Does the space used for parking even register compared to height limits and other NIMBY policies? My routes take me through quite a bit more empty vertical space (single family homes, and apartments of maybe 4 stories max) than horizontal parking space. Most parking is underground or in ~4 story garages a block or two off the main pedestrian corridors, whose entrances are 1-2 storefronts wide.

It'd take a staggering amount of low-rise to compensate for just one 40-story high-rise killed over the neighbors' concerns about shadow.

We shouldn't underprovision public transit, we should make it better than driving is today.

I can't remember the link, but there was an article that took satellite photos and showed how much land was taken up by parking lots. It was something close to a third or a half, using places like downtown houston as an example. Also many roads sacrifice 2 lanes to street parking. A townhouse I lived in pretty much sacrificed %80 of one floor for the 2 car garage.

I agree the NIMBY policies are pretty horrible. 8 story apartments should of been a by right development type ages ago. European cities who take up the parking lane with huge sidewalks are very nice, all of this space for outdoor seating.

If they were using Houston then the study was either an internal study for the city, or someone cherry picking their study area to make sure they got the results they needed.

Houston is either the worst place in the world to live, or the best depending on who you talk to. They have almost no zoning laws at all, which has resulted in endless sprawl. The place is literally where you go to study the effects of unbounded urban and suburban growth of a city.

I read a study about Houston recently that actually had another perspective on that. There's not "zoning" laws per se - you can build whatever you want - but there are minimum lot sizes and parking requirements that effectively limit the density of the city to the point where cost effective public transit is impossible. It's not really all that free. I think this was it. [ http://austinzoning.typepad.com/austincontrarian/files/ssrni... ]

Or a really nice good ole boy network where to build some stuff you need to be able to call in some favors.

The example wasn't just houston, it was other cities too with zoning.

"In L.A., 60 percent of our land area is devoted to streets and parking lots"

-http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/03/los-angeles-seeks-ped...

Or, when your city is hit by a parking bomb:

http://theoverheadwire.blogspot.ie/2010/02/parking-bombs.htm...

Is LA a fair example?

> Does the space used for parking even register compared to height limits and other NIMBY policies?

you're thinking of dense urban centers, like midtown Manhattan. Think more about what horizontally sprawling cities look like. or suburbs, for that matter. in the suburb I grew up in there was a 3 to 1 ratio of parking lot to buildings in all of the major shopping centers and housing complexes.

in addition to that building was basically restricted only to areas that were suitable to construct huge parking lots on. i.e. it had to be very flat, and have easy access to the large highways nearby.

the way we build our cities has been utterly warped and distorted by cars being much too cheap.

And in those dense urban centers where not much space is used for parking, there is still an extraordinarily large amount of money spent on parking. Underground parking garages like you will frequently find in dense urban centers often cost close to $100k per parking space.

> It'd take a staggering amount of low-rise to compensate for just one 40-story high-rise killed over the neighbors' concerns about shadow.

It isn't either or.

Imagine how much parking would be needed for everyone in a 40-story high-rise to put their car there.

And using multi-level parking garages is often prohibitively expensive because the upper levels have to be built to support the weight of the cars.

Generally, the load requirements for parking garages are smaller than the loading for space where humans can crowd.

Cars just aren't that heavy compared to people.

A typical car park is about 2.5m wide and 6m long, so 15 sq m. A typical car weighs about 1.5 tonnes, so the load on the floor of a car park is 100 kg per sq m.

I think it would be hard to exceed that with people, without breaking the fire code.

Design loading for human occupancies come in in the range of 100psf, which is something like 500kg/m2. That's roughly one 200lb adult per 2sf.

You can pack a _lot_ of humans into a small space.

Cars are about half that, because they don't pack well.

Of course, libraries are even worse, sometimes you're looking at 300+ psf design loads there.

Last I checked, my car weighed more than me, and all my posessions, combined.

Is it also a lot bigger than you?

> Imagine how much parking would be needed for everyone in a 40-story high-rise to put their car there.

About as much as many 40-story high-rises already have underground.

I've never seen a 40-story high-rise that had enough underground parking for more than a small fraction of its occupants. They build them in places that have transit links and set the cost of parking spaces at a high enough level that most don't bother.

