Are Parking Lots Ruining Your City? 

Production value looks awesome! So excited for all the new videos/podcasts in the works, just became a member yesterday 👍🏽

love the work you've done but i love it even more that you've decided to surround yourself with talented individuals who can turn your ideas into well produced and edited content!

Chuck is correct, once again!

I do love it. And I’m so happy that StrongTowns is now doing videos that will reach even more people. Also you have a winner in Michael Pasternock. This video is well produced and tightly edited maximizing the message and keeping your interest!

It's so good.

Glad you caught that 😅

🤣😂🤣😂 This expensive land should have something that generates little revenue, lowers property values, and reduces pedestrian safety.

The reason that decision was made was because most of the population lives outside of the downtown core. They only way that population can reach the businesses downtown is if they drive there and have a place to park.

@@Novusod they should set up public transportation instead (and put the parking lots to the non downtown end of the line).

Absentee/remote land owners/REITs have interest only in short term rent, not building sustainable communities or replacing the ones they tore down and "developed". Look at who owns it. They prolly don't live there.

Very happy to hear this from an elected official! Thank you for your service!

Here in Switzerland, most parking spaces in downtown areas are privately owned underground parking garages, often up to 10 floors deep. Americans should love these, as it is a possibility for companies to make money. Capitalism! Yeah!

Maybe repeal zoning next?

That is wonderful! Great to hear of more people in places of influence learning of the effects of walkable neighbourhoods

@@mina_en_suiza Unfortunately, there are a lot of places in the US it’s impossible to have structures underground because of the type of rock that is below ground. I.e., see Texas - most of the underground is limestone past 4 ft deep and why you don’t see a lot of underground structures.

Subsidized car dependent suburbia go brrrrrr

Absolutely. The focus should be on improving the lives of city residents first and foremost because they are paying city fees and taxes.

@@ladyravendale1 it literally goes vrrrrrooom 😆

That's not mindblowing. What's mindblowing is when they get it.

Commuter taxes can help address this, but it’s not a catch-all. My local tax withholding is paid to the city I work in, since the suburb I live in provides a 100 percent offset to incentivize housing demand in the area. We are not a bedroom community so we have the commercial base to do this, but the problem with this is that it leaves people with the doubly wrong impression that the suburbs are not only self-sufficient, but subsidizing downtown. First, the housing demand is artificial. Take away the residential tax offset, and housing demand (and values) in this suburb would drop like a rock. Second, this model depends on the jobs located within urban cores. We’re not a high-income suburb despite the city, but *because* of it. Where do you think all the jobs that we all have are located?

Ikr, it would be so much better

such as turning a car park into a real one

mandatory things are freedom in murica

Yes!

Screw sprawl n crawl

Man, that hurt to read. Thank you for sharing. This is why we do what we do- so people like you can start their dream businesses and improve their towns.

I wonder how many people that come to a skatepark require handicap spots. Or, depending on the location and environment, parking in general. You would expect them to be young and healthy and at least some of them coming by other means. So these rules are oblivious of considerations like these.

@@co7013 I agree. They also required ground floor and handicap accessible restrooms for the zoning change.

@@co7013 Actually I kinda disagree with you about the HC spots. Yes, you'd suspect that a disabled person won't be skating, but maybe their child or loved one is. You don't get to unilaterally decide which businesses are the sort of businesses that handicap people won't frequent, and get to ignore ADA standards. We should make our cities as accessible as we can to all. In fact HC spots are the only parking that I think SHOULD be required- those people are the only ones who actually have a good reason to be driving there. Your fully mobile skaters young can walk to the skate park, but maybe Grandpa can't.

Wow, thirty parking spaces seems like a lot! I’m sorry that this was such a barrier to you. I agree that accessible parking and bathrooms need to be included. Many folks that you may not clock as disabled, and who may be able to participate in small amounts of activity or participate by cheering on their friends and family benefit from those features :) Families and friend groups that have a disabled or chronically ill member often have to take their patronage elsewhere when a business isn’t accessible to everyone. Employees may also benefit from accessibility features. I had a change in health, and couldn’t continue at my job even though I could still perform it well. The facility was just set up in a way that I couldn’t easily enter my place of work, or access the bathroom.

