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"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.
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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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.
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.
That's why they could require it. The TIA showed that the university would have an impact on the public system and the city could require them to mitigate that impact, and the university chose to build a parking circle and dedicate out as city ROW as its mitigation measure.
A local restaurant generating maybe 200 trips a day isn't going to have the necessary traffic impact for the city to demand infrastructure upgrades.
Now, a mega-development generating thousands of daily trips is a different story. They have to mitigate.
But they can still choose how to mitigate, and it's usually a dedicated turn lane and a traffic signal. Because if a developer has the choice between saving 1 penny and building a development that truly serves the interests of the city and the future tenants, they'll take the penny every single time.
@chiliedogg @PhoenixAlpha did a car write this?