Comment by scotty79
7 hours ago
> like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease the property owning class.
This regulations are crucial for preventing cities from being littered with cars (more than they already are). If developers were allowed they would build only very limited parking space and then people living there would have to park in public space burdening everybody. If anything it's a regulation against property owning class.
Are you suggesting that less “free” (cost-bundled) parking spaces would lead to more cars? Or do you just mean from an aesthetic perspective more street parking would be used when you say cities would be more littered with cars?
We’ve ended up with such car-centric cities (in the U.S.) thanks in part to the presence of ample free (subsidized) parking thanks to parking minimums and free street parking. If the cost of parking was actually borne by car owners, it would reduce car ownership thanks to higher cost. This is less true today thanks to car ownership being near-mandator, but with the right investments that can change. I’d describe parking minimums as a regulation against non-car owners as they still pay in part for the parking spaces required by their apartment/home/every business they visit in most cases.
As an aside, have you looked at how parking minimums are often set? It’s only loosely correlated with the goal of sufficient parking.
> Or do you just mean from an aesthetic perspective more street parking would be used when you say cities would be more littered with cars?
Yes, but I'm more concerned about practical aspect than esthetics. Blocked walkways, lower visibility for drivers, longer distance between place of living and the car, and the car you had to park far away on the crowded street snd your business. This are all costs that developers love to externalize to all members of society instead of passing them to the future owners of the property they are building.
I'm not really talking about situation in US where people live so sparsely that they have plenty of space to patk their car when they are at home. Parking minimums I'm supporting are for medium to high density residential intermixed with conmercial zones. That is pretty much majority of spaces in European cities.
I'm sure that mininum parking requirements for businesses in US in purely commercial zones might be too high.