
Why parking minimums almost destroyed my town and how we repealed them (2017) - tartoran
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/22/how-parking-minimums-almost-destroyed-my-hometown-and-how-we-repealed-them
======
pjc50
How could a bank possibly require _two hundred_ parking spaces? For a branch
in a small town? There's only about 9,000 people in Sandpoint!

Edit: ah, it's a multistorey office building, so that's presumably 1:1
employee parking, not a branch with customer parking?

I was trying to work out how this would play in the UK, and in the first
instance it's most likely the bank would shut:
[https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/caroline-
flint-...](https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/caroline-flint-small-
town-britain-suffers-as-bank-branch-closures-continue-1-8914883) (Thorne has a
population of 16k and no bank branch).

There is always a back-and-forth about parking availability, charges, and
business taxes in relation to the UK high street. But the usual model is
either a small amount of on-street parking or a charged-for public or private
car park.

~~~
maxsilver
(According to local news articles) It's a 90,000 sqft building, in a small
village with zero alternative transportation. 200 parking spaces is actually a
conservative low requirement, all things considered.

The building, if some day fully occupied, would have over 400 employees daily
in it. In my city, they'd probably push closer to 450+ employees into there.

------
Gobd
I used to live in Sandpoint, and the large city parking is full very often
forcing people to park on the street where it's a 3 hour or so limit. I always
rode my bike (yes even in the winter) but it's challenging for tourists
visiting the beach or shopping in the summer to find parking. Also very few
people ride their bike in the winter with all the snow & ice, and that's when
there are the fewest parking spots since the snow piled up cuts the size of
the city lot in half.

I always thought a park and ride would do well there so tourists could park
out of downtown and take a bus to downtown or the beach.

It's not a big problem, but I couldn't imagine the city having less parking.

~~~
CalRobert
Just charge for it. That encourages efficient allocation of the resource
(land).

If the government mandated free ice cream for everyone there would likely be
an ice cream shortage. The solution would be to charge more for ice cream, not
just try to increase the supply to meet demand (which is basically infinity
when the cost is 0)

~~~
ars
It also encourages people to go elsewhere.

I needed glasses recently, with my insurance I had a choice of 4 stores. I
went to the one with free parking. (Google maps streetview is great for
checking that.)

Requiring paid parking in a tourist town encourages people to visit a
different town.

~~~
graeme
Choosing a store within a town is different from choosing a different town.

All the old style tourist towns with limited parking seem to be doing _more_
than fine. I live in such a neighbourhood, with no parking minimums and paid
parking. People still visit.

~~~
ars
Think about it like this: Why is there paid parking? It's because demand
exceeds supply, so they require a fee in order to encourage people not to
come.

But that means you _could_ have more visitors.

Now, if you are maxed out, then good, paid parking makes sense - send those
tourists elsewhere.

But if more visitors = more money, and that is something the town wants, then
adding more parking, and reducing fees is what the town should do.

Which is what I said: "It also encourages people to go elsewhere."

It boils down to this: When choosing paid parking make sure this is what you
want, that you want people not to come.

(And I acknowledge that in certain situations it makes sense to want that.)

And I know what you are thinking: You'd rather they take the bus or whatever.
But think about this: Why do they chose to drive anyway, forcing you have to
encourage them not to?

Clearly there is something lacking with the bus, to the point that you have to
deliberately make driving worse just to induce them to use it.

~~~
graeme
Have you ever been to Europe? People just don't use cars when visiting most
cities there. They walk, take a bus, use an Uber.

