The intersection of "how dare government mandate that I buy health insurance" conservatives and "how dare government *fail* to mandate the exact amount of parking on everyone else's private property" conservatives is fascinating. At least until you realize that the whole parking minimums are really indirect redlining that crypto-conservative old guard local politicians use in deep blue cities to win votes.
See also, SF where our local "progressives" are so pro car you'd think they are on the verge of lobbying to rebuild the Embarcadero Freeway.
It is interesting to me to see progressives turn all libertarian-y and extoll the market actions of unregulated private profit-making entities, so as to promote a favored lifestyle. I mean, it's my favored lifestyle too, but still. The zeal for coercion, for denying the legitimacy of public action only in these circumstances, is kind of scary.
At the end of the day, it's all about whose ox is being gored.
That said, the world would be better if we would go back to being honest about both progressives and conservatives lobbying for freedoms/rules they believe are good based on the merits. There are things that are generally for the public good, like masks and vaccines. And there are things that are not, like using zoning laws to enforce economic segregation.
Imagine a world where making a bad faith argument is about as socially acceptable as farting in an elevator.
I would say this is an issue (like immigration) where there is no "right" answer, but only a balancing of interests and views. Tolerance and understanding helps arrive at that balancing - binary thinking simply ensures that there is no solution.
I’ll emphasize if I wasn’t clear, I live in SF, where so called “progressives” operate in so much bad faith (look up CEQA and historic laundromats) that I’m convinced bad faith arguments are clearly an equal opportunity hack tool across the political spectrum.
A defect of highly-localized and granular land use regulation is that it generates a million such fights, far too many to negotiate one by one. I think that some high-level density and use rules, combined with a kit of building envelope rules that address the public interest in the streetscape, working in a very uniform way across broad areas, would tend to channel these fights in a more cooperative direction. There would be fewer tools for bad-faith actors to oppose each other with.
No, no -- principled conservative federalism means, "only the federal government can be tyrannical." When states keep half of their citizenry disenfranchised, that's just an organic expression of local control. And when fathers beat their wives and children, it's just a Biblical household.
That federal gummint, though, interfering with states' rights and a man's private family! It has too much power!
What do you mean? I thought I could choose a different state if I want to not have parking lot size mandates in my hometown. Maybe I'll just convince everyone I know to come with me, totally practical, amirite? /s :)
What, you're from out of state? You didn't grow up here? Then shut up and learn your place. We're all natives here, and we like it just the way it is. Carpetbagger!
[You forgot the second half of the federalism two-step: first pretend that people are free to move to the state of their choice, then pretend that they must defer to tradition and heritage if they do move.]
"Principled conservative federalism means following the Constitution."
It's just no fair, Ken. I put real time and effort into trying to write comments that will make people laugh, and then you write something this hilarious and gut-busting without any effort at all.
It's so perfectly dead-pan! A concise, tight-lipped, one-line demolition of all right-wing pretensions, a total send-up of all the preening nonsense that the petty authoritarians of Fox News constantly spout, without any extra padding or set-up. My hat's off to you-- this is comedy writing of the highest quality.
Over here in the other place, we complain a lot (and correctly) about institutional sclerosis, but a reformed and nimble New York that had fixed its capital cost issues would probably make completing Robert Moses’ plan for trans-manhattan highways at 34th and 14th street it’s first priority.
I'm currently living in a small new england college town and recently looked over its parking requirements and those of other college towns. Every one I looked at had mandatory minimums. One space per living unit. X number of spaces per table at a restaurant. Etc etc. I've been thinking about putting together a short memo for the select board suggesting removing the minimum.
Do you think it's worth while to do so? Would there be benefits in lower densisty and less transit rich places?
I think you definitely should. A get step would be to look if these towns have stated desires to address climate change and housing affordability and then note how at odds those rules are with their objectives.
Thanks! The big issue of the day is the regulation around marijuana cultivation (it's in MA), and climate change frames get thrown around from time to time. But I think the more persuasive argument, at least in the town I'm living in now, will be around the possibility of reducing the visual impact of new buildings.
Strong Towns has done a ton of reporting on this. Parking minimums like that end up creating such an overabundance of parking that even during peak demand parking lots are less than half full.
A good argument should be "hey, we're mandating all this parking and that is preventing folks from making more money from the space, which would raise property values, and lower our collective taxes." But my experience in these small New England towns is that they suddenly don't care about the money when you make this argument.
Part, maybe most, of the opposition you're going to run into is that the parking regulations amount to zoning restrictions disguised as parking. The reason to require one space per living unit is to keep the owner from chopping the building into more and smaller units and having more college students living in each building. People love living in college towns, but they don't really want the students living next door to them. Which, if you remember how different your hours, behavior, tolerance for noise, etc. was as a college student is probably not irrational. So be sure when you frame your argument that you reassure the town elders that the change somehow won't result in more college students per building living next door to the long term homeowners.
Luckily for the strong contingent of local NIMBYs and unluckily for anybody who wants/needs to rent, there are very strong regulations around adding additional dwelling units to properties. But yes, I'll need to cover this topic.
Part of the reason to get rid of unnecessary mandates is we don’t always know what people want and this helps figure it out.
But I’d suspect the big user of no cars would be the college students. So eliminating parking for student housing and parking for businesses that primarily serve college students is what would shift the most. It would help expand the “cool, small, walkable downtown” that’s great about a college town. The college might create/expand a bike share program, which isn’t the deepest public transit, but can solve enough issues that a 20y assistant prof who lives near the grocery store and work might decide to skip a car.
There's also a contingent of minimum wage service workers who could benefit. I think the college is prestigious enough for a not insignificant number of students to have cars. I really hope that town does go for a bike share program soon!
I totally agree with the argument that parking minimums are harmful, but I am wary of the idea that abolishing minimums alone solves the parking issue - in particular if subsidised parking is displaced from off-street to on-street.
On-street parking is really bad! It decreases urban mobility, makes it harder for cyclists in particular to get around, encourages people to get much bigger cars that are more dangerous and polluting than they actually need, and is a huge implicit subsidy by the Government to motorists at the expense of everyone else.
The solution to this is to copy Japan and ban overnight on-street parking, and require everyone who buys a car to demonstrate that they have private land to park their car on when they buy it. This would mean people who don't own cars can use their garage for something else, but motorists are encouraged to get small, cheap cars that use very little of their private land, which means travel across the city improves. Visitors and rentals can use little commercial parking lots for overnight stays.
Parking minimums should be abolished, but their abolition can't do all the heavy lifting in policy terms here. We need to mix it with some other tools to reduce demand for car parking as well as reducing the supply of land for car parking.
The public owns the streets. There is no reason to give away this valuable real estate for free. We should charge for parking, and also consider using some of this valuable space for uses other than car storage.
We should not be subsidizing on-street parking, but that is one of the harder less popular parts of this debate.
The policy should be that off-street parking in residential areas must come with an annual parking pass. Those passes should be sold based on market demand, meaning that if there is a large demand for parking on a single street new permits are going to be sold at increasingly more expensive rates. And you can grandfather rates at inflation so people don't oppose development because it may increase parking rates.
You can also make parking permits cheaper for buildings with less cars than space in front of their building and higher rates for those in buildings with more cars than space.
With parking permits it can become a better investment to have off-street parking.
Why sell annual passes? It seems better to me to grant existing residents a permanent pass when you create the policy, and then require any new resident to buy an existing pass if they want to park in the neighborhood. Unbundle the ownership of a parking spot in the neighborhood and ownership of a residence in the neighborhood, so that a zero car household can save money, and a multi-car household can buy the pass from a neighbor if it's worth it to them.
Because the cost of the land you do end up consuming when you park is free. You may have to walk a bit further to find a big enough spot, but it's much cheaper than having to buy land
If you need to park on the street driving a full size truck is going to substantially impair your ability to find a space in a timely fashion. I’m trying to understand the scenario you’re talking about where the existence of street parking results in people buying larger vehicles.
In general I would agree with BronxZooCobra that when people are forced to park on the street, they are more likely to buy smaller cars, esp. when spaces are not delineated.
In Europe having to park on the street is perhaps more common, and while there are several reasons why Europeans typically prefer smaller cars to Americans, this may well be one.
There is an entire class of small "City Cars" that are typically below the size of the vast majority of cars sold in the US market, and while they're not the *most* popular segment, they sell well enough.
Interesting, though I think the Japanese solution would be perceived as a bit drastic for the US. Here in Philadelphia, it took us years to even get street sweeping because people in South Philly didn't want to have to *move* their cars *once a week*. (Technically, we don't even have that yet because the pandemic started shortly after the pilot street sweeping.) The realistic alternative is implementing permit parking; it's a familiar concept, so while people will grumble about how the City is trying to take your money, it actually stands a chance at passing. (Well, it would if it weren't for certain members of Council, but now I'm getting ahead of myself.)
Japan also requires prime to prove they have overnight off street parking before they can register a new car. Stops the "commons" problem at the new car instead of the new home!
Re: Uber/Lyft I really wish urban progressives would lean into surge pricing. I generally bike or take transit anywhere I go in Chicago, save the occasional Costco trip. But my sister-in-law was visiting a couple of weeks ago and just defaults to ride share wherever she is. We were eating somewhere downtown that is a couple of blocks from a train station that would get us a couple of blocks from where we live, but we were planning to defer to my SIL who wanted to order an Uber. Turns out, it was a Saturday night in a busy part of town, and the Uber ride would have cost like 8x the cost of transit, so we took the train instead.
You think you can run an elementary school out of your garage and not have the miniature hoodlums vandalize the joint? Good luck with that. Much easier just to call it "art class".
Public parking brings up a lot of economic concepts and theories into sharp focus. It all starts with a problem of the commons and the use and regulation of public spaces. There have been a lot of crazy schemes to marketize parking. For a brief while there was an app where you could "sell" your parking space. Many meters now expire after a vehicle has left it, which exploits people who either overestimate the time of their stay or unexpectedly have to leave early.
In many older cities sniping a snow-cleared street parking space is a social sin meriting the death penalty. Determining how parking spaces are assigned (or not) is an important factor in denser communities where the installed common parking is less than the need, particularly has families age and have more drivers in their household.
It's a practical issue which is fraught with philosophical and theoretical economic ramifications.
Agree, and this is what makes parking mandates on private property so weird. They're regulating the wrong thing. The only matter of public concern is the use of *public* streets, for parking or whatever else. So why not regulate that directly, and let people use private property as they choose. As far as I can tell, the only justification for parking mandates is a belief that they will, indirectly, free up more public street parking - but they don't really have a clear theory about the purpose of public street parking, who it's for, or whether it should be allowed at all.
Some neighborhoods - Center City Philadelphia, for example, with it's narrow 18th and 19th century streets - would be vastly improved if all street parking was banned, and more parking garages were built.
It's a matter of *public* concern that I can't lease a 2 bedroom apartment without paying for 2.3 expensive parking spaces that I don't want. It's a matter of public concern that unnecessary parking requirements prevent housing from being built by making it so expensive that builders can't afford to build it.
I live just outside Center City (where the streets are a bit wider but still narrow enough) in an area where street parking is generally free on non-arterial streets (the arterials have metered parking). I keep telling my girlfriend that all the streets should have permit parking. A local YIMBY/urbanist type proposed having a blanket parking pass for the cost of the local transit pass, and I remember a few people discussing it (mostly with derision; I held my tongue because it was my first day at my new job). (As for my girlfriend, she never puts forward anything convincing on the policy case but hates it anyway because she hates paying for parking.)
I don't know how I feel about parking passes, but I do think it would be good to move away from the idea many people seem to have, that there's an entitlement to park your car on public property.
Public streets should be used for transit, I think, not for storing cars. Prioritizing street parking space for people running errands makes sense to me. If there's plenty of space in a neighborhood to sell overnight or all day parking passes that might make sense. But generally it seems like the best approach would be to force car storage off the public streets, which would spur demand for building large off-street parking garages, but wouldn't require mandating that private buildings have parking space.
I think the idea behind parking passes (which I am using as a shorthand for putting a price on all street parking and allowing people to buy a pass to pay that if they live in the neighborhood) is that it's a relatively palatable way to ease people into thinking that all parking is paid parking. People can then decide whether they need their car and/or whether a large garage makes more sense.
The problem is if you're not charging the actual market rate for the parking (which is way higher than is politically possible), you're not actually getting people into that mindset - you're just formalizing the right of local residents to the public street in front of their house via a token payment.
You can also sell residential passes (ie only to residents) at a big discount - possibly just the nominal cost of administration.
The last place I lived before moving here, my commute was to drive to a rail station and get a train. The car park at the station wasn't big enough so I'd regularly street park anywhere nearby. The number of times I would get back and there would be an upset local who had got home from work and couldn't park outside their own house was not small.
I took to carrying a petition for more parking at the station and asking them to sign it. This got me out of more than a few arguments and also eventually worked - they built the car park just after I moved out and stopped needing it personally.
Why give a discount? It seems reasonable that existing residents should be granted a free parking pass to represent their existing parking rights, but new residents should be able to buy the pass or not buy the pass as they like, if they want the savings of not having to pay for car storage (and the existing resident who sells their house can keep the pass if they still work in the neighborhood, or sell it to another person who wants to store multiple cars in the neighborhood).
