Comment by Akronymus
12 hours ago
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: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/harrison/latest/harris... (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.")
>Usually parking minimums are WAY too high in required parking spaces to make sense in most cases.
That hasn't been my experience. Anytime I've wanted to go somewhere halfway popular the lot is usually full or nearly full. On the flipside, the lots are often empty during times when the business is closed, but reducing the size of the lot would exacerbate the issue of not being able to park nearby when the business is open. You aren't going to stop the US from being car centric, so you either have to dictate that businesses maintain a reasonable amount of parking or you have to have the municipality maintain several large parking structures throughout the city. Most cities would rather have the businesses that need the parking pay for the parking and most people would rather park near the businesses that they frequent.
> You aren't going to stop the US from being car centric
I think this isn't true. The same way suburbia spread out from cities, I think walkability can spread outwards too in baby steps.
For example, SF is relatively walkable/has public transit. The next step would be slowly removing parking minimums and making the areas surrounding SF more walkable. And then over time as people in those surrounding areas start using their cars less (not getting rid of them but at least trying to do short journeys on foot/bike/transit).
Over time that spreads outwards because half the community served by an area no longer needs a car for their daily travel and the envelope of walkability spreads further.
Sure you can slowly, over a long time, convert already dense areas into being less car centric, but you aren't going to make the rest of the country that way. Parking minimums, when they exist, are set by super local governments, they already don't exist or are set very low in areas of high density. The solution is to increase density, but again you aren't going to do that in the rest of the country. Random bars in Ohio are still going to have large parking lots, because land is cheap and given the choice, most people prefer less density.
The idea of a bar (ie a place people go to get drunk) with a dedicated parking lot strikes me as particularly bad for road safety. I'm baffled that this is not only encouraged, but mandated.
How do people do this in practice? Just drink and drive and hope they don't crash / get fined? Or does everybody bring 1 friend who sips colas the whole night?
We call the latter a designated driver [1] though as you can imagine sometimes the designated driver is "only" slightly drunk.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_driver
Yeah but I mean, if everybody goes to the pub by car, does it mean everybody brings a designated driver? Or is this one of those things where everybody drives drunk but pretends nobody does?
4 replies →
Parking lots are not mandated for bars in the US, at least not everywhere. I helped my girlfriend's dad open a bar in Long Beach 20 years ago. The city required us to pay for the maintenance of three streetside parking spaces, but that was it. Pay the city. We didn't have to build anything that didn't already exist.
>Parking lots are not mandated for bars in the US, at least not everywhere.
This, they are making the mistake that all the people on /r/askamerican do over on reddit. Laws like this mostly aren't nationwide or even statewide, they are decided on a very local level.