You can even expand this concept to have the parking lots on the perimeter of the city and then almost completely remove cars from the streets.

So if I go to like 5 shops I’ll have to carry everything by hand from store to store before lugging it all back to my car that is parked far away… ???

That entails that these people drop the anti-car zealotry and actually concentrate on building something worth walking around first. Some of these people are so off their meds, they would demand that driveways be "banned".

@@wck OR.. and hear me out here, you have a tram, bike or other type of transportation for such occurrences. Here in Europe I often take the train from the suburbs to downtown (ten minutes), walk from one end of the no-cars shopping street and then take the bus back home (thirteen minutes).

@@WillmobilePlus speaking of off their meds, what the hell is this entire reply man? You make zero sense

I agree. The positivity is really great and refreshing.

Optimism is important in the darkest of times.

I remember having a positive tone - back in the 70s. Happy that you are having a powerful impact with yours.

If you consider Dickson St and the university campus as an extension of the walkable "city-like area", you can perhaps convince yourself that Fayetteville is actually pretty good. We had the same parking issues with the downtown area in Gainesville Florida. I always felt off in downtown, despite having the right elements for a walkable neighborhood.

my quiet part would be 'but people ARE COMPLETE MORONS WHO DON'T KNOW WHAT IS GOOD FOR THEM AND ARE EASILY BRAINWASHED BY CAR LOBBYISTS' maybe it's better to keep that a quiet part....

The reaction when I suggest that we should remove parking on Dickson and Arkansas Ave 🙄. The city would do better to use that space for scooters and bikes instead of putting up signs saying that they can't be on the sidewalk. They should expand the bussing too, but the school is only concerned about using them for shuttles on game day, not as viable transportation for residents.

@@AssBlasster I felt the same way when I went to UF. I loved walking around campus but downtown felt like just a tiny area with cars everywhere robbing the space, because it is a pretty nice place. I loved walking in and around campus the most. I went back there recently and things are better and so many things are getting built around campus it's a really transformative change that is making the area more walkable and enjoyable. There are less parking spaces and the speed limit is lower on University. I hope the buses that only came every 15 minutes are a little more frequent nowadays!

Fayetteville is a hot market dominated by outside investors. Look at who owns it. They don't live there. Look at Austin, same deal. Reduced parking regs often just mean the neighborhoods surrounding these zones have to provide parking for commercial interests who see them only as a harvestable "amenity", externalizing their costs. No sense of shared buy in by the "entertainment districts" (read bars) and residents. Just seen as cheap land to flip, or looking for an easy buck. Absentee/remote land owners/REITs have interest only in short term rent, not building sustainable communities or replacing the ones they tore down and "developed", ones often with the qualities they use as selling points.

F#CK YES - Fixed it.

No. Absolutely not. Unless you don't have a car, but then you can't understand.

​@@trinkCOKEorDIE It absolutely is. It's the #1 reasons cities struggle to stay solvent because too much space is being used for parking instead of other more productive uses such as commercial and residential space.

@@taoliu3949 and with good planning you wouldn't feel the need to HAVE to drive, you also have more freedom of cheaper alternatives to driving. Here in the U.S. we're so generationally brainwashed that economically insolvent cities are ingrained in our culture.

@@DavMovis_ because this nation is too big. Why bother fixing a dying community when the people with money will always up and leave for another town?

Rare Florida W. Assuming the parking is in fact replaced with something beneficial.

Lol no surprise from my alma mater. Protesting for street parking SMH. The top issue for students every semester always seem to be on-campus parking, but I liked how the university kept replacing parking lots with new buildings during my time there. I also spent a summer in Fayetteville and found the city had a better urban layout than Gainesville, albeit with the same issues of abundant parking.

