A similar policy operates here in the UK, except that the parking allowance is significantly less generous.

I find it utterly asinine because it is not paired with the necessary corollary: you can't "encourage" more environmentally friendly methods of transportation, you have to actually - you know - take action and build the infrastructure.

Example: I live about 10 miles from the office and would cheerfully cycle into work come rain or shine because it would be great exercise, but there is no safe cycle route, so I'm forced to use some form of motorised transport (I have a car but usually ride a motorcycle). Buses are available but they're once an hour, take too long, are often tardy, and don't run late enough into the evening.

Depending on where you live there are better options available (guided busway paired with a cycleway, or the train) but there's no joined up thinking when it comes to more sustainable transportation. The result is that vast swathes of the area around Cambridge (UK) are either inadequately served, or not served at all.

If you do want to get rich middle class people to use busses - you will have to accept that the services will have to have a lot more investment and increase in cost and be partially rebalanced away from servicing pensioners and to be blunt poorer workers.

The problem is local councils prioritise bus service in order to cater to the urban users who are mostly pensioners "granny farming"

Having been both dirt poor and relatively affluent more than once, and growing up poor, I'm not really sure buses do an adequate job for elderly or poorer people either: they just use them because there are no other options. And in that context I'm deeply uncomfortable with any initiative that makes them less accessible for the elderly, infirm, or those with low income.

Also certainly where I am they pull busses off peak commuting times to make more $ bussing kids to school which effects both poor and better off workers

Doesn't it self-regulate though ?

If it's not viable to build in a place for a specific use, developers will go to greener fields. It happens in a lot of heavily congested cities. Making whole areas unfit for heavy traffic moved the office building elsewhere, generally in places that where more welcoming to them.

Possibly in an ideal world, but not in this one (or certainly not on any timescale that I'd regard as acceptable - human lifetimes, and working lifetimes especially, aren't that long in the grand scheme of things and I'm already at least half way through on both fronts).

https://twitter.com/metrolosangeles/status/11538072082299576...

The solution to these issues is to provide bus signalization, dedicated lanes, and/or queue jumping opportunities. These changes minimally inconvenience cars while significantly speeding up buses. It makes it so that a bus route, while longer, can be time-competitive with driving (or rather, closer enough that it overcomes the inconvenience of walking to/from stops and sometimes having to wait for your bus)

And having frequent stops makes buses go slower.

Traveling long distances doesn't make the bus any slower; it just limits the frequency you can revisit a stop on the route without increasing the number of buses on that route.

- Motorcycle to work: 15 - 20 minutes door to door (driving generally ~30 minutes, but 40 minutes or so during busy periods)

- Bus to work: > 60 minutes (7 minute walk, 5 minute wait, 45 minute average bus journey, 7 minute walk)

Cycling would, I reckon, take me about 45 - 50 minutes door to door until I got fitter, but that would be fine because I'd be getting loads of exercise, so the trade-off becomes worthwhile even though it takes longer. (The reason I don't cycle is there's no safe route.)

Presumably most congested roads are used mostly by cars, so I suppose you could say that "cars cause congestion and congestion makes buses slower." But of course, the congestion also makes the cars slower as well.

If you want faster buses, evict the cars from the bus travel lanes.

Same with parking. You build parking in areas where you anticipate increased demand or already have unmet demand. By building parking, you increase your capacity to meet that demand.

If you have unmet demand (i.e. not enough spaces for the volume of vehicles that wish to park in an area), you're limiting the economic throughput of that area. Yes, you're reducing traffic congestion in the process, but at a very real economic cost for those whom were being patronized by that now-gone traffic.

Same with anticipating new demand. If you're building in an area, you want to be sure the area has enough parking capacity to absorb the intended volume of people traffic your building will have. If you're building a new skyscraper or mall or big box store, that's likely not true. So you incorporate parking into your project. Once your building (and parking) come online, you'll start attracting a higher volume of individuals to an area. Which, except for the most underutilized or mature transportation networks, will have a corresponding impact on congestion due to the greater throughput of individuals to the area.

If you have mature public transportation, then your transportation network likely has the bandwidth to absorb this throughput increase with a lesser impact on congestion than if you're in an area with immature public transportation options. But mature public transportation tends to be very expensive to build and maintain. Which is only likely to happen after growing to the point of having heavy enough congestion to make such expensive and regionally disruptive changes both politically palatable and economically feasible.

