Comment by crote
10 days ago
> Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night.
... which is exactly why it can have a huge impact! The default American suburban street is insanely wide due to the assumption that people will need on-street parking. Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increase a suburb's density by something like 5%-10%.
Just think how much the municipality would save in road maintenance by basically halving the amount of road surface! And it's also a 10% reduction in water/sewer line length, a 10% reduction in area which needs to be covered by emergency services, a 10% reduction in commute distance, and so on.
As an added bonus: the smaller streets will disincentivize speeding, so it'll directly make the neighborhood safer as well.
Of course this won't immediately fix existing neighborhoods, but it'd at least open up the possibility of building right-sized ones in the future.
> Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increase a suburb's density by something like 5%-10%.
As you say, only for new construction. The lack of new construction is itself the problem.
A problem is that most municipalities require excessively wide streets with on street parking for any new developments.
Japan-width streets, despite their increased safety & land-use efficiency, are prohibited most places.