L.A. Council Committee Approves Step toward Eliminating Parking Requirements - Streetsblog Los Angeles
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Off-street parking at new developments is not going away. If the city doesn't require parking, developers will still build parking.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles City Council Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee approved a motion that could lay the foundation for ending harmful parking requirements for new development.

This could lead to developers right-sizing parking based on what makes sense for a specific project, instead of current one-size-fits-all city codes that apply to both the urban core and far-flung suburbs. Eliminating city parking requirements does not mean that all, or even most, new development will have no parking. It means that parking will be tailored to specific needs for each project.

Many Streetsblog readers know that parking mandates increase housing costs, including rents. Experts term these generally outdated excessive requirements a pseudoscience. Eliminating parking requirements is good for walkability, housing (quantity, affordability, and streamlining approvals), and climate.

  • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPM
    1·
    20 days ago

    What about changing the parking requirements to be vehicle agnostic? Require construction projects to have parking for X people, rather than X cars, and consider the requirement met if it’s a mix of bicycle parking, cargo bicycle parking, and car parking.

    this is already how most parking mandates work (they’re not for X amount of cars, they’re obliged to have a set ratio of parking spaces to people), and changing it in this manner would almost certainly lead to no change because Los Angeles is extremely car-dependent and sprawling, and bicycling is only useful with actual pro-bike infrastructure which largely doesn’t exist.

    • Hirom@beehaw.org
      1·
      20 days ago

      Requirements do specify a number of ~8x18 ft cat parking spaces. The regulation mention the space needed to park a car, rather than the word “car”, to make things precise and consistent. See https://www.munistandards.com/ca/los-angles/parking-requirements/

      Good point on the overall transport infrastructure. Parking is necessary but not sufficient. Parking requirements and urban planning should work in pair to make the city human and bicycle-friendly. It won’t happen overnight, so better start soon.

      Requiring car parking space around a building means there’s more space between building, ie buildings are further part. So the parking requirement itself contribute to city sprawl.