If there’s a war against cars (there is — and it won’t make much difference whether those cars are electric or powered by an internal combustion engine) it would make a lot of sense for those fighting it to take aim at car parks, and so they are.
Kevin Krizek and John Hersey, writing in Fast Company (February 2023):
Two assumptions undergird urban parking policy: Without convenient parking, car owners would be reluctant to patronize businesses; and absent a dedicated parking spot for their vehicle, they’d be less likely to rent and buy homes. Because parcels of urban land are usually small and pricey, developers will build multistory garages. And so, today, a glut of these bulky concrete boxes clutter America’s densely populated cities.
Those assumptions are correct. People, especially from outside the city, like to come into town to shop and eat. In some cities, they like to drive into town to work. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the pandemic, it is that cities need the inflow from out of town to flourish economically. Cutting down on parking places is going to make that more difficult. Equally, if cities want to retain the inhabitants that they have, providing them with adequate parking space would seem to be the way to go.
And the authors’ reference to space-efficient “bulky concrete boxes” cluttering up densely populated cities seems to reflect a judgment that is more aesthetic than anything else. Aesthetics are all very well, but we should not forget that cities serve utilitarian purposes, too. Car parks are part of that latter picture.
Read on to find this:
City planners, developers, and designers now have new guidelines that make parking spots less of a priority and take into account all of the new ways people get around.
Something tells me that those “new ways” are going to include bicycles, and sure enough, one model development cited by the authors is in Tempe, Ariz.:
[A] development called Culdesac is being built as a car-free community. As a stipulation of living in the 17-acre development, which includes a mix of stores and apartments, residents must agree to never park a car on site.
Another word for “cul-de-sac” is “dead end.”
Dave Seminara, writing in The Spectator’s U.S. edition:
[I]n dozens of cities across the country that have removed their parking minimums, apartments and townhomes will go up without adequate parking spaces for their residents. (In this era of woke corporations, don’t be surprised if companies market developments with no parking as eco-friendly.) Many on the left prefer to believe that people will change their behavior and start cycling to work or take public transportation. Perhaps some will, but many more fell out of the habit of using public transportation during Covid and won’t go back.
Many residents without parking will simply park their cars wherever they can find a spot, snarling traffic, as drivers prowl the streets looking for spots. In 2019, researchers at the Harvard Business School set out to try to change the commuting habits of employees of a large European airport. They sent letters to 15,000 of them encouraging them to sign up for the company’s existing carpool. Fewer than 100 did so and, when the researchers followed up a month later, only three were using it.
Those claiming to argue for people-friendly cities might like to consider what people actually want.