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Comment by burfog | Hacker News Reader

Every business would prefer to have customers swipe parking provided by every other business. That way, the other businesses pay the cost of land for parking. It's a freeloader problem. Parking minimums exist to fix this.

You don't need parking minimums in the middle of nowhere, with businesses too far apart for swiping each other's parking spaces.

Customers really do go elsewhere if there are no spaces, but a business can't affordably provide the spaces if they will mostly be swiped by customers of other businesses.

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   Parking minimums exist to fix this.

True, but it's not the only solution.

Other approaches include parking maximums, in particular, not allowing parking (e.g. inside dense city centres) at all, see e.g. [1] for such requirements in London. A hybrid solution would be shared parking only, so no business is allowed to have on-site parking. Various other alternatives exist.

[1] https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/london-plan-new-dev...

Every business will prefer someone else to handle parking. No business will survive if parking is not handled. Eventually, someone will pay for it, else no business will survive. And since we know businesses survive without parking minimums, we must therefore also know that a solution to your freeloading problem can be found without the requirement.

Also, parking minimums can omly make sense in the middle of nowhere. In a dense location, each business cannot be reasonably expected to build parking.. because the location is dense. Unless you spread out the buildings, to make it sparse enough to support each building owning x spaced... but I don’t think anyone wants to take a city and pretend its the middle of nowhere.

Parking minimums are neither a good solution, nor the only solution. I don’t know what the best solution is, but as above, alternative solutions obviously exist. My opinion: city-owned street parking + private lots offer a good setup; businesses shouldn’t be directly involved in parking lots, except as a worst case scenario (ikea/walmart 40 minutes out of the city proper)

A lot of people on here are big on just eliminating or drastically reducing parking in cities. That works fine if you live and work downtown and don't need a car otherwise. But I pretty much guarantee you that the vibrancy of your downtown is sustained to a large degree by people who don't live there coming in. I was just in the local city for dinner and a play last night. I can guarantee you that, to the degree traffic and parking make that too much of a chore (and, believe me, it's getting there) I'll just fire up a movie at home instead.

ADDED: Some cities (e.g. New York, London, various other European cores don't really lend themselves to driving in--though many people still do in the evenings--but that presupposes public transit that can comfortably substitute for driving in terms of convenience and cost).

I think a lot of people's point here is that one of the biggest blockers to convenient public transport is high-density, and that parking lots are one of the things that is reducing density. 200 car spaces take up a lot more land area than the building itself!

Driving and transit are not the only two ways of getting around. There is also walking, which is both the cheapest form of transit to provide and also completely dependent on density in order to work. Places like Boston, London, and New York are not dense because they have great transit, they're dense because they predate things like parking minimums which would have prevented them from becoming dense in the first place. Their high density, in turn, drastically increases the efficiency of public transit, meaning a lot more people can be served by a given amount of transit spending. Parking minimums undermine all of this by forcing buildings to either be very far apart (to accommodate the parking lots) or very expensive (to pay for parking structures). Both of these things tend to make cities less vibrant and walkable, while also increasing economic inequality and carbon emissions.

This.

Picture the middle of nowhere: There is a farm supply store, and the nearest other building is a mile away. There is no freeloader problem because nobody will walk a mile. If parking is not provided for every possible customer, the potential customers will be unable to shop. Worse yet, they will get in the habit of going elsewhere, and so they won't visit even on days when there is room to park. Thus there is no need to enforce a minimum.

In a dense location, each business can be reasonably expected to build parking... because the city requires it. Businesses don't get the option to ignore the city regulations.

In general, businesses don't survive without parking minimums. Businesses die all the time, falling into bankruptcy. There are a few that can survive on tourist foot traffic in the more-famous cities, selling junk like postcards and T-shirts. Businesses with enormous per-visit revenue can of course provide valet parking, so a 4-star Michelin restaurant might work. You're going to have a bad time running a Home Depot in a city without parking minimums.

>In a dense location, each business can be reasonably expected to build parking... because the city requires it.

Well, no, thats my point. A dense location... is dense. There’s not much room for n parking per business, at least directly where the shop is located. You meet the requirement by doing as the article does: destroying dense locations and forcing them to be sparse. Pretending that they live in the middle of nowhere, when in fact they’re in the heart of the city.