I live in Montreal, and it's the same when tourists come here. They may drive
to the city, but they leave their car parked the whole time. (Side streets out
of the center have some free parking. Commercial arteries and downtown core is
paid)

Sure, you could have more parking for cars, but you might not have more
_people_. And with too much parking you destroy the city you want to visit.
Edmonton and Calgary have plentiful parking, and no ones goes to visit them,
except as a stopping point to see the wilderness around the city.

~~~
graeme
Oh, when I said "not have more people", I meant it in the sense that cars take
a lot of space in the environment, blocking people. They also transport fewer
people in a given space than bikes, buses, subways, sidewalks, etc. In a dense
urban car that is.

------
Faaak
Meanwhile, in Geneva, some new buildings are forbidden to build an underground
parking in order to discourage the use of cars.

It's interesting how cities react to cars differently

~~~
lolc
Yeah, Geneva is already clogged and just doesn't have the space to build more
roads. Driving is curable, as they say.

~~~
saiya-jin
So they decided to build a completely new subway just to incentivize french
daily commuters to drive less into the city. Project costing billions, making
ton of mess all over the city for last 10 years, planned either by incredibly
stupid people or as outright fraud.

If you look at the map, it won't help in transport practically any Geneva
inhabitant, since there are only 4 stops altogether (1 is in so called ugliest
town in France just across the border, Annemasse), and moving between those 3
within Geneva will be faster by existing bus system (ie Eaux-Vives -> train
station, takes 12 mins). That's not how you build a city subway. What a
fail...

Add to that the fact that french commuters would have to drive to centre of
border french town (which has its own traffic jams every day and no
infrastructure to handle extra commuters) and somehow park (expensively) there
- it will take them +-same time to just go to centre of Geneva.

The problem would be solvable very easily without any digging and spending
billions and pissing off everybody - just change legislation to make parking
to non-swiss (or non-Geneva) cars more restrictive (blue zones) or more
expensive (white zones, inner city parkings). And make the border huge
parkings really cheap, the prices now are ridiculously high for what they are
supposed to do (and waiting times for a slot are 6-12 months). It would also
bring more revenue to city without having to build more parking spaces for
which there is simply no space.

I suspect huge bribery from companies involved (mainly construction) to push
this through, because this really doesn't make any sense. Yet another example
of Geneva not really being Swiss in anything but location - more like 50%
French with their mess, inefficiency and corruption, and 50% somehow Swiss
(but its really smaller half, they just have tons of money from all the
companies due to low corporate taxes).

~~~
Faaak
> "1 is in so called ugliest town in France"

> "more like 50% French with their mess, inefficiency and corruption"

It's sad to bring an emotional "argument" to a rational one

------
shard972
I'm not sure why a bank building a 3 story building can't accomodate some
underground/roof parking? Or just make the carpark space the bank would have
made multi level.

I don't see why the only solution was to go horizontal, for a bank of all
companies!

~~~
slyall
Ballpark construction costs:

    
    
      Surface parking $3,000 per space
      Multistory $20,000 per space
      Underground $30,000 per space

~~~
sschueller
Don't let them decide on cost.

It's the cities job to put regulations in place to require underground parking
when building certain structures. It is also their job to calculate in the
additional toll on traffic as well as public transport in order to plan future
expansion.

~~~
Arnt
We have that kind of regulation where I live, including a requirement for off-
street parking per apartments that pushes builders strongly towards
underground parking. Now people complain about the rents, because of course
the added construction cost ends up increasing the rent, and about a lack of
new affordable housing.

You see the same thing in the original story — some popular restaurant decided
not to expand because of the cost of parking. Mandating expensive extras
sucks, one way or another.

~~~
varjag
That's not extras, that's paying for the externalities you otherwise incur
upon others.

~~~
Arnt
About half the residents in such apartments have no car.

~~~
varjag
Interesting, because here nearly everyone wealthy enough to buy a central,
newly commissioned apartment (ballpark of million dollars) does own a car.

~~~
TomMarius
Not in Europe. Cars aren't really practical anywhere near city centres.

~~~
varjag
I am in Norway, not even in the capital.

~~~
TomMarius
Owning a car in city such as Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Prague, Brno... is
significant pain, and it costs you a lot to even keep that car on the street
(if you can find a place - you can't). As a result, people in many historical
cities with compact greater city centres (where there simply is not enough
land to even theoretically accommodate 1 car per household) simply don't own a
car, because why. Probably more than half of the people living in the building
where I do don't have a car, many of my coworkers don't...

~~~
varjag
All of the European cities I've been to are full of parked vehicles. Someone
got to own all them.

