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Comment by overcyn | Hacker News Reader

They aren't forcing subsidized parking. They're forcing the construction of parking lots and structures.

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.

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> They aren't forcing subsidized parking. They're forcing the construction of parking lots and structures.

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.

Like you say, for most businesses running a paid parking scheme is too much overhead to be worth it. But you would remove requirements for minimum amounts of parking. So wouldn't you expect in areas with limited parking the issue to be exacerbated, since business would have less incentive to build parking? You say that the city can then charge for parking, but also that they already do it, so not much would change there...

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.

> So wouldn't you expect in areas with limited parking the issue to be exacerbated, since business would have less incentive to build parking?

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.

Then just enforce the existing rules against parking on the street! This is not difficult. Indeed, it's easier than trying to centrally plan out exactly how much parking each house and business needs.

What rules against parking on the street? In many existing neighborhoods, houses don't have garages and rely exclusively on street parking. Should we disallow street parking and start making people rent garages? That would definitely affect the poor.

Well, there's a number of solutions. You can tie the properties to particular street locations, like immediately in front of their house. You can give parking permits to local residents, and disallow visitor parking in some or all areas. You can turn it into metered parking, for which local residents are reimbursed some or all of their costs (or from which they receive a share of the local parking fees.) You could even turn it into neighbourhood-owned "parking co-ops" where neighbours in an area determine the price and can trade shares in the co-op.

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.

But these resident-permit systems are already in place in many cities, and we still have parking problems. And you want to remove minimum parking spot mandates on top of that, which will only reduce the supply of parking. I guess auctioning off street parking permits could work but it hardly seems any more fair than forcing new developments to provide their own parking.

Most of the problems of resident-permit systems come from the fact that they are inconstantly enforced, or that no spots are reserved, so that people arrive in an area where they have permits but cannot find a spot. This is a problem in the design of the particular resident-permit system - it does not mean that all such systems will fail. And, to me, resident-permits is indeed second-best to a system where the prices for parking are allowed to float, to balance demand with supply (and residents can be reimbursed by some share in the parking revenues.)

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?

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