RE: [ihc] RE: Parking lots? Yeah, right...

[Tom Harais <THarais@xxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Grammer [mailto:jgrammer@domain.elided] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 7:53 AM
To: ihc@domain.elided
Subject: [ihc] RE: Parking lots? Yeah, right...


> And speaking of 'exacerbate', somehow real estate developers(in CA
> anyway)have convinced city/county planners that 2 lines 8-9' apart
> constitute a parking space for purposes of fulfilling the space count
> required by planning standards. This in the face of laws that pretty much
> nationwide allow vehicles to be 102" wide.

Jim:

You hit it right on the head:  The law of unintended consequences.  You
think we would have learned from the failures of socialism/communism.  I
work with local planners and am painfully aware of how the "parking
requirement" regulations cause this.

The developer wants to maximize the economic value of the available land.
Parking just doesn't generate the income that office or commercial space
does.  So, the developer would prefer to minimize parking at the site and
figures that people will park on the street.

The ultimate user of the property knows that their customers want parking
near the entrance, preferably less than 20 feet from the front doors. :-)

Someone (probably a government "planner") gets a law passed requiring a
minimum number of parking spaces be provided for each square footage of
retail or commercial construction.  It all sounds like a good compromise.
The "government" has looked after the "good of the people".  Workers and
customers will have somewhere to park.

The, "anti-auto" crowd complains that such parking will cover the earth with
asphalt (they take paradise and put up a parking lot).  In reality, these
folks think that limiting parking will magically reduce the number of cars
on the road.  Fools, all of them!

So, the designer, responds by creating the minimum required number of
parking spaces on the available land, after installing "green space" to
quell the opposition from the second group.  No one notices that the spaces
are 15 feet long and 7.5 ft wide, until they find a Suburban parked next to
their Honda with only 5" between the vehicles.


I've found, that the denser populated the area, the smaller the parking
spaces.  I parked in a multi-level garage in Walnut Creek one day in my '87
Prelude (about 70" wide and maybe 150" long) and found I could not open the
door on either side far enough to get my then 180 pound frame out of the
car.  It was just ridiculous.

Ultimately, economics wins out over "central planning".  But to me, it's
always seemed that behind economics, is human nature, and we're never going
to change that with laws.

For those of you that didn't understand the reference to "communism"
earlier:  In a centrally controlled economy, the controllers would dictate
what was important and demand that the producers make the product in a given
quantity.  

In communist Russia, the economic planners observed that many people did not
have adequate shoes.  So, they decreed that the shoe manufacturers make X
million pair of shoes.  

The shoe manufacturers looked at the leather supply that was available to
them, and found that there was no way they could make all those pairs of
shoes.  So, they complained to the planners.

But, the central commanders, via their governmental authority, persisted in
their demands.  After all, it was for the "good of the people". The
manufacturers had to make the required number of shoes or the people would
go barefoot.

The manufacturers relented and made the required numbers of shoes.  But they
made them all size 6 or smaller as that was the only way to meet the
production quota with the available raw materials.  It didn't matter that
the bulk of the small shoes produced were not useable to the "people".  The
quota was met.

Versus the marketplace, centrally controlled economies are notoriously
inefficient.  Even in our so called "free market economy" here, government
regulations seldom achieve their designed goals and introduce all kinds of
inefficiencies - like 7.5' wide parking spaces.

Can you imagine if Washington had dictated how many Scouts that IH should
have produced in 1961?


Tom H. '76 Traveler