> About as much as many 40-story high-rises already have underground.

It isn't about where you put it, it's about how much it costs.

Hugely so— much of the density of Japan's cities today, and many traditional cities worldwide, comes from small single-family homes and apartment buildings. They just don't have parking lots and huge roads between them.

High-rises aren't necessarily very dense, especially if they're surrounded by a lot of open land— for example, NYC's high-rise housing projects are often less dense than the low-rise apartment buildings they replaced.

Agreed. Glad that Scott Weiner got elected to state senate, as he is a force for building dense housing around transit stations - exactly the combination we need. Now if only Bay Area politics around housing development didn't move at a snails pace...

As for that statistic about the use of parking lots, I think that also included road space and other forms of car storage; I do think parking lots are good candidates for construction, as doing so doesn't displace anyone, and I would also like to narrow lots of streets in San Francisco (SOMA is basically a giant freeway grid), but I also agree that densification of neighborhoods is potentially more impactful.

The other hand is what happens when parking lots get developed...

Portsmouth, NH has made their downtown completely unvisitable by allowing three or four lots on the edge of the old downtown to be developed into mostly unoccupied luxury condos and hotels. The one municipal parking garage is constantly filled, and on-street parking has gotten cutthroat.

Portsmouth is a community of 20ķ and from a cursory look on Google maps relatively small area wise. .

If parking downtown is that in demand, has the city investigated things such a bus circulator, demand-based pricing to fund parking improvements, improving bike amenities and connections or negotiating public parking agreements with private lot owners? There's a lot of potential solutions here, but paving over business districts doesn't make sense.

It sounds like there's a lot of demand for parking and some land mistakenly allocated to condos and hotels, as evidenced by the low occupancy you cite! This could be a great opportunity for the enterprising business to put parking in place of that housing and charge market rate for it!

Or, if people won't pay market rate for land to store their car, maybe there actually isn't a shortage, and that land is already being put to better use by people who _are_ willing to pay.

This, of course, assumes that people are perfectly rational actors when it comes to things like paying for parking. I would submit that years of free or extremely cheap parking have made us not.

>I do think parking lots are good candidates for construction, as doing so doesn't displace anyone

I have strong anecdotal evidence against that. In Richmond, VA, nearly the entire neighborhood of Monroe Ward was leveled to provide parking for skyscrapers downtown.

I think he's saying the opposite - it makes sense to build on sites that are currently parking lots.

> Why should we deliberately under-provision transit

No one is suggesting that. Make transit great. I'll pay more in tax if need be.

I just don't want to be told that I have a choice between shitty transit or a deliberately shitty driving experience.

Honestly, the only reason why this is an argument is because people know that taking the bus sucks. I took the bus to work one day to see how it was (this was when I was debating takign my car, right after I started). It was slow, hot, uncomfortable, cramped, a guy fell asleep on me, and I felt sick by the end (motion sickness). So the only option is make driving shittier.

I'm not sure the data support the claim, at least in the US, that we under provision transit. We slight subsidizing driving, but not by much, and I agree that that should stop. Here's the numbers. http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=12133

The data in there is incredibly misleading. They're comparing total highway miles driven to total transit miles, even though transit is disproportionately skewed towards dense urban areas where everything is more expensive (and I suspect that highway miles are skewed the opposite direction).

Plus it completely ignores any non-highway driving subsidies, like tax revenue going to local roads and public parking areas, government regulations that mandate parking minimums, etc.

AND it ignores how valuable the land is that roads exist on, that could potentially be used for something else. Now obviously we do have to set aside some land for transportation purposes, but with cars, you have to set aside a lot MORE land, so you have to factor in that subsidy as well. E.g. if the city could, by switching to denser transportation modes, lease out a bunch of land to private companies and earn a million dollars a year, then that's a million dollar a year subsidy.

>We slight subsidizing driving, but not by much

Must also factor in the untold billions used by the military to ensure cheap oil.

That's sort of fair, but only if the "stop subsidizing cars" money comes from reducing what we spend on the military, not some attempt to rebalance things by imposing a regressive tax on driving without doing anything to make driving-alternatives more viable.

I don't know about your city, but availability of transit generally seems to be well over demand where I live.