I didn't believe in much liberal bias in the media until this election. This is simply another extent of it, it's really eye opening.
The true victims in America? The most powerful and influential, of course.
The argument is:
* mandatory parking is imposed by urban planners
* mandatory parking raises costs for all people
* poor people are less able to absorb the increased costs
Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking goes into a lot of detail and approaches it from the point of view of planning theory. It's a good read, I recommend it.
As for public interest. The idea is that without regulation, new apartments and condos would choose not build parking pushing their residents to park on the street. This causes congestion (cars circling trying to find parking) and makes going to these areas less pleasant. And I'm sure some would say these regulations remove preexisting subsidies, since they prevent new developments from using city streets as their parking lot.
How do these other countries deal with the lack of parking? I think simply suggesting better public transportation and redesigned cities does not solve problems that people are having right now.
The part where they're required to build these lots virtually always results in subsidized parking. Yes, technically you could charge for spots, and then they wouldn't be subsidized, but in practice that's so much effort that it's much easier to just let the spots be free. For most businesses, running a paid parking scheme involves too much overhead to be worth it.
> This causes congestion (cars circling trying to find parking) and makes going to these areas less pleasant.
Then the city can charge; since they'd be doing it in many areas (and many cities already charge for this anyway in a section of their core), it's much less of a burden for them to do it than for individual businesses.
> How do these other countries deal with the lack of parking?
In Tokyo, you can't buy/register a car unless you can prove you have an off-street space.
> I think simply suggesting better public transportation and redesigned cities does not solve problems that people are having right now.
Well yeah, actually implementing those things is what's important.
Re-planning cities takes a long time. Do you suggest people just take taxis/uber for a decade until public transportation catches up? Might not be the worst idea.
Yes. This is actually the natural outcome one would expect from the market; it takes a lot of resources to provide storage for cars, and those costs will result in things like, say, less parking.
> You say that the city can then charge for parking, but also that they already do it, so not much would change there...
Many (most?) cities do it in a small part of their urban core. I'm suggesting they could expand those areas. They can also adjust the price of parking as the supply:demand ratio changes.
Additionally, past a certain point, it becomes worthwhile for developers to create parking garages as a standalone business.
> Re-planning cities takes a long time. Do you suggest people just take taxis/uber for a decade until public transportation catches up? Might not be the worst idea.
Of course not. Removing parking requirements wouldn't result in massive change overnight. There would be plenty of time to improve transit (and walking and biking) as the number of parking spaces gradually declined.
I mean, there's a large, obvious middle ground of solutions in between "nobody can park on the street ever" and "anybody can park on the street for free at any time". There are many options; you can ration it by price, by local ownership, or some other mechanism, quite easily. Indeed, almost everywhere in the city I live in where people rely on street parking, there's a resident-permit system. So, in effect, when people buy houses on that street, they're paying to buy a "share" of its parking too.
The only real problem with zero parking minimums is the possibility that people will park in places that other people were hoping to use (for parking, driving, biking, etc.) But all that means is that either rights have been unclearly assigned (as in street parking that doesn't officially belong to anybody), or a scarce good has been underpriced (as in 'free street parking' that's always full.) So, just assign clear rights, or adjust the price until there's free spots.
To me, it seems totally fair that the people who use parking should own it or pay for it (which are really the same thing). Why mandatorily bundle parking with other things if people don't want it?
The news media of course has a an anti-status-quo bias. The status quo isn't news.