An area that large numbers of people can easily drive to whenever they want and find parking wherever they please isn’t a “central city”. It’s an exurban outlet mall.
It appears that San Jose has figured out that the people who refuse to engage with a center-city area unless they can always haul their flabby asses into it in a nearly-empty car and easily park right at their destination are not going to be any use for actually revitalizing the center city anyway.
Another aspect here is that non-shared parking is just inefficient. Businesses have different needs at different times of day; you can use less land for the same capacity by just sharing the lots. Can’t do that when each business is required to have their own spaces.
Of course, in practice, when parking gets scarce, people tend to park where it’s available–in the nearest McDonalds or whatever. They all have signs about “parking is reserved for customers only”, so there’s a certain risk. Either way, it’s dumb. If you really must cater to car users, put in public lots and charge businesses proportionally.
Yes, tell those “flabby-assed” drivers to take their business elsewhere, and you can have a roaring success like Chicago’s State Street Mall and similar ventures in many other cities.
That’s not to say that the concept can’t work in certain circumstances, but showing contempt for suburban visitors and others for whom public transit is not a convenient and reliable option, is probably not a consistent recipe for municipal revitalization.
Part of me thinks that businesses should be able to decide for themselves how much parking they need, and if they put in too little, that’s their problem. But on the other hand… There’s a large… complex (not sure precisely what to call it-- In includes a dance club, multiple restaurants, recreational sports facilities, etc.) that was recently built near my place, without enough parking. My street used to have parking only on one side, and that used only occasionally, but any more, on a Friday night, there’s bumper to bumper parking on both sides. Which narrows the street enough that it’s very difficult to get traffic through both ways. Clearly, something should be done about that, though I’m not sure what.
Very true. When I lived in Montana, my church co-owned a parking lot with the bank next door, since there was almost no overlap in the usage patterns.
Apologies If I missed it, but I think nobody here has talked about the reality that municipal governments have constituencies. Let’s look at it from their pov.
Who complains to/puts pressure on/wants attention from government? Everybody. By definition everybody will have differing, competing, and contradictory demands.
Businesses always want to maximize access to their businesses at the least cost to themselves. Neighborhoods always want to maximize openness and access. Car-owners want freedom to move their cars. Non-owners want public transit to be convenient. Everybody wants the costs of maintenance pushed off onto others.
How these get balanced is the definition of local politics. Businesses used to win almost all the time until neighborhoods learned to unionize. Nobody calls it that, but that’s what happened when they started banding into pressure groups. Turns out that concentrations of locals beat individual businesses and citywide Chambers of Commerce. But when businesses start going under the nervousness spreads across groups.
Minimum parking requirements started as a way to appease across groups. They make some sense. An animal grooming business obviously attracts fewer customers per square foot than a restaurant so doesn’t need as many parking spaces. Everything else means that somebody wins and somebody loses.
The notion that society collectively has interests that can’t be expressed by local groups is relatively new. Our auto culture developed before that notion became widespread. Both cities and suburbs are the result of responding to local interests. People are now trying to turn the world upside-down and reverse decades of car-related decisions for the benefit of society at large. Maybe we shouldn’t be totally surprised that success is sporadic.
Empty?
I lived in San Jose for over 20 years and this *endless empty parking lots" you talk about must have been in another dimension or reality. I was also a City Commissioner for almost 20 years.
San Jose’s mass transit is a joke. I mean, I have seen worse, but the Light rail is surface in the downtown etc areas, which means it crawls. And it doesn’t even go to the airport (the airport lobbied against light rail as they needed the parking $$).
Other than the dead Downtown, no part of SJ is walkable.
San Jose has already killed it’s Downtown in order to help the Super Mall. No parking, and flocks of meter maids who swoop also. I lived there.
Oddly, they have done this- there is not enuf parking at…BART. In other words, you can’t get to BART to take mass transit. So stupid.
I suspect he thinks that San Jose is a lot smaller than it is.
I live in Fremont, and used to work at Oracle in Agnews. (Santa Clara officially, but close to the border.) I live fairly close to the BART, but before they extended it it would have taken me an hour and a half at least to get to work, including 2 or 3 transfers. Our empty parking lot was sure useful. Not to mention that I’d never find parking at the Fremont BART station at any reasonable hour. People, they expect you to car pool to get to mass transit. Or show up at 6 am.