@@teuast Floridias been taking dubs for like 3 years now

I can only imagine the relief Tallahassee would have if some of these FSU tailgate lots could be converted into businesses or housing. These lots get used about 6-12 days out of the year and are blocked off otherwise. They are within walking/biking distance to campus because they're walking distance to the stadium. Density is increasing but could be better.

Keep on fighting the good fight! It may take longer than expected, but if you keep it up you'll be the envy of your state in no time!

As a fellow wild hog, I must concur. Wps

Instead we had Wal Mart come in and market their supercenters as a "one stop shop" and killed off all the local business. Derp.

​@@DFPercush Walmarts are only possible if the infrastructure is there to support it. That means a huge amount of roads leading out to their supercenters in the middle of nowhere. Many localities desperate for tax revenue will also offer tax incentives to try and get Walmart to move into their area, which does nothing but shoot themselves in the foot.

@@DFPercush The whole downtown/city can be a one-stop shop.

I'm from Utrecht, the Netherlands, and the downtown area is of course very dense. I would often just park my bike on the edge and walk to the shops. I can't imagine having to use a car to do basic grocery shopping, buy some clothes etc. The only places I'd grab a car for are large hardware and furniture stores.

It has always puzzled me why people would complain about going to a commercial shopping/entertainment district and complain about walking. But then go to a shopping mall. Park once and walk all over the damn mall. Personally if a district has to have parking it needs to be in a parking structure. Preferably municipal owned with rates that are not outrageous. And any multi unit residential building should be required to provide one space per unit within the footprint of the building. Unless the building is in a car free zone.

It's a disease they imported from the USA and the UK

Rochester, MN! The DMC corporation (based off Mayo Clinic) is working with the city government to build up a vibrant downtown and increase tax capacity. The work they’ve done in their 10 years of existence is not too large, but already has a very visible footprint that, given another 10-20 years, will make it a great town to be in! (PS, I heard your organization is based out of Minnesota, so it’d be cool for you to work with them) :)

Question - San Jose recently voted on a similar topic and I believe it’s the same parking minimums from this video. Any thoughts on how San Jose went about it or anything interesting to know from that process? Thanks for the content

Here in Utrecht, the Netherlands im privileged. But I hope we get standardization of public transport infrastructure in NL/Germany/France/Belgium :)

Boise, Idaho, is trying to better build density instead of just building more single family homes and are also trying to get a public transit system(BRT, commuter rail, and an Amtrak connection).

This is my community. I have a lot of hope for the future. I’ve reached out to city councilors about closing Dickson street to cars and they seem open. There is a plan in progress to remove lanes from south school to make the area more accessible. The city council is currently looking at approving a new active transportation plan which has a goal of having 90% of the population be within 1/4 mile of a multi-use trail.

Where abouts in the UK did you go? We've got some lovely walkable cities but also some pretty car centric ones too

@@TheWolfXCIX Which cities in the UK are the most/least walkable in your opinion?

@@johns.8220 Most of them are at least decent: the best I've been to being York, Cambridge and London. The worst is Milton Keynes by quite a distance, and Leeds is also fairly poor outside of the very centre.

Texarkana has one of the most beautiful old historic downtown train stations in the area, sadly it's being left unused to rot away slowly

i noticed the UK has a rail system that makes it pretty easy and efficient to get to smaller towns from big cities like london, which is what the US severely lacks. so i am absolutely gobsmacked to see headlines in the british media about increasing car dependency! sunak and his administration inherited a precious gift and it seems he wants to throw it in the bin 😐

24 kilometers one way, in -30 degree freezing cold, with a pretty good chance of getting stabbed in at least 3 sections of that walk... Yeah, I'm good. No thanks.

My family has a rather egregious example they would do all too often. We live in an older, somewhat walkable suburb. There's a restaurant we'd often eat at for Birthdays or other celebrations all of 900 feet from our house. Despite this, we'd almost always "have to" pile in the cars. Even as a Kid I realized this was absurd and sometimes was able to convince everyone to walk, usually only if the weather was just about perfect, but others times I'd get yelled at just for wanting to on my own. Even though by the time everyone actually got in the cars you could be a third of the way there on foot, and parking was often a struggle. With my friends, unless they were driving from across town, we'd always walk. Though I did bike once when I was running late.