Parking permits aren't much of a help if they're distributed on demand. In Boston, wide swaths of the city are reserved for neighborhood parking permit holders (ie, people who can prove residency). Unless things have changed (left in 2014), the city A) charges no fee and, B) imposes no cap. Which translates into a lot more car ownership than is necessary for a pretty walkable town like Boston and, as an added value, parking is more difficult (including, of course, for residents!) than would be the case if the city employed market forces to manage scarcity.
Consider the possibility that most American people are not adherents of urbanism and would rather see street space used for parking than for street fairs and other purportedly attractive uses in their neighborhoods. That is why there are cars parked on the street now.
Instead of the one-size-fits-all YIMBY zealotry, it might be good to develop a form-based approach that encompasses a model for higher-density development with cars, not just higher-density development without cars. It works in my neighborhood, with is a mile from the nearest (local) subway but easily accommodates 10- and 20-story apartment buildings.It allows two-car or three-car families to cut down to one car and this is a lot of progress. It works because there is enough parking.
Since we are talking market mechanisms, I would argue for requiring private garage spaces to be rented to residents or non-residents alike at a market price, and allowing developers to build such garages that they judge to meet the demand at that market price. Thus the cost of owning a car is known and built into residential decisions, knowing that you can keep a car, even if you are a newcomer, but at a price. The cost of the garage would not be built into the price of the apartments, since it would be a separate profit-making entity which (in a coop apartment) would accrue to the benefit of the shareholders. Then, and only then, could you consider restricting or eliminating overnight street parking.
Yes agree, but there's plainly not enough space on the public streets to store everyone's cars. My point is just that parking regulations should focus directly on allocating that limited public resource, not dictating what portion if any of private property should be allocated to parking. Clear rules for how parking on public land is allowed, and let the private sector figure out the rest.
I see your point, and I don’t fully disagree. There’s a contradiction here: we think that streets don’t have enough space for cars, but zoning makes us build too many parking spaces. Something isn’t adding up here. I think lavish minimums in the zoning code are a bad thing, but I wouldn’t just expect the private market to fix the problem. Land scarcity and land economics will ensure that is not the case. Market failure is the reason that the minimums were put in place in the first place, so a smart policy would start from that point.
The market failure here is what? Tragedy of the commons, where free parking on the street is overused? Why is the solution not allowing developers to build as much or as little parking as they think the market will bear, and then charging market rate for street parking?
Because land economics doesn't work that way. Given the scarcity and positional qualities of land, it is much easier to create a parking shortage than it is to create a sufficiency of market-rate parking where it is needed. Parking needs to be marketized, but it will need some help from public policy for that to happen.
Cars are f-ing awesome. It allows me not only to get wherever I want in the city I live in, but to get anywhere in a 10 hour drive radius to do whatever I want for a weekend for the price of 2-3 tanks of gas and a vacation day (or 2).
I’ve always been perplexed at the urbanites who I have worked with for my entire life that speak endlessly about their need to travel the world... yet now own a bike and no car and demand a working arrangement, that forever mandates never leaving their house.
Screw that. You’ll be seeing me burning down highways listening to npr and pulling the “I only smoke on vacation” at every coffee shop and bar in the nation. Til I die. I’ll need a place to park for that.
And that’s great! I want a world of diverse interests and lifestyles. So let’s not mandate that one of those lifestyles is better than the others and let markets do their work.
Agreed, as long as the negative externalities created by the "cars are awesome guy" are paid for by him and not the person who happily walks five blocks to the supermarket.
In many cities, the density of "suburbs" can be pretty high and I never quite understood what is supposed to be the dividing line there. Is there some research as to what counts as dense vs non dense with regards to paying all the tax revenue?
I think this is where I am mostly also. I like having a place to park as a surbanite and am annoyed when businesses don’t cater to me but I guess that’s there choice.
Urbanists really lose me at parking maximums though. Luckily for me it’s politically impossible for a policy like this to pass (I think?) because Twitter is not real life.
They are on Twitter and advocate parking *maximums* (i.e. no *more* than X parking spaces per unit). I'd say they probably don't work in most of the US (not dense enough, not enough transit), but make sense in places where they've been implemented (e.g. Mexico City) where space is at a serious premium and transit is fairly abundant.
I guess I don't even know what an urbanist is...I would have thought it was someone who likes cities and wants them to grow, so they would include Yglesias for example. Maybe the term has come to mean a more narrow, specific group of people and policies
This is an example of Matt was talking about when he said discussing minimum parking requirements often become discussions of whether or not parking is good. Former town planner from a rural/exurban town here at a time when Target was coming. Target knows 100% of their customers and probably 90% of their employees are driving. The town still required easily twice as much parking as Target wanted to build because... reasons.
The question is not whether people should drive, or developers should build parking, it's what is the pubic interest in a *legal requirement* to centrally plan the number of parking spaces a business/developer should provide, regardless of what they market wants. Even in places where absolutely everyone is going to drive anyway, minimum parking requirements drive up the cost of everything for everybody, require acres of asphalt to unused at least 85% of the time, or even year round.
Drive around the back of a supermarket in the suburbs...a lot of times there is a whole extra lot back there required by the minimums, but developers know no one will use it so they hide it so the drive to the store isn't so long. This is a huge waste of money and natural resources with impacts to water quality, etc etc etc.
Central planning for economic development doesn't work... We just need to believe that applies to parking lots as well as factories... Because it does!
Are there impacts of storm water runoff in more urban developments? Like if it’s a parking lot or another form of sealed asphalt/cement... is it all the same to Mother Earth? Or are there other water impacts to large parking lots outside of storm water
It's increased storm water runoff, which gives a greater chance to pick up contaminants/cause erosion in the runoff, and depending on local circumstances, the extra impervious surface can mess with the ability of rain to recharge an aquifer. Any impervious surface is not great for this, but asphalt has the additional impact of absorbing heat, contributing to the "urban heat island" effect (which exists locally in developed areas, not just "urban" areas). To the extent the extra heat can impact surface water, that is typically not great for water quality, either.
Also because the minimums tend to be higher for any given use! This article is about effects on housing, but parking minimums impact stores, restaurants, factories, literally anything
I am not too happy with the CA legislature when it comes to YIMBY legislation. AB50 was killed and the Governor didn't get behind it. There's a good article from Vox-Matt about the proposed legislation.
In the 5th paragraph of ":Mandates hobble innovation and change" there is a somewhat hilarious typo that suggests that innovation makes people careless instead of carless.
"But if an e-bike or an electric scooter expands your range of carelessness"
Funny, I didn't read that as a typo but assumed "range of carelessness" was a way of referring to easy, spur of the moment trips that don't need to be carefully pre-planned around mass transit schedules, aka "range of carefreeness".