Anyway we were talking about parking norms for newly commissioned buildings,
and "you can't find parking place on the street" isn't really an argument
against it.

~~~
shaki-dora
To bring some numbers into this otherwise useless exchange of made-up
anecdotes: half of all households in Berlin do not own a car.

To get back to useless anecdotes: as far as I can tell, this is not a result
of poverty. Indeed car ownership is far more prevalent among the poorer
immigrant community than the younger hipster community. I know people owning
apartments but not cars. It’s simply a shift in the value system.

~~~
varjag
Younger people tend to have both smaller incomes and smaller families, so it's
neither anything new nor surprising. Give them 15 years.

~~~
shaki-dora
You missed the part where I mentioned people owning apartments yet not cars,
and also where I explicitly referred to my (admittedly subjective) impression
of a subset of car owners as ‘poorer’. To expand: this is a rather well-known
cultural effect, with first-gen immigrants valuing wealth and its symbols more
than the postmaterialistic boheme.

The families I know generally use attachable bike carriages for their
children, and car sharing for exceptional needs.

~~~
varjag
Meh, I owned an apartment and didn't own a car until I was 30, until the
kindergarten commute with two bus changes really started to get old. You
extrapolate the trend from an early datapoint.

Maybe where you live car ownership is for poor, but not here. A rustbucket in
Norway would buy you a great car in Germany.

------
jpm_sd
I live in a small city (Alameda, CA) that has a couple of concentrated
"downtown" areas with limited parking. The construction of a 6-story municipal
parking garage as part of a large renovation of the old movie theater complex
in 2008 was beneficial to all of the surrounding businesses. It seems like
this is a pretty good general strategy, it just requires a large up-front
investment by the city.

More details:

[http://www.alamedatheatres.com/historic-
theatre/](http://www.alamedatheatres.com/historic-theatre/)

[https://www.overaa.com/projects/alameda-historic-theatre-
res...](https://www.overaa.com/projects/alameda-historic-theatre-restoration-
civic-center-parking-garage)

~~~
iso1337
What would have been even better is investment in a BART line that runs to
Alameda. Getting on and off the island is horrible due to there being only 3-4
bridges/tunnels (IIRC). Of course, that would have been a larger up-front
investment but one that they're now looking at.

[http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/May-2018/BART-in-
Alameda/](http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/May-2018/BART-in-Alameda/)

~~~
jpm_sd
The theater/parking renovations totaled around $37 million. Bringing BART to
Alameda is, according to your link, a 12 to 15 BILLION dollar project. That's
300 to 400 times more expensive.

~~~
mercutio2
That is an uncharitable comparison. 12 to 15 billion is the cost to build an
_entirely new transbay tube_. The cost to tunnel BART from Oakland to Alameda
would be a small fraction of that.

I’d certainly shop in Alameda vastly more frequently if it had a BART station.
Heck, my wife would probably insist we move there, the reason we don’t live
there is I insist that we live near a BART station.

------
burfog
Every business would prefer to have customers swipe parking provided by every
other business. That way, the other businesses pay the cost of land for
parking. It's a freeloader problem. Parking minimums exist to fix this.

You don't need parking minimums in the middle of nowhere, with businesses too
far apart for swiping each other's parking spaces.

Customers really do go elsewhere if there are no spaces, but a business can't
affordably provide the spaces if they will mostly be swiped by customers of
other businesses.

~~~
setr
Every business will prefer someone else to handle parking. No business will
survive if parking is not handled. Eventually, someone will pay for it, else
no business will survive. And since we know businesses survive without parking
minimums, we must therefore also know that a solution to your freeloading
problem can be found without the requirement.

Also, parking minimums can omly make sense in the middle of nowhere. In a
dense location, each business cannot be reasonably expected to build parking..
because the location is dense. Unless you spread out the buildings, to make it
sparse enough to support each building owning x spaced... but I don’t think
anyone wants to take a city and pretend its the middle of nowhere.

