Posted by surprisetalk 3 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
The article explains this well:
> The office, filled with workers and transactions, generates far more in economic activity and value creation than its land value and, therefore, rises the highest. The apartment, where dozens of residents live, stands nearly as high. The rowhomes add steady, smaller value. But the parking lot does something different. It dips below the surface, shown as a red bar sinking into the ground.
> Why below ground? Because in economic terms, a parking lot doesn’t simply fail to add value; it actively subtracts value. Every year it sits idle, it consumes some of the most valuable land in the city.
> When valuable downtown land lies idle, it blocks the housing, jobs, and amenities that could exist there. The costs ripple outward: higher rents, longer commutes, fewer opportunities nearby. What could have been a productive part of the community instead becomes a hole in its fabric.
The LVT focus on profit above all else is why it is an unsatisfactory solution.
If the most important goal for every plot of land is to maximize its economic activity & tax revenue, that's going to be a miserable place to live.
All of the space uses that make a town nice to live in, are also underutilizing the land if the sole goal is to maximize economic activity.
Open space with native vegetation, parks, playgrounds, sports fields of all kinds like soccer fields, community pools, hiking trails.. all of that is wasted land if viewed through the lens of LVT maximization. All that space should be crammed full of high rise offices and apartments.
With regards to the argument presented in the article, it's arguable that parking lots create value by making places accessible to more people. As such, a parking lot raises the property values and economic output of neighboring properties. I didn't see anything about that covered in the article, nor did I see any actual data. This is why chambers of commerce and the like support parking mandates, because they actually have positive externalities, not negative ones.
I think it's arguable, but I think it's not the full picture. Let's look at downtown Columbus, Ohio where I live. With the parking lots that exist, there's less housing, which means that people move further away from where they work, creating traffic, creating highway construction costs, insurance, &c. I'm quite sure that creating a parking lot makes the location of my employer (well not mine literally) more valuable, but it does seem like it creates more costs. If those lots were, say, because it's a downtown location a 10-story building with 300 residents those people would be shopping downtown, going to restaurants and bars downtown, spending more time there, &c.
There are cases where a parking lot does create economic value, though I think those are more nuanced and limited. I'm not sure your point nor the one you were responding to, nor mine for that matter, are able to really calculate the economic costs of surface parking lots without taking into account factors like, well where the hell is the thing?
> As such, a parking lot raises the property values and economic output of neighboring properties.
Cherry-picking this comment. I'd add to what I wrote above, but I'd also add that I'm not sure that there is evidence to support this statement and if you take this to its quasi-logical extreme you wind up with your entire neighborhood just being one gigantic skyscraper with a Costco and doctors office inside surrounded by parking lots or something. And then the increased profit flows to Costco's shareholders which is fine, but for your local economy that's kind of bad versus having a variety of stores that can open and close. It's putting your eggs in one basket, so to speak.
I assume that Syracuse or other similar tier-2-to-3 cities would be far worse off if you replaced all the parking with apartment buildings.
I've never been to Syracuse but with the university there and number of employees you may be right, but it really depends I think on the layout. In the US once you get away from college towns or smaller towns like you're describing and get into medium-sized American cities we really lack density and transportation and we pay out the ass for the poor planning and past destruction that took place. It's changing though.
When ranking consumption such as large cars, flights, plastic toys, etc, space on the surface of the Earth, within an urban/suburban metro, is at the very top in terms of impact on others.
And it’s taxed the least.
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.
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.
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.
If we're talking about commercial properties and zones, people unwilling to pay that time cost just won't come to the area.
I'd say change the requirements first, then if there's a surge in street parking demand there will be natural pressure to raise prices.
Ultimately this is a geometry problem. Cars are by far the least space-efficient method of transporting people; eventually your roads just can't accommodate any more traffic. If there's enough demand to visit a given area then anything that doesn't minimize cars will just make things worse.
And parking is a time sink. There's a place in my city that has huge parking garages with lots of parking but you still have to drive through a few levels of the garage, park, and then walk back down a few flights of stairs, then walk to your destination. I just park my bike right outside of my destination with the wheel lock. Street parking is always awful in populated cities, and I never have to worry about it. I always park right at my destination, where ever it is.