A useful fact is that one parking space in a multifamily building takes up 350 square feet. So two parking spaces are the same size as a small apartment—and in some jurisdictions, that 700 sq ft apartment has to have the two parking spaces. I prefer homes for people to homes for cars.
I live in Warsaw, which while dense compared to American cities is quite sprawly for Europe due to being built mostly post-war, and there doesn't seem to be any problem with parking. I live carless in the dead centre and a parking spot in my building is terribly expensive – people definitely sell them all the time. Some people live in more open (though I think ghastly) suburban areas where there's plenty of on street parking. Some pay for garages...my grandad even rents a garage a block from his house, in a sort of garage development. Some people live what I jokingly call the Polish dream – an American style house with a garage built 10m over the city line for tax purposes.
I don't know the exact laws around parking, but it seems to work just fine and the policy debate is largely on how to reduce the number of vehicles coming into the city centre. It's a pretty car-oriented culture, too, with the car and the house remaining status symbols. We have giant suburban big box stores with vast sprawling parking lots. I can't imagine a deregulated America would want for parking.
I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, which (as far as I can tell) doesn't have any parking minimums. It also had essentially zero cars until very recently. That's starting to change as the middle class emerges. I am pro everything Matt talks about but living here I can also see the appeal of parking minimums.
I don't really know *why* but people with cars seem to have an extreme amounts of entitlement when it comes to stopping and parking their cars. I live in an alley that is technically wide enough (barely) for two cars to pass side-by-side. It is described as a "two-car alley". Yet both sides of the street have cars parked from employees of local businesses. (Vietnam also lacks zoning, so businesses and residential mix.) The result is that street is (barely) wide enough for a single car.
It is common to see cars simply stopped in a lane of traffic because the owner is waiting for someone inside a local business. Cars will also park in front of people's houses and businesses nearly blocking them in. There was a fairly well-known incident a few months back where someone parked a car in front of a business and left a sign saying "please call me and I'll come move my car". The business owner instead spray painted the car and the ensuing online fight was about whether the business owner was justified or not. (Many wondered why the onus was on the business owner to call the car owner, instead of the car owner preemptively calling the business owner and asking permission.)
On the one hand you could say: All of this just means illegal parking needs to be enforced. Which is one of those things that is true but not very useful. Even in America parking enforcement has long been one of the most hated things there is. Movies have been complaining about it for 40+ years. And it isn't just America: parking enforcement is despised in nearly every country.
So I guess what I'm saying is: I see parking minimums as a legislative run-around dealing with this reality. If a local government *actually* rigidly enforced parking laws they'd almost inevitably deal with tremendous amounts of backlash. Sure, eventually, after many years, the strict enforcement might engender a new cultural norm. But all the politicians and bureaucrats would have been fired, condemned, picketed, recalled, etc.
Or....you can pass laws mandating parking minimums and fix 80% of the problem of illegal parking and get effectively zero pushback for over half a century except for Donald Shoup.
I have had a lengthy conversation with a transportation engineer who argued that the most realistic solution to create significant change in urban land use is driverless cars. She persuaded me that the technical challenges are much much more likely to be overcome in the near future than the mix of existing regulatory challenges.
Once we get to the point where you can have driverless cars that can drop you off and then park themselves some distance away, then many of these land-use issues associated with parking will become a lot more manageable.
These state bills are good where you can get them passed. As a supplement, I think local YIMBY city council-folk should consider getting a multi-level parking garage built in certain residential neighborhoods as a sweetener for eliminating parking mandates. There are lots of urban neighborhoods where SFHs aren't required to have parking but big apartment and condo buildings are. Opposition to the latter inevitably come from owners of the former. If you could guarantee incumbent no-garage-SFH-owners a cheap parking spot not too far from their houses, you could drastically lower opposition. You could perhaps offer a deeply discounted rate to those SFH-owners, but charge a much higher market rate to anyone who buys a SFH in the future. It isn't the kind of thing that purist YIMBY theory would approve of, but as a realpolitik measure it might get the job done.
There is another strategy where you assign the number of street parking permits based on linear curb space for each building, so incumbents get priority for parking passes.
Why do you imagine that owning a single family house entitles you to park in front of your house and prevent others from parking there? The owner bought the house; they didn't buy the street.
I think the way to do it is to grant *existing* residents a free pass, to represent their existing legal right to park free on the street. But if they want another pass in the future they'll have to pay. And if they don't have a car, or get rid of it, they can sell it to someone who wants another.
Highly recommend the "The High Cost of Free Parking" by urban planner Donald Shoup.
He presents empirical data about the percentage of traffic in various urban
neighborhoods which is at any given moment just "cruising" around looking for street parking. The numbers are horrifying. Like, up to a third of all drivers in some places at some times, IIRC.
I wonder how much of this is based on commercial (destination) areas rather than areas of home residence. In that case, you can solve your problem simply by driving to the suburbs.
The intersection of "how dare government mandate that I buy health insurance" conservatives and "how dare government *fail* to mandate the exact amount of parking on everyone else's private property" conservatives is fascinating. At least until you realize that the whole parking minimums are really indirect redlining that crypto-conservative old guard local politicians use in deep blue cities to win votes.
See also, SF where our local "progressives" are so pro car you'd think they are on the verge of lobbying to rebuild the Embarcadero Freeway.
It is interesting to me to see progressives turn all libertarian-y and extoll the market actions of unregulated private profit-making entities, so as to promote a favored lifestyle. I mean, it's my favored lifestyle too, but still. The zeal for coercion, for denying the legitimacy of public action only in these circumstances, is kind of scary.
At the end of the day, it's all about whose ox is being gored.
That said, the world would be better if we would go back to being honest about both progressives and conservatives lobbying for freedoms/rules they believe are good based on the merits. There are things that are generally for the public good, like masks and vaccines. And there are things that are not, like using zoning laws to enforce economic segregation.
Imagine a world where making a bad faith argument is about as socially acceptable as farting in an elevator.
I would say this is an issue (like immigration) where there is no "right" answer, but only a balancing of interests and views. Tolerance and understanding helps arrive at that balancing - binary thinking simply ensures that there is no solution.
I’ll emphasize if I wasn’t clear, I live in SF, where so called “progressives” operate in so much bad faith (look up CEQA and historic laundromats) that I’m convinced bad faith arguments are clearly an equal opportunity hack tool across the political spectrum.
A defect of highly-localized and granular land use regulation is that it generates a million such fights, far too many to negotiate one by one. I think that some high-level density and use rules, combined with a kit of building envelope rules that address the public interest in the streetscape, working in a very uniform way across broad areas, would tend to channel these fights in a more cooperative direction. There would be fewer tools for bad-faith actors to oppose each other with.
