Quote:
Originally Posted by nei
Here's an article on what new urbanism is about. Mentions Buffalo and the author went to the "22nd annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism":
New Urbanism, from Buffalo to Lowell | Learning Lowell
Also includes an arguement for favoring downtown redevelopment. |
Nothing new. It's the normal tax chattel argument. Take from the entire metro area and spend it downtown. The privileged people who live in cities deserve to have transportation provided to them by others since they can't be expected to pay for it (more tax chattel). It talks a big story about unfettered access and "getting out of the way" but then mentions that it only means that if you act as they want giving the example of a bank that won't finance an apartment unless it has two free parking spots per unit. Which is absurd, by the way. Last apartment I lived in in a suburban part of Sacramento had no where near enough parking. It wasn't free and there wasn't one parking spot per bedroom. The entire nine months we were there we were on waiting list to pay for parking, never got one and thus often had to park blocks away. It was one of the larger factors in leaving when the 9-month lease was up
What's really cool about Schoup is even though he isn't a scientist and went in with an expected outcome that parking was too cheap, the reality is LA overpriced its parking and it was too expensive and he has some credibility and acknowledge that... just not in his title, which would be more aptly called "The High Cost of Improperly Priced Parking." San Francisco's SF Park Pilot program found the exact same thing. They both set out with a preconceived notion that parking was underpriced and that underpriced parking lead to people driving around in circles looking for parking that wasn't available. The actual reality was the complete opposite. Parking was overpriced but poorly allocated. People drove around in circles because they had imperfect information and didn't know where the parking was. They headed to a busy area with no parking because, like most people, that's where they were going. They then spent several minutes driving around in larger circles trying to find a spot. They didn't know there was a street two blocks away with 10 free spaces so they went straight to their destination and began driving around looking. Even though the area within easy walking distance of the "hot spots" that had insufficient parking were nowhere near at 85% capacity and parking was overpriced, the exact opposite of Schoup's predetermined outcome. That's the beauty of SF Park. If you're in one of the pilot neighborhoods, you just pull up the map and go to the parking. No circling necessary.
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