In suburbia, cars are faster because the average distance per trip is a lot longer. But it's ironic that the reason why the average distance is longer is BECAUSE it was built for cars so everything gets spread out! Cars are a solution to a problem that they created.
The High Cost of Free Parking is an incredible book that shows exactly how awful parking has been for society.
What's your solution to it then?
Then invest in public transit (trains, mainly) for whatever isn't within walking distance.
Nice to think, "the people will take trains!" but sometimes it doesn't work that way.
Which in turn affects the kind of economies that the new development can support. A car dealership? Needs parking and a large catchment area. Burrito shop? Probably not getting much destination traffic and can support itself on locals.
It need not happen, but all too often simple answers are wrong.
I've seen this sad downward spiral multiple times, it is not a good outcome.
I used to live not too far from a town with a mellow but nice downtown center. Not a huge draw but many small nice restaurants and shops and there was steady business. Sensing a profit machine, the city filled all streets with parking meters. Turns out that while it was a nice area, it wasn't so irreplaceable, so nobody goes anymore. Business collapsed. I drove by last summer and everything is closed, the parking meters sit empty.
Same is happening now to the downtown one town over. It used to very vibrant awesome downtown, although small. Bars, restaurants, music venues, fun shops. I was there every night for something or other. Loved it. Easy free parking around. Some of the parking lots have office buildings now and the city lots have become very expensive. Much less activity there now, about a third of the venues are closed and the remaining ones are saying they can't last very long with fewer people going. While in its heyday this downtown was far more active than my first example, turns out it wasn't irreplaceable either. People just don't go anymore.
Point is that this tactic works only when the downtown is so established and so dense that people are going to go anyway even if parking is hard, like Manhattan.
I've heard this, but I've never seen an example in practice. It seems like making things more walkable and bikeable, at the expense of cars, always increases foot-traffic, with no exception.
Basically anytime it is tried in the suburbs where nobody is walking now nothing changes. When a lot of people are already walking you can increase traffic by getting rid of cars.
Details matter, most of the places people take aware cars are already dense areas and they tell you about it. However in a few cases someone who hasn't understood the context tried to apply a lesson it doesn't apply and it fails.
Churchill Downs for example is surrounded by residential properties. At Derby time a lot of those enterprising people would let you park in their yard for $5 or $10 (maybe more now, it's been many years). These are not large properties - typical older shotgun houses. I seem to remember them getting 10 or more cars and that's not even counting the space the house itself is taking up.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
We need to attack The Modern Moloch (99pi).
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.
Imagining sitting in a cosy, warm pod, driving in a tunnel autonomously, point to point, and you have my vote.
> Imagining sitting in a cosy, warm pod, driving in a tunnel autonomously, point to point, and you have my vote.
They already have this. It's called a metro.
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.
Maybe some people are fully car-pilled, but many people want to live in an area that isn't so car-dependent, it tends to make everything more spread out, noisy, polluted, and congested. It also imposes very large personal costs.
... do people hate park and rides? Where I'm from (suburbs outside a US city) it's completely standard to park outside the city (in a garage or big lot at a train station) and take the train in. I find it quite comfortable personally.
It sounds like yours is specifically for buses, but I think it's that people generally don't like buses, they're slow and uncomfortable. The park and ride is fine when you can walk from it to a subway/train.
I do think parking garages are a pretty good solution, though obviously expensive (but cheaper than building out trains, like you said)
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.
It is generally more productive to assume charity in the people you are talking to, that of course no one is going to ignore that some people need cars to get around.
It's a great group of advocates that are making impactful changes across the US and internationally.
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.
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.
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.
In the US most places that aren't already highly urbanized are based on car culture. The culture isn't going to magically shift to transit if you take away parking, people will just complain and go elsewhere.
The article also completely abandons this angle later when it acknowledges that parking can be financially acceptable for the land owners. It also acknowledges that municipally mandated parking isn't the issue either.
How many parcels in e.g. downtown Syracuse are just vacant? That represents a much lower value than surface parking.
I definitely agree that parking in garages and integrated into buildings is much better but if you're unsatisfied with your downtown area I don't think targeting parking lots is the place to start. The real question is why don't people believe they can get more value out of it with further development? It's a little chicken-and-egg but you have to make the downtown a desirable place for those investments.
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