This doesn't feel like it would be a big concern for most conservatives, given how few of them live in urban areas. Did I miss something?
Parking mins drive up the price (and ugliness) in low density areas too!
The federal government does not mandate parking.
I mean, true. But if the principle holds true - whether a state, city, or feds mandate parking, still means parking is mandated.
No, no -- principled conservative federalism means, "only the federal government can be tyrannical." When states keep half of their citizenry disenfranchised, that's just an organic expression of local control. And when fathers beat their wives and children, it's just a Biblical household.
That federal gummint, though, interfering with states' rights and a man's private family! It has too much power!
What do you mean? I thought I could choose a different state if I want to not have parking lot size mandates in my hometown. Maybe I'll just convince everyone I know to come with me, totally practical, amirite? /s :)
What, you're from out of state? You didn't grow up here? Then shut up and learn your place. We're all natives here, and we like it just the way it is. Carpetbagger!
[You forgot the second half of the federalism two-step: first pretend that people are free to move to the state of their choice, then pretend that they must defer to tradition and heritage if they do move.]
In Austin it's "you moved here six months ago? we've all been here at least 12 months, and we like it just the way it was then! carpetbagger!"
Principled conservative federalism means following the Constitution.
"Principled conservative federalism means following the Constitution."
It's just no fair, Ken. I put real time and effort into trying to write comments that will make people laugh, and then you write something this hilarious and gut-busting without any effort at all.
It's so perfectly dead-pan! A concise, tight-lipped, one-line demolition of all right-wing pretensions, a total send-up of all the preening nonsense that the petty authoritarians of Fox News constantly spout, without any extra padding or set-up. My hat's off to you-- this is comedy writing of the highest quality.
Straw man arguments aren’t especially humorous.
So let a state mandate health insurance.
Yes. The state I used to live in has really high taxes - that’s one of the reasons I left. I can’t avoid the feds.
Protection from regulation of the Commons isn’t a human right.
Just curious, Ken: should NYC be allowed to ban Big Gulp sodas?
Local Man Discovers "Keep Power Close To People" is Cherished Conservative Ideal -- more at 11!
Jesus don’t give them any ideas.
Over here in the other place, we complain a lot (and correctly) about institutional sclerosis, but a reformed and nimble New York that had fixed its capital cost issues would probably make completing Robert Moses’ plan for trans-manhattan highways at 34th and 14th street it’s first priority.
I'm currently living in a small new england college town and recently looked over its parking requirements and those of other college towns. Every one I looked at had mandatory minimums. One space per living unit. X number of spaces per table at a restaurant. Etc etc. I've been thinking about putting together a short memo for the select board suggesting removing the minimum.
Do you think it's worth while to do so? Would there be benefits in lower densisty and less transit rich places?
I think you definitely should. A get step would be to look if these towns have stated desires to address climate change and housing affordability and then note how at odds those rules are with their objectives.
Thanks! The big issue of the day is the regulation around marijuana cultivation (it's in MA), and climate change frames get thrown around from time to time. But I think the more persuasive argument, at least in the town I'm living in now, will be around the possibility of reducing the visual impact of new buildings.
Strong Towns has done a ton of reporting on this. Parking minimums like that end up creating such an overabundance of parking that even during peak demand parking lots are less than half full.
A good argument should be "hey, we're mandating all this parking and that is preventing folks from making more money from the space, which would raise property values, and lower our collective taxes." But my experience in these small New England towns is that they suddenly don't care about the money when you make this argument.
Yes, I was going to bring in Strong Towns. I would strongly recommend looking specifically at Sandpoint, ID.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/1/30/one-line-of-your-zoning-code-can-make-a-world-of-difference
This is a relatively small town in a rural state. If they can see large rapid gains from this, so can your college town.
This is really helpful, ty!
Thanks for the suggestion! How had I not heard of them before now?
Not Just Bikes on Youtube has a great series that covers a bunch of Strong Towns arguments and is high quality stuff.
IIRC Not Just Bikes has been doing a series in collaboration with the Strong Towns team recently. Two great tastes that go great together! :-)
Part, maybe most, of the opposition you're going to run into is that the parking regulations amount to zoning restrictions disguised as parking. The reason to require one space per living unit is to keep the owner from chopping the building into more and smaller units and having more college students living in each building. People love living in college towns, but they don't really want the students living next door to them. Which, if you remember how different your hours, behavior, tolerance for noise, etc. was as a college student is probably not irrational. So be sure when you frame your argument that you reassure the town elders that the change somehow won't result in more college students per building living next door to the long term homeowners.
Luckily for the strong contingent of local NIMBYs and unluckily for anybody who wants/needs to rent, there are very strong regulations around adding additional dwelling units to properties. But yes, I'll need to cover this topic.
Part of the reason to get rid of unnecessary mandates is we don’t always know what people want and this helps figure it out.
But I’d suspect the big user of no cars would be the college students. So eliminating parking for student housing and parking for businesses that primarily serve college students is what would shift the most. It would help expand the “cool, small, walkable downtown” that’s great about a college town. The college might create/expand a bike share program, which isn’t the deepest public transit, but can solve enough issues that a 20y assistant prof who lives near the grocery store and work might decide to skip a car.
Meant 20 somethings in general, but I suppose the 20yo boy genius assistant professor might be interested in a walkable downtown as well.
There's also a contingent of minimum wage service workers who could benefit. I think the college is prestigious enough for a not insignificant number of students to have cars. I really hope that town does go for a bike share program soon!
Yes!!!!
I totally agree with the argument that parking minimums are harmful, but I am wary of the idea that abolishing minimums alone solves the parking issue - in particular if subsidised parking is displaced from off-street to on-street.
On-street parking is really bad! It decreases urban mobility, makes it harder for cyclists in particular to get around, encourages people to get much bigger cars that are more dangerous and polluting than they actually need, and is a huge implicit subsidy by the Government to motorists at the expense of everyone else.
The solution to this is to copy Japan and ban overnight on-street parking, and require everyone who buys a car to demonstrate that they have private land to park their car on when they buy it. This would mean people who don't own cars can use their garage for something else, but motorists are encouraged to get small, cheap cars that use very little of their private land, which means travel across the city improves. Visitors and rentals can use little commercial parking lots for overnight stays.
Parking minimums should be abolished, but their abolition can't do all the heavy lifting in policy terms here. We need to mix it with some other tools to reduce demand for car parking as well as reducing the supply of land for car parking.
The public owns the streets. There is no reason to give away this valuable real estate for free. We should charge for parking, and also consider using some of this valuable space for uses other than car storage.
We should not be subsidizing on-street parking, but that is one of the harder less popular parts of this debate.
