[josuepeq]

I like the idea!

I also like Dingbats. And parking.

Removing parking minimums is a noble idea, but one thing I have noticed is that the new “parking free” apartment buildings in San Francisco, such as the Tenderloin and SOMA, are having a hard time getting all of their units filled, even with prices slashed. This is a problem that buildings with parking seem to not have. Even with good transit, the city is much easier to navigate by car. People who have the means to drive, will mostly drive when factoring decisions like this:

Today I went from Church/Market to Chestnut/Fillmore in the Marina on public transit, which took me about 40 minutes. If I was going to drive my car, 15 minutes.

In Berkeley, there are also buses that traverse every major street, BART cutting through downtown and then over to North Berkeley, but it is significantly more difficult to get everything done without a car - food deserts abound, and the main retail and entertainment areas are also lopsided on the east side of town, with the other being 4th street, which is more like a destination retail area - CB2, Apple.

Without a 1:1 ratio of parking, we gain an abundance of traffic congestion in people circling blocks to find a parking spot on the street.

If parking is available for rent in less than a 1:1 ratio, the affluent - with the deeded parking space in their market rate apartments - usually end up with the few parking spots in a development, on the idea that they can afford to pay premiums for it. Below Market Rate units usually only have a few spots available for multiple residents to pay for at full price.

Parking imbalances give credence to the idea that cars are exclusive, everyone else should take the bus. Its not easy to force people to give up their cars.

[chottocharaii]

Okay so if that’s the case the developers/owners will work out the most economic model; whether it’s best to satisfy demand with bays or without bays

This is self-correcting. Minimums only ensure an inappropriate amount of parking will be built

[jjav]

> This is self-correcting.

It can't be if the regulation prohibits building parking for each home, as in this case.

Building housing units without parking just externalizes the problem and makes the whole neighborhood worse. People still need a car, so if they can't have parking they will have to find it on the streets somewhere, which is worse for everyone involved.

I've lived in a neighborhood where apartment buildings didn't have enough parking for residents, it was not pretty. Constant fights over parking, vandalized cars, people circling four hours looking for a spot. Nothing good came out of that.

[CalRobert]

This is a good reason to charge appropriately for street parking.

[jjav]

> This is a good reason to charge appropriately for street parking.

How would that solve it? There still aren't enough spots.

If you do unreserved spaces through parking meters or resident window stickers, people are still stuck doing all the same things (circling for hours, getting into fights).

To solve that you'd need to have reserved street spots so people are guaranteed which spot is theirs. So now you have to staff up enforcement and towing so the spots they reserved is available. But wait.. so we're back to dedicated spots, but in a less convenient and more cumbersome way. So to solve that, just have the apartment buildings themselves provide the spot for each resident. So we're full circle back to where we started.

As long as cars are needed (in the US, they are needed) the optimal solution is for each housing unit to provide it built-in, instead of externalizing the problem onto the neighborhood.

[CalRobert]

So if someone wants to live in a home without parking, it should be illegal?

Anyway pricing means that people can allocate the scarce resource of land in a city efficiently.

[jjav]

> So if someone wants to live in a home without parking, it should be illegal?

That's a good question, difficult to answer in the general sense.

At the individual level the answer seems very easy. Of course I wouldn't want it to be illegal to live however you want or configure your apartment however you like, with or without parking! You do you.

But what about the next owner? If the very first owner gets to spec the apartment however they like (before it gets built) and opts for no parking that's fine. But later they sell it and the next owner needs a car so now they join the street parking scene. Multiply this by all the units and over time it's a problem.

Because ultimately housing lasts for a very long time. That new building is likely to stand there for a century or more, so those initial decisions of how many parking spots it has vs. units will last for a very long time, far beyond the preferences of the first buyer. So it's not that easy.

[sokoloff]

I agree that parking minimums can cause inappropriate amounts of parking to be built.

It seems obvious to me that parking maximums can do the same thing.

[sensanaty]

I now live in the Netherlands but spent some time in SF, and the problem really is just horrifically bad public transport options over there.

Sure, the US is a bit different in that getting to other cities is more difficult without a car, that's definitely true. However within the city itself? My building has dedicated parking spaces for the residents - as in you can't even get into the garage if you don't have a keyfob that opens the garage doors - and of the neighbours I'm acquainted with, people avoid taking their cars as much as possible. And this isn't due to congestion or whatever, cycling or taking a train/bus/metro is just cheaper & more convenient if we're talking within the Netherlands.