@@Joesolo13 Ha! Yep, this sounds very familiar. There are two streets out of my neighbourhood and one of them has a small group of eateries and other businesses along the main road. It would be about 900 feet from home and we have absolutely driven to restaurants there for celebrations. I've never been yelled at for walking, but when I was I think early teens I remember I got some funny looks when I said I was going for a walk around this small, holiday town we were staying at one morning. The looks weren't about it being dangerous, but more like why on Earth would I want to do that. The town is smaller than our neighbourhood back in the suburbs and I don't think they quite realised that. I mean, I walked around the entire town in maybe three-quarters of an hour. Came back and they were finally ready to go somewhere so, of course, we got in the car and went somewhere I passed in the first minutes of the walk. lol I've never really thought about it before, but my best friend and I went everywhere by bicycle when I was a primary (elementary) school kid. I wonder if that's why you and I see our suburbs differently to the previous generation, because growing up we had to find alternate means of getting about without a car whereas the previous generation moved there with cars so just kept driving everywhere?

It's a really great place.

WPS!🐗

It looks like a gorgeous city!

@@strongtowns Are you folks familiar with Cathy Tuttle's Downtown Portland Car Master Plan? It's pretty awesome.

Usually what really ends up happening is that, instead of going to multiple places, people just go to Wal-mart and get everything in one place. That's why those proliferated so much in America, since it really leans into the car dependence. When you drive, people don't like to make more than one stop. So they don't. And thus, in a car-dependent society, small businesses suffer.

"Rome wasn't built in a day" as they say

Making supervisors do "park walks" would be great if applied to cities. Make city council do "city walks" and "transit trips" so they get first hand experience at what needs to be fixed and the actual impacts of their policies. The hard part is actually finding a way to force city council & the mayor to actually do these.

Yeah I was surprised to learn they just got funding for light rail down Van Nuys Blvd! That street (stroad?) is so insanely wide I always questioned what they were thinking when making it. I'm praying they narrow it down and add protected bike lanes as well. That neighborhood deserves better.

😂😂😂 your joking I was there is nothing

One thing im proud of in Seattle is the sheer quantity of quality bike infrastructure that has spawned up around the city in the last decade

@@LimitedWard There are streets in Italy where you have 1~3 lanes of "express" traffic in the middle, another lane with a tram, and then another segregated local only road on the sides; these local streets often feature some on-street parking while some have bike lanes. I think some stroads in LA would work really well with a system like that. A good example of that is Corso Regina Margherita, in Turin.

What confused me a bit in LA was the waiting times for the subway and trams. Granted, it was a weekend, but still I had to wait almost 30 minutes for a train from Civic Central/Grand park going south. That's night time trafic in my home town, a metro in the city center would have a train coming in every 3-5 minutes daytime, even on weekends.

I wouldn't get your hopes up too much yet. This is one rule, and only being overturned in limited jurisdictions. But yes, at least it's a baby step in the right direction. Let's just hope, speaking of babies, that we don't throw that baby out with the bath water.

It’s not all generation I’m over 35 and I believe in a walkable development in limited parking. !!

@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 Awesome, me too! :) No, obviously it's not ENTIRELY generational but it definitely is part of the problem. I'm in my 40s and most of my friends around my age are in the suburban stage of life where they're carting their kids around to soccer and lacrosse practice and feel like they have no other choice but to live in their sprawled out suburban subdivisions and drive their oversized SUVs.

If you do all your shopping on the same day its not bad at all.

@@NeSeeger It kinda still is if you want to do window shopping. If I park my car and walk down a street to do shopping, I still have to walk back to retrieve it. I don't have the option of just walking down the street and going straight home or my next destination. I have to constantly retrieve my car and drive to my next destination, find parking, rinse and repeat. You lose a lot of flexibility because the car ends up becoming a liability.

@@taoliu3949 It is a shame the Mall has been killed

@@NeSeeger It wasn't "killed", it was never viable to begin with.

