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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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Is it really a horrible concept per se, or do people in reality have cars and need to park them somewher, even in Europe?
If the business chooses to accommodate cars, that should be up to them and to do so at whatever level they feel is optimal. A government mandated requirement only forces it on them without then being able to consider what's best for their business. Some businesses would do better with no parking, or just less parking. They're still required to pay for the land to sit empty just because the government forced them to. How is that a reasonable concept?
The problem with this line of thought is that oftentimes cars then will just be parked wildly (or on adjacent areas) and that can lead to large problems. A traffic concept is almost always a basic neccesity. I agree that this must not necessarily be a car optimized one (and in these times probably shouldn't be).
But leaving it to the business owners is a road to utter chaos and will in most cases lead to very unpleasant and potentially dangerous situations. Also keep in mind that if the public hand takes care of the resulting problems this will come out of tax money and thus will cofinance the business owners profits, taking it from the general public. This is also oftentimes not desirable (unless you are a business owner).
While that does seem to make sense, in my opinion it really just gives people more incentive to use a car. If you ban wild parking completely, that might be a different story. But just creating more and more space for cars is not going to solve the problem. The problem is that there are too many cars in the first place.
You mean if wild parking was banned completely, it would be a different story if you'd still need regulation in those places. There i'd agree. But in general street parking is not banned in Germany, and illegal street parking is widely tolerated by lots of communes. Where i live the street parking capacity is being used at around 150-200% lol (numbers from a few years ago).
As I said before, different concepts are possible. Nowadays e.g. the trend in Germany goes towards central parking (Quartiersgarage) and an otherwise completly car free neighbourhood (the central parking then gets financed over the plots), combined with public transport and bikeways. Even less car-friendly concepts are possible. But you defintly need a concept. Just "let the plot owners decide themselves" will almost always lead to desaster.
huh? if there's no parking you don't get to park, not having parking doesn't lead to chaos what are you on about?
In our city we have shops without parking. People do defintly park where there is no parking, blocking everything wildly. I personally had a car crash into me, because of the resulting chaos (the driver backed up without looking). This is quite common in places without a sound transportation concept (as said above, the concept does not necessarily have to be, and imo shouldn't be, car focused). Yes, the driver is responsible, but as a city planer this is something that has to be considered unconditionally. (I might also add that I work in public infrastructure planning, though not roadways, but I have meetings with those guys quite often.)
I did not claim that every parking regulation anywhere is reasonable and good.
Yes it is. If you're travelling by car, go to places that accomodate cars.
Don't expect all places to accomodate cars. If you want to go to place with no parking, use other means of transport.
You know, it does not need to be a one size fits all regulation, and at least where I live it isn't. You get all kinds of exceptions for lowering the amount, like how good is the object connected to public transit, you can swap car parking for additional bicycle parking etc the actual location plays a big role in how much car parking is required in the first place.
The regulators rightfully expect a certain amount of people having cars and place the burden of finding the space and money for it on the developer.
I've seen a number of denser developments start burying their parking lots, or stacking them on the roofs. You get denser (and conceivably more walkable) neighborhoods when places are built up this way. But it also drives up the cost of development and is only viable where real estate costs are astronomical. Then you've still got these six-to-eight lane Stroads intersecting the city blocks, with relatively little pedestrian infrastructure for crossing safely.
So if I live in a (atrociously overpriced) condo directly next door to a Whole Foods, you're still stuck hustling across enormous expanses of asphalt in order to make a simple grocery run.
Compare that to a dense urban neighborhood I lived in for a few months in Leeds. Walk downstairs, cross a simple cobbled two lane street, pop into a small grocery / sandwich shop combo, grab lunch plus essentials, then pop home inside 20 minutes. No risk to life or limb and I didn't even need a bike, much less a car.