My favorite anecdote about a country getting rid of car infrastructure is actually in the city I live in now, Utrecht, where they replaced a highway with a canal [1], and right now Amsterdam has an initiative to bring the number of cars down drastically. They're getting rid of parking spaces in favor of better, human-friendly spaces, small gardens and things of that variety. There's similar initiatives across the whole country, and they've all worked out pretty amazingly in terms of QoL for people.

The US has a planning issue where life is unlivable unless you drive everywhere, but there's no reason for major cities like SF to have this issue if the people in charge really gave a shit. Having good public transportation is an easily attainable goal for cities with so many resources, yet it keeps getting fucked over by car-centric infrastructure.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restor...

[nemo44x]

Life is a lot more than cities and traveling between them. The USA has a vast array of things not in it even close to cities. The USA is vast and beautiful and many people like to explore our nature, parks, etc, etc.

[sensanaty]

Realistically what's the proportion of car use between going to/from work (or the grocery store or other similar destinations) vs traveling the country for your average USAian? Especially one living in a dense metro area of some kind? And even then, I'm not saying we get rid of all cars, just that owning one shouldn't be a necessity in a massive, dense metropolitan area in order to get from point A to point B.

I own a car myself and use it regularly for longer road trips the few times of year I do that, but I avoid using my car like the plague if I'm traveling within 90% of the Netherlands.

[CalRobert]

Indeed, which is why every home should be forced to build a helipad.

[CalRobert]

Hilversum here (envious of utrecht) - I wish I hadn't needed to leave the US to live somewhere nice for me.

[mint2]

It would not take just 15 minutes by car, it would take another ten to park, but also if one person takes their car, how can they ask other people not to as well. It will take 30 minutes to driver now, and there won’t be parking as everyone drove.

Now upzone the city, oh dear it’s utter gridlock.

Edit: but actually forbidding the building of parking is just as misguided as requiring it. Did not initially see that it was actually proposed to be prohibited rather than simply not required.

[Swizec]

> food deserts abound, and the main retail and entertainment areas are also lopsided on the east side of town, with the other being 4th street, which is more like a destination retail area

Have lived in SOMA for the past 9 years or so. No car. Works great.

To be fair I think of The Avenues and the Marina as almost another planet. It’s easier to get to Oakland than over there. Although I do run past the Marina every weekend, but most people don’t do weekly 16mile runs just for fun.

In my area most daily trips are easier by bicycle or public transit than by car. My gym is 15min by car, 12min by bicycle, 20min by bus, and 25min by foot away. During rush hour, which is when I go to the gym, that car trip easily turns into 20min+. I can literally outpace cars uphill on my bicycle thanks to slight fudging around red lights.

[atlasunshrugged]

I think a lot of this gets solved if the city cracks down on crime and cleans up public transport. I've lived in downtown SF (5th and Mission) as well as across the Bay Area and avoided public transport other than Caltrain (even then, the SF station was not great) because of so much vagrancy, people doing drugs on the bus and metro, and just being worried about personal safety. I personally still didn't buy a car and just walked or took a Lyft/Uber most places in the end but I can see why many refuse to give up cars until public transport is safe enough for the average person who can afford an alternative.

[HPsquared]

Taxis are just awful for traffic: every journey they drive twice as far as a private car (need to drive to the customer first, then take them to destination) and they spend all day driving around, idling etc. Granted if they are actively driving around, they don't take parking spaces. But they increase congestion instead.

[sokoloff]

Surely the average deadhead to pickup leg is shorter than the occupied leg, right? If I think of my typical Uber experience, I’m often 3-6 minutes from being picked up and I think I’m usually in the Uber for 15-30 minutes (with occasional longer outliers and almost never a shorter outlier).

[atlasunshrugged]

I agree, but I wonder what the counterfactual climate impact is for someone who takes a few taxi rides a week but without them would have to buy a car instead (which of course also then needs physical space for parking)

[zozbot234]

> the city is much easier to navigate by car.

Cities stop being "easy to navigate by car" when they have too many cars around. And car-congested streets are also very hostile to bikes and pedestrians, so it's very hard to correct the problem once it gets ingrained. So it makes sense to give the latter uses high priority, and keep car use as a rare exception.

[onos]

Therefore, we should ban willing builders from delivering things their customers want.

[CalRobert]

One of the issues is that your car makes it harder for other people to get around by bike or bus, or walking.

Also, if you price street parking appropriately people don't need to circle for blocks.

Cars _are_ exclusive. They're one of those things where the more people get them, the worse the experience is for existing users. It makes sense to price their negative externalities appropriately.

[adrianN]

San Francisco doesn’t have good transit.