@@taoliu3949 Not everyone lives in a city, or wants to.

You mean that wacky idea of people not living a$$ to face with their neighbors? How WEIRD!!!!!!!!!!!?!?!?!?!?!?! I cant even open the curtains in my bathroom because it faces straight into the window of the people next door's bedroom. Privacy actually matters to some of us.

Yeah, fortunately, this is changing, whether some holdouts like it or not.

@Oak Island Pictures >Like with parking minimums, this issue often gets straw-manned into “they want to bulldoze all the Craftsmans and put us in commie block apartments” There is no "strawman". People like that openly say they despise single family homes and consider the people that live there to be "parasites". That's actually a words used by some dude on Twitter regarding zoning I just read today.

@@WillmobilePlus you can choose to live somewhere far away from others if you want. It’s just insane to make illegal to have a store or cafe within walking distance due to single family zoning.

Single family zoning is exclusionary, and leads to vast swaths of unused land and car dependent cities. I shouldn't be forced to own a vehicle to live my life, or send my kids to school, or get groceries. Its an embarrassment and needs to be fixed.

OK. Can do! Let's get rid of one car lane, and put in 2 separated bicycle lanes on either side of the street. That's one lane more!

I'm just worried that in the true American fashion, they're gonna screw this up just like they screwed up their cities half a century ago. I see too many people who watched Not just bikes and decided that every city can and must be like Amsterdam, except with a full ban on cars and almost utopian public transport. These people fail to realize that a balance is necessary and real problems need to be solved that aren't of ideological nature. Ok, sure, the "car-centric" concepts don't work all the time. Expanding highways just doesn't lead anywhere. Excess parking space destroys the urban fabric and people lose sense of the city atmosphere. But just saying "this, except totally opposite" is not the solution. There are problems that emerge with every solution - that is why transportation and urbanism actual academic skill. No solution is panacea, nor is every city the same. These real problems impact regular folks who are supposed to live there. Building entire parking blocks has a different negative effect to public transport that is non-stop overcrowded, smelly, filled with crime and crazy folks. All in all, balance ought to be achieved - I doubt Americans are able to make compromises as they see the world in black and white, very ideologically. Like "good vs evil". Good being walkable cities, bad being evil cars. Logical solution is to just create one massive pedestrian zone. Except even us in Europe see that sometimes, even in the densest city cores, pedestrian areas will sometimes be avoided by people as they aren't practical or charming, maybe even unsafe. Or on the contrary, lead to other problems like overcrowding, apartment prices through the roof, many foreign expats taking away the essence of the city, essentially soulless city center.

Yes and no. Improving transit system is good, but not necessary to allow outsiders to visit the city. Eliminating parking minimums allows developers to "right size" the amount of parking according to demand. In Buffalo for example, developers still build parking in the downtown area, but it tends to be shared rather than single use.

Not that this is a defense of US cities, but it's helpful to remember that the bulk of the issues in the US exist because the wrong people have the most influence. Your average citizen never would have chosen to bankrupt cities by restricting downtown development and chasing the Ponzi scheme that is suburbia. But developers _love_ this setup. They can turn a buck a lot faster building sprawl than dealing with the challenges of building in an already-developed and dense environment. Likewise big corporations who need to be able to build at scale to leverage their advantages over mom-and-pop stores. I'm just glad to see that individual citizens are starting to wake up to these issues and take back what was always rightfully theirs in the first place.

Why the editing specifically? I was more impressed with lighting, camera work, inset infographics etc. Interesting to know why how the video has been edited down is your focus on this one?

@@amiddled I apologize, I was using the colloquial definition of editing to refer to the entire cinematography process. Plus, I made the comment just based on the release trailer from a few days ago, so I haven't had a chance to comment on the actual full video. I just wanted to build hype and mostly juice the algorithm a bit through early commenting.

That's it! I want to live in a city where car ownership is optional.

It's basically parking garages. Historically this was the preferred way for building parking in cities before parking minimums became a thing.

