If you want to build apartments and homes in Nashville, you are required to build parking for cars. Otherwise, the city council will kill your project.
If you want to build apartments and homes in Nashville, you are required to build parking for cars. Otherwise, the city council will kill your project.
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While the fuck cars sentiment is as important as always, planning rules like this have a few goals which aren't all so malicious, including stopping projects decoupling their parking space and selling it for extra, or avoiding 30+ cars all over the sidewalks once everyone is moved in.
Planning codes tend to try and anticipate a community's immediate vicinity needs. The best approach though would be "$x000 per unit to provide and maintain local public transport facilities and routes"
Japan at least seems to direct this at the car owner instead of at the property developer. If you don't have proof of owning or leasing a parking space, you can't register a car.
This would be literally impossible to implement in the United States.
I don't see why. It wouldn't pass obviously, but structurally there's no problem.
Because the majority of people park their car and their homes where they don't have to pay for a space.
Then they have proof of owning a space. Japan outlaws overnight street parking to prevent cheating the system.
How specifically
You either own a space or you don't. I edited it earlier about overnight street parking being outlawed if that's what you're talking about. I don't know what you mean by parking at their homes. Driveways? That's owning a space. The key point here is if a house/apartment isn't built with a space you need to get one either from someone who isn't using it or a commercial parking structure. If a municipality wanted to dole out street parking in residential areas they could do that too.
It won't work in the U.S. because people still have to drive everywhere anyway. Go over to a friend's house? Get fucked I guess.
I should have said "it won't work in the united states without decades of work undoing car centrism"
Also in its current state there's no good way to actually ensure that an address has a parking space. And what do you do with large families? Or people registering multiple cars at the same address otherwise?
They rent or lease spaces if they don't have enough. It means they're paying for the infrastructure they use. The alternative is the above system that just enforces car centrism. I don't consider it particularly hostile myself. Parking would be dirt cheap in rural areas and very expensive in urban. And inacessable suburban hellholes would be penalized. As it should be.
and this is the key point i think: it would be incredibly easy to transition to this system, because the easy way is simply allowing people to pay extra for a “street parking” version that’s essentially paying extra for road maintenance to “rent” the street spot… nothing changes except there are no externalities, and there’s control over the situation: over time you can disincentivise street parking and eventually drive it down to acceptable levels
You're being downvoted but what you're raising is a common argument point. I'll put in some effort here to explain what Japan's system is trying to achieve. Let's start with a simple concept: someone has to build and pay for each parking spot. That is, it's impossible to order a parking spot to have it delivered and maintained to you for free.
If you have a home that you bought, then it was included in the price of the home. That garage and driveway was built on land you paid for and poured by the developer.
If you don't have a driveway, then you'll park on the street. That street was bought and paved by the developer or the city. Each year you'll pay taxes to cover the expense of maintaining that street spot (sweeping, drainage, chip sealing, etc).
These two cases present the same utility: a place to store a car. The difference is in how it's priced: one is internalized and one is externalized. You directly pay to repair your driveway but you don't directly pay to repair your street spot. Your neighbors, no matter if they drive or how many cars they own, pay for your street spot when it needs a repair.
Japan's system is designed such that the general public is not burdened with your choice to drive. Your choice to drive is yours to make, but it's not something that you get to externalize onto others. If you wish to drive, then buy that extra lot of land and put a driveway on it. Heck, make it extra wide so you can park your daily driver and your fancy classic for nice weekend days. Do what you wish with your property.
there’s no good way to actually ensure that an address has a parking space.
Japan enforces their system through registration. A permit is needed to buy and register a car. These permits are issued by officers who will measure your private parking space. A dealer will not sell you a car larger than your space nor will you get tags for your car without sufficient space.
States in the US also have registration but don't require proof-of-parking to register a car. The change to adapt to Japan's system would be to make a proof-of-parking permit a requirement to register a car.
And what do you do with large families? Or people registering multiple cars at the same address otherwise?
Each car gets a permit (it's a sticker on the window). If you have a two car garage, then you can get two permits for each spot in that garage to stick on your two cars.
It's very similar to permitted street parking in the US. Typically you'll get issued X number permits per house that you can affix to your car's bumper. Japan simply takes parking permits a step further by including your car's size and requiring a permit before registration rather than issuing permits post registration.
There's no limit in Japan (that I'm aware of) regarding how many permits a household can get. If you have a four car garage, then you can get four car permits. Or if you only have two garage spots, then you can lease two spots from a neighborhood parking lot to get to your ideal four car permits.
It won’t work in the U.S. because people still have to drive everywhere anyway. Go over to a friend’s house? Get fucked I guess.
Japan has metered general-public parking lots and there are not restrictions preventing a friend parking on your property.
This is not too dissimilar from HOA developments in the US. Most HOAs require owners to put their cars in their garage and disallow cars sitting in the driveway, but are fine with guests temporarily parking in the driveway. They'll also issue a limited number of daily permits for guests to use in a neighborhood lot.
I realize you’re getting downvoted with a lot of comparisons to Japan, and I wanted to lend a real life example.
In Chicago, it’s not uncommon for the parking space to have a separate title not tied to the people who live there, and each vehicle also has to register for a city sticker, which is basically an annual tax. Most parking is street parking, a house would have like 2 spots in the alley, but that might be for a 2 unit building.
It’s not the same as what others are suggesting, but a bit scaled back from what Nashville is requiring.
I just learned this on Not Just Bikes, an awesome YouTube channel!
Unless your car is a Kei car, which is one of the main reasons those exist. IIRC.
Parking mandates are some of the most egregiously bad laws on our books.
They increase housing costs significantly; land isn't free and cars structures are expensive to build. This is a punitive for those who are trying to make ends meet, or those who are unable to drive. Why would you force a blind man to pay for a two car garage when you're also disallowing them to drive? Doubly so when you don't allow them to sell their unused parking to their neighbors. Oh, and parking minimums significantly reduce our housing inventory. Parking reform alone can boost home building by 40% to 70%. If you haven't noticed yet, we have a bit of a housing crisis going on.
These laws also increase public expenditure because a car is used as transport from A to B. If A is your home, where is B? Pushing parking onto private developers is why in US there are, on average, 6 parking spots per vehicle. That's 5 car spots in your downtown and on your streets that you pay for, be it taxes or increased grocery prices, that sit empty most of the time.
Parking mandates are broken. So broken that it's the #1 campaign item for Strong Towns. We must remove parking minimums or we'll continue to pave over our downtowns and create insolvent cities.
As far as I'm aware, the big issue is the parking minimums at businesses, not residential buildings. I.e. what you call point B, rather than point A. That's what basically forces huge unwalkable strip malls. Which forces them out of the city. Which forces people to always drive there.
Now, the numbers in Nashville do seem a bit high. But the alternative to built-in parking spots in residential buildings is street parking, which costs just as much as built-in parking, but is entirely paid for by taxes instead. Street parking also takes up space that could be used for protected bike lanes.
The alternative to resident parking isn't street parking but to provide residential parking as determined by the developer and purchaser. You're not going to sell a condo if there's no parking and prospective buyers need to drive. Likewise you'll make better sales if you sell a condo without parking for a lower price to people who don't/can't drive. Let your local developers work with their civil engineers to figure out the best bang-per-buck of housing to parking spot ratio with each property they work on. I'm sure there would be fewer spots built near transit and downtown but fully loaded with parking on the edge of town; a nuance often missed in one-size-fits-all regulations.
Also the alternative to private parking is not necessarily street parking. You can:
- Lease a local parking space (a developer builds parking but it's not included with an apartment/condo/town home purchase).
- Lease a spot in a public parking lot.
- Lease a neighbor's parking spot.
- Lease car time on a car share.
Street parking shouldn't be free anyway. Free parking limits developments from building parking! Why would they build an expensive spot when there's plenty of "free" parking instead. Even post-sale you'll see the effect of free street parking. Look at your neighbor's garage. Do they park their car in there or do they use it for storage and instead park on the street? Free street parking is free real-estate.
The problem of "not enough street parking" can be solved by internalizing the price of parking. For example, San Francisco adjusts meters up and down until spots are between 60% to 80% filled. Price adjustment also signals the true cost of driving to the driver of the car rather than spreading their choice's cost across everyone in the city/county/state.
Street parking also takes up space that could be used for protected bike lanes.
I agree! I'd rather street parking not exist. See the thread on Japan's zero street parking strategy for their solution to parking (spoiler: it doesn't include parking minimums).
However, a small side note. You don't necessarily need protected bike lanes if your streets are slow enough, which is often a desirable feature of residential neighborhoods. The oft-cited Netherlander's civil engineering calls them "fietsstraat" (cycle street). San Francisco calls them slow streets.
including stopping projects decoupling their parking space and selling it for extra
They already sell it for extra, those parking spaces are never free and you always pay for them
OP posted another article with more details on it: !https://lemmy.world/post/31486375
From the article:
Construction costs run from $10,000 per parking space in a surface lot to $70,000 per space in an underground garage. That gets baked into what developers must recoup from tenants and buyers, whether they own a car or not. The rules drive up the per-unit cost to build affordable housing (in New York, affordable units near transit are exempt from parking minimums, but the rules still apply elsewhere). And they often require more parking than people actually use.
i think that is a really smart idea as a transition. not having parking minimums within x meters of public transit is a great start because a lot of public transit is shit in usa (no funding, etc).
i hate being forced into owning a car in my neighborhood and wish i didnt need one for basic everyday things, but if there were no parking minimums where i live then it would be a shitshow while waiting for some kind of public transit to never be built.
i agree with this as a starting transition goal : D
Sure. But Nash specifically has a lot of nimby bigots - so while 2 car park spots is great, they won’t vote for a future in which no car spots is acceptable because that would mean an increase in public transit. cf the whole light rail idea that was killed even though a light rail from downtown to east or bellevue would have been fantastic.