Parking minimums are neither a good solution, nor the only solution. I don’t
know what the best solution is, but as above, alternative solutions obviously
exist. My opinion: city-owned street parking + private lots offer a good
setup; businesses shouldn’t be directly involved in parking lots, except as a
worst case scenario (ikea/walmart 40 minutes out of the city proper)

~~~
ghaff
A lot of people on here are big on just eliminating or drastically reducing
parking in cities. That works fine if you live and work downtown and don't
need a car otherwise. But I pretty much guarantee you that the vibrancy of
your downtown is sustained to a large degree by people who don't live there
coming in. I was just in the local city for dinner and a play last night. I
can guarantee you that, to the degree traffic and parking make that too much
of a chore (and, believe me, it's getting there) I'll just fire up a movie at
home instead.

ADDED: Some cities (e.g. New York, London, various other European cores don't
really lend themselves to driving in--though many people still do in the
evenings--but that presupposes public transit that can comfortably substitute
for driving in terms of convenience and cost).

~~~
eherot
Driving and transit are not the only two ways of getting around. There is also
walking, which is both the cheapest form of transit to provide and also
completely dependent on density in order to work. Places like Boston, London,
and New York are not dense because they have great transit, they're dense
because they predate things like parking minimums which would have prevented
them from becoming dense in the first place. Their high density, in turn,
drastically increases the efficiency of public transit, meaning a lot more
people can be served by a given amount of transit spending. Parking minimums
undermine all of this by forcing buildings to either be very far apart (to
accommodate the parking lots) or very expensive (to pay for parking
structures). Both of these things tend to make cities less vibrant and
walkable, while also increasing economic inequality and carbon emissions.

~~~
titzer
This.

------
logfromblammo
Parking facilities are like hash tables. They get less efficient (time) as
they get more full. But they are also less efficient (space) when nearly
empty.

Unfortunately for city planners, doubling the size of a lot when it becomes
80% full is not a cheap operation.

------
jimmaswell
There's an area with a bunch of businesses all served only by street parking
in the town by me. I never go there because I hate street parking. If they had
parking lots I'd go there. I wonder how many other potential customers feel
this way.

~~~
sethhochberg
A town nearby where my parents live recently experimented with zoning some of
their parking lots for development and expanding street parking in the (small)
downtown core, an area full of small shops and restaurants, mostly. The street
parking had meters, which were very cheap (I think the maximum you could spend
was something like $3 a day). The local residents revolted, business owners
claimed their income was taking a hit, etc. At the time, I wondered how in the
world this seemingly thriving, walkable little downtown was so dependent on
giant free parking lots behind the main strip... it seemed crazy to me that
someone would stop going to a restaurant they enjoyed because their $50 bill
for dinner turned into a $51.50 night out with parking fees.

I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike street parking, its just such a foreign
concept to me that someone would avoid an entire otherwise-nice area because
there is plentiful parking that doesn't suit their tastes. Kind of weird to
see it written out like that.

~~~
pxeboot
Same concept with free shipping. People really like it, even if the total cost
is higher.

~~~
jimmaswell
Are meter fees the primary complaint about street parking? They don't really
factor into it for me.

~~~
sethhochberg
[https://www.tampabay.com/news/localgovernment/Dunedin-
shuts-...](https://www.tampabay.com/news/localgovernment/Dunedin-shuts-down-
paid-parking-discussion_171353318)

This is an article from the town in my example above - comments from business
owners make it seem like, yes, the primary issue really was that people don't
want to pay anything at all to park.

(A couple of years after the controversial paid street parking experiment
started, a new mixed-use development with a public parking garage on the
ground level opened up. The garage is still free to park in to this day.
Somebody paid a lot of money for those garage spaces, and is seemingly very
afraid of charging anything to use them)

------
aeharding
An interesting city to look at parking is Madison, WI. Because the heart of
downtown is physically restricted by an isthmus, there are many public parking
ramps.

[https://www.cityofmadison.com/parking-utility/garages-
lots](https://www.cityofmadison.com/parking-utility/garages-lots)

------
wstuartcl
Seems like a reasonable requirement to have a certain number of parking spots
for new construction. If anything it needed to be modified to apply pain for
making the choice to build parking at street level (vs underground or multi
level parking) by applying a penalty against the sq foot footprint of parking
installations that feeds back into the cost equation for the buildings. IE, if
the requirement is to have 200 spots for a specific building adding those
spots by buying blocks of land for flat parking increase the requirement count
by a ratio of the land used to supply the spots. Given a properly sized ratio
the builders will have a choice of a cheaper underground/multilevel parking
system or a much more "expensive" flat parking lot.

------
frankus
I have noticed a weird left-right political reversal around parking in the US.
Or maybe it's not entirely left-right but wonk-populist.

The voices that most loudly condemn socialism and regulation suddenly become
advocates for government-run parking and against deregulation of private-
sector parking. (For example:
[https://twitter.com/KCGOP/status/1067502185099841536](https://twitter.com/KCGOP/status/1067502185099841536))

