Quite a lot of developments in the UK - certainly in London - are proposing zero parking.
We had a (now shelved) plan near where I live to build 700 2 & 3 bed apartments in a new development with zero parking spaces in the design. This strikes me as blindly optimistic that of those 700 apartments (that will likely have between 2 or 3 people or more per apartment on average, so somewhere like 1500-2500 people) absolutely none of them will bring car with them... not even spaces for people who need a car for their disability!
I think their usual rationale of being "environmentally friendly" is really wake-washing/cover for wanting to fit in more apartments that sell for £650,000-1,000,000+ each, vs parking spaces which only sell for £25,000 each.
(incidentally is there a word for this willful ignoring of reality, where people basically just keep on repeating the same false/questionable statements as if they were genuine facts over and over regardless of any reasonable evidence to the contrary? E.g. this insistence that something is for environmental reasons when it is clear to everyone that it is not, or the rhetoric politicians keep on wheeling out for e.g. Brexit. I guess "lying"is one word...)
" think their usual rationale of being "environmentally friendly" is really wake-washing/cover for wanting to fit in more apartments that sell for £650,000-1,000,000+ each, vs parking spaces which only sell for £25,000 each."
...and?
The fact that apartments cost more than homes means that the market values that area more highly for human habitation than for car habitation. Perhaps you simply can't afford to store your car there.
Also, what are you talking about? Lying? Please support your statement before leveling this accusation.
Sheesh, these “conversations”. Just “eliminating” parking at new developments does not eliminate the _need_ for parking. People still have to get to work, school, the grocery store.
We had that happen near us 30 years ago by a developer who used a similar argument. A golf course was developed into 13,000 apartments with virtually no parking.
Overnight, the surrounding neighborhood’s streets were changed. Once they had been calm quiet places with plenty of parking. Now they are loud, crowded with double-parked cars blocking the street, blocked driveways, yelling and fist-fights. They’ve tried many thing to “fix” the problem. But 30 years later, the problems only gotten worse. It still sucks. Of course the neighbors will oppose it - label it NIMBYism or whatever you like.
But, we do have a problem and it would be great to actually change the status-qo. So, here’s a proposal:
*New buildings may be constructed without parking but _only_ if both of the following conditions are met:
1. The occupants are not allowed to own or operate motorized transportation of any type. This is enforced by the local police and the fines are huge.
2. 20% of the sales price of the new development is used to build mass transit.
I agree with the idea of impact fees being used to fund public transit but your first suggestion sounds very confrontational for a few reasons:
First, why are only the people who "got there first" allowed to use the public streets for storing privately owned items?
Second, why not require that people who do have parking are only allowed to own as many motorized vehicles as can fit in their parking and cannot use the public right of way to store their private possessions, with huge fines?
Tokyo manages this problem before it ever becomes a problem: you can't register your car to a Tokyo address unless you can prove you have a parking spot. It could be a spot in your front yard (in this case probably the entire yard) or a rented space in a parking garage. If you can't afford a parking spot at market rate, then you can't afford a car.
More than that, registration is actually a national requirement for full sized cars (kei's don't need a registered spot). And the country as a whole generally does not have street parking. Conjoined, means that illegal/congested streets from parking isn't an issue
One way or another, prior development had to provide adequate parking. Conversely, cars cause a lot of problems - pollution, gridlock, greenhouse gas emissions. And I can understand a developer who is committed to changing the world we live in by not allowing parking on their new development. That's awesome!
So, the suggestion is not confrontational. It's going with the dream that the developer is suggesting. We'll never get there if the people who believe in the dream don't commit to it. People have to get around somehow. And if they aren't allowed motor vehicles, then they will push their politicians to invest in public transit.
I think what you're intuitively feeling is that developers don't actually have that vision. Instead, they want to freeload on parking that was provided by others and make life worse for everyone. A few weeks ago, there was an article in HN that suggested Los Angeles could solve their homeless problem by converting every parking spot into housing, which might be true. The idea seemed to be taken seriously with lots of comments supporting it. Yet, that would truly be confrontational and unbelievably disruptive. And kinda dumb since anyone with a map can see that Los Angeles is bordered by hundreds of square miles of open land to the north and west. Plus there's Griffith park, the stadiums, unused warehouses and on and on. So, one has to wonder - was the story truly written by someone who cares about the homeless? Or, was it a developer wanting to increase their profit margin?
If the vision is to get to something like this wonderful "nooks and Crannies" story, then the challenge is getting from the current situation to that vision. I'd love to see that vision come true. Unfortunately, I can't see is a humane way of changing many (most?) existing neighborhoods.
But, what could work would be to change zoning in large undeveloped areas to allow for much higher density housing, walkability, and to link them together via public transit.
> why not require that people who do have parking are only allowed to own as many motorized vehicles as can fit in their parking and cannot use the public right of way to store their private possessions, with huge fines?
> It seems like we need more carrot and less stick.
I feel like that suggestion is precisely more stick and less carrot. More carrot and less stick would indeed be to put some of the money toward public transit, or to build parking spaces for smaller vehicles (e.g. bikes/scooters, motorized or otherwise).
Oh I've got no doubt that the value for humans is higher. It's just the unrealistic expectations from developers that zero people will bring a car and park on street that is absurd.
Often these "luxury apartments" that they build like this actually don't have cars so they are kinda right but for the wrong reasons: these sort of apartments in London are often bought by people for speculation/money parking/laundering and are actually never occupied (1) so it is more that the market values the apartments as assets/money laundering opportunities more than human habitation. Locals cannot afford to buy these sort of places.
Eliminating parking requirements is also starting to gain traction in the US: Seattle did it [0], and it's underway in Los Angeles [1]. Unfortunately it tends to make NIMBY opposition to development even more intense than it already is ("They'll use up all the street spaces!"), but fingers crossed we can keep this trend going.
Eliminating parking requirements is not the same as eliminating parking. If you can park in a parking garage the multi-level part means that the cars do not take up so much ground space. However garages are very expensive and so they won't be built unless people are going to buy a parking spot.
In London generally on-street parking is already at- or over-capacity, so adding an extra couple of hundred to a thousand people wanting to park their car in the surrounding 3 or 4 streets is not just NIMBY-style petty complaints of "I don't want someone parking outside my house" and so on, but more "there physically isn't enough space for even more people to try and park in the already over-capacity on-street parking - get a reality check, this isn't going to work".
I think there is a difference between those two responses
If I gave out free hot tubs then there would pretty quickly be a hot tub shortage. The problem is that parking is the leasing of public land for insanely low amounts for private property storage. You are forcing everyone around you to pay for your private property storage because you don't feel like paying for it yourself.
After all, can I pay the council the £100 a year (or whatever tiny amount it is) for an on-street parking spot so I can store my hot tub? Have a little garden? No? Then perhaps we shouldn't let you store your metal box there either unless you're willing to pay market rate for the land.
Keep in mind that any time you say developers must be forced to add room for parking, they were trying to add room for humans and NIMBYs told them places for cars to sleep were more important.
I'm not defending parking on street parking, and I am not saying we should force developers to add parking (I just find the fingers-in-ears ignoring of the issue frustrating), but with respect I think your views on the parking are a bit maladjusted.
That's because you could use your same argument about any public service. We pay for it in spades through income and council taxes.
Deliberately semi-quoting your argument:
You get public services for an insanely low price (healthcare, firemen, police, libraries, schools) for your own private benefit. You are forcing everyone around you to pay for you to not die/not have your house burn down/not get robbed/learn/get your kids educated etc because you don't feel like paying for it yourself.
Can't afford your own healthcare/fireman/police/library/school? Then perhaps we shouldn't let you use them unless you are willing to pay market rate for the service.
In and around a commercial district, there is. If your customers are living in a standard suburban area around your commercial core, the city will often provide parking so that those customers can reach the businesses in that area. See the publicly owned parking lots in Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, etc. Without those lots, there would be a lot less business (and thus less tax revenue) because the customers couldn't get to the businesses.
Or you can design your city to not be so car-centric. Why aren't commercial districts designed so that walking or using public transportation to reach them is viable?
If you put cars right at the center of urban planning, you'll always build cities that require people to own cars.
This is true, but the challenge is that you can't just change how wide the streets are or how big the buildings are in an urban area overnight. It takes decades to change the transportation orientation of a neighborhood, and in the meantime, people have to live/work there.
Because there isn't enough space. 4 or 5 parking spaces is the same footprint that a 1 bedroom apartment would consume, then multiply that by the number of floors which is often between 4 or 8 in the outer parts of "central" London.
So 4 to 5x25000 for parking spaces, or 4 to 8x650000.
Underground parking is possible but rare - you see it more these days, but then it costs significantly more than just a tarmac lot outside both to construct and to purchase a space in. Multistorey aboveground would take up space that would be used by apartments and would never get past planning approval in a residential area.
It sounds like the problem here is that cars just aren't feasible in semi-dense urban areas. Based on your comments you seem to feel that cars are pretty much the only solution to transportation.
I think this is a pretty poor way of thinking that leads to US style cities where there are these "dense" urban areas that have oceans of lifeless areas and greatly increased cost due to the amount of space taking by car parking/storage areas.
> Underground parking is possible but rare - you see it more these days, but then it costs significantly more than just a tarmac lot outside both to construct and to purchase a space in.
An apartment costs significantly more than just a tent outside, too. We still choose to build apartments instead because they're easier to build vertically and they're more attractive.
> Multistorey aboveground would take up space that would be used by apartments and would never get past planning approval in a residential area.
You can always build apartments on top of the multistory aboveground parking. That's pretty common in San Francisco.
An ideal would be for every building to have parking underneath it at street level, and then for there to be an upper "street" dedicated entirely to pedestrian and bicycle traffic (and perhaps rail). It'd be a huge upfront cost (which is why very few - if any - cities actually do this), but it'd be a much better experience for pedestrians and drivers alike. It could also potentially pay for itself (by charging for parking), and having all cars underground could make it easy to recapture any automotive emissions (hopefully electric cars will mostly or fully displace ICE cars, but if not, then it's at least a lot easier to trap greenhouse gases in a tunnel than out in the open).
You see both underground and multistory above ground in residential builds in LA. However I’m willing to bet that those 2-4 stories of parking make up most of the cost of building.
We had a (now shelved) plan near where I live to build 700 2 & 3 bed apartments in a new development with zero parking spaces in the design. This strikes me as blindly optimistic that of those 700 apartments (that will likely have between 2 or 3 people or more per apartment on average, so somewhere like 1500-2500 people) absolutely none of them will bring car with them... not even spaces for people who need a car for their disability!
I think their usual rationale of being "environmentally friendly" is really wake-washing/cover for wanting to fit in more apartments that sell for £650,000-1,000,000+ each, vs parking spaces which only sell for £25,000 each.
(incidentally is there a word for this willful ignoring of reality, where people basically just keep on repeating the same false/questionable statements as if they were genuine facts over and over regardless of any reasonable evidence to the contrary? E.g. this insistence that something is for environmental reasons when it is clear to everyone that it is not, or the rhetoric politicians keep on wheeling out for e.g. Brexit. I guess "lying"is one word...)