Parking

Urban Areas Should Have Significantly Less Parking. Fortunately, the CodeNEXT draft reduces parking requirements in many places. It does not go far enough.

Resources

• The Economist: "Don't Let People Park For Free"
• Strong Towns: "End Parking Minimums"
• Freakonomics: "Parking Is Hell"
• CityLab: "Parking Minimums Create Too Many Parking Spots"
• The Economist: "The Perilous Politics of Parking"
• Slate: "Free Parking Isn't Free -- Parking Mandates are Strangling American Cities"
• Transportation Research (academic): The Trouble With Minimum Parking Requirements
• Obama Whitehouse: Housing Development Toolkit (includes other issues as well as parking)
• CityLab: The Strongest Case Yet That Excessive Parking Causes More Driving

The Problem

Parking is the problem. You all know that, so in one paragraph, it takes up space, it encourages unhealthy lifestyles, carbon pollution, smog, hours spent in traffic. From a constructability perspective, there are MANY examples where a new unit just doesn’t get built because the parking won’t fit.

Recommendations

Comment	Page #
Eliminate all parking requirements everywhere. Of course, if you don’t do that, see below.
Eliminate parking requirements within a ¼ mile of an Imagine Austin Corridor.
Eliminate parking requirements within a ½ mile of an urban rail station
Eliminate parking requirements within ¼ mile of a street with planned or existing 15-minute or better bus frequency.
Eliminate parking requirements in the urban core
Ensure the base zoning for the UNO overlay is T6, so that it has no parking requirements OR modify the UNO overlay to waive parking requirements
Reduce parking requirements by ½ for forms with two to ten units OR waive them for small implementations, similar to how commercial is handled in the draft code. Allow parking on street to count toward parking requirements for any that can fit on street in front of the property