As well as everywhere else

>This is what happens when you build your country around CARS and not PEOPLE. Well it wasnt "built around cars" despite what the propaganda keeps telling you. And Europe isnt this massive "car free" Disneyland many of you pretend it is.

@@WillmobilePlus I live in Europe, I do know that this isn't "car free disneyland", but it's not built around cars.

>The idea that you would drive to each individual errand or activity you're doing in a city centre is kinda making my head spin, So? The idea of having to take 4X as long to do the same thing, because you have to wait for trains or busses, and then lots of times have no place to sit, is utterly barbaric to us.

@MW Mobile growing up in the UK, it was most common that you would live in the suburbs and drive into to (down)town and park at one of 2 or 3 multistory carparks on the edge of the city centre. I lived in a farely small city so you could walk from one end to the other in about 25mins to give a sense of scale. But that area was filled with hundreds of restaurants, shops and other establishments down narrow pedestrianised streets. If every single one of those had to provide it's own parking then the surface area of that city space has to massively increase and all the properties are flung far away from each other seperated by a sea of tarmac from surface parking and arterial highway to get all those cars there. Yes, it would take 4x longer to walk between places Precisely Because of the obsession with driving. If no one was driving between shops but instead walking between them, then you could build things in walking distance with each other.

Takes way longer to accomplish things having to drive everywhere. Car dependency is the worst.

​@@contrapunctusmammalia3993 Well, ok, an small English village/city that is a 25 minute walk from end to end is not comparable to even a mid-size midwestern city that isnt some sprawled-out trope that foreigners tend to get from these types of channels. It would take me 25 minutes to walk from my home to where my wife works and there would still be miles of city to walk through to get to the edge and all of that would be blocks of homes and businesses, with not even one stroad. It certainly isn't this goofy stereotype of " flung far away from each other separated by a sea of tarmac from surface parking" >If no one was driving between shops but instead walking between them, then you could build things in walking distance with each other And how many homes to you want to see demolished for that purpose if no one was driving? Sorry that you don't like driving, but that is your personal choice, not a statement that people that visit places that just aren't located where they live are "doing it wrong". Our cities weren't created in 1433, so the configuration and growth reflect that, and arent the result of people being "stupid". Your quaint small town can make "pedestrianized streets in the narrow width of your 500 year old roads, but that isnt a pratical thing in cities made during 1800s pioneer days. I live in an area that is economically higher income + surrounded by multiple "high streets". 99% of the places are boutique stores and restaurants, with no space to ram in everyplace else you would want to go "within walking distance". So if you want to get certain things, it just makes more efficient sense to drive. And no we are not "stuck" in bottleneck traffic for hours like these channels like to pretend. h3ll, I can get to my parents house in the next county and 4 cities over, in 20 minutes outside of rush hour, and that is 13-19 miles away.