The policy should be that off-street parking in residential areas must come with an annual parking pass. Those passes should be sold based on market demand, meaning that if there is a large demand for parking on a single street new permits are going to be sold at increasingly more expensive rates. And you can grandfather rates at inflation so people don't oppose development because it may increase parking rates.
You can also make parking permits cheaper for buildings with less cars than space in front of their building and higher rates for those in buildings with more cars than space.
With parking permits it can become a better investment to have off-street parking.
Why sell annual passes? It seems better to me to grant existing residents a permanent pass when you create the policy, and then require any new resident to buy an existing pass if they want to park in the neighborhood. Unbundle the ownership of a parking spot in the neighborhood and ownership of a residence in the neighborhood, so that a zero car household can save money, and a multi-car household can buy the pass from a neighbor if it's worth it to them.
"encourages people to get much bigger cars"
How does on street parking encourage people to buy larger cars? The smaller the car the easier it is to find a space into which your car will fit.
Because the cost of the land you do end up consuming when you park is free. You may have to walk a bit further to find a big enough spot, but it's much cheaper than having to buy land
Full size trucks don't fit in most residential garages.
No one has a full size truck in the city.
what's "the city"? Most fast growing MSAs in the US have single family homes within easy walking distance of transit.
If you need to park on the street driving a full size truck is going to substantially impair your ability to find a space in a timely fashion. I’m trying to understand the scenario you’re talking about where the existence of street parking results in people buying larger vehicles.
In general I would agree with BronxZooCobra that when people are forced to park on the street, they are more likely to buy smaller cars, esp. when spaces are not delineated.
In Europe having to park on the street is perhaps more common, and while there are several reasons why Europeans typically prefer smaller cars to Americans, this may well be one.
There is an entire class of small "City Cars" that are typically below the size of the vast majority of cars sold in the US market, and while they're not the *most* popular segment, they sell well enough.
Interesting, though I think the Japanese solution would be perceived as a bit drastic for the US. Here in Philadelphia, it took us years to even get street sweeping because people in South Philly didn't want to have to *move* their cars *once a week*. (Technically, we don't even have that yet because the pandemic started shortly after the pilot street sweeping.) The realistic alternative is implementing permit parking; it's a familiar concept, so while people will grumble about how the City is trying to take your money, it actually stands a chance at passing. (Well, it would if it weren't for certain members of Council, but now I'm getting ahead of myself.)
Japan also requires prime to prove they have overnight off street parking before they can register a new car. Stops the "commons" problem at the new car instead of the new home!
Yes, with the exception of very small "Kei Cars".
*people, not prime
Re: Uber/Lyft I really wish urban progressives would lean into surge pricing. I generally bike or take transit anywhere I go in Chicago, save the occasional Costco trip. But my sister-in-law was visiting a couple of weeks ago and just defaults to ride share wherever she is. We were eating somewhere downtown that is a couple of blocks from a train station that would get us a couple of blocks from where we live, but we were planning to defer to my SIL who wanted to order an Uber. Turns out, it was a Saturday night in a busy part of town, and the Uber ride would have cost like 8x the cost of transit, so we took the train instead.
Slightly off-topic, but is where there so much graffiti there? That bothered me for than anything in Matt's post.
You think you can run an elementary school out of your garage and not have the miniature hoodlums vandalize the joint? Good luck with that. Much easier just to call it "art class".
No "eyes on the street" in a back alley?
I think that’s it. Plus homeowners for whatever reason don’t seem that invested in graffiti removal when it’s on the back of the house.
It's not exactly pretty to look at to begin with, looks like a prison to me :(
It didn't bother me at all. You should consider increasing your tolerance for that sort of thing, if you can; it'll make your life better.
Public parking brings up a lot of economic concepts and theories into sharp focus. It all starts with a problem of the commons and the use and regulation of public spaces. There have been a lot of crazy schemes to marketize parking. For a brief while there was an app where you could "sell" your parking space. Many meters now expire after a vehicle has left it, which exploits people who either overestimate the time of their stay or unexpectedly have to leave early.
In many older cities sniping a snow-cleared street parking space is a social sin meriting the death penalty. Determining how parking spaces are assigned (or not) is an important factor in denser communities where the installed common parking is less than the need, particularly has families age and have more drivers in their household.
It's a practical issue which is fraught with philosophical and theoretical economic ramifications.
Agree, and this is what makes parking mandates on private property so weird. They're regulating the wrong thing. The only matter of public concern is the use of *public* streets, for parking or whatever else. So why not regulate that directly, and let people use private property as they choose. As far as I can tell, the only justification for parking mandates is a belief that they will, indirectly, free up more public street parking - but they don't really have a clear theory about the purpose of public street parking, who it's for, or whether it should be allowed at all.
Some neighborhoods - Center City Philadelphia, for example, with it's narrow 18th and 19th century streets - would be vastly improved if all street parking was banned, and more parking garages were built.
It's a matter of *public* concern that I can't lease a 2 bedroom apartment without paying for 2.3 expensive parking spaces that I don't want. It's a matter of public concern that unnecessary parking requirements prevent housing from being built by making it so expensive that builders can't afford to build it.
I live just outside Center City (where the streets are a bit wider but still narrow enough) in an area where street parking is generally free on non-arterial streets (the arterials have metered parking). I keep telling my girlfriend that all the streets should have permit parking. A local YIMBY/urbanist type proposed having a blanket parking pass for the cost of the local transit pass, and I remember a few people discussing it (mostly with derision; I held my tongue because it was my first day at my new job). (As for my girlfriend, she never puts forward anything convincing on the policy case but hates it anyway because she hates paying for parking.)
I don't know how I feel about parking passes, but I do think it would be good to move away from the idea many people seem to have, that there's an entitlement to park your car on public property.
Public streets should be used for transit, I think, not for storing cars. Prioritizing street parking space for people running errands makes sense to me. If there's plenty of space in a neighborhood to sell overnight or all day parking passes that might make sense. But generally it seems like the best approach would be to force car storage off the public streets, which would spur demand for building large off-street parking garages, but wouldn't require mandating that private buildings have parking space.
I think the idea behind parking passes (which I am using as a shorthand for putting a price on all street parking and allowing people to buy a pass to pay that if they live in the neighborhood) is that it's a relatively palatable way to ease people into thinking that all parking is paid parking. People can then decide whether they need their car and/or whether a large garage makes more sense.
The problem is if you're not charging the actual market rate for the parking (which is way higher than is politically possible), you're not actually getting people into that mindset - you're just formalizing the right of local residents to the public street in front of their house via a token payment.
You can also sell residential passes (ie only to residents) at a big discount - possibly just the nominal cost of administration.
