Climate Town
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2023–2025
31:39 · 1.9M views · Jul 17, 2023
Climate Town traces the history of American parking minimums, how they came from shaky research and ITE guides, and how they shape zoning, cities and housing costs. It is a long, comedic video essay.
Recommended as a fun but well-researched explanation of why parking requirements are arbitrary and harmful.
9 comments from Hacker News
This is a good video about the history behind idiotic American zoning laws and parking minimums. this video It was a mess of utopian central planning, good intentions, private capture, bad science, corruption, bad incentives, and never looking back and fixing it. At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums this video Noise pollution [LINK] Infrastructure strain [LINK] More on Infrastructure and Sprawl [LINK] Articles: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: [LINK] The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
Parking minimum requirements are usually handled at the local level. Parking minimum recomendations were somewhat standardized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers,(ITE). So whenever city councils around the country decide to prioritize car usage over walking and public transit, and obligated to guarantee people a place to store a car, they often turn to the ITE's guides. That said, the ITE's parking minimums guides are themselves kind of arbitrary. And the guides absolutely assume that practically everyone is traveling by car, and maybe (!!) that's not a great assumption to build on. A YouTube channel called Climate Town created a fun and well-researched video recently on the topic. this video
Market forces would be nice, but actually the minimums are completely overestimated. Climate Town had a good video about it this video Tl;dr old low quality research, bad stats, lead to numbers that don't make sense, but in many places are still enforced; overbuiling led to larger distances incentivising more driving and acting against small commerce areas.
Mandatory parking minimums in American are insane. The rules for them are a joke and just made up at random with little justification for them other than trust us bro . Climatetown has a good, if long, video on it: this video