According to this new study, off-street parking takes up:
🔹14% of downtown Minneapolis
🔹 15.6% of downtown Phoenix
🔹 20.5% of downtown Dallas
🔹 22.3% of downtown Los Angeles
🔹 31.7% of downtown Tulsa
Now add into this total the amount of surface area taken by paved roadways.
What really gets me each time, is how unnecessarily wide most, if not all roadways are in cities and urban areas.
You have streets that are two dedicated lanes in one direction, but the total width is close to 3.5 cars. When you add this up for a typical 2 lane street with two lanes of travel each way, you get a street that becomes close to 6-7 cars wide. All to accommodate parking near the curb on certain hours of the day.
I find it so strange that cities spend so much tax dollars and budget to provide publically funded street parking. The cost to repave these wide streets every few yeara adds up exponentially and eats away at a cities annual budget.
Streets and lanes should only be as wide as the car traveling down them, and street parking should not be a thing at roadway level. Business should provide their own lots ideally with cobblestone to help with rainwater runoff, and this space the city paves over should be taken back as proper sidewalk space and green space, with the addition of cycling paths.
covered
infested
Infected with the cancer that is car parking.
And it costs about $12-20 a day for a parking garage in downtown Dallas.
There are a few garages with validated parking in downtown Dallas. But ultimately charging for parking in a downtown makes sense, that same space could be used for economically productive purposes rather than holding a car. Mandating we build even more parking would only make traffic worse and lead to an underutilized downtown. If it’s too expensive, DART stations have free parking and the train to get downtown is only is $3 ($6 for a day pass).
Relevant City Nerd video
Not in my city. There is a massive lack of parking. So they charge for everything. It sucks and I appreciate places where I can park for free or without getting towed.
Do what I do… Never go to the city!
Seattle sucks for parking. San Francisco is horrible. Yet somehow, day after day people get on the freeway and plug the thing every morning, noon and afternoon. And they drive like crazy people.
Same.
For example, the city’s library is totally off limits because there’s no way to get there because there’s no place to park.
Even so, I’d still like to convert the on-street parking into bike lanes and mandate adequate off-street parking as a prerequisite for new building permits.
Mandatory parking minimums will just incentivize driving and make biking even worse, even if you also install some bike parking near the streets. It’ll make all buildings more expensive because they’ll need double the land so they can have the off-street parking you want, everything will be spaced further apart because half the land is dedicated to parking, and inevitably the streets will become more car friendly because everyone is driving anyway, might as well try to get the drivers where they want quickly and efficiently.
I support mandatory parking minimums, for bicycles. Many american cities are adding bike lanes to streets. You could bike there, but outside of the central core of the city there is no guarantee there will be any place to lock up the bike on arrival.
Parking minimums for bikes, parking maximums for cars.