The last place I lived before moving here, my commute was to drive to a rail station and get a train. The car park at the station wasn't big enough so I'd regularly street park anywhere nearby. The number of times I would get back and there would be an upset local who had got home from work and couldn't park outside their own house was not small.
I took to carrying a petition for more parking at the station and asking them to sign it. This got me out of more than a few arguments and also eventually worked - they built the car park just after I moved out and stopped needing it personally.
Why give a discount? It seems reasonable that existing residents should be granted a free parking pass to represent their existing parking rights, but new residents should be able to buy the pass or not buy the pass as they like, if they want the savings of not having to pay for car storage (and the existing resident who sells their house can keep the pass if they still work in the neighborhood, or sell it to another person who wants to store multiple cars in the neighborhood).
Parking permits aren't much of a help if they're distributed on demand. In Boston, wide swaths of the city are reserved for neighborhood parking permit holders (ie, people who can prove residency). Unless things have changed (left in 2014), the city A) charges no fee and, B) imposes no cap. Which translates into a lot more car ownership than is necessary for a pretty walkable town like Boston and, as an added value, parking is more difficult (including, of course, for residents!) than would be the case if the city employed market forces to manage scarcity.
All accurate, my thoughts on parking passes is they should be paid.
Consider the possibility that most American people are not adherents of urbanism and would rather see street space used for parking than for street fairs and other purportedly attractive uses in their neighborhoods. That is why there are cars parked on the street now.
Instead of the one-size-fits-all YIMBY zealotry, it might be good to develop a form-based approach that encompasses a model for higher-density development with cars, not just higher-density development without cars. It works in my neighborhood, with is a mile from the nearest (local) subway but easily accommodates 10- and 20-story apartment buildings.It allows two-car or three-car families to cut down to one car and this is a lot of progress. It works because there is enough parking.
Since we are talking market mechanisms, I would argue for requiring private garage spaces to be rented to residents or non-residents alike at a market price, and allowing developers to build such garages that they judge to meet the demand at that market price. Thus the cost of owning a car is known and built into residential decisions, knowing that you can keep a car, even if you are a newcomer, but at a price. The cost of the garage would not be built into the price of the apartments, since it would be a separate profit-making entity which (in a coop apartment) would accrue to the benefit of the shareholders. Then, and only then, could you consider restricting or eliminating overnight street parking.
Yes agree, but there's plainly not enough space on the public streets to store everyone's cars. My point is just that parking regulations should focus directly on allocating that limited public resource, not dictating what portion if any of private property should be allocated to parking. Clear rules for how parking on public land is allowed, and let the private sector figure out the rest.
I see your point, and I don’t fully disagree. There’s a contradiction here: we think that streets don’t have enough space for cars, but zoning makes us build too many parking spaces. Something isn’t adding up here. I think lavish minimums in the zoning code are a bad thing, but I wouldn’t just expect the private market to fix the problem. Land scarcity and land economics will ensure that is not the case. Market failure is the reason that the minimums were put in place in the first place, so a smart policy would start from that point.
The market failure here is what? Tragedy of the commons, where free parking on the street is overused? Why is the solution not allowing developers to build as much or as little parking as they think the market will bear, and then charging market rate for street parking?
Because land economics doesn't work that way. Given the scarcity and positional qualities of land, it is much easier to create a parking shortage than it is to create a sufficiency of market-rate parking where it is needed. Parking needs to be marketized, but it will need some help from public policy for that to happen.
Cars are f-ing awesome. It allows me not only to get wherever I want in the city I live in, but to get anywhere in a 10 hour drive radius to do whatever I want for a weekend for the price of 2-3 tanks of gas and a vacation day (or 2).
I’ve always been perplexed at the urbanites who I have worked with for my entire life that speak endlessly about their need to travel the world... yet now own a bike and no car and demand a working arrangement, that forever mandates never leaving their house.
Screw that. You’ll be seeing me burning down highways listening to npr and pulling the “I only smoke on vacation” at every coffee shop and bar in the nation. Til I die. I’ll need a place to park for that.
And that’s great! I want a world of diverse interests and lifestyles. So let’s not mandate that one of those lifestyles is better than the others and let markets do their work.
Agreed, as long as the negative externalities created by the "cars are awesome guy" are paid for by him and not the person who happily walks five blocks to the supermarket.
In many cities, the density of "suburbs" can be pretty high and I never quite understood what is supposed to be the dividing line there. Is there some research as to what counts as dense vs non dense with regards to paying all the tax revenue?
I think this is where I am mostly also. I like having a place to park as a surbanite and am annoyed when businesses don’t cater to me but I guess that’s there choice.
Urbanists really lose me at parking maximums though. Luckily for me it’s politically impossible for a policy like this to pass (I think?) because Twitter is not real life.
Urbanists are on twitter and in favor of parking minimums or do I have it backwards?
They are on Twitter and advocate parking *maximums* (i.e. no *more* than X parking spaces per unit). I'd say they probably don't work in most of the US (not dense enough, not enough transit), but make sense in places where they've been implemented (e.g. Mexico City) where space is at a serious premium and transit is fairly abundant.
I guess I don't even know what an urbanist is...I would have thought it was someone who likes cities and wants them to grow, so they would include Yglesias for example. Maybe the term has come to mean a more narrow, specific group of people and policies
This is an example of Matt was talking about when he said discussing minimum parking requirements often become discussions of whether or not parking is good. Former town planner from a rural/exurban town here at a time when Target was coming. Target knows 100% of their customers and probably 90% of their employees are driving. The town still required easily twice as much parking as Target wanted to build because... reasons.
The question is not whether people should drive, or developers should build parking, it's what is the pubic interest in a *legal requirement* to centrally plan the number of parking spaces a business/developer should provide, regardless of what they market wants. Even in places where absolutely everyone is going to drive anyway, minimum parking requirements drive up the cost of everything for everybody, require acres of asphalt to unused at least 85% of the time, or even year round.
Drive around the back of a supermarket in the suburbs...a lot of times there is a whole extra lot back there required by the minimums, but developers know no one will use it so they hide it so the drive to the store isn't so long. This is a huge waste of money and natural resources with impacts to water quality, etc etc etc.
Central planning for economic development doesn't work... We just need to believe that applies to parking lots as well as factories... Because it does!
"The question is not whether people should drive, or developers should build parking, it's what is the pubic interest..."
Hey now, this is a family Substack, take it somewhere else.
Are there impacts of storm water runoff in more urban developments? Like if it’s a parking lot or another form of sealed asphalt/cement... is it all the same to Mother Earth? Or are there other water impacts to large parking lots outside of storm water
It's increased storm water runoff, which gives a greater chance to pick up contaminants/cause erosion in the runoff, and depending on local circumstances, the extra impervious surface can mess with the ability of rain to recharge an aquifer. Any impervious surface is not great for this, but asphalt has the additional impact of absorbing heat, contributing to the "urban heat island" effect (which exists locally in developed areas, not just "urban" areas). To the extent the extra heat can impact surface water, that is typically not great for water quality, either.
