[article] Montreal becomes largest North American city to eliminate mandatory minimum parking spots
[article] Montreal becomes largest North American city to eliminate mandatory minimum parking spots
There’s parking In Montreal?
I suppose that’s what potholes are for…
The problem is tons of free parking everywhere needlessly sprawls out our cities, makes people drive further, and makes actual green methods of transit (like walking, cycling, and electrified public transit) less viable.
In the long term, maintaining car dependency is fundamentally incompatible with addressing the climate crisis. Removing mandatory parking minimums is a necessary step towards ending car dependency.
parking again is cheap relative to the finished area per square foot
Rough estimates are $90 / sq foot for parking, $160 / sq foot for finished construction.
But guess which one sells and rents for more?
If parking sell/rents for more than housing, you should be building parking garages instead of condos. Peter you aren’t maximising potential of the land.
Allowing storage in parking stalls is inefficient. They should be leased to people who want to pay. Massive lanes between storage lockers is inefficient space usage. Task cabinets blocking sight lines is a safety issue. Just use strife lockers.
There’s nothing stopping people from building them.
There’s just no longer something forcing people to build them.
For no parking? Short term they do stupid shit (like a large event). Long term they just get rid of cars.
Ground and semi-recessed also makes a fantastic space for retail, which makes more money than parking. Digging subterranean JUST to add parking only adds costs, you don’t have to keep digging (or if you do, you can solid fill instead of putting in parking garages).
Again, nothing stopping people from putting them in, but don’t think it’s free space or inexpensive to do.
Several new major developments in my area have done this. They have underground parking for residents and businesses only and for everyone else you get 5 slots of street parking and nothing else.
The problem is that public transit in my city is horrible. It is expensive, unreliable, slow, and has poor service coverage. These developments are 100% completely inaccessible to me both by car and by transit unless I’m willing to blow away the next 4 hours busing there and back for what would be a 10 minute car ride.
Cars are a cancer on the world and I hate them as much as anyone else here, but cities must give proper alternatives if plans like this are to work properly. Slow, stinky buses that only come every 50 minutes and spend 80% of their time stuck in traffic help nobody and yet they are all our politicians are willing to provide.
Taking away parking must be done while also providing alternatives, or you just have a bunch of homes and businesses that are inaccessible. This is especially the case if you want to integrate something like rail/tram access which has to have infrastructure considerations before construction even begins.
“Build now, “fix” later” is exactly how we ended up in the situation we’re in now where they just keep throwing more and more buses at the problem.
“We can’t reduce parking until alternative transportation infrastructure is perfect” is inevitably paired with “we can’t build alternative infrastructure because there’s no demand for it [because of too much free parking].” It’s a dishonest tactic by concern-trolling reactionaries and “moderates” (in the “great stumbling block” to progress MLK sense) to manufacture an excuse to do nothing, every single time.
I’ve been doing bike/ped/transit activist stuff for over a decade, and that’s the bullshit I’ve heard over and over and over and over. Y’all gotta stop falling for it!
we’re in now where they just keep throwing more and more buses at the problem.
Sounds fine. Buses aren’t perfect but they are flexible and don’t require much infrastructure (ideally, they have a dedicated bus lane).
I’d much rather they do away with votes for transit. There are never votes on road widening, new bridges, new interchanges, etc. But it always seems that transit must be put to a vote.
Just build the damn thing and stop asking.
Hey, that’s my favorite System of a Down lyric!
*All research and successful health policies show That walking should be increased And law enforcement decreased while abolishing Mandatory minimum parking spots
I buy my crack, I smack my bitch Right here in Hollywood*
I just love that the “law enforcement decreased” line didn’t change.
It’s just always applicable.