passenger rail line that just heads straight there, like the USSR did.
The more significant problem with this isn’t so much that it’s some sort of like, totally impossible thing, it’s that any city doing that shit will probably be overrun by a shit ton of annoying gentrifiers, which is a harder problem to solve.
I feel like it’s pretty obvious that the main problem here is with the local NIMBY voters which might not like such a thing, and a significant lack of federal funding. There isn’t really a solid argument against any of the fundamental and somewhat universal planning principles which increase density, walkability, public accessibility, economic efficiency and productivity.
Well you failed your job then, after removing minimum parking requirements you need to add in public transport, make streets walkable and cyclable, you need to induce the kind of traffic that helps build foot traffic, that way the businesses grow naturally around foot traffic.
You got a spare billion dollars for a city with an annual budget of 50 million?
Edit: And my job is to implement the vision of elected leaders as defined in the Comprehensive Plan. We handle the details, but direction is provided by Council.
Seriously, its like you’ve never played Sim City or Cities Skylines. If you are going to rezone or redesign districts and remove parking then you need to, like everyone else is saying, maximize public transit and walkability. Without doing that you are just creating an urban desert.
The actual day to day job of a planner is closer to Papers Please. 80% of my time is spent reviewing meeting with, reviewing plans of, or writing stag reports about private developments.
In fact, we’re so busy dealing with fights over fence height, pool lighting, and screening of HVAC equipment that most cities outsource their Comp Plan development to third party companies that specialize in it.
You gonna pay for it? Our city’s entire annual budget wouldn’t even begin to pay for that.
That’s where parking requirements come from.
If you already have existing transit it likely wouldn’t cost an exreme amount to add a couple stops. If your city doesn’t have any transit then someone should plan some.
Once again, who is gonna pay?
The city can’t afford it without a bond, and voters will never approve an increase in taxes to remove parking and install transit that will increase local (e.g. Voter) commute times and invite the “undesirable elements” from the city they fled to the suburbs to avoid.
We can’t legally force developers to build public infrastructure that isn’t directly required due to their individual business (e.g. traffic signal or wastewater line extension).
Know what we can do? Force developers to build parking for their business through zoning ordinances with minimum parking requirements based on use. So a restaurant needs more parking spaces per square foot than an office building, which needs more than a warehouse.
Most cities cannot afford their extisting road infrastructure maintaince. Once built transit systems and walkability are far cheaper to maintain.
Great.
Your still haven’t offered a solution for how to pay for it.
Our roads are 30 years behind on maintenance, but we can patch them here and there and do one out two major projects a year. And when a street collapses it’s relatively easy to get a bond to fix it because the citizens want their roads back.
We can’t patchwork a public transit system, and the citizens are overwhelmingly against it anyway. We tried buying a single bus to shuttle people around and we had a new city manager following that backlash.
Planners aren’t kings. We’re public servants subject to the will of Council, which is made up of people who represent voters, who overwhelmingly don’t want more density, new people, etc. We have pretty much zero input on the direction of the city.
Shit… we spend way more time reviewing swimming pools for code compliance than actually developing plans. When it does come time to do a new comp plan or transportation study, almost every city outsources that to a third party company.
We pay for it by redeveloping massive multi lane roads into multi transit corridors when their major repair/resurfacing work is due. A few places have used this strategy to redevelop car centric areas into areas with better transit and pedestrian accesses.
If your city is only designed for drivers, it’s no surprise that people will want to drive places. When you remove parking minimums, you also need to prioritize transit and micromobility accessibility, so people are actually incentivized to switch modes. Cities can and are making this shift successfully: here’s one example.
Yes. Let’s spend multiple times our annual city budget to force people to walk in 100-degree heat 4 months out of the year to visit a local restaurant or wait 20 minutes for a shuttle.
They definitely won’t choose to go to the next town over where they can park 50 feet from the door of their destination, and our entire staff definitely won’t be let go in the blowback.
Depending less on car infrastructure will save more tax money long term. Eliminating parking minimums and building denser developments often increases city tax revenue, turns out parking lots don’t generate a lot of taxable revenue, meanwhile more business space does.
Not empty businesses.
And local governments can only develop with the money they have on hand without a bond, and good luck passing a bond that removes parking, increases taxes, and, in the eye of the voters, invites “undesirables.”
Turns out our money is currently being used for things like keeping water flowing, toilets flushing, libraries open, and other civil projects.
We can make a developer build parking through Zoning codes. We can’t make them build public infrastructure that isn’t directly required for their project.
If we can make a devloper build parking, we can make them build transit stops. The car is not the only thing we can force developers to accomadate.
You can’t just decide what’s legal and what isn’t.
A public transit stop serves more than just the property in question, making it a public project and not a private development. We can’t make private developers pay for public projects. It’s illegal.
Whereas a private parking lot is specifically for that exact development, so it can be mandated.
Planning isn’t a videogame where the perfect solution is achievable. We have to work within the confines of the existing legislative and legal environment.
The city could at least communicate with the development plans and purchase the required land for public stops. The city could mandate certain developments require this kind of transit inclusion to the planning process. The city can also mandate for denser zoning around major transit corridors.
The college I went to maintained a roundabout for buses. The college had to fully cover the costs of pavement maintaince and snow removal. It seemed worth it since tons of their students were arriving by bus, because it delivered them to the center of campus.
@chiliedogg @PhoenixAlpha did a car write this?
No point in that big store if I never go to it because I don’t have anywhere to park.
And I love how cute it is that you think there are “car lobbyists”.
If they only lobbied, lol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
And I love how cute it is that you think there are “car lobbyists”.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summary?cycle=2021&id=M02
There’s a lobby for a lot of shit and you didn’t take 2 seconds to think about your claim that a major American industry (one that relies on fossil fuel at that) wouldn’t have lobbyists? Like not downvoting you or anything, I’m too embarrassed for you. Hope you’re not someone who takes downvotes etc to heart.
And why do you think you should need to drive?
There’s a shitload of big stores like that in my city that I can get to in less than 20 minutes without a car.
Your city is frankly built shit if that’s not also the case.
Big box stores, not just big stores. From the from door to one to the front door to the next is just barely reasonable walking distance - and that is assuming you take unsafe shortcuts, go around the parking lot on the sidewalks and it isn’t a reasonable walk (if there is snow they pile that between the two doors). If you want to go to some third store instead of the second you can’t get there in a reasonable walk.
there are many different ways to do a big store. Big box stores are not necessarily any bigger than the others, but the layout of the doors is such that anything other than driving is discouraged by the design and if you do anyway you realize it isn’t safe. There are other big stores where walking is reasonable.
What distance would you call a reasonable walk?
from their front door to their car ofcourse.
And I love how cute it is that you think GM, Ford, Tesla, etc aren’t lobbying for parking minimums.
Also, auto companies have never tried to manipulate a country’s government, no they would never.
excuse me corporations have no financial incentive ever to behave the slightest fart unethically so they never ever ever will.
Actually curious, is this an ongoing thing in America also, or are you just saying it’d be silly to think it’s not? I’d not considered your perspective before and am unsure if this is a documented issue contributing to American city planning, or if your just saying people should be open to the idea of it
Read all about it here (skip to section 1.5 if you like but the whole thing is worth your time) and then check out Not Just Bikes on youtube, his Strong Towns playlist is a great place to start.
Thank you for the link! I occasionally really enjoy a Not Just Bikes video 😊
