innov8ion wrote:Bastiat, if you had your druthers, our tax burden would be next to nil. We hear you
As an aside, it's amusing how we are censored on this forum from talking politics when practically every issue is political (including this one.)
People will always support taxes so long as it goes to the "right" things (aka things that
they want). I'm not going to argue against taxes for things that most people support...on this thread. But what about the thing that people on this board hate most: sprawl. How do people feel about subsidizing driving through paying tax money for parking lots and roads? The money paid for "free" parking is not a direct tax, but you pay it everytime you buy a good or service from a store that is forced to provide it.
It seems that most people did not read the review of the book (you have to scroll down and click on one of the links), so I'll post some of the interesting facts from it:
in 1946, only 17% of a sample of cities surveyed had parking requirements, while by 1951 71% of cities had parking requirements or were in the process of adopting them; today, off-street parking requirements so common as to be one of “three basic sets of regulations” that are virtually universal).
Minimum parking requirements artificially disperse population, because land devoted to parking cannot be used for housing or businesses. For example, in 1961, Oakland, California began to require one parking space per dwelling unit for apartment buildings. Within just three years, the number of apartments per acre fell by 30%. The effects of parking upon job density are even more extreme: more than half of downtown Buffalo, for example, is devoted to parking.
You can probably subsitute St. Louis for Buffalo in that last sentence as well...
Initially the developer pays for the required parking, but soon the tenants do, and then their customers, and so on, until the cost of parking has diffused everywhere in the economy. When we shop in a store, eat in a restaurant, or see a movie, we pay for parking indirectly because its cost is included in the price of merchandise, meals and theater tickets. We unknowingly support our cars with almost every commercial transaction we make because a small share of the money changing hands pays for parking.
Thanks to the parking subsidy, more Americans drive to work, which in turn means that fewer people use public transit than would otherwise be the case, which means that public transit agencies have less revenue, which means that those transit agencies must raise fares or provide less service, which means that even fewer people ride public transit. And where more Americans drive, there is of course more demand
for parking- which means that minimum parking requirements, by encouraging driving, may actually create parking shortages.
Off-street parking requirements restrict the redevelopment of older buildings, thereby discouraging infill development and forcing potential businesses out of established areas. Suppose, for instance, that a barbershop closes in a city which requires 2 parking spaces per barber, and that a beautician who hopes to open a beauty shop in the same location must, under city parking regulations, create 3 parking spaces
per beautician. Unless the beautician can obtain a zoning variance she must either
1) provide more parking spaces or
2) move to another building with more parking space. If the beautician’s shop is surrounded by other buildings, provision of additional parking
may be impractical, so the beautician must move to another building with more space and allow the existing building to stay vacant unless another barber can be found for that location. Thus, minimum parking requirements discourage redevelopment of existing buildings.
Institute for Transportation Engineers survey parking occupancy at various land uses, and create a “parking generation” rate that measures the number of drivers who park at various types of enterprises. ITE data is flawed in two respects. First, ITE data is based on data from sites with ample free parking and no public transit. Thus, planners who rely on ITE data create a selffulfilling prophecy: they set parking requirements based on data from automobile dependent places, which ensures that cities enact stringent minimum parking requirements, which in turn helps to create the automobile-dependent places upon which ITE data is based. Second, ITE data is based upon parking during peak periods, and thus dramatically overestimates day-to-day parking demand, leading to government-mandated parking lots that are often more than half empty.
That's just a sampling of the review, not to mention the book itself.
The point is, maybe instead of dreaming up new plans and regulations to make our city more urban, we could turn our efforts towards tearing down the plans and regulations in place that prevent the market from producing this density on its own? Instead of critiquing parking lot designs, we could be fighting to repeal the laws that mandate developers to have that many spaces in the first place. Thoughts?
