709
"It's not like the government is forcing you to buy a car!"
If you live in a city with parking minimums, yes they fucking are.
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
709 points (91.7% liked)
Fuck Cars
9818 readers
4 users here now
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
-
Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
-
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
-
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
-
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
-
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
-
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
-
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why not let the business decide how much parking to have then? Surely they know the needs of their customer base better than the city. Even as an anti-capitalist anti-free-market socialist, parking minimums seem like an extreme government overreach. You can still have parking without mandating a parking minimum.
Why are you working with the base assumption that people have to drive? If you can't park somewhere, maybe that place should be set up with good alternatives so people don't have to drive there in the first place, i.e. good sidewalks, protected bike lanes, frequent public transit. Humans are surprisingly space efficient when they're not in huge metal cages.
To 1: Where do you have the parking then, without the mandated parking minimum? On the street? Second row in the street? On the little piece of green that is there? On the sidewalk? In the bicycle lane? On the neighbours parking lot? Let's assume the business wants to provide and pay for parking in good faith, with the minimal reasonable amount of parking for the demand: That should be the number of parking space you are looking at if your municipality sets a reasonable parking minimum! The municipality has no interested in letting developers build some crap that will not work or be an unbearable burden to the neighbourhood. These regulations also incorporate necessary bicycle parking, which i think may become a hotter issue where i live, because the demand is currently absolutely not there in the numbers that some municipalities require, miles away really. But if the municipality has the interest to push the means of transport in that direction, regulating these kinds of things is a way to do that.
To 2: I am not working with that assumption. I am working with the fact that people do have cars and do drive, not all of them, but it's not a number to just brush under the carpet. If you have a reasonable minimum parking mandate all these alternatives you mention should play a role in what the number actually looks like. Let's make a quick calculation how it would look like where i live for a business that has "ridiculous" minimum parking requirements (1 slot per 100 m² of storage space), as some other user here deemed. A storage space.
They have 30 employees and 10000 m² of storage space. The minimum car parking required is 1 slot per 100 m² of storage space. 100 parking slots, that is ridiculous! Oh wait, it is 1 slot per 100 m² or 1 slot per 3 employees. 10 parking slots, not that ridiculous anymore. Depending on how well the storage space is connected to public transit you can reduce the parking minimum up to 30%. Let's say it is not very well connected, just a bus. You claim 10% off. 9 slots. Tell me this is not reasonable, if 78% of households here own at least one car. You can get more reductions if you build extra bicycle parking (bicycle parking would also already be at ten slots already btw), you can buy yourself out of the need to some degree, or have other kinds of ideas (but the municipality has to go along of course).
That would be a parking minimum calculation for a bland situation, where nothing special is going on, just some shitty public transit nearby, a place where you would build a storage space i guess. And my conservative guess would be that at least double the amount of employees will arrive by car, so the business gets to push half of their actual demand into the public space, for which you now pay for and get to look at when you stroll down the sidewalk.
The closer you get to something like "downtown", the lower the base number for your calculations will become, because it will be more feasible for people to walk, cycle places, public transit is better too, the idea is to have reasonable regulation that tries to reflect (planned) reality.