[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.