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mmirate t1_jbeb8b2 wrote

Reply to comment by proteus94 in Manchester: Pearl Street parking lot apartment building heads to ZBA by BlackJesus420

While parking minimums can be bad, the developer choosing to put adequate parking on her development can easily be a wise choice. Specifically, doing so means the development will be attractive to a much bigger pool of prospective tenants, i.e. those who aren't necessarily content to spend all of their time inside a shithole.

Increased demand means higher price which means the developer will actually make money by developing which means the developer will actually develop instead of doing something else with her life.

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megagem t1_jbeptmz wrote

Cars are the entire reason Manchester is a shithole.

Cars only support low density housing due to their space inefficiency and create a constituency with a strong incentive to protect unearned subsidies (free or below market parking, free use of road capacity, pollution, etc.). This drives up home prices, locks people into the most expensive transit mode, creates social issues like homelessness, and blocks most attempts to address any of it.

Manchester needs a dramatic reduction in parking and road space for cars to make other modes of travel safe and effective. Walking, cycling, and personal electric vehicles like scooters are the obvious best-in-class options in a city that lacks the population to support real public transit, but they're severely underused because cars are given priority on literally all roads, making them hostile places for anything else.

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mmirate t1_jbepzg4 wrote

Cars are the entire reason that people can live in cheap middle-o'-nowhere areas and work in one of several possible mutually-competing not-so-cheap maximally-centralized areas. If you get rid of cars, or make it impossible to drive a car into the centralized areas to work, then you will make life unprofitable for a lot of people.

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