"Developers do not need to be told a minimum to build, they will build what the market will bear because if they underpark their buildings no one will rent units or office space."
The problem with this boils down to
1) That ain't exactly true; in sufficiently-dense cities people will still rent spaces in underparked buildings
2) If you underestimate the demand for parking, it's way more difficult to add parking after-the-fact
I do agree that parking lots are absurd wastes of space, though. They're cheaper than parking garages, sure, but they suck on pretty much every other metric. Parking garages are much more space-efficient, and if every building was built atop a parking garage (even just one or two levels), that'd cut down significantly on both the need for parking lots and the need for street parking.
1 and 2 are fine, because if enough people need parking spaces then someone might develop their lot with a parking garage that there is market demand for.
Structured parking is extremely expensive; 19K per spot for an aboveground structure [1]. I've heard 30K per spot for underground parking. And parking garages are generally terrible for the streetscape and building, and are difficult to convert to other uses if say, autonomous cars get rid of the need for it later on.
If you're building parking based on demand for free parking you'll never build enough unless you want buildings too far apart to walk to the bus stop or their house, which just drives the need for parking up. Pricing parking is a very effective way of managing spaces so that some proportion of them is always free; in my current city, Seattle, new buildings cannot hand parking to residents or workers free with the unit or job, since many people are car-free and all bundling does is socialize the cost of parking. As a result even with no parking requirements many garages are overbuilt (out of town developers not used to developing for local conditions) and the well located ones do a brisk trade in monthly passes and day parking while the residents are out parking their cars at their job.
> someone might develop their lot with a parking garage that there is market demand for.
My point is that if there's market demand for it, it's usually because something's already built there and it's too late to build a parking garage without tearing stuff down. The exception is if you started with a parking lot.
> parking garages are generally terrible for the streetscape and building
Eh. A lot of SF buildings seem to have no trouble building shops in front of them and more shops / offices / residences on top of them. The garage I park at almost every day has a small grocer / convenience store in front of it and (what I assume to be) offices on top of it, and it's got three levels of parking.
> and are difficult to convert to other uses if say, autonomous cars get rid of the need for it later on
That seems far-fetched. Yes, it might reduce demand somewhat, but it's wasteful to not park (gas costs money, and batteries don't last forever), and electric cars might actually drive demand for parking up if the parking spaces include charging capabilities (and in the future I'm envisioning, that could very well be literally every parking space).
> If you're building parking based on demand for free parking
That's not what I'm advocating. Charging for parking is totally reasonable, especially given the expenses involved as you've pointed out.
Of course, quite a few businesses do take on the cost of parking garages themselves, whether by offering access for free or by validating customers' parking passes after-the-fact. They do this because they believe it'll attract customers (and it certainly attracts me).
Which is fine. There's no need to require building parking garages. There's certainly no need to require such a ridiculous amount of parking that store lots don't even fill up on Black Friday, which many jursidictions do. [1]
Many places outside the US, and some inside, do not mandate parking for developments. In fact, Manhattan has an absolute parking cap.
I guess it depends on area. I've lived in considerably more underparked places than overparked - places where except for anti-peak (valley?) times, parking availability is perpetually at or near zero. This would include most of the Bay Area.
Note that "underparked" includes "inadequate parking near the target structure"; underparking can still happen even when sprawling parking lots go unfilled if it's an absurdly long walk from far away parking spaces to, say, the Wal-Mart surrounded by said sprawling parking lot. Given a parking lot and a parking garage with equal numbers of parking spaces, you'll likely find that the parking garage will be much more fully-utilized, since folks don't have to walk as far to an elevator.
(Not to mention the rather severe methodology issues in that particular article; the instructions for that bit of activism don't include controls for time of day, most glaringly.)
The problem with this boils down to
1) That ain't exactly true; in sufficiently-dense cities people will still rent spaces in underparked buildings
2) If you underestimate the demand for parking, it's way more difficult to add parking after-the-fact
I do agree that parking lots are absurd wastes of space, though. They're cheaper than parking garages, sure, but they suck on pretty much every other metric. Parking garages are much more space-efficient, and if every building was built atop a parking garage (even just one or two levels), that'd cut down significantly on both the need for parking lots and the need for street parking.