Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town

Parking minimum requirements are usually handled at the local level. Parking minimum recomendations were somewhat standardized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers,(ITE). So whenever city councils around the country decide to prioritize car usage over walking and public transit, and obligated to guarantee people a place to store a car, they often turn to the ITE's guides. That said, the ITE's parking minimums guides are themselves kind of arbitrary. And the guides absolutely assume that practically everyone is traveling by car, and maybe (!!) that's not a great assumption to build on. A YouTube channel called Climate Town created a fun and well-researched video recently on the topic. [this video]

This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums [this video] Noise pollution [link] Infrastructure strain [link] More on Infrastructure and Sprawl [link] Articles: [link] [link] [link] Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: [link] The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.

> Shortages of buildings are not the only reason that property prices can be high. It pretty much is - everything else is window dressing. Pretty much every single city in China is 3-10x more dense than any area in the US, so lack of land is a reason I find continually uncompelling. Our lack of density, zoning practices, NIMBY attitudes and car dependency all contribute to this, with the result being a lack of construction. Tokyo has been and continues to be affordable for anyone who wants to live there by building: [link] Here's a grad student on tiktok who does good, well-sourced analysis on this front (he has an entire playlist on the issue of vacancy rates given how frequently it comes up): [link] Article on zoning law changes in CA and how municipalities have put out estimates for how much they should build and then consistently, for decades, not even come close to meeting them: [link] There's endless amounts of info on this front - look up strongtowns, YIMBY, parking minimums and associated issues ( [this video] ), japanese vs. american zoning policy ( [link] )...