“It’s not like the government is forcing you to buy a car!”
If you live in a city with parking minimums, yes they fucking are.
“It’s not like the government is forcing you to buy a car!”
If you live in a city with parking minimums, yes they fucking are.
The car owners pay for that parking with their road taxes or via parking meters - the small extra cost also serves to discourage those with the choice from driving while not strongly adversely affecting those without a choice
Oh yeah, do they? I believe I pay 36€ for my residential parking permit for two years. Is also not necessary to have everywhere. That is joke money, it discourages nobody.
I was talking about when visiting non-walkable businesses - I pay about double that, but that’s because I have a 0.9l city car and if you had something more polluting it’d be significantly more, plus double for your 2nd+ car. That covers up to around 1km from my flat, which I’d deem walkable, and means people who don’t live locally have to pay even higher rates
Non walkable businesses in europe usually have free parking in my experience. But i visit those rarely since I live downtown, i and most other people living downtown don’t use a car to get around. But it doesn’t make all the cars, including mine, disappear from the streets. The area where I live has no free capacity for parking on public space, so if somebody wants to build apartments or a business park on a formerly barren piece of land, they have to prove that they have reasonable parking facilities for the expected additional demand. Which will be there, that is just reality, not liking cars does not make this go away. 78% of households in Germany own at least one car, and even in the “car free wonderland” Netherlands it is 74% of households.
Apparently the idea, that developers are being forced by regulation to figure out their assumed parking problem for themselves, and not get a free pass to just put the burden onto the public space, is not well liked here. I don’t know anything about the minimum parking regulations in the us, but for all I care it could as well be set to “minimum parking = zero” if it made sense in a specific area. But it needs to be regulated, I don’t think there are many countries where that is not the case, maybe somalia or something. So maybe the regulation in place is bad and unreasonable, but that does not mean that regulating this problem is a bad idea in general.