Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town on HackerTube: recommended by 6 Hacker News commenters across 5 separate months, 2023–2025.
explainer · evergreen
Climate Town traces the history of American parking minimums, how they came from shaky research and ITE guides, and how they shape zoning, cities and housing costs. It is a long, comedic video essay.
Recommended as a fun but well-researched explanation of why parking requirements are arbitrary and harmful.
“This is a good video about the history behind idiotic American zoning laws and parking minimums.”
9 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
This is a good video about the history behind idiotic American zoning laws and parking minimums. ▶ this video It was a mess of utopian central planning, good intentions, private capture, bad science, corruption, bad incentives, and never looking back and fixing it. At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
in “Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars” · View on HN
This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums ▶ this video Noise pollution [link] Infrastructure strain [link] More on Infrastructure and Sprawl [link] Articles: [link] [link] [link] Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: [link] The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
in “Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"” · View on HN
Market forces would be nice, but actually the minimums are completely overestimated. Climate Town had a good video about it ▶ this video Tl;dr old low quality research, bad stats, lead to numbers that don't make sense, but in many places are still enforced; overbuiling led to larger distances incentivising more driving and acting against small commerce areas.
in “Why is it so hard for the U.S. to build quality transit?” · View on HN
Mandatory parking minimums in American are insane. The rules for them are a joke and just made up at random with little justification for them other than trust us bro . Climatetown has a good, if long, video on it: ▶ this video
in “Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees” · View on HN
Parking minimum requirements are usually handled at the local level. Parking minimum recomendations were somewhat standardized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers,(ITE). So whenever city councils around the country decide to prioritize car usage over walking and public transit, and obligated to guarantee people a place to store a car, they often turn to the ITE's guides. That said, the ITE's parking minimums guides are themselves kind of arbitrary. And the guides absolutely assume that practically everyone is traveling by car, and maybe (!!) that's not a great assumption to build on. A YouTube channel called Climate Town created a fun and well-researched video recently on the topic. ▶ this video
in “Asphalt Wasteland: Maybe parking does explain the world” · View on HN
On a related note, minimum parking requirements are hilariously bad (e.g. including gems like laws based on a trend line fudged between two data points): ▶ this video
in “Minimum-Lot-Size Regulations Limit Housing Supply in Texas” · View on HN
A minimum amount of parking spots per patron capacity. So a bar with 60 people capacity must have 15 parking spaces. [0] Usually parking minimums are WAY too high in required parking spaces to make sense in most cases. Which leads to stuff like a arena having 5x the land area be parking than what is taken up by the arena itself. [1] 0: [link] (this is for harrison, ohio, just happened to be the first result I found. it's under commercial -> "Tavern, bar, club, lodge, and dance hall.") 1: ▶ this video
in “Shortest-possible walking tour to 81,998 bars in South Korea” · View on HN
> Shortages of buildings are not the only reason that property prices can be high. It pretty much is - everything else is window dressing. Pretty much every single city in China is 3-10x more dense than any area in the US, so lack of land is a reason I find continually uncompelling. Our lack of density, zoning practices, NIMBY attitudes and car dependency all contribute to this, with the result being a lack of construction. Tokyo has been and continues to be affordable for anyone who wants to live there by building: [link] Here's a grad student on tiktok who does good, well-sourced analysis on this front (he has an entire playlist on the issue of vacancy rates given how frequently it comes up): [link] Article on zoning law changes in CA and how municipalities have put out estimates for how much they should build and then consistently, for decades, not even come close to meeting them: [link] There's endless amounts of info on this front - look up strongtowns, YIMBY, parking minimums and associated issues ( ▶ this video ), japanese vs. american zoning policy ( [link] )...
in “Priced out of home ownership” · View on HN
These maps provide graphic evidence of how parking lots “eat” U.S. cities: [link] America has paid a steep price for parking: [link] The force that shapes everything around us: Parking: [link] Parking Laws Are Strangling America: ▶ this video Austin Preparing To End Parking Mandates Citywide in 2023: [link]
in “The High Cost of Free Parking” · View on HN