If a business decides that it doesn’t need parking spots shouldn’t that in theory result in less customers and therefore be a purely capitalist business decision?
Parking minimums are legal requirements on the minimum number of parking spaces businesses and housing are allowed to have. The thing is these laws were developed using shoddy pseudoscience, are extremely arbitrary, and developed with maximum (rather than typical) usage in mind, meaning many developments have oversized parking lots, wasting valuable land. Further, old buildings that predate the parking minimums (and thus don’t have legally sufficient parking) can’t renovate or change usage without being legally required to build new parking, often by buying up a neighboring building and demolishing it to build a parking lot. This exact thing is why so many dense American and Canadian downtowns got bulldozed and turned into parking lots, like in the images below:
I’m guessing, the idea is that you don’t want companies ‘freeloading’ off of public infrastructure and/or the parking lot from the business nextdoor.
Like, if there’s not enough parking outside a store, car people may to some degree decide not to visit that store, but if they do, then they’ll park on surrounding parking lots or streets or walkways.
![[meme] Parking minimums in a nutshell:](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cac0e6ed-5a91-437b-aaef-1206b27cad24.webp){kind=link}
TF is a parking minimum?
If a business decides that it doesn’t need parking spots shouldn’t that in theory result in less customers and therefore be a purely capitalist business decision?
Parking minimums are legal requirements on the minimum number of parking spaces businesses and housing are allowed to have. The thing is these laws were developed using shoddy pseudoscience, are extremely arbitrary, and developed with maximum (rather than typical) usage in mind, meaning many developments have oversized parking lots, wasting valuable land. Further, old buildings that predate the parking minimums (and thus don’t have legally sufficient parking) can’t renovate or change usage without being legally required to build new parking, often by buying up a neighboring building and demolishing it to build a parking lot. This exact thing is why so many dense American and Canadian downtowns got bulldozed and turned into parking lots, like in the images below:
Atlanta
Tulsa
Kansas City
For more in-depth information on the insanity and idiocy that are parking minimums, see this video: https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=KQbU00UPKw5GeNhQ
Those are some depressing examples!
I’m guessing, the idea is that you don’t want companies ‘freeloading’ off of public infrastructure and/or the parking lot from the business nextdoor.
Like, if there’s not enough parking outside a store, car people may to some degree decide not to visit that store, but if they do, then they’ll park on surrounding parking lots or streets or walkways.