I do not envy urban and transportation planners.

That's hard to do without BRT - we have plenty of dedicated bus lanes (the right lane) around here, but they all allow cars for right-hand turns, so buses still get stuck behind a line of cars.

Without BRT and center-island boarding, it's harder to reserve anything but the far-right lane since the bus needs to get there to pickup/dropoff passengers.

Dedicated bus signalization, no right turn on red, and cars perform right turns from the second lane. Dedicated signal phase can be combined with separated bike lanes to improve safety for other road users, as well.

We should be pushing people to get rid of their cars instead of keeping them.

After that, it's chicken-and-egg more than cart-and-whores. With surface parking lots taking up easily half the space in many US business districts, eliminating them could double density and thereby cut average distances in half, making other modes of transportation much more feasible.

Essentially, the US at one point chose cars as the dominant mode of transportation and got trapped in that decision. Anybody who has seen alternatives knows this is a tremendous burden on quality of life, yet any change will, in the short term, also hurt in different ways.

The glass half full answer is that it incentivizes economic activity to happen elsewhere.

The regulations here should be based around things like structural integrity, egress, and safety. Not views, not density, not what size of apartment is “too big” or “too small.” All of those are things the market can sort out.

EDIT: discounted, not “free.”

It’s fashionable to hate cars, but when I need to get from Mountain View to the Hayward Airport at 4:30am, there is no combination of public transport that would get me there in less than 2 hours. Going from Palo Alto to Livermore on public transport is practically impossible. These European-style high density dreams aren’t based in reality for the majority of the United States. Making San Francisco high density would certainly be great, but applying that model to the rest of the Peninsula is just a pipe dream. 50 floor apartments like Korea would be the only way to make that work, but that still doesn’t account for the reality we have. Saratoga to Milpitas— how does that work with public transportation? The United States is built around cars. That horse has left the barn. You can’t realistically redesign the entirety of America to fit a model that is ideal for Copenhagen. Even in Europe, there are vast searches that are car dependent. Putting a tram or high frequency buses in southern France for instance would be ridiculous outside of Marseille perhaps. Even in the cities: how do you deliver a refrigerator easily within a pedestrian-only city? How about moving trucks? I spent a lot of time in Venice and prices for things are astronomical simply because everything has to be delivered via boat. Venice’s geography makes this unavoidable, but intentionally destroying city logistics because of some fantasy is ridiculous. We can do better, but the anti-car movement doesn’t really understand the Law of Unintended Consequences.

A better question is: do automobile users? And the answer is: no. Roads are subsidized: https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...

> when I need to get from Mountain View to the Hayward Airport at 4:30am

Well it sounds like the right tool for that job. But that doesn't mean it's the right tool for every job or even most of them.

> Going from Palo Alto to Livermore on public transport is practically impossible

That's a political choice that those places made. It can be fixed if there's the will to do so.

Yeah, there's no trams in southern France. Except for in Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Grenoble, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice, Saint-Étienne, and Toulouse. And there are plans for trams in Nîmes and Avignon.

Yes, definitely. Granted, this may vary from state to state, and I don't know the situation in California. Most of the roads that I travel on are city and county roads that are paid for out of my property taxes. Ironically, our property taxes are higher because living in a bike friendly zone with good access to public transit increases our property value.

I'm not allowed to ride my bike on the freeways, and I avoid the major federal / state highways. I suspect that those are what suck up the most money.

I pay income tax.

Most cyclists still own cars. My family pays for registration of two cars that we drive less because of our bikes. We pay gas taxes when we drive, plus license fees, and state-mandated insurance.

Our bikes do negligible damage to the roads, and we reduce the need for both road construction and parking space.

I'd be willing to bet that if we analyzed all of the numbers carefully, we'd find the net effect is that motorists and cyclists both pay -- to subsidize the trucking industry.

If I was a builder, my incentives are closely aligned with the city - build something that appeals to buyers. If I build a fancy apartment building where everyone owns cars but I provide no parking, well those aren’t going to be very desirable.

Consider Japan, which has building restrictions to avoid eternal shadows. Building height is a function of the setback from the street.