You can find spots like this all over Italy, France, and Spain as well. Probably common to the Eastern Bloc, too. I've just never been. But the idea that people "need cars" is more predicated on the fact that we've created these oceans of asphalt and concrete in the states which are uncross-able without one.
I've thought for a while we need to start banning cars in downtown areas. We can use parking structures at the edge to store cars. When you need to take a road trip you just include the mass transit time to your parking structure. With large enough areas designated POV free, and restrictions on commercial vehicles we can reduce road usage to the point of bringing back open air markets and having everything a city dweller needs without leaving the car free area on a daily basis.
@Maggoty @UnderpantsWeevil Melbourne is slowly on it's journey to banning cars in the CBD. I wish we'd do it with a timeline with less decades in it, but each step towards it is good.
So far 2 of 21 pieces of street have been made car free.
That's awesome!
The same people who have "emotional support animals" and dick-nosed through mask mandates (if they even wore one) will shop around for doctors who will give them a bogus handicap placard for a small cash fee. I guarantee it.
Aren't those people already doing that though? and they can take mass transit to their car the same as you or me.
This subthread is about europe, people in Europe still have cars that are being parked somewhere. And the number is growing, not shrinking. Seems like this is an unpopular "opinion" to have here though lol.
EU car sales at 3-year low in August, EV sales plunge 44%
From just last month.
Cars are extraordinarily expensive to purchase and maintain. As the European domestic economy struggles under a host of economic headwinds, individuals are finding it more difficult to buy new cars or repair existing ones. This has been complicated by spiking the price of cheaper imports with high tariffs. Also, by the poor funding for domestic infrastructure in Austerity-focused European governments.
Ok, well maybe this year we finally see a downturn for real, there were dips during covid as well, but in general there was still growth, and growth being expected. I would welcome it, that would be great!
But when a developer in my neighbourhood develops new housing, on a previously industrial barren area, they need to build parking space for their expected demand, because there is no space for cars left elsewhere, and people buying appartments usually do have (money for) cars. The fact that there is now a free parking lot wherever the people who move here moved away from, does not help the situation here.
I would guess that the rate right where i live would end up at around 0.6 slots per appartment (including appartments for families with 2-3 kids), as a regulatory requirement. To me this seems to be reasonable regulation, although it is most likely too low for the actual demand, at least if the appartments are being sold. Of course it will be underound parking in a dense area like this.
generally in Europe people will either:
not every business needs parking right outside
What is it, left and right of those walkable streets? Parked cars on public space.
Also i did not claim that every business needs parking right outside, and they don't, not necessarily.
Is it really horrible to make the businesses / developers of housing complexes to pay for and build the expected parking?
Yes, as this increases housing costs a lot, especially when underground parking is required, with little to no benefit for most people.
There are tons of regulations that increase housing costs a lot. Doesn't mean they all don't make any sense whatsoever.
Car / inhabitant rate is about 58% in Germany, if you like it or not, and the rate is still getting slightly bigger, so no, most people have a car. Also the parking lots are usually being sold / rented out as an extra, that should at least in theory compensate the price for people without the need somewhat.
Underground parking is more expensive to build, but it's not being built to blow up the prices, usually it is the only way to reasonably accommodate the parking necessary, also from a financial POV. I hope you are not proposing atrocious ground level parking for urban settings.
The car owners pay for that parking with their road taxes or via parking meters - the small extra cost also serves to discourage those with the choice from driving while not strongly adversely affecting those without a choice
Oh yeah, do they? I believe I pay 36€ for my residential parking permit for two years. Is also not necessary to have everywhere. That is joke money, it discourages nobody.
