Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town

This is a good video about the history behind idiotic American zoning laws and parking minimums. ▶ this video It was a mess of utopian central planning, good intentions, private capture, bad science, corruption, bad incentives, and never looking back and fixing it. At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.

This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums ▶ this video Noise pollution link Infrastructure strain link More on Infrastructure and Sprawl link Articles: link link link Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: link The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.

Market forces would be nice, but actually the minimums are completely overestimated. Climate Town had a good video about it ▶ this video Tl;dr old low quality research, bad stats, lead to numbers that don't make sense, but in many places are still enforced; overbuiling led to larger distances incentivising more driving and acting against small commerce areas.

Mandatory parking minimums in American are insane. The rules for them are a joke and just made up at random with little justification for them other than trust us bro . Climatetown has a good, if long, video on it: ▶ this video

Parking minimum requirements are usually handled at the local level. Parking minimum recomendations were somewhat standardized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers,(ITE). So whenever city councils around the country decide to prioritize car usage over walking and public transit, and obligated to guarantee people a place to store a car, they often turn to the ITE's guides. That said, the ITE's parking minimums guides are themselves kind of arbitrary. And the guides absolutely assume that practically everyone is traveling by car, and maybe (!!) that's not a great assumption to build on. A YouTube channel called Climate Town created a fun and well-researched video recently on the topic. ▶ this video

On a related note, minimum parking requirements are hilariously bad (e.g. including gems like laws based on a trend line fudged between two data points): ▶ this video

A minimum amount of parking spots per patron capacity. So a bar with 60 people capacity must have 15 parking spaces. [0] Usually parking minimums are WAY too high in required parking spaces to make sense in most cases. Which leads to stuff like a arena having 5x the land area be parking than what is taken up by the arena itself. [1] 0: link (this is for harrison, ohio, just happened to be the first result I found. it's under commercial -> "Tavern, bar, club, lodge, and dance hall.") 1: ▶ this video

> Shortages of buildings are not the only reason that property prices can be high. It pretty much is - everything else is window dressing. Pretty much every single city in China is 3-10x more dense than any area in the US, so lack of land is a reason I find continually uncompelling. Our lack of density, zoning practices, NIMBY attitudes and car dependency all contribute to this, with the result being a lack of construction. Tokyo has been and continues to be affordable for anyone who wants to live there by building: link Here's a grad student on tiktok who does good, well-sourced analysis on this front (he has an entire playlist on the issue of vacancy rates given how frequently it comes up): link Article on zoning law changes in CA and how municipalities have put out estimates for how much they should build and then consistently, for decades, not even come close to meeting them: link There's endless amounts of info on this front - look up strongtowns, YIMBY, parking minimums and associated issues ( ▶ this video ), japanese vs. american zoning policy ( link )...

These maps provide graphic evidence of how parking lots “eat” U.S. cities: link America has paid a steep price for parking: link The force that shapes everything around us: Parking: link Parking Laws Are Strangling America: ▶ this video Austin Preparing To End Parking Mandates Citywide in 2023: link