Yes but it's worse storm water-wise in the suburbs because parking it's more likely be a lot rather than, say, a garage
Also because the minimums tend to be higher for any given use! This article is about effects on housing, but parking minimums impact stores, restaurants, factories, literally anything
Yeah I mean I wasn’t really looking to provide a retort to the article with my oafish 3rd grade writing level ode to the cigarette infused road trip.
Haha fair enough. This has just been my crusade for decades, so I get fired up!
I am not too happy with the CA legislature when it comes to YIMBY legislation. AB50 was killed and the Governor didn't get behind it. There's a good article from Vox-Matt about the proposed legislation.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/7/18125644/scott-wiener-sb-50-california-housing
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-29/high-profile-california-housing-bill-to-allow-mid-rise-apartments-near-transit-falls-short
In the 5th paragraph of ":Mandates hobble innovation and change" there is a somewhat hilarious typo that suggests that innovation makes people careless instead of carless.
"But if an e-bike or an electric scooter expands your range of carelessness"
Funny, I didn't read that as a typo but assumed "range of carelessness" was a way of referring to easy, spur of the moment trips that don't need to be carefully pre-planned around mass transit schedules, aka "range of carefreeness".
I was also a little unsure whether to read it as a typo or as Allan has suggested.
"Range of carelessness" is a cool turn of phrase if intended though.
A useful fact is that one parking space in a multifamily building takes up 350 square feet. So two parking spaces are the same size as a small apartment—and in some jurisdictions, that 700 sq ft apartment has to have the two parking spaces. I prefer homes for people to homes for cars.
I live in Warsaw, which while dense compared to American cities is quite sprawly for Europe due to being built mostly post-war, and there doesn't seem to be any problem with parking. I live carless in the dead centre and a parking spot in my building is terribly expensive – people definitely sell them all the time. Some people live in more open (though I think ghastly) suburban areas where there's plenty of on street parking. Some pay for garages...my grandad even rents a garage a block from his house, in a sort of garage development. Some people live what I jokingly call the Polish dream – an American style house with a garage built 10m over the city line for tax purposes.
I don't know the exact laws around parking, but it seems to work just fine and the policy debate is largely on how to reduce the number of vehicles coming into the city centre. It's a pretty car-oriented culture, too, with the car and the house remaining status symbols. We have giant suburban big box stores with vast sprawling parking lots. I can't imagine a deregulated America would want for parking.
Nice to hear some non-US perspectives, even if influenced by US car-culture.
I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, which (as far as I can tell) doesn't have any parking minimums. It also had essentially zero cars until very recently. That's starting to change as the middle class emerges. I am pro everything Matt talks about but living here I can also see the appeal of parking minimums.
I don't really know *why* but people with cars seem to have an extreme amounts of entitlement when it comes to stopping and parking their cars. I live in an alley that is technically wide enough (barely) for two cars to pass side-by-side. It is described as a "two-car alley". Yet both sides of the street have cars parked from employees of local businesses. (Vietnam also lacks zoning, so businesses and residential mix.) The result is that street is (barely) wide enough for a single car.
It is common to see cars simply stopped in a lane of traffic because the owner is waiting for someone inside a local business. Cars will also park in front of people's houses and businesses nearly blocking them in. There was a fairly well-known incident a few months back where someone parked a car in front of a business and left a sign saying "please call me and I'll come move my car". The business owner instead spray painted the car and the ensuing online fight was about whether the business owner was justified or not. (Many wondered why the onus was on the business owner to call the car owner, instead of the car owner preemptively calling the business owner and asking permission.)
On the one hand you could say: All of this just means illegal parking needs to be enforced. Which is one of those things that is true but not very useful. Even in America parking enforcement has long been one of the most hated things there is. Movies have been complaining about it for 40+ years. And it isn't just America: parking enforcement is despised in nearly every country.
So I guess what I'm saying is: I see parking minimums as a legislative run-around dealing with this reality. If a local government *actually* rigidly enforced parking laws they'd almost inevitably deal with tremendous amounts of backlash. Sure, eventually, after many years, the strict enforcement might engender a new cultural norm. But all the politicians and bureaucrats would have been fired, condemned, picketed, recalled, etc.
Or....you can pass laws mandating parking minimums and fix 80% of the problem of illegal parking and get effectively zero pushback for over half a century except for Donald Shoup.
This is a really smart analysis, and a little depressing.
"Mandates hobble innovation and change"
It warms my heart to see a progressive admit that.
I have had a lengthy conversation with a transportation engineer who argued that the most realistic solution to create significant change in urban land use is driverless cars. She persuaded me that the technical challenges are much much more likely to be overcome in the near future than the mix of existing regulatory challenges.
Once we get to the point where you can have driverless cars that can drop you off and then park themselves some distance away, then many of these land-use issues associated with parking will become a lot more manageable.
These state bills are good where you can get them passed. As a supplement, I think local YIMBY city council-folk should consider getting a multi-level parking garage built in certain residential neighborhoods as a sweetener for eliminating parking mandates. There are lots of urban neighborhoods where SFHs aren't required to have parking but big apartment and condo buildings are. Opposition to the latter inevitably come from owners of the former. If you could guarantee incumbent no-garage-SFH-owners a cheap parking spot not too far from their houses, you could drastically lower opposition. You could perhaps offer a deeply discounted rate to those SFH-owners, but charge a much higher market rate to anyone who buys a SFH in the future. It isn't the kind of thing that purist YIMBY theory would approve of, but as a realpolitik measure it might get the job done.
There is another strategy where you assign the number of street parking permits based on linear curb space for each building, so incumbents get priority for parking passes.
Why do you imagine that owning a single family house entitles you to park in front of your house and prevent others from parking there? The owner bought the house; they didn't buy the street.
Its just one of many strategies for managing residential parking permits. Every city needs to find a policy that works best for them.
I think the way to do it is to grant *existing* residents a free pass, to represent their existing legal right to park free on the street. But if they want another pass in the future they'll have to pay. And if they don't have a car, or get rid of it, they can sell it to someone who wants another.
Highly recommend the "The High Cost of Free Parking" by urban planner Donald Shoup.
He presents empirical data about the percentage of traffic in various urban
neighborhoods which is at any given moment just "cruising" around looking for street parking. The numbers are horrifying. Like, up to a third of all drivers in some places at some times, IIRC.
I wonder how much of this is based on commercial (destination) areas rather than areas of home residence. In that case, you can solve your problem simply by driving to the suburbs.