I was talking about when visiting non-walkable businesses - I pay about double that, but that's because I have a 0.9l city car and if you had something more polluting it'd be significantly more, plus double for your 2nd+ car. That covers up to around 1km from my flat, which I'd deem walkable, and means people who don't live locally have to pay even higher rates
Non walkable businesses in europe usually have free parking in my experience. But i visit those rarely since I live downtown, i and most other people living downtown don't use a car to get around. But it doesn't make all the cars, including mine, disappear from the streets. The area where I live has no free capacity for parking on public space, so if somebody wants to build apartments or a business park on a formerly barren piece of land, they have to prove that they have reasonable parking facilities for the expected additional demand. Which will be there, that is just reality, not liking cars does not make this go away. 78% of households in Germany own at least one car, and even in the "car free wonderland" Netherlands it is 74% of households.
Apparently the idea, that developers are being forced by regulation to figure out their assumed parking problem for themselves, and not get a free pass to just put the burden onto the public space, is not well liked here. I don't know anything about the minimum parking regulations in the us, but for all I care it could as well be set to "minimum parking = zero" if it made sense in a specific area. But it needs to be regulated, I don't think there are many countries where that is not the case, maybe somalia or something. So maybe the regulation in place is bad and unreasonable, but that does not mean that regulating this problem is a bad idea in general.
Why not let the business decide how much parking to have then? Surely they know the needs of their customer base better than the city. Even as an anti-capitalist anti-free-market socialist, parking minimums seem like an extreme government overreach. You can still have parking without mandating a parking minimum.
Why are you working with the base assumption that people have to drive? If you can't park somewhere, maybe that place should be set up with good alternatives so people don't have to drive there in the first place, i.e. good sidewalks, protected bike lanes, frequent public transit. Humans are surprisingly space efficient when they're not in huge metal cages.
To 1: Where do you have the parking then, without the mandated parking minimum? On the street? Second row in the street? On the little piece of green that is there? On the sidewalk? In the bicycle lane? On the neighbours parking lot? Let's assume the business wants to provide and pay for parking in good faith, with the minimal reasonable amount of parking for the demand: That should be the number of parking space you are looking at if your municipality sets a reasonable parking minimum! The municipality has no interested in letting developers build some crap that will not work or be an unbearable burden to the neighbourhood. These regulations also incorporate necessary bicycle parking, which i think may become a hotter issue where i live, because the demand is currently absolutely not there in the numbers that some municipalities require, miles away really. But if the municipality has the interest to push the means of transport in that direction, regulating these kinds of things is a way to do that.
To 2: I am not working with that assumption. I am working with the fact that people do have cars and do drive, not all of them, but it's not a number to just brush under the carpet. If you have a reasonable minimum parking mandate all these alternatives you mention should play a role in what the number actually looks like. Let's make a quick calculation how it would look like where i live for a business that has "ridiculous" minimum parking requirements (1 slot per 100 m² of storage space), as some other user here deemed. A storage space.
They have 30 employees and 10000 m² of storage space. The minimum car parking required is 1 slot per 100 m² of storage space. 100 parking slots, that is ridiculous! Oh wait, it is 1 slot per 100 m² or 1 slot per 3 employees. 10 parking slots, not that ridiculous anymore. Depending on how well the storage space is connected to public transit you can reduce the parking minimum up to 30%. Let's say it is not very well connected, just a bus. You claim 10% off. 9 slots. Tell me this is not reasonable, if 78% of households here own at least one car. You can get more reductions if you build extra bicycle parking (bicycle parking would also already be at ten slots already btw), you can buy yourself out of the need to some degree, or have other kinds of ideas (but the municipality has to go along of course).
That would be a parking minimum calculation for a bland situation, where nothing special is going on, just some shitty public transit nearby, a place where you would build a storage space i guess. And my conservative guess would be that at least double the amount of employees will arrive by car, so the business gets to push half of their actual demand into the public space, for which you now pay for and get to look at when you stroll down the sidewalk.
The closer you get to something like "downtown", the lower the base number for your calculations will become, because it will be more feasible for people to walk, cycle places, public transit is better too, the idea is to have reasonable regulation that tries to reflect (planned) reality.
As someone who owns a car and is married to a handicapped person, I'm pretty happy about parking minimums where I live.