~~~
jsight
I feel like I have misunderstood your post. I'm assuming by "voices that most
loudly condemn socialism and regulation", you mean the GOP? But the article
linked doesn't seem to complain about deregulation of private-sector parking,
but rather to complain about giving over parking to bike lanes and government
run buses.

Where is the part where they want government run parking and regulations on
private sector parking?

~~~
frankus
Maybe it really is more about shifting priorities away from cars and towards
more green uses like bike lanes and buses.

That specific example doesn't touch on parking minimums, and maybe
deregulating those are less of a political hot button, but the fact that they
remain pretty much ubiquitous in the US suggests that there is still some
opposition.

But there also seems to be a lack of faith that the private sector will step
in a replace the public sector spots that have been converted to other uses,
as well as opposition to charging a market-clearing price for the remaining
government-run spots.

------
nqzero
beautiful writing and a beautiful approach to building consensus

------
enriquto
From an European standpoint, this text reads like a nightmarish dystopia. I
find solace in the trend towards banning cars altogether inside the cities.

~~~
guitarbill
Agreed, although for small communities, public transport doesn't always work.

Coincidentally, the author's bio says he now lives in Seattle, which has truly
awful traffic. They could have banned traffic in e.g. South Lake Union when it
was being developed and didn't.

~~~
enriquto
> for small communities, public transport doesn't always work

For very small towns, you can walk. For mid-size villages, you take the bike.
For cities, there is a public transportation network. In exceptional
circumstances you can take a cab or an uber. If you want a week-end in a
remote site, you can easily rent a car. I see _zero_ need of owning a car for
the general population, and I have never had or needed one.

~~~
guitarbill
If you're lucky enough to be able to walk or cycle, great - I love living in
places like that, and currently don't own a car.

But I grew up in a small, isolated village (in Europe, as the other comment
notes). When your bus ride to school (on public transport, not a school bus)
takes 40mins+, walking or cycling just isn't practical. So please, rural
communities have it hard enough already without presumption or condescension.
A bit of empathy goes a long way, although I guess it's easier to just assume
everyone lives a certain way.

~~~
xbmcuser
Unless automated cars really become good enough the need for self owned cars
will always be there. I live in Singapore which has a very good public
transport system and it's extremely expensive to own and keep a car so most
people use public transport and 30-40min or more Transit time to work and
school is common. So your 40 min time school commute doesn't sound that bad to
me.

~~~
guitarbill
Fair enough, I'm happy to turn this into a Monty Python sketch. Frequency also
matters. For my particular route this was roughly once an hour during business
hours, and nothing after 8pm. This is not so rare [0].

