On shortest day of year, Calif reaches 100% WindWaterSolar for part of 219th day in 2025 Fossil gas down 37.4% in '25 v '23 Batteries up 183% v '23 PV up 39.4% v '23 Wind up 4.4% v '23 51.7% of all in-state electricity from WWS v 44.7% in '23 CA will be 100% WWS 24/7 by 2039

A little good news from the world’s fourth largest economy: “From 2022 to 2023, GHG emissions per capita in California fell by 2.8% while inflation-adjusted GDP per capita grew by 2.3% over the same time period, demonstrating that climate ambition and economic growth can complement each other.”😎

And for the skeptics, $1 million in revenue in one year from a single (popular!) street in Austin where paid parking was fully implemented. The revenue from 2025 is *even* higher. www.axios.com/local/austin...

Removing minimum parking mandates pays off.😊 In #Bellingham, “The housing nonprofit is nearing completion of LaFreniere Court, 18 permanently affordable, net-zero energy homes in Birchwood. Lathrop said the project had benefited from…”

It looks like North America could learn a lot from Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, about how to make high-rise housing more affordable.

In many advanced nations that have better fire safety records than the United States and Canada, construction costs per square foot do NOT increase as density increases. If US planners want to make housing more affordable, they should fix our mediocre building codes.

This was literally the code requirement for basement or cellar dwelling spaces in NYC - imposing $000,000s of costs on the legalization of an existing unit - until recent legislative reforms. Important fixes to make

I agree! Here’s an example of a local building code amendment in San Francisco that never should’ve been adopted in the first place. How many more amendments like this are in place around the state?

SF's refusal to charge for parking on Sunday is so mysterious. It's like a blue law for bad transit www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/m...

“Their ceilings were 7 feet high — an acceptable minimum height for residential space under state code, but 6 inches too low to meet San Francisco’s more stringent requirement — meaning the units were “unwarranted” and couldn’t legally be rented.“ 🎁 link: www.sfchronicle.com/personal-fin...

“A fear that we heard often was, 'This policy change is going to cause havoc in our streets, there's going to be no parking, folks aren't going to be able to move around,' but that is absolutely not what we've seen." – #Edmonton City Counselor Ashley Salvador

When you think of a New England downtown, you probably don’t think about a parking lot. But maybe you should. According to analysis done by CT Parking Reform, 29% of the land in CT's charming downtowns is devoted to storing cars. We can change this. Get involved at the link in bio.

If Seattle and Washington state adopted a good European building code, how would that affect hard costs? My guess is that costs for some elements (stairs, elevators, etc.) would decline substantially. Lower hard costs, in turn, often lead to lower soft costs.

Modern #roundabouts, like this one, are unfazed by power outages. America needs more roundabouts and fewer signals.

California's approach to risk is incoherent. I can't choose an apartment building with an elevator unless it fits a stretcher laid flat but I can legally ski down insanely-steep, rocky mountainsides where, when I break my neck, reaching the hospital will require a long, bumpy, painful toboggan ride

Posting is a good follow-up to praxis. My routine is: Win consulting gig. Re-read research. Make slides summarizing research. Present slides to electeds. Post slides to inform advocates elsewhere. Even if the place that hired us doesn’t embrace all our recommendations, they may help someone else.🙂

Salt Lake City has reduced minimum lot size requirements and minimum parking mandates. It’s an effort to make it possible to actually build multifamily homes in zones where they have been allowed in theory but blocked in practice by onerous rules.

I don’t know exactly what it means to gazette a map, but it’s apparently something Australians do that can make good things happen.

Here is my new favorite metric for judging maturity levels in Planning.

“In 2023 alone, Boston's planning agency approved 69 large development proposals that would build enough parking to store up to 8,053 more cars into the city – enough to fill all eight lanes of the Southeast Expressway (I-93) with bumper-to-bumper traffic from the Neponset River to downtown #Boston“

Now that NITA is signed, Chicago should go ahead amend the municipal code to clearly and uniformly eliminate off-street parking requirements citywide. No good reason to keep the entire parking and loading section around as-is when it only applies to a few scattered blocks on the edge of town.

Illinois‘ new People Over Parking law is going to reduce rents and home prices for so many people.😀🎉🎉🎉

Is there a single school district anywhere in California with overcrowded schools? All the impact fees that are based on the assumption that more homes will require more schools should be reconsidered (and probably repealed).

I do! If you want to learn about the birth of #BART, while enjoying a strangely-hypnotic view from the train operator's perspective, check out this documentary. It was great to see it on the big screen in a packed theater. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Jr...