@@WillmobilePlus Perhaps I wasn't clear, 25 minutes is the diameter of the city centre area. (My hometown is Norwich if you want to have a look yourself.) The full urban sprawl of Norwich is about 20 sq miles and home to 200k people. Fayetteville, AR in the video has an urban sprawl of 55 sq mi and a population of 98k, that's about half the population of Norwich at over double the surface area and this before we get into metro areas. Maybe in your estimation, Fayetteville isn't a "mid-sized midwestern city" that Norwich "is not even comparable to", but it is the focus of the video (and therefore what my comment is reacting to). And being the second largest city in all of Arkansas has got to count for something. The sea of tarmac from surface parking is in reflection to the downtown areas depicted in this video (about 04:06-04:11), lots of businesses separated by their own individual parking spaces. The council in this video stopped the requirement to provide parking provision for every lot or business and bit by bit they are filling in the gaps of a decimated downtown. Moving towards this kind of high-street layout would demolish literally nobody's home because no one lives in a fucking car park. That's what this video is about, filling in the downtown area to make a dense and walkable district (as the councillor says at 09:56), we're not even talking about public transport, we're talking about driving to a multi-storey carpark and then walking for like 15 minutes - less probably. It's not just my personal sentiment against driving though, car culture is horrendously destructive in many ways including: climate breakdown caused by pollution in connection to construction and usage of cars (EVs don't get a pass), infrastructure cost (massive roads are very expensive to maintain), personal finance, personal wellbeing, municipal finance, social cohesion and stability, and just general efficiency of moving people around. "Cities made during the 1800s". You're right, almost all American settlements predate the 1900s - which means they predate the use and even invention of the car in the first place. American towns and cities looked completely comparable to European cities before the age of car domination which is pretty much a post-war invention. They had dense downtown areas and streetcar systems (creating streetcar suburbs) were very common, and there were many many more railways across the country as a whole and in urban areas as suburban rail and metro systems. Some might say that the populations were much smaller back then so it would never work today. To that I say, look to the European or even East Coast of American examples. America chose (because of the lobbying of oil companies and car manufacturers) to focus city growth on a car-centric model and they could have chosen to focus on walkability and public transport. The Netherlands also went down a car-centric way post-war but reverted it from the 1980s or so. That's all an aside though and I'm gonna guess you won't appreciate such politicised language. The point is, Norwich - "quaint small town" as it may be - has a higher population than the 2cnd largest city in Arkansas. This is because of density of downtown districts and the surrounding housing areas. Even though the downtown is dense it does not give a feel like thundering metropolis that the word "high-density" often evokes; there are no skyscrapers of even high-rises in Norwich. I looked it up and the highest residential/commecial complex is about 40m tall. The only thing taller is the damn Cathedral.

We live in Fayetteville (and love it), but Bethlehem has always intrigued us!!

Yes, if a parking minum is truly mandatory atleast let buisnesses count bike parking spots and seats/capacity on transit services towards their parking minimum to reduce the needed lot size. And at that point just change the name to access minimum considering thats the original intent (ignoring the other intent of making cars more popular for the oil & automotive lobby). Or better yet just get rid of the mandate and let the free market decide considering thats the kind of society we claim to be.

@@jasonreed7522 I agree, but I do see a justification for access minimums. As long as that public access is a limited and shared resource (like street parking), it's vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. One place that doesn't care can cause congestion that drives the neighbours out of business. Personally, I think the best idea is a complete rework of zoning, based on the ideas that high traffic/access areas can and should have high-traffic uses (like every train/subway station as a mini downtown). Changing parking minimums to access minimums is an idea for a short term compromise solution, since car centric thinking still has the majority of political power.

@@tristanridley1601 the tragedy of the commons is definitely a good example of an externality/market failure to be wary of whenever proposing a true free market solution, so i accept that even if parking/access minimums are removed some sort of regulation will need to exist to prevent a "tragedy of the commons" from happening. As far as a complete zoning rework goes, we definitely need one but i think it will be easier to achieve with small incremental improvements instead of big sweeping changes/reforms. In this vein changing "parking" to "access" is a small change that may not do much on its own but will contribute towards the goal of better cities/towns. Parking minimums are currently out of hand, i used google earth to measure the size of the Walmart parkinglot in my hometown amd its 6 acres just for the customer parking and nothing else, the eastbound reststop on the mass turnpike in Lee has a 0.6 acre lot, almost exactly 1/10 that of a Walmart in objectively the middle of nowhere.

​​​@@tristanridley1601 So the government doesn't want to build more parking, therefore they should force private businesses/residences to build it for them? Parking should never have been a "shared resource", it's a convenience for those who drive. If there is a demand for parking, private garages will pop up and take over. Sure, you can build public garages, but they still need to be priced according to demand. On the otherhand, mandating businesses to build their own parking is downright unreasonable. If a business can't survive because of the lack of "cheap parking" provided by the government, then it probably was never sustainable to begin with. People have been building towns and cities without parking minimums for the entire human history. And your concept of "access minimum" doesn't make much sense either. Businesses are not going to infill if they don't think they have the customer base to support their business. If they think they need parking for their customers, they will secure it either by building their own lot or securing spaces with a nearby lot.