Matt Yglesias points to an article about Toronto’s new zoning code. The story is short on details, although the lowering of parking minimums near transit and overall simplification of the code seem like appealing features to Market Urbanists. I did, however, find a blog post from last year about the proposed changes, which has [...]
by Stephen Smith
At the risk of beating the parking theme deader than the Ground Zero Mosque, here are some recent parking-related stories published around the world:
The NYC DOT’s Park Smart program has been called a success in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, and officials are considering making the program permanent and expanding it to more [...]
by Stephen Smith
Donald Shoup and his arguments about free and underpriced parking have been getting quite a bit of press recently, and it looks like Shoup’s hometown of Los Angeles has surpassed San Francisco (with its SFpark initiative) as the largest city in America to adopt some of his proposals:
The yearlong ExpressPark program, slated to begin [...]
by Stephen Smith
Although we at Market Urbanism are big fans of Donald Shoup’s work on parking minimums, we have to admit that rigorous econometric evidence that parking minimums mandate more parking than the market would otherwise supply has been a bit lacking. Randal O’Toole at The Antiplanner quite rightly asks to see empirical proof that parking [...]
by Stephen Smith
Back in February Streetsblog had a good three-part series on planning changes in New York City since the beginning of Michael Bloomberg’s term, and while they had a lot of praise for upzonings that have occurred throughout much of the four urban boroughs, they highlighted minimum parking regulations as the biggest impediment to walkable, [...]
by Stephen Smith
The LA Times reports that Los Angeles is considering “privatizing” ten public parking garages to fill a budget shortfall. The story is, unfortunately, a reminder of how infrastructure “privatization” is often little better than the status quo, and how media reporting of the issue can doom real reform.
Whereas pure privatization would mean selling [...]
Discussing Ithaca, New York’s plan to increase permitted density and reduce parking minimums, I can dig what Matthew Yglesias says :
The distributive impact of parking minimums is to redistribute income from people who don’t own cars to people who do own cars—not to shift income from poor to rich. A rich family will probably have at [...]
Bill Hudnut at the Urban Land Institute wrote a post that attracted some attention at Austin Contrarian and Overhead Wire. Hudnut discusses a different approach to taxing land:
How about restructuring the property tax across America to install a two-tiered system? More tax on those horizontal pieces of empty land and asphalt, less on the buildings. That [...]