[letitbeirie]

I wish they'd be a little less one-size-fits-all.

Nixing parking minimums for businesses in already-walkable, transit-connected downtown cores is overdue, and areas close to that density can easily become new downtown cores when infill is allowed to cover their parking lots.

Nixing parking minimums for downtown apartments, to your point, is a terrible idea (outside the densest areas of NYC at least, where parking minimums are already effectively nil) because most transit systems in the US are designed to bring suburban commuters into the city, so even if said apartment is situated directly above a multi-modal mass transit hub, it might not necessarily connect its residents to much more than a handful of giant parking decks clustered around a freeway.

[jadengeller]

If downtown apartments are not sufficiently desirable without parking, developers will build parking.

[Ekaros]

What I will guess happens is that they are still desirable, they will not be cheaper. And there will be parking problems...

[brewdad]

My adult child lives in an area of Seattle where parking minimums have been eliminated. Their building, built 3 years ago, has about 65 adult residents. There are 10 parking spaces on site and the street the building sits on has zero street parking. Renting a parking space adds about 10% to the cost of renting. Currently there is still one spot available if a resident wants to pay for it.

If they had built 60 parking spaces and let residents park for free, I feel confident there would be at least 50 spots in regular use based on how nearby buildings with larger parking lots are utilized. Since the parking is underground, the most expensive type of parking to build, I also feel confident that rents would be at least 10% and probably 20% higher with "free" parking.

[NoZebra120vClip]

Speaking for my metro area, while it is true that there are significant resources in Express routes and other commuter-movers to get people into the downtown hub, a secondary, or even primary aim of our transit system is to GET PEOPLE SHOPPING.

Our transit centers are literally hosted by shopping malls, more often than not, until they are significant enough to be freestanding or independent of such malls. The routes are carefully planned to get people from one major retail center to another; the stops stop in front of stores, restaurants, and venues; it's all quite transparently consumer-focused.

The transit system here would look significantly different if they concentrated on moving workers to places of business. Transit riders work in certain areas which simply aren't served at all by transit. Take call centers, for example: a call center is usually situated in a business park or industrial zone. This will not have bus stops. I worked in a call center where I'd take my bicycle every day to ride the last mile, quite literally.

I regularly negotiate with recruiters about commute distance, and it's always my chore to explain how distance means a different thing to a transit rider: I can ride the train a long ways and it's a short, easy commute; if I need to transfer 2 buses it's a huge pain, 3 hours each way, even if it's 1/3rd of the distance of that single train ride.

Transit systems which serve upper-middle-class workers in downtown hubs do it because those workers find it impractical to park downtown, not because they can't afford private vehicle ownership. I took advantage of Caltrain in the Bay Area, just so I didn't put so many miles on my car.

Transit systems like mine don't actually serve the proletariat nor support our commuting needs; they're fundamentally here to encourage consumerism and stimulate retail economies, and that's how they score such massive subsidies that they hardly even need people to pay fares.