[giantg2]

The heart of the problem is that cars became popular for the majority of the people due to freedom and convenience, causing most of the infrastructure to focus on them. The existing public transit saw worse service and problems such as crime or cleanliness. New projects become more difficult and costly to build, and were hijacked for political causes. Willingness to fund even the existing projects fell.

Nobody wants to ride public transit that is unreliable/late, has limited service times/areas, prone to strikes, dirty or unsafe, etc. It's easier and/or better to own a car or Uber in most areas. It's not really going to improve since we're stuck in a catch-22.

[infotainment]

It's not just market forces though; most municipalities in the US legally mandate a focus on cars. For example, most downtown areas in the US are pre-existing, as they're largely illegal to build today due to mandatory off-street parking minimums among other onerous requirements.

[giantg2]

Those mandates are due to the market forces. Go ahead and build a building without parking. Tenants or customers are going to bring their cars anyways and try to find street parking, or they'll go somewhere else. If you make it inconvenient for car and the other option is inconvenient public transit, then people will just look for alternative housing or stores that are more convenient.

[infotainment]

Why not just let market forces handle that then?

If no one is going to go to my shop with no parking, that's fine. Let it get built, and then let it die due to lack of business. No need for any heavy-handed mandates.

[pandaman]

This is because of nuisance and the lack of private law enforcement. People will still park illegally if there is no parking in your establishment and the other people who will be affected by the illegal parking, will get upset, will call police, who will tow the illegally parked cars, and the owners of those will, in turn, get upset and, overall, it makes a lot of people unhappy. At the end the upset people will vote again for the current status quo of required off-street parking.

[HDThoreaun]

Parking is an externality. The surrounding businesses and residents get pissed when the new development takes "their" spots.

[theshrike79]

It's not just the "need for parking" it's the regulation that you need a MASSIVE AMOUNT of parking.

The formula used to calculate "required" parking is based on the theoretical maximum amount of customers for said store, resulting in grocery stores having parking lots 20 times bigger than the store itself.

[nrr]

Is this true? This doesn't jive with my lived experience, particularly when you consider walkability/wheelability.

The suburban shopping mall, oddly enough, is something of a counterexample. People in aggregate will easily put up with the agony of walking half a mile from a parking space, and extrapolating to a setting more urban, this is roughly what downtown St. Louis around Busch Stadium is like.

The MetroLink isn't the most convenient thing either, but Busch Stadium and whatever-the-Kiel-Center-is-called-this-time are very well trafficked for Cardinals and Blues games (particularly in light of very limited parking availability), and shopping and eating over on Washington Ave west of Broadway doesn't seem to suffer either.

[HDThoreaun]

> agony of walking half a mile from a parking space

I think a lot of people actually enjoy waking through malls.

[nrr]

They do! A lot, it turns out.

[fmobus]

"Mandate" and "market forces" are two terms directly at odds here.

If this was really a "market forces" situation, then parking price would be what determine the equilibrium, not a zoning law article written by the local government.

[viraptor]

Market forces would be nice, but actually the minimums are completely overestimated. Climate Town had a good video about it https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8 Tl;dr old low quality research, bad stats, lead to numbers that don't make sense, but in many places are still enforced; overbuiling led to larger distances incentivising more driving and acting against small commerce areas.

[vundercind]

… and building for car-centric zoning and infrastructure makes all of walking, bicycling, public transit, and automobile travel a ton worse and/or more expensive, forming a harmful feedback loop. At first the cars were freedom. Now they’re cages. That you’re forced to buy. And not even for much benefit.

[rsynnott]

Also, it likely worked better before cars became popular. In Dublin, at peak, in 1928, we had 23 tram lines. By 1949 they were all gone. Today we have two to four, depending on how you count them (some branching is involved), but they were only built 20 years ago.

What happened to the old ones? They were largely replaced with buses. Some of Dublin’s bus lines _still_ follow the path of tramlines from a century ago. And the thing is, _at the time_, this kind of worked. Not many people had cars in 1928. There was no significant traffic, and the buses operated about as fast as the trams, and were cheaper to maintain (and the trams from a century ago weren’t the 400 person capacity monsters you get now; they were similar capacity to buses). A few decades later, when traffic picked up and suddenly the buses weren’t so fine, the tram infra was all gone, and it was far too late to go back.