How was this law enforced. Japan town seemed to have a common lot, and certainly no parking associated with each restaurant.
Six years ago just before I retired I drove past a crapload of new condo/apartment construction. (Around First Street near Cisco.) I’m just glad I was gone before all the people moved in there - the bad traffic would have been worse.
Quite the opposite. San Jose has only a small downtown compared to the rest of it. It’s these outer areas that pay the highest cost for excessive parking.
Excessive parking makes traffic worse. It lowers density and makes public transportation less viable. It spreads things out to be less walkable. And it increases the distance between places so that cars have to drive more miles to get to the same destination.
I live pretty much exactly in the place you mentioned. And while my exact location is reasonably high density, nearby are endless light commercial/industrial zones with huge, empty parking lots. There’s a post office nearby with a lot that I’ve never seen more than 20% occupied, even at the busiest times of year. I’d walk there if it were just a little closer–which it might be if it weren’t for all the mandated parking lots.
Yes, that was insane. They actually claimed it was a Good Thing as it “would encourage people to take mass transit” 
What public transportation? SJ or Santa Clara is not walkable at all.
Well, yes, since the building is likely not occupied. SJ had a terrible issue with office and light commercial space with low occupancy rates.
Because it’s so low density. Increasing the density makes places more walkable. Walkable places don’t have huge parking lots separating every business you might wish to visit.
Something has to change first. But this isn’t even a chicken-and-egg problem; we have a clear example of wasted space, all because of some arbitrary decisions made many decades ago. Thankfully, it appears to be fixed now.
I’m looking at the BART stations on the line currently being extended through San Jose (at stupendous cost due to bad decisions like putting stations in jumbo-sized tunnels that are so deep they can only be reached by huge banks of elevators) and I’m not really seeing this lack of parking. 1,500 spaces, 1,600 spaces, 2,000 spaces, 2,000 spaces… It’s like having a couple of Walmart parking lots on what should be prime real estate, and unlike a Walmart, a lot of these spaces are dedicated to housing a single car for the whole workday.
Each one of those cars is sitting there and not using up gas and emitting pollution from being driven into the city. Plus, they reduce congestion on the way. Don’t knock it.
I once had to drive into the city - which I was not happy about because there was not a single parking space at the BART station at 8:30 am. This was pre-Lyft, but still, why pay a ride share company because there is no parking?
The real problem are local ordinances that have limited housing density. The state has passed regulations requiring that higher buildings near transit centers be allowed. The cities object, mostly. Where I live people object strenuously to tall (5 story) buildings - despite being told that our city can’t hire police because of high housing costs.
The newer places in San Jose have some decent height at least.
I rather think that people leaving their new apartments to drive to work at 8 am will make traffic worse than it was when these were empty lots.
It’s certainly interesting in a historical sense how these laws came about–the different interests involved, how they expanded their power, what compromises they ultimately hammered out, and so on. But whatever the case, the assumptions that they baked in should no longer be considered valid. Not only has the city itself changed drastically since the laws were made, but we have decades more understanding of how cities work in the first place. Not to mention new external factors like climate change.
Well, we’ll just have to see how much effect this has. Maybe it’ll be negligible. But at least it’s a move in the right direction.
Failed early pedestrian-mall experiments from forty years ago aren’t exactly the most useful diagnostic for how modern cities should attempt to cope with the continuing social and environmental damage inflicted by American ubiquitous car culture.
Sorry bro, didn’t mean to trigger you with that one sarcastic phrase making fun of the learned helplessness and entitlement inculcated in so many Americans by the aforesaid car culture.
The fundamental problem with most American center cities is not intrinsic to public transit, and it’s not that sustainability advocates are hurting the tender feelings of “suburban visitors” with their mean old sarcasm. The fundamental problem is that American society is stuck in a suicidal habit of bending over backwards to subsidize unhealthy and unsustainably wasteful transportation patterns.
Cities have been obstinately trying for decades to magically turn dense downtowns into places that will be consistently appealing and convenient for huge numbers of car-addicted “suburban visitors”. It hasn’t worked, and there’s no way it can work.