Parking garages/lots (lots of parking, shared by all stores) is a clearly more ideal solution: its much more compact. And there’s no real reason parking has to be located directly next to the businesses themselves; just nearby enough to make walking (like, well, any shopping mall)

So then you have the question of who pays for it — in a shopping mall, its built in by the mall. In a city designated shoping center, its built in by the city. But those are totally pre-planned situation. In a more organic environment, where parking minimums are meant to operate, it would either be a collective decision... or its independent of the businesses, and expanded as necessary, as any private garage works. And I’ve personally seen examples of this situation in LA, chicago, mumbai.... and probably any city that manages to exist without minimums.

The only way you can believe that parking has to have a minimum is if you believe parking must be free. But thats nowhere near true. In most cities, but not in a mall, its not free.

The freeloading problem in a dense location is trivially resolved by looking beyond the individual businesses, and realizing that parking itself is a market.

And the belief that its absolutely required is trivially disolved by... realizing parking minimums are already not the default, and so pretty much any successful city/area will constitute an example of it not being a necessity

Home depot/ikea are self-incentivized to build parking for themselves, because regardless of minimums, they tend to carve out a huge plot of land for themselves and exist independently of other businesss. They don’t sit in dense locations by their nature, and I don’t think you really want them to, and they barely share parking by their nature.

Maybe a good solution would be to have zoning systems for parking requirements so in dense areas the city would manage the parking making it shared and charge business according to their capacity or property area and at the same time charge users according to demand.

In a sparse location, with one or a few buildings off on their own, parking is free and self-incentivized, because there's simply no way around it (the business needs parking more than people need the business)

In an artificially dense location (eg parking mall/center), parking is free and its owned and maintained by the owners of the overall location, paid for by the business's rent.

In an organically dense location (eg chicago downtown, chinatowns, etc), a parking-market will inevitably exist, and garages/lots will be privately owned & maintained, paid for by, well, the price of parking.

Parking minimums seem to me to be an artificial solution to an artificial problem: the only time it might be effective is in the last case, and that's only if you believe parking should always be free. If you accept the parking-market, as most cities do, the market solves parking without issue. Zoning would just be a bandage solution, vulnerable to many edge cases, and likely lead to similar and perhaps even brand new mistaken outcomes.

You're being downvoted a lot (perhaps too much), mostly because I think people disagree with this view because it's very narrow. Parking minimums destroy locality and walkability and cause sprawl. Sprawl is bad in the large; it destroys communities and causes traffic.

Source: lived 4 years in Los Angeles, a city with pervasive minimum parking laws. Can't hide 101sq miles of parking spaces (https://la.curbed.com/2018/11/30/18119646/los-angeles-parkin...).

It's a false dichotomy between parking minimums that are too high, or that fail to account for existing under utilized parking, and no minimums. There are several projects I have seen built with insufficient parking that have created problems for surrounding businesses and homes, traffic safety issues, and a great business for shady towing companies.

I've always like the solution of the town/city center having limited to no parking. Then within walking/biking distance, but outside the centers, the city maintains or contracts out sufficient (distributed) parking in whatever form. Increasing the minimum required parking would of course cause they business to foot part of the bill.

What's shady about towing away cars of those that are essentially stealing parking? Or did I assume wrong?

towing companies are inherently shady: they're stealing your car, with little to no proof of justification, with little to no recourse, and charging you to get it back (often with obscenely inconvenient and long waiting periods). My friend has had his car towed from in front of his house, because his neighbor called it in thinking it was.. I dunno, ditched there?

And there's no recourse. He paid up, because it'd cost more and be a massive headache to try to fight it. I'm not sure there's anything stopping me from calling it in on any neighbor I dislike. (AAA has a weird setup as well; they've never once properly verified I owned the car I was having towed.. but they're not antagonistic, and the caller is verifiable by their AAA account, so I'm not worried about them as much)

The only thing that keeps towing companies in line is that if they caused too much trouble with their bullshit, they'd see repercussion from populace/city. But as long as they're justified 70% of the time they take your car, they'll keep on truckin'

I mean shit, how do you even consistently verify that the car was parked at the wrong business... you watch someone park and go into the neighboring business? 5 minutes later he goes to the correct one, and whoops, there goes his car.

There's not much difference between a well-behaving towing company and misbehaving one.

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