[0] not where I grew up, privacy, but comparable:
[https://www.cumbria.gov.uk/elibrary/Content/Internet/544/931...](https://www.cumbria.gov.uk/elibrary/Content/Internet/544/931/6586/6592/6635/42766165941.pdf?timestamp=4343992810)

~~~
Radim
For those who didn't catch your (brilliant and well-placed) Monty Python
reference:

 _Four Yorkshiremen_ ,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ZDB9h7BLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ZDB9h7BLY)

------
ineedasername
The articles seems to setup a false choice between having minimums and not
having them. In fact from reading the article, the problem wasn't the minimums
per se, it was the fact that they were excessive and didn't account for
parking factors that varied across different parts of the town. It's a classic
bit of over regulation with backlash shown by the author that "regulation
bad", when in reality it's just that regulation was still needed, it just
needed to be more nuanced.

------
xte
I do not know how parking/constructions are ruled in the USA however here
(France) and in my origin country (Italy) it was common to have minimum park
space for any new building in cities simply because we are out of parking
space, going from A to B in a city often take far less than orbiting around B
looking for a parking lot...

IMO the problem reside in city concept itself: in the past we need cities
because we need to be together around water, together to have services, to
being able to defend ourselves etc now those needs are substantially disappear
or marginal but space need it start to be a super-serious problem. Basically
we can't evolve a city simply because we are so dense that we can't reach
agreements to destroy something old to build something new or even if we can
reach such agreements costs are so high that no one face them looking for
other options.

IMO the sole thing we can and should and must do is start to limit population
like "only one child per capita" incentives to child-less peoples etc and
start to create distributed place to live make easier work from remote as much
as possible, make ease to travel around the country but without "concentrated
place" except for factories, official buildings etc that need a _small_ scale
concentration.

~~~
ginko
I disagree. High density cities are more energy efficient and ecological than
sprawling ones. The solution to this is public transport, not density
restrictions. No one living in a city should have to own a car in the first
place.

~~~
xte
Try to compute how much energy you need to build and maintain a dense city
than a sprawling suburb. Try to compute evolution possibilities of a dense
area than a sparse one. Try to compute the magnitude of any disaster from
natural phenomenon to human-made ones on a dense area than the countryside.

I have lived in a dense and modern big European city, now I'm living on
mountains: cost, quality of life, energy efficiency etc are _far superior_
here than in a city. No matter how developed is public transportation that's
it's regularly inefficient because to handle peak time it work at a very bad
efficiency for the rest of the year and you can't reduce it without hurting
people freedom.

~~~
lolc
You can't beat the energy efficiency of dense urban housing with modern
insulation. What are you comparing?

~~~
village-idiot
Right? My parents home consumes an order of magnitude more electricity per
month, despite only being 3x bigger. Turns out reducing exterior walls helps.

~~~
xte
Try looking around your country: how many modern, well isolated, airtight,
tall buildings there are in percentage than modern, isolated etc single
houses?

In Sweden for instance most of the buildings are "ancient" enough to be far
less efficient than newer one, most of individual houses (that are build
generally with a very poor quality and little price) are newer and as a result
far better isolated. Also they are easy to be recycled since have far less
concrete and far more wood than tall buildings.

In France situation is less different since houses tend to be kept for longer
time and they are not build until few years with much energy efficiency
attention, however they are still a bit more efficient than buildings since
they tend to be a bit "newer" in medium.

~~~
village-idiot
My parents home was new too. So this wasn’t a “new apartment vs. half century
old home” situation. I also lived in a more extreme climate too.

~~~
xte
Well my personal case is a mid-size apartment (130m², ~1399ft²) in a building
built in the end of the sixties to a newly build home around 210m²/2260ft².

Old apartment was heated by a central methane based burner, new house by a VMC
with a heat pump and a two solar thermal vacuum panel + 800l heat cumulus
(~28ft³/ 211 US gal / 176 UK gal), whole cost dropped around 80%, whole energy
consumption drop from around 300-350w×m²/years to around 25w×m²/years...

But in medium in the whole country individual homes are newer than tall
buildings mostly because they tend to be poor quality to a point that's cheap
demolish and rebuild than maintain and also tall buildings are normally
property of many different subjects so reach agreements on any upgrade /
maintenance is far complex than individual houses and physical space and
usable ground for construction around the home is normally far more present
than around a tall building...

Keep attention that I always talk about mean values, not single buildings.

Another thing, I do not know in the USA but in Italy and France construction
norms are less tight for airtightness in collective buildings than individual
houses, airtightness often play a more prominent role than insulation
thickness in term of energy cost. I do not know in big buildings how for
instance a VMC (mechanically controlled ventilation with heat exchanger) can
possibly work...