The sooner people start focusing on the simple fact that cities just can’t support unlimited amounts of low-density car commuting, and stop getting distracted by the indignation of car-addicted drivers outraged by the idea of not being able to have traffic-free roads and ample parking for their mostly empty climate-controlled rolling mini-homes whenever and wherever they want it, the sooner we can turn our attention to municipal revitalization ideas that actually can work.
Or, we can just continue trying to repurpose cities and transportation in general for the benefit of car-addicted suburbanites, and continuing to fail, thereby making cities worse for everyone. Which is probably where we’re headed, since it seems highly unlikely that the stranglehold that the automobile and fossil-fuel industries have on American society can be broken by any humanly possible amount of civic solidarity and environmental responsibility.
The issue is, at least in the stretch of Dallas I’m thinking of, that there are safety and sanitation issues that come from having people park on residential streets to go bar-hopping. People get mugged, people puke and piss everywhere, and so forth. I wouldn’t want that if I lived near there.
I look at it this way… providing parking is part of the cost of doing business. Shunting commercial parking onto residential streets as the default parking mode is basically getting something for nothing for the businesses. I’m all for minimum parking space requirements, but I don’t think they need to be sized to accommodate the maximum parking needs. Maybe aim to provide 30-40% of that- maybe aim to provide enough parking for a Saturday afternoon during normal times (i.e. not World Cup, Super Bowl, etc…).
The issue as I see it is that the parking requirements aren’t prima facie bad, they’re just mis-sized.
If the city (or state) does not want to attract cars, it’s not like there is absolutely nothing they can do. How about slapping people with the aforementioned significant congestion charges? People understand those well enough, even if they do not care about civic solidarity or environmental responsibility. A $2 per gallon road tax might also discourage people from driving not only downtown, but also anywhere, for no reason.
One trend I’m seeing in a few places in my city is parking lots in run-down malls being used to build new apartment buildings, both rentals and condos. Makes better use of the space, and will probably revitalize the malls too, since there will be a couple of hundred new residents literally in their parking lots. There’s at least two that are almost complete, and I’ve seen talk of several more in the works.
But businesses change…
That animal grooming place in a strip mall gets maybe 5 customers per hour. But it closes down, and the same location is rented to a “human grooming place” -a barber shop that gets 10 customers per hour, which then closes and is replaced by a mom-and-pop taco restaurant that gets 20 customers per hour , with spikes of 50 customers per hour at lunchtime. Now instead of 5 , you need 50 parking spaces
Two major points.
One is that cities are the inverse of suburbs. Both their developments defer to our car culture but they are unlike in almost every other way. Think the difference between Euclidean geometry and spherical geometry. Applying the rules of one for the other gets the wrong answer. San Jose is not a city; it is a suburb. (I’ve seen the “downtown.”) We’re talking about two separate subjects and the examples provided belong in one category or the other.
The other is that car culture is much like fossil fuel culture. It badly needs to be undone, but doing so is like starting with a continent-sized knotted rug and turning it back into a ball of yarn while people are standing on it. Even with many hands the process will take almost forever.
Small steps are useful. I’m grateful for each and they seem to be proliferating. There’s no magic wand out there that will simply reverse the past. Nevertheless, people have to look at each of these small steps and realize that they will stick around for another 50 years. How will they fit into the new world of changes? Can they all be compatible with one another without causing a new set of problems? Will the changes coming in 20 years and 40 years show them to be wrong solution?
Nobody knows and yet something has to be done.
I hate car culture as much as anyone, but the emphasis should be on improving public transportation rather than removing parking. In my area the no-parking advocates seem to believe that if you remove parking then people who would have driven will instead take public transportation. The problem as I see it is that public transportation doesn’t run frequently, at all hours and in all locations.
As an example of the problem, my eye doctor, who is located in the city of Boston, will be moving because two large towers are going to up nearby (one with offices and one a hotel), neither of which will provide ANY parking, and a nearby mid-sized garage is being torn down and replaced with condos.
I think that public transportation should be extended before development takes place. Unfortunately it’s too late to do that, and thanks to our capitalist system, it probably never will.
