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Lance, I don't get to see my brother as often as I like, so it's been a while since I've had someone really talk down to me. Thank you so much for filling in that void in my life.

The solution here is not a one-step, too simplistic solution, it is quite nuanced. The proposal in the last paragraph imagines a method that would allow residents to park under one system, employees under another and shoppers under a third. It also discourages people from owning more than one car. And it uses the money raised from all of this parking to pay for alternative forms of transportation. That's far more than one step and not exactly simplistic. If anything it's more open to criticism that it's too complex.

As for parking minimums, that too is a complicated solution - my position was not that we should get rid of parking, but that we should avoid over-building parking. Parking minimums raise the cost of development which means fewer other amenities or higher costs or both. Sometimes the cost of adding parking means that a good project doesn't move forward. Parking minimums also hurt retail. So ending parking minimums is not the solution to one problem, nor is it a panacea for those problems. It is one part of a menu of solutions to a host of problems. In order to explain it all and break it all out I would need to write a book - so I apologize if a blog comment seems too simplistic. It is, I'm afraid, the nature of the medium.

Furthermore, moving people from cars to other forms of transit by reducing the subsidy for cars in the form of free/cheap parking and increasing the subsidy for transit and active transportation seems a far better solution than building parking until the roads become so clogged that commuters turn to alternatives in disgust. I'm just not that excited about misery by design.

by David C on Jun 27, 2009 8:30 pm • link • report