A buyer may well want a taller building, and a builder might well be happy to provide it, when the city is dead set against it.

What is the mechanism by which "the market" balances out the desire by the megarich to live in tall towers in NYC, with the desire by those who use Central Park to not be in shadows more?

It doesn’t help an owner if they build units nobody wants to live in because of shadows, no parking, etc.

That is, if the megarich enjoy the 50 mile views and don't care about Central Park at all, then it can smother in shadow, yes?

And the only mechanism for the people who want to have sunlight in the Park is to make the megarich either socially or physically uncomfortable enough (perhaps by threats of violence?) that they decide it's time to move away ... or buy more security?

If so, your mechanism seems rather prone to encourage social unrest.

  If I was a builder, my incentives are
  closely aligned with the city

I'm planning to sell all the apartments and move on to another project, so I won't have to solve any parking problems residents or locals end up having.

I have the option to add an extra floor on, so there would be 12 apartments - but no guest parking any more.

What do you imagine my incentives are?

I won’t replace parking with units unless that makes the building more valuable overall. If there is a strong demand for parking spots, the existing units are likely to lose value by having no parking. And I’d also have to shell out cash upfront to compensate them.

Additionally, I also indirectly disagree with the last two points because it is absolutely crucial that cities have some control over population changes as it relates to density. Utility overload is a real issue, and needs to be accounted for. Schools need to get built, sidewalks widened, and so on.

What's ultimately needed is a form of adaptive city planning, that reacts to market forces (such as population changes, desire from developers to build new buildings, ect) with planned solutions such that there are no tragedy of the commons issues that come about. What's unacceptable is the 20+ year horizon planning that most cities do now.

Unfortunately, developers and property owners will care nothing for the wider community. Firstly, at what point would you end regulations? Perhaps zoning and planning permission frameworks are too much? Let the market decide. Electrical, again that really is too much regulation, and we should let the free mark reign as people will have to adhere keep up their personal reputation.

The unfortunate fact is that personal reputation does not count for shit. Just look at Trump and Johnson. They outright lie and nobody is holding them to account, so what makes you believe that shonky developers and property sales people will hold to their word.

Secondly, our road systems and other community infrastructure can only accommodate and scale with so much growth. If growth is not managed reasonably, then our communities will become truly awful places to live.

I would agree that where population density is lower, then there needs to be less regulation, and where it is higher there needs to be more.

Finally, I would add that that charging 5p for disposable plastic shopping bags has had a hugely positive effect on curtailing the use of single use plastic bags.

Sometimes there is too much regulation, and sometimes there is too little, but fundamentally we need regulation, and participatory democrat systems to manage it.

Your quality of your life and ownership should not be obliterated overnight because somebody bought the neighbouring property and decided to build an industrial composting facility.

https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-regulates-...

Although it's increased purchases of garbage bags, which use more plastic in the end because they're thicker.

This is a critical cycle that must be preserved!

This is something of a problem because one of the features of the building is a large conference center where we can hold events. Luckily the older buildings on campus all over overbuilt parking so it's not a completely unworkable issue, but it does mean people who come for the conference need to walk over from the neighboring building.

I actually use the relatively convenient metro stop most days, but sometimes I have to drive and it is always a crapshoot if the underground parking will be full. The funny thing is my building is in one of the least walkable suburbs in the world. The suburb was completely built around cars and plans to make it even a little walkable are at least a decade way from completion (have not even started yet).

My monies will no longer benefit these businesses, and if enough people stay away, they will eventually have to shut down. Storefronts will be boarded up, meanwhile, somewhere next to an interstate, another Amazon Warehouse grows.

This trend has already started, especially in small-to mid-sized European cities (large ones seem to hang on a bit longer, mostly because their public transit systems were heavily updated in the late 20th century). But even in Berlin, or Munich, or Paris I start noticing storefront rot - increasingly more shops, often specialized ones (which served as focal points for customers from afar who might then use that day to do secondary purchases) go out of business.

In the end, you will have very dense city centers filled with large-brand stores, next to major traffic hubs, and slums around it. Cities will lose their one major advantage: the desirability of living there.

Hacker news loves to talk about solutions to zoning problems that only benefit people who don't live there.