East Nashville has gotten three food court type businesses in the past 4 years since we did away with parking requirements. The Wash Lost & Found The Hangout Cafe Parking requirement amounts were never scientific. Allowing business owners to decide how much parking they need is better.

Is your city suffering under America's huge heat dome? Want some relief? Parking lots create massive heat islands. We can do a lot to fix that. If you can, grab a cold drink, find a cool spot, and make a plan to depave your neighborhood. Here are four steps to get started.

🔔🔔RING THE BELLS🔔🔔 Residential Parking Mandates are officially a relic for the history books!! No longer will the tyranny of rules like 3 spaces per studio apt rule Connecticut Wallingford CT out of the gate strong taking a sharpie to its existing rules. Those that embrace this will rue the day

Happy Connecticut Parking Reform day to all who celebrate! 🎉 Starting today: ➡️ no mandates for developments 16 homes and under *statewide* ➡️ right-sizing parking for 16+ developments More homes (especially more infill homes!), less unused parking 👏

One of the databases that my students use for their #dataviz project is the @worldresources.bsky.social electric school bus database. This is an outstanding use case!

Before the invention of exclusionary single-family house zoning, great neighborhoods — housing thousands of people from all walks of life — grew up around great universities. We should make that legal again.

Parked but not idle: The buses “will charge up their nearly 200-kilowatt-hour batteries overnight, when the power supply is at its cleanest & cheapest, then send energy back to the grid from 4 pm to 7 pm on days when the grid is strained. The district will earn revenue for the power it shares…”

How do you build a bipartisan coalition to pass sweeping parking reforms? #NorthCarolina shows how.

All ten of the top ten US cities with the lowest shares of people driving to work alone have removed or substantially reduced minimum parking mandates. This is not a coincidence.

North Carolina just passed the most comprehensive parking reform to date! H162 eliminates *all* off-street parking mandates for nearly the entire state (everywhere but along the Atlantic coast) Amazing work by the Catawba Riverkeeper org, which initiated the bill as a water conservation measure!

🚨 BREAKING 🚨 North Carolina legislature passes most comprehensive parking mandate reforms in the country! Water conservation groups and proponents of small businesses and main streets come together for a bipartisan success story!

Economists agree that externalities exist, but disagree about whether they are positive or negative.

If you want to keep your family safe, reduce the risks that are most likely to kill. My brother & his neighbors got their streets rebuilt to stop speeding. Why focus on streets, instead of sprinklers? Because: 1️⃣Traffic deaths are common & fire deaths are rare...

People who defend minimum parking mandates & exclusionary zoning deserve a good deal of blame for #childcare deserts.

“Everyone says they support housing somewhere, somehow, someday. Then when a real project moves forward under the law, the goalposts move.” — Larry Mazzola Jr., President, San Francisco Building Trades Council

"Lui pointed out that another reason Emeryville’s housing market has cooled is that potential buyers have a good number of options. The city, one of California’s fastest-growing, has long encouraged housing construction, making it a bit easier for buyers to shop for deals." #AffordableHousing

California lawmakers could clear the way for thousands of new homes near transit by clearly defining the term "major transit stop." UCLA scholars find an expansive definition legalizes apartments & removes parking mandates on ~1,900,000 acres, compared to ~600,000 acres under a minimal definition.

In #Toronto in 2021, "city staff estimated that a single parking spot in a new building adds anywhere between $48,000 to $160,000 to the cost of a new project."

This is a great first step. Here in Oakland, we are doing neighborhood traffic circles and curb extensions as well. A friendly challenge to our neighbors across on the foggy side of the Bay!

" #SanFrancisco neighborhood groups will be allowed to place planters and murals in some daylighted intersection corners under a new 24-month pilot program approved by the city’s transit board, an effort meant to turn no-parking zones into more protected public spaces."

"Cities that lift minimum parking requirements may find that the overall change in parking supply is modest, while the added flexibility can make new development more feasible and allow land to be used more efficiently." - UCLA Center for Parking Policy escholarship.org/uc/item/8df4...

"For Holyday, the argument is simple. Since council stripped itself of the power to require developers to include parking in new buildings, more cars are showing up on suburban streets, forcing residents to compete for scarce road space." To avoid this kind of backlash, manage curb parking well!

From coast-to-coast, minimum parking mandates are in decline. In America's capital, the Zoning Commission has removed minimum parking mandates in neighborhoods along several new bus corridors "including routes serving Anacostia, Southeast D.C. and Northeast D.C.”

In other good news, the decline and fall of minimum parking mandates continued this week.🧵 "In an effort to add more housing, #Worcester is considering ending a mandate that requires a certain number of parking spaces be built with new developments."

"'Parking reform might not sound like a water quality issue, but impervious surfaces, like parking lots, are the leading cause of water pollution in North Carolina,' says Ryan Carter, Catawba Riverkeeper's policy director." www.axios.com/local/charlo...

A new study by researchers at Yale concludes that poorly-connected street networks, with thousands of cul-de-sacs feeding into a few through streets, worsen pollution, social isolation, and sedentary behavior.