“Self-driving vehicles could significantly reduce revenue at Des Moines International Airport, CEO Brian Mulcahy told the Des Moines City Council....The airport owns or manages most of the nearby parking, including a 1,122-space ramp that opened this year” How much did that cost? $49 million. Oops!

This is what @parkingreform.org does all day long. I encounter its flagship products (the parking reform map, etc.) in staff reports, articles, videos, conference presentations, the list goes on and on…

A few years ago, I worked for the City of #Cupertino on a plan to convert a dead mall into a mixed-use center with hundreds of homes. Furious neighbors feared it would lead to overcrowded schools. Shortly afterwards, the district announced it would close schools due to falling enrollment.

America's #NIMBY movement is a victim of its own success. It's blocked so many homes that journalists can no longer afford to buy one. If NIMBYs were thinking strategically, they would just buy every reporter a house.

"The oWOW team said it has already proven it can cut costs by using mass timber and prefabricated components at its existing 236-unit #Oakland tower at 1510 Webster Street…. Full floors were installed in as little as one day, at a total cost of about $425,000 per unit."

Congratulations to our friends in Illinois for passing major parking reforms!

"A new book has come out in honor of Donald Shoup, the tireless proponent of parking reform who died this year. The Shoup Doctrine: Essays Celebrating Donald Shoup and Parking Reforms, was published by Routledge/Taylor + Francis and edited by Daniel Hess..."

Different city, same story - Parking requirements + zoning restrictions are hidden barriers to fixing the childcare crisis. Want to make day & adult care more affordable? Eliminate parking mandates, and allow more of these business in every part of your community .

She "is looking to open the Park Ridge Play Lounge children’s play space in one of the retail spaces at 811 Devon Ave....Both spaces don’t have enough off-street parking to meet the current minimum requirements, & there isn’t room to put in more." Parking mandates: bad for kids, bad for business.

If a state law ALLOWS me to build a duplex on a lot I own near transit, the headline should read "Allowing Density near Transit." It should read that even if the state overruled local exclusionary zoning rule that bans duplexes. If the state actually forces me to build a duplex, call it a mandate.

One of the great strengths of the urbanist movement is that many of us have worked as bartenders.

None of Boston’s neighborhoods could be built today if they had to meet modern minimum parking requirements.

In the bad old days, “state officials often asked residents to use less electricity on hot summer days to prevent power outages. But there have been no such alerts since 2022, largely because batteries have allowed California to use its abundant solar power well into the evening.” Progress!😎

"The Little Book of Low-Cost, High-Impact Housing Solutions" identifies six key areas…" They include, “Creating preapproved architectural plans, reducing parking minimums, garage, and other design standards…”

"The Bluegrass Institute today congratulated the Kentucky Housing Task Force for advancing a slate of housing reform measures.... Among the most notable areas of alignment:.... Eliminating or reducing mandatory off‑street parking minimums to maximize land use efficiency."

Thanks to the #SanFrancisco Bay Area’s regional Transit-Oriented Communities Policy, 80 cities around the bay are allowing more housing and removing minimum parking mandates near transit. Little #Cotati is just the latest one.

There's a medium-sized message here on the safety of buildings based on the size of their floorplates and number of stairwells. There's an enormous message here on how important it is for our safety rules to be evidence-based.

Fire protection engineers hired by Minnesota find that an 8-story apartment building with 1 staircase & <=6000 sq. ft. per floor has much lower fire risk than an 8-story code-compliant building with 2 stairs. Why? Maybe it's because a 2-stair building can legally have more than 40,000 sq. ft./floor!

The 12/09 hearing on @councilordurkan.bsky.social's Docket #1061, “Order for a hearing to explore amending the Boston Zoning Code to remove parking minimum requirements for new development," previewed what a 2026 fight to enact the policy might look like. Read more in tmrw's WTR! #bospoli #mapoli

This webinar is 2 years old now, but I’ll bet it’s full of good information. I look forward to watching it! Thanks to @urbanistfromwhk.bsky.social for sharing the link.

“The #Boston City Council wants to spur housing construction by eliminating minimum parking mandates for new residential buildings. Why it matters: Removing these barriers to speedy construction is a growing trend around the region, with the goal of boosting housing supply and cutting costs.”

If your realtor is earning a 3% commission, how much can they make by persuading you to spend an additional $35,000 on something you don’t need?

Working with others to remove minimum parking requirements in New Zealand occupied almost a decade of my life and is a highlight of my career. In the long run, removing MPRs is perhaps one the most important urbanist reforms you can make, up with (de) congestion pricing? Just do it!

Who (besides me) would be interested in learning what happens when an entire nation removes virtually all of its minimum parking mandates? It's now been three years since #NewZealand abolished these costly regulations. What's happened since?

New Zealanders baffled by New York's peculiar customs: