Parking requirements totally killed the vibe at a brewery by me. During COVID they were relaxed so that there was more outside seating, and then the permit was revoked. Now there’s 16 more parking spots and three total outside tables. Totally sucks.
Wtf kind of regulations are those?
2 parking spots per apartment seems uhh excessive.
Here in Toronto you get 0-1 if your apartment has a garage, otherwise you can get a fairly cheap residential permit that lets you ignore metered parking on your street. The number per street is limited, so you’re almost always guaranteed a spot.
Not just Nashville. Any city in the US and undoubtedly other countries. Also not just apartment buildings.
My town outside of Boston, technically a city, has like three screenfuls of parking minimums listed to cover many situations. New apartment buildings in the center require 1.25 spots per unit, as part of othe statewide goal for transit oriented development
I looked into opening a bar long ago in a fairly rural college town. One of the regulations was to have one parking space for so many seats. It’s an issue in a neighborhood where I once lived. Most of the houses were built before cars so most residents park on the street. It became the hip new place to be and high end restaurants and bars popped up causing lots of conflict
Any city in the US
I don’t think that’s correct, for example, San Francisco:
On December 11, 2018, the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance (the “Ordinance”) eliminating required parking minimums citywide for all uses.
Yeah, surely at least Manhattan isn’t like that as well
Huh that’s interesting, maybe because San Francisco is so densely packed. It’s the exception not the rule. In our car centric country having parking space requirements is common sense like building codes.
While the fuck cars sentiment is as important as always, planning rules like this have a few goals which aren’t all so malicious, including stopping projects decoupling their parking space and selling it for extra, or avoiding 30+ cars all over the sidewalks once everyone is moved in.
Planning codes tend to try and anticipate a community’s immediate vicinity needs. The best approach though would be “$x000 per unit to provide and maintain local public transport facilities and routes”
Japan at least seems to direct this at the car owner instead of at the property developer. If you don’t have proof of owning or leasing a parking space, you can’t register a car.
Unless your car is a Kei car, which is one of the main reasons those exist. IIRC.
I just learned this on Not Just Bikes, an awesome YouTube channel!
Imagine suburban trash having to cope with such abuse
This would be literally impossible to implement in the United States.
I don’t see why. It wouldn’t pass obviously, but structurally there’s no problem.
Because the majority of people park their car and their homes where they don’t have to pay for a space.
Then they have proof of owning a space. Japan outlaws overnight street parking to prevent cheating the system.
How specifically
You either own a space or you don’t. I edited it earlier about overnight street parking being outlawed if that’s what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you mean by parking at their homes. Driveways? That’s owning a space. The key point here is if a house/apartment isn’t built with a space you need to get one either from someone who isn’t using it or a commercial parking structure. If a municipality wanted to dole out street parking in residential areas they could do that too.
Parking mandates are some of the most egregiously bad laws on our books.
They increase housing costs significantly; land isn’t free and cars structures are expensive to build. This is a punitive for those who are trying to make ends meet, or those who are unable to drive. Why would you force a blind man to pay for a two car garage when you’re also disallowing them to drive? Doubly so when you don’t allow them to sell their unused parking to their neighbors. Oh, and parking minimums significantly reduce our housing inventory. Parking reform alone can boost home building by 40% to 70%. If you haven’t noticed yet, we have a bit of a housing crisis going on.
These laws also increase public expenditure because a car is used as transport from A to B. If A is your home, where is B? Pushing parking onto private developers is why in US there are, on average, 6 parking spots per vehicle. That’s 5 car spots in your downtown and on your streets that you pay for, be it taxes or increased grocery prices, that sit empty most of the time.
Parking mandates are broken. So broken that it’s the #1 campaign item for Strong Towns. We must remove parking minimums or we’ll continue to pave over our downtowns and create insolvent cities.
As far as I’m aware, the big issue is the parking minimums at businesses, not residential buildings. I.e. what you call point B, rather than point A. That’s what basically forces huge unwalkable strip malls. Which forces them out of the city. Which forces people to always drive there.
Now, the numbers in Nashville do seem a bit high. But the alternative to built-in parking spots in residential buildings is street parking, which costs just as much as built-in parking, but is entirely paid for by taxes instead. Street parking also takes up space that could be used for protected bike lanes.
The alternative to resident parking isn’t street parking but to provide residential parking as determined by the developer and purchaser. You’re not going to sell a condo if there’s no parking and prospective buyers need to drive. Likewise you’ll make better sales if you sell a condo without parking for a lower price to people who don’t/can’t drive. Let your local developers work with their civil engineers to figure out the best bang-per-buck of housing to parking spot ratio with each property they work on. I’m sure there would be fewer spots built near transit and downtown but fully loaded with parking on the edge of town; a nuance often missed in one-size-fits-all regulations.
Also the alternative to private parking is not necessarily street parking. You can:
- Lease a local parking space (a developer builds parking but it’s not included with an apartment/condo/town home purchase).
- Lease a spot in a public parking lot.
- Lease a neighbor’s parking spot.
- Lease car time on a car share.
Street parking shouldn’t be free anyway. Free parking limits developments from building parking! Why would they build an expensive spot when there’s plenty of “free” parking instead. Even post-sale you’ll see the effect of free street parking. Look at your neighbor’s garage. Do they park their car in there or do they use it for storage and instead park on the street? Free street parking is free real-estate.
The problem of “not enough street parking” can be solved by internalizing the price of parking. For example, San Francisco adjusts meters up and down until spots are between 60% to 80% filled. Price adjustment also signals the true cost of driving to the driver of the car rather than spreading their choice’s cost across everyone in the city/county/state.
Street parking also takes up space that could be used for protected bike lanes.
I agree! I’d rather street parking not exist. See the thread on Japan’s zero street parking strategy for their solution to parking (spoiler: it doesn’t include parking minimums).
However, a small side note. You don’t necessarily need protected bike lanes if your streets are slow enough, which is often a desirable feature of residential neighborhoods. The oft-cited Netherlander’s civil engineering calls them “fietsstraat” (cycle street). San Francisco calls them slow streets.
including stopping projects decoupling their parking space and selling it for extra
They already sell it for extra, those parking spaces are never free and you always pay for them
OP posted another article with more details on it: !https://lemmy.world/post/31486375
From the article:
Construction costs run from $10,000 per parking space in a surface lot to $70,000 per space in an underground garage. That gets baked into what developers must recoup from tenants and buyers, whether they own a car or not. The rules drive up the per-unit cost to build affordable housing (in New York, affordable units near transit are exempt from parking minimums, but the rules still apply elsewhere). And they often require more parking than people actually use.
$70,000 per space in an underground garage.
i was old enough to remember people buying 2 bed rooms apts in third tier cities for this kinda of money.
i think that is a really smart idea as a transition. not having parking minimums within x meters of public transit is a great start because a lot of public transit is shit in usa (no funding, etc).
i hate being forced into owning a car in my neighborhood and wish i didnt need one for basic everyday things, but if there were no parking minimums where i live then it would be a shitshow while waiting for some kind of public transit to never be built.
i agree with this as a starting transition goal : D
Sure. But Nash specifically has a lot of nimby bigots - so while 2 car park spots is great, they won’t vote for a future in which no car spots is acceptable because that would mean an increase in public transit. cf the whole light rail idea that was killed even though a light rail from downtown to east or bellevue would have been fantastic.
On the one hand, that sucks, on the other…well, what really sucks is that it’s probably necessary given the state of public transit and bikeability. (Haven’t been to Nashville, so I can’t comment on public transportation there.)
Changing rules for parking generally serves only to create local parking shortages (and subsequent emotional discussions) as rhetoric underlying problem is not addresssed. This is a bit chicken-and-egg, but consider what happens if a standard subdivision is built without driveways, parking lots, or garage space. A 2 mile walk to the grocery store doesn’t really work. Instead, the regulations should be for higher density, space for bicycles (and transit), and space for essential amenities like small, local grocery stores and restaurants. ETA - with current conditions creating unplanned multigenerational housing, dad, mom, kid1, kid2, and partners makes for tight parking even with 3 spots.
You know, like they used to build before it was about maximizing the revenue per square mile of land?
An apartment building in a walkable area with a parking garage is more walkable than a regular suburb without the cars.
The issue here is that for those things you suggested to exist we would inherently need to reduce parking as part of the change in regulation. Parking spaces are currently taking up the spaces that those amenities would be built, just as you described.
Unfortunately, NIMBY fools hear “reduce parking” and completely turn their brains off to screech about it, without ever considering the rest of the proposal and what it would do to benefit the community, simply because it makes them change their habits and they don’t want to.
Like, yes, there will be parking shortages, but that’s kinda the point so that people have to utilize alternatives instead.
Are you conflating the idea of banning parking with repealing mandatory parking? These are two very different policies. Developers will still build parking infrastructure when the market demands it and it makes sense for the neighborhood and project. They just won’t be universally required to even when literally no one wants it.
It’s not always the case that builders provide parking. The market demands shareholder profits, and if you don’t build a driveway, that’s more units you can fit on a given plot of land.
This is the trend I’m observing, but I’m certain it is not universal. 
Parking is for residents. If they want more parking, they can pay for a property that has that, which will usually cost more. If not, they can pay less and go without. This is a good thing and it’s not something the government needs to involve itself in. Right now the vast majority of places (in the US at least) have a really excessive amount of parking, so it may be that segment of the market is temporarily saturated, and they’re building for a market that wants less, which has gone unserved for a long time due to these pointless laws.
This raises the price of housing for everyone, since it compels developers and the end user to pay for the added work, physical space, and opportunity cost.
At the same time it enforces car dependency since it arbitrarily reduces density making walking, biking and public transport unfeasible.
Some of the newer communities in my city have that… fiddlehead greens design. None of them are walkable in the slightest, they don’t even have sidewalks! The houses are built so tight you could scratch your neighbor’s ass if the windows were open. And there is absolutely zero street parking. Many of them would require a 10-minute walk to a single bus that comes once every 70 minutes. In some communities there is one bus in the morning and one bus in the evening.
