Quote:
Originally Posted by chirack
The reality is the city of Chicago forces the developer to build legal parking and the city has less towing to do as well as better traffic flow. The effect isn't the same as Chicago building the parking itself(Chicago once did own some downtown parking garages but privatized them.). The urban burb of Oak Park does own it's own parking lot structure that it maintains and staffs. Chicago does not maintain nor staff my garage. If Chicago did decide to build a parking structure the city would be responsible for maintenance and security as well as clearing the snow out of it. These are on-going expenses. It is much cheaper for the city to push the need for parking back on to the developer or the owner of the property.
As for more parking than the market will bear, please. Retail stores often go beyond the parking minimum so that sales are not limited by the number of cars. The only places where people tend to skimp on parking is for development of residential housing....sometimes and even then an house with an garage esp. an two car one is worth more than one without. Maybe for some office buildings you might just build the min. but many times the parking lot is bigger than the min.
You make the assumption that the car is an burden and that people are trapped with them. I am so grateful I have an car, everyday. I know people who live without them and it ain't fun. Sure if you have an certain situation like work in the loop, and live in an area without parking the car could be more trouble than it is worth but the people who put up with this tend to be young white collar singles or couples. People with families or less into parting tend to have cars. Anyway the reason why people don't like to give their cars up is the power of individual transport that isn't limited by how far you can petal and provides an direct non-stop route. The direct non-stop route is one heck of an time saver. Not to mention not being tied to transit schedules and ability to easily carry cargo.
|
You're really missing the point. Of course I didn't mean the effect would be literally the same in every instance. Of course I don't mean that it is the same as the government staffing your garage. It is obviously similar in the sense that we are actually discussing: that it forces more parking than the market can bear. It's not really relevant that minimum parking restrictions require less government revenue than the government building parking itself (undoubtedly true) because no one is advocating that the government build more parking.
If you really think that min. parking rules don't cause an overbuilding of parking then you just haven't done enough research on the topic. Yes there are many places where developers will go over the minimum but that is not universally true. There is a mountain of evidence that the rules lead to more parking than the market demands in commercial areas. Start here:
http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf
"The generous parking capacity required by planners often
goes unused° Studying office buildings in ten California
dries, Richard Willson (1995) found that the peak parking
demand averaged only 56 percent of capacity. Gruen
Associates (1986) found that peak parking demanda t nine
suburban office parks near Philadelphia and San Francisco
averaged only 47 percent of capacity, and that no office park
had a peak parking demand greater than 60 percent of
capacity.3 The Urban Land Institute (1982, 12) found that
the recommendepda rking requirements for shopping
centers provide a surplus of parking spaces for all but
nineteen hours a year, and leave at least half of all spaces
vacant for more than 40 percent of the time a shopping
center is open for busines"
I make no assumption that cars are a burden. Getting rid of minimum parking restrictions wouldn't get rid of cars. It would allow certain urban neighborhoods to get more dense so that people who don't want to have a car or want to drive less would have more options. Even in my dense city neighborhood with mostly street parking, there are tons of families with cars. The difference is that there are also people who don't have cars and are able to have convenient lives.
There will always be plenty of neighborhoods for people who don't want to deal with street parking to live in. Suburban areas removed from city cores will always have plenty of space for parking because most of the homes have driveways and garages. Getting rid of minimum parking rules won't turn those areas into Manhattan.
You seem to think that your personal preference of having cars is objectively true and you are more than happy to call upon the government to help force that preference down onto others.
And yes, that is all it is: a personal preference. So far you have tried to make the argument that your preference goes beyond a preference because it is necessary for public safety, yet utterly failed to provide any statistical evidence behind that claim.