In 1992, Donald Shoup's ideas were correct but unpopular. The little band of reformers who agreed with him (like me) were lonely & frustrated. We're not lonely anymore! After passing the North Carolina's House by a vote of 107-0, the "state Senate voted 44 to 1 to pass House Bill 162 on Tuesday."

Westport P&Z rejected an early childhood center/daycare (and a court upheld!) because it would “only” have 24 parking spaces, not the required 32.4. As always, parking mandates are arbitrary junk. We need childcare way more than fake parking numbers www.ctinsider.com/news/article...

Last session, a bipartisan bill to eliminate minimum parking requirements statewide passed the NC House unanimously. On Tuesday, a similar bill eliminating most mandatory parking minimums passed the NC Senate 44–1. The bill heads to the House for concurrence. 📍North Carolina

“…prominent area organizations opposed the bridge. The Sierra Club feared it would cause environmental damage… Operating in one of America's busiest ports, local shippers fretted that bridge construction would negatively affect their businesses.“

LA's poorly-designed transfer tax sparked a revolt that's put a draconian anti-tax initiative on the ballot. If passed, it will let a 1/3 minority block taxes for crucial services. I wrote my Assemblymember to support AB736, a fair compromise that'll torpedo the initiative. You should too!

Are you a timid, milquetoast planner, afraid to get ahead of the curve? Good news! Removing minimum parking mandates is now a boring, mainstream, centrist solution. www.usnews.com/news/new-yor...

Worcester's "city manager also called for the removal of parking minimums — a mandate that requires a certain number of parking spaces to be built alongside new developments. The city’s housing production plan states that parking minimums are directly linked to limitations on land development."

Maryland's "other new law encourages new housing development around transit-oriented locations by restricting parking minimums and other local decisions in specific situations."

"In recent years, NH has enacted a series of housing reforms that are starting to show results. Allowing accessory dwelling units is one example. These units, often created within or alongside existing homes, provide a relatively low-cost way to add supply. Eliminating parking minimums is another."

Who is the most prominent living supporter of minimum parking mandates, in either academia or professional practice? Since the 2012 death of Paul Box, I've rarely if ever seen an article in academic or professional journals that supports them.

BREAKING: North Carolina Senate overwhelmingly rejects harmful pseudoscience.

The beautiful thing about charging for parking is that more motorists mean more revenue (instead of just traffic jams, crashes, car alarms, and honking horns).

"It is the one thing the mayor and all 50 alderpersons agree on: The infamous 2008 parking meter deal is awful." Has a city ever sold its future parking revenues in return for an upfront cash payment – and not regretted it?

What's the most popular dance in Bend, Oregon? There's a good chance it's the two-hour shuffle. Bend gives away its best parking: the curb spaces in front of the most popular shops and restaurants. These spots are easy to find, easy to access, closest to the destination, and perceived to be safest.

If your hospital plan is in financial trouble, in part because a proposed garage "isn't fully funded," try raising fees for all the EXISTING parking spaces to a level high enough to pay for the new garage. There's a good chance that demand will fall so much that the new garage won't be needed.

“CEO Tina Lee told the Chronicle that the opening required navigating 66 separate state regulations. Electrical, utility and construction issues pushed the opening date back twice.” If it were easier to open stores, maybe we’d have fewer vacant stores. I hope a journalist does a story about this!

A single local building code amendment apparently raised the cost of legalizing two ADUs by a million dollars. Under CA's Residential Code, "habitable spaces like bedrooms must have ceiling heights of at least 7 feet, which Roberts’ two studios do." But SF's code requires "7 feet, 6 inches." 🎁link:

Some details about unbundled parking: caanet.org/governor-sig...

Senakw will be “more than 6,000 housing units in towers as high as 58 stories — and only a few hundred parking spots.… The project will also be carbon-neutral once completed, using a new system that will recover heat from the city’s sewer mains, which run beneath the buildings.” 🎁 link:

In 2018, @scottwiener.bsky.social introduced multiple bills as a young legislator. SB827, legalizing apartments near transit, drew headlines & huge opposition. It failed. #SB828, a very consequential bill that massively increased the # of homes that rich cities had to allow, went almost unnoticed.🧵

Only "about 20% of homes need some kind of electrical upgrade before installing an EV charger." But once "with 100-amp or older 60-amp panels may need an upgrade or workaround solution." If you've added EV charging to a home with a <=100-amp panel, how did you do it? What were the costs & benefits?

The state of #Massachusetts wants to build 180 homes on a surplus state parking lot. The town of Wellesley is trying to block them. They prefer 5 acres of asphalt. Once again, we see that local control of land use delivers too many homes for cars & too few homes for people.

"The town of #Wellesley, #Massachusetts is suing the state over plans to build housing on a surface parking lot..." If you are tired of reading headlines like this one, you should join @parkingreform.org. I am, and I did!

Federal courts overturned Berkeley's first-in-the-nation ban on fossil gas appliances in new buildings, but #SanFrancisco has adopted a workaround that's persuaded virtually all new construction to go all electric: of 387 building permits submitted, just 8 have received exemptions. 🎁link: