Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town

I've been standing in this Staten Island parking lot for 15 minutes and two

dudes named Sebastian have already tried to sell me painkillers

I said no but the way this video is going I

might just take them up on it you see it's not a coincidence that

this parking lot looks identical to almost every other parking lot in America it's

because there's a sneaky little law in almost every

city in the United States that

forces private businesses and Residences

to build way more parking than they actually need and when I say way

more parking than they actually need I

mean way more parking

than they actually that's a dog need

there are so many parking

spaces in America that

we literally can't even count them all the

best estimate puts it at around 1

billion spaces which is four spots

for every car in America and

that number of empty spaces is only getting larger because

any new construction or renovation in almost any city in America is

being held hostage by a bunch of archaic laws

from the 1950s called minimum

parking requirements which is a big reason why every city in America is

starting to look like this

and look I'm aware you didn't have watch a punishingly

long video about parking

on your agenda today but

what parking law lacks in excitement it makes up for in being so blunt

force head trauma stupid that

once you learn about it you won't be able to unsee

the damage the parked car has done to the land of the free and

you know if I'm doing a video about cars and parking I'm calling in

my guy Jason from the YouTube channel not just bikes

oh hey Raleigh did you know that when they were making the latest SimCity

game they plan to accurately model real American cities but when they realized how

much space is devoted to parking and how ugly that would make the game

look they decided to make the parking lots way smaller than they are in

real life wow I did not know that until I read it in the

script for this video thanks

Jason from not just bikes he's going to help me get through this hellscape

that is parking in America but

maybe there's actually something we can do to fix it maybe hi

I'm Raleigh Williams a guy with pretty good balance a climate science and policy

degree and right now I'm about a mile away from three of Staten Island's

finest Eyebrow Threading salons and

this is a video about how parking laws are strangling America welcome

to climate town okay

parking was a very different game before every man woman and child in the

United States got behind the wheel of a car you remember this kid where

were you going to

the gas station how

come because I love leases

we do love to drive but

back in the 1900s

there were like 80 cars on the road and they were all owned by

Rich dicks they just stopped driving whenever they felt like it and that was

the parking spot as for the pores well they'd have to go around as

God intended then in 1913

Henry Ford smashed the Subscribe button on the assembly line and by the 1920s

cars were everywhere and these aren't modern cars

these are the first draft of a mass-produced

car being driven on streets with very few established

traffic laws by a bunch of drunken businessmen

with a maximum of seven years Driving Experience

understandably it was a full nightmare for cities and

nothing made that more obvious than

the thousands of cars parked

all William nilliam on the sides of streets and sidewalks

fun fact the term parking

itself used to refer to streets having a delightful grassy

park on the side these

Parks were the streets parking

like a houses siding

or a jacket's lining

or a River's white water rafting

see parking used to refer to grass and then people parked their cars there

and then look at me look at me

I'm the parking now now obviously

having cars piled everywhere was bad for business and

American cities were desperate to find some place to put a never-ending

stream of automobiles so they called in the Big Daddy William Phelps

Eno the father of traffic safety

he's the guy credited for inventing such traffic Classics

as stop signs traffic circles

and even pedestrian Islands

so you can thank him when you're standing in the middle of an eight-lane

strodes safely protected from high-speed

traffic by a small concrete

curb so in the 1920s

Eno was tasked with solving the parking crisis in cities and he proposed a

pretty practical solution Park

and rides see William Phelps Eno came to the conclusion that devoting the most

valuable real estate in

the world to the parked car was

an absolutely insane thing to do why on Earth should wealthy

car owners be entitled to unlimited

free use of taxpayer

subsidized land to store their personal property

a car park downtown clogs

delivery Lanes it congests traffic

it impedes pedestrians so

obviously no to that it made way more sense to have designated

parking lots on the outskirts of town and then a robust system of public

transportation to Ferry people into City centers

many city planners believe that really good public transportation

is the only way to keep our cities from being choked to death by

the automobile seems like a pretty great

as long as the Auto industry

doesn't completely take over the American psyche

while colluding with the oil industry

to have front companies buy a bus in streetcar lines only to shut them

down to clear the road for cars so that cars become the only method

of transportation and as all of that did happen

parking went from a regular tight bummer to

a crisis in 1947

New York City Police Commissioner

Arthur Wallander stated the parking of cars on the public thoroughfares

constitutes one of the greatest problems

facing the city this was the police commissioner

of a city that just had a race riot saying that parking

was one of their core problems

automobiles had America by

the balls and a whole generation of politicians

and public officials decided

to make parking and cars their

whole deal County city

and state tax money is

matching federal funds to pave the way Pittsburgh

is digging a four million dollar hole

in the Heart of the City to

provide underground storage for

thousands of cars a forward-looking

city is conscious of the automobile it

is responding by providing

adequate well-located parking facilities

but it turns out all this incentivizing

car ownership had the unintended

consequence of more people buying cars

as millions of new cars were added to the streets every year cities

quickly realized that their current system was

not going to work in

small town and suburb

the situation is the same all

snarled up every day it gets worse shopping it's

not just a matter of getting through the congestion it's

impossible to find a place to park

and to quote Michael Kane in

their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully

understand is that pretty close uh

that man was Mr minimum parking lot see instead of cities building all the

parking spaces they could just make the private sector do it and at first

it seemed like a pretty slick little solution see

American entrepreneurs and developers

and small business owners want to build shops

or residences or whatever an amazing City Superstore

is so why not have them each tax and parking onto their establishments

and solve the parking crisis once and for all cities

would still have to manage their meters and on-street

parking but if we could make parking lots the responsibility

of store owners and developers surely

we can fix this problem with

no repercussions these minimum parking requirements

seemed like the perfect cure for the parking problem and they spread through America

like the smoke from Canadian

wildfires eh in 1946

about 17 percent of cities had parking requirements in their zoning ordinances

but by 1951 that number had shot up to around 71

percent of cities and if you're dyslexic that might not seem like a big

deal but trust me it's

a huge jump and if you find yourself wondering

exactly how many Park spots

and aspiring malt shop owner has to build before they're allowed to open their

business you're asking the right questions what

were minimum parking requirements

based on let's go to the board

oh no you gotta be joking me you gotta be kidding me I'm

ruined I thought it was based on something good

I need a win baby I

need one win oh

no no like that yeah

the minimum parking requirements

that each City readily

adopted left the actual number of spaces up to city planners

and town committees the typical instruction they were given was to have enough parking

for maximum possible building usage rather

than normal usage which would ensure that small businesses

and private developers would be forced to buy and pave land that would go

to waste anytime the maximum conceivable

number of people were

not at the store and how did the Committees determine the maximum occupancy

well they had two main methods

number one they'd guess but number two they'd

ask a neighboring Town who

almost certainly also just guessed

not surprisingly this led to a lot of inconsistent

and nonsensical minimum parking laws like Detroit's

one space per 100 square feet in a beauty shop but one space per

150 square feet in a courthouse but also one space per 200 square feet

in a bank there were also parking laws based on physical items

in the establishment like

one space per pool table in a pool hall or one space per tumbling

apparatus at a tumbling Center some

cities required a minimum of one space per 10 nuns in a nunnery and

an absolutely diabolical one parking space for each employee

and employer at a bowling alley plus five spaces for each lane everyone

can enjoy the rich satisfactions

that bowling offers 10

big fat pins just asking

for it I've been bowling with four people before it

sucks okay no one remembers whose turn it is everyone uses nicknames

and you're like whose

ball man is that Corey is that Grace it's

terrible the only one they got right was

adult entertainment you want that nice and spaced out there's

no carpooling involved it was a cornucopia

of guesswork brimming at the Wicker with speculation

and conjecture and no one was even keeping

track of it the

planning advisory service even

admits the underlying assumptions used in drafting parking requirements

are unknown believe it or not this wasn't some kind of shadowy

cabal of pro parking lobbyists it was City Council Members with approximately

zero parking expertise taking their best shot at ensuring that their City would always

have enough parking eventually

a group called The Institute

of Transportation Engineers decided

to try to standardize

the minimum parking numbers with some cold hard science

now the ite was no stranger to the car game they formed in 1930

with a goal of reducing the absolute Bonanza

of car crashes and traffic that the United States was experiencing

and they were ready to bring their engineering and science to the minimum parking

game Unfortunately The Institute of Transportation

Engineers soon discovered that minimum parking requirements

were a bunch of

and you just know I got some fun examples

so let's get right into it to

the edit to the edit Bay now

I did earmark my entire props Budget on getting my eyebrows threaded later on

so I couldn't afford an actual copy

of ite's parking generation manual but they will graciously

sell it to City planners

for the Rock Bottom price of

495 dollars for non-members

and the screaming deal of 345

dollars for members and at that price you'd

be an idiot not to buy one I mean this thing must have so

much good parking science in it man

I really want one curse

these big bushy eyebrows

luckily a couple of completely Anonymous

friends sent me some absolutely

gorgeous PDFs of actual graphs

from parking generation so

let's take a look here the ite surveyed

a series of fast food restaurants measured

the square footage of the restaurants and found that each one thousand square feet

of restaurant needed exactly

3.55 or 15.92 parking

spaces or somewhere in the middle or possibly some

other number completely yeah

here's the graph here's

the trend line and

the r squared value is

.038 and if we go back in time to when you were in math

class you might remember that an r squared value of.038

means the square footage of the store is

about 3.8 responsible for why that particular number of cars

is parked there the

remaining 96 of the responsibility

is probably something else entirely

the ite acknowledges that square footage is a horse way to determine parking requirements

it's simply not a useful variable they even admit it right on the graph

caution used carefully low r squared value oh

my God he admitted and used carefully is doing some heavy lifting here it

should say caution do

not use this but you can't really sell a book that says all the

information in this book is

and we know it so used carefully

was gonna have to suffice and

despite knowing that their information was

useless as a predictive tool they had the audacity

to include the exact precise

average of 9.95 parking

spaces per 1000 square feet which is a lot like saying we have no

idea when humans first gained Consciousness but

we think it might have been at 9 51

a.m on a Thursday in the year 300

0006 BC but maybe city planners

did use caution I mean obviously

they didn't just take the graph at face value round

up and then force a ton of fast food restaurants all around the country

to build 10 parking spaces for every 1

000 square feet of wreck

and it just goes on like that an analysis of over a hundred other

ite parking graphs revealed

that about half of them are based on just four or fewer data points

and about a quarter were based on a

single data point let's

take a look at the ite graph of sporting goods stores like

Dick's Sporting Goods remember when dick was a guy's name and that was it

Dick's Sporting Goods remembers here's

the graph of parked Vehicles versus number of employees

the line of best fit should be here not

here and if we're going by just the information we're given in this graph

of number of employees versus parked

Vehicles as number of employees goes up parked

Vehicles goes down which means according to their own data with enough employees

you'd have a negative number of parked cars which means a logical interpretation

of this graph is that you could solve parking everywhere

Forever by having sufficiently

overstaffed sporting goods stores in

every city in America and

since that's not really something the ite he can sell they made up this

line which I think is what you get when you add up all the

parked vehicles and you divide by all the employees which

is uh not how

statistics works so effectively

American city governments tried to get everyone to build the maximum possible amount of

parking using the time-tested

method of pulling data out of their axes and those non-scientific

guesses became the Bedrock

of U.S parking legislation

but when the Institute of Transportation

Engineers tried to back up those

with science they poked and prodded the numbers until they could prove that we

needed maximum parking everywhere which was then turned into literal

laws requiring it I did not believe that this could possibly be true the

first time I read about it it's just that stupid to think that we

over built parking basically

everywhere because of feelings and

overbuild parking we did virtually

every municipality in the United States has had 75

years to develop under the toxic influence

of minimum parking requirements and you

can see the problem from

space not space in the classic sense but

high up the automobile that no one would think of giving up is doing

this to our Central cities in Los Angeles nearly

two-thirds of the downtown area

is taken up by the automobile parking

lots garages streets and freeways

and town after town has

expanded and sprawled under the metastasizing

drum beat of parking over people and it's easy to fixate on the parking

part of parking space but

the space is the real killer

you build a restaurant in Houston another

restaurant's worth of land is permanently flattened

you build Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles an

additional 10 Dodger stadiums worth of perfectly good land is

sacrificed for parking minimum

parking guarantees sprawl and it's easy to see why virtually every city in the

United States keeps developing into the same stretches of low to the ground boxy

structures with minimal multi-story

buildings and lots of blank spaces for parking we get a lot of fast

food restaurants chain stores and single family housing

because they can accommodate parking laws by simply Paving

part of the surrounding property the other kind of structures we keep making are

expensive larger buildings like luxury apartments Office

Buildings hotels that kind of thing the parking requirement is

costly developers have to build underground

garages or huge parking structures or

buy the building across the street and

knock it down for parking increasingly

we are seeing large-scale

demolition as the first step in building modern cities here

for example is the tallest building in America to be demolished

to start over surely

we shall not demolish all our large buildings but

the lesson is clear we

live in a day of bold planning

they then pass that cost along to their tenants in

the form of rent apartment developer

Peyton Chung calls this the valley of high parking

requirements with these two kinds of developments

on the sides and a missing middle of mixed-use

mid-rise buildings and low-cost

apartments that can't afford to buy sufficient land and build the parking minimums

and to be crystal clear here parking

is absolutely not free that's

like saying the bathroom is free in your hotel room it

may not be a line item on the bill but you're paying for it

whether you use the bathroom or just piss off of the balcony when a

store or developer is forced to buy twice

the necessary land that

extra cost is just rolled into everything you buy and the worst part is

if you don't drive you're still paying for that disgusting sea of asphalt

that you need to cross every

time you go shopping plus

your city needs to extend every road every pipe and every wire that extra

distance for a bunch of parking spots that stay empty almost

all of the time and that cost is

high each individual parking space costs

between eight thousand and eighty

thousand dollars depending on if it's just a paved surface or

a multi-level or Subterranean

parking structure the Walt Disney Concert Hall costs 274

million dollars to build and

a hundred million dollars of that with was building the underground parking

structure that's not free that's

a hundred million dollars and

you bet your ass concert goers are paying for that in

their ticket prices The

Godfather of parking reform Donald Shoop

whose actual website is

shoopdog.com the dude is the man we talked to him

for this video he's

awesome and he estimates that the cost of building a mall increases

by 67 percent if

you build above ground parking

and by 93 if

you build below ground parking

it's also almost gotten to the point where you can't even build affordable

housing a seattle-based study by The sightline Institute

found that the mandated parking increased

the monthly rent by

246 dollars well can I just have my 246

dollars a month back and not own a car

I don't think so Jack because you live in America the

land of the free market unless

we're talking about parking

which is a cost the government forces

its citizens to collect devise

for the good of the motherland

and not to put too fine a point on it but making parking

free is a textbook subsidy

to car owners every time the government forces

a business to build parking

that is the government incentivizing

car ownership and people who don't own cars

are getting absolutely every time they have to pay extra for toothbrushes

or rent to fulfill a subsidy that they do not benefit from

almost died and since wealthier people are more likely to own cars this is

a subsidy that the poor tends to pay to the rich it's also a

great example of big government overreach

that continuously reinforces itself the worst part is that these parking requirements

have and are actively

preventing downtowns from being successful

older buildings were grandfathered

in but if you wanted to renovate one of these downtown buildings

for your avocado toast bar you'd

need to buy the building next to it and bulldoze

it in order to meet the off street parking requirements

this is why downtown in my hometown looks

like this this is insane right like legitimately

insane literally bulldozing historic

buildings to meet arbitrary

parking minimums and this is still preventing

people from opening businesses

in traditional walkable downtowns

to this day in the case of a bank in Sandpoint Idaho they

were required to buy up nearby buildings evict

the tenants and demolish everything to make enough surface

parking spaces to legally operate

in Dallas Texas a

couple wanted to open a hotel in the ailing downtown area

but fulfilling the parking requirement would have cost them two to three million

dollars in Fayetteville Arkansas a

whole gaggle of downtown building

sat vacant for decades because minimum

parking laws made it too expensive for small business owners to move in parking

laws are a boot but not like a fun cute boot that you might

wear to the movies they're

a boot on the neck of cities and towns that have fallen on hard

times and are just trying to revitalize

themselves they have the effect of driving would-be

City dwellers to just say it and sprawl out to The Burbs where the

cost of buying land for parking isn't

prohibitively expensive and we haven't even talked

about the climate implications yet my

God urban sprawl and minimum parking laws are

crazy destructive to the environment first

of all parking lots require a lot of asphalt

and concrete those two substances

are responsible for like 10 percent of global

greenhouse gas emissions when you build parking lots you have to displace something and

historically that something has been Wildlife

including Paving over tens of millions of Acres of American wetlands

and hundreds of millions of Acres of other ecosystems

parking also contributes to the urban heat island effect which

honestly should be its own video but

the tldr is that it ain't great for climate

change and speaking of urban areas all that pavement prevents water from absorbing which

leads to floods and exacerbates

the effects of Storms and hurricanes

it also pollutes the ever living

out of our water when dirty Dusty heavy

metal and pesticide infused

water runoff sluices off the pavement and into the lakes and rivers and of

course parking creates more parking

by pushing buildings further and further apart making

a short tolerable walk into one that sucks and takes forever and

also about a million more environmental

problems that I don't want to get into because we're already however

long this video is and

honestly I can't believe you're still watching but thank you so much for sticking

with it because oh

we finally got into the what we can do about it section of the

video and I'm extremely

happy to say this

part is actually very promising

now you know my guy Donald Trump has been calling out bad parking laws

for decades and it seems like people are finally starting to listen to them

remember those vacant buildings in Fayetteville Arkansas well

in 2015 Fayetteville became quite possibly the first city in the country to

completely eliminate commercial parking

minimums and let businesses

decide how much parking they need really they were probably the first but I

don't want to get sued by the residents of New bicklesburg

Virginia or whatever small town thinks they were the first so I used the

legal term quite possibly to

protect myself try it out for yourself sometime

and you guessed it without minimum

parking laws in Fayetteville a new restaurant opened up in a building that had

been vacant for 20 years another

restaurant opened up in a historic building that would have required 41

new parking spaces and once other towns heard about this they

followed suit I'm talking about

the King of Wings the

Drake of lakes just

don't slip in Niagara

Falls 000 people it's the Widow of the Whalers

Hartford Connecticut I really have to stop because here's a map of all the

cities and towns that have changed their minimum parking requirements

in some way that would take hours days

if I really got into it but don't think I won't do it you

think I won't do it coming in at six foot eight

450 million tons of raw steel it's

Pittsburgh Pennsylvania now I will say that while there are a ton of great

success stories getting rid of parking minimums

is just one step in a long road of

reforming our ridiculously car-centric

culture it's going to take a lot of time to deworm our Collective car

brands and that means some of the steps are probably going to feel a

little anti-climactic which is a great word

anti-climactic firm sounds like what it means like

brussels sprouts that's exactly what those little

are so clearly some cities are finally fixing their if you're interested in learning

more I can strongly recommend strong towns

a non-profit organization that is committed to undoing

the car-centric mistakes of the 20th century and repairing

North American cities they've

done a lot of great work on making cities more resilient

and financially sustainable and ditching parking minimums is a big part of their MO

they actually made a great video about Fayetteville

here on the YouTubes and on their website they even have guides on best

practices for eliminating parking minimums our friends at climate change makers have put together

a Playbook that draws on the many successful

strategies that other towns and cities have used to delete minimum

parking requirements from their zoning

and if you want to be a part of getting your City to

delete some of this weird archaic

government overreach meets pseudoscience

legislation that is currently turning your Prime City real estate date

into undevelopable land you

can do that by clicking the link in the description honestly

it'll take you five minutes you

know what don't even do it just click the link and

see what there is to see and then if you're there and you feel

like doing it more

power to you and if you really want to get crazy with it you

can drop by your local city council

meeting where you can be the voice of reason in

a room full of people who would really like to speak to your manager

but above all whatever you do just

consider getting more educated about the climate crisis because if we're not careful we

might find ourselves in the middle of a copyrighted

song about Paving paradise and putting up a parking lot which I would love

to play for you underneath this sort of closing monologue right here but

obviously I can't so

I am singing it in my head right

now man that's a great song

wish I could play it right now

okay you made it to the end thank

you so much for watching and thank you to Jason from not just bikes

go ahead and like And subscribe and even leave a comment about what a

nice guy Jason is now I do have a special super secret announcement

coming up the end of this video but

first uh add oh

yeah here it is okay

let's just say you spent the last nine

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can't believe you cut stuff this video is long as hell we did cut

stuff okay we did a lot of research we read three

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we got a lot of extra stuff and you can find that extra stuff

in the newsletter and finally the after the credits Marvel movie secret scene

I'm starting a podcast

oh what a guy with a podcast yeah

everybody else has one I've

got one too it's called the climate deniers Playbook you can get it on

Spotify Stitcher pocket whatever you get your podcasts

on I'm co-hosting it with my friend Nicole conlon

who is a writer on The Daily Show and also one of the writers

here at climate town every episode we look at a different piece of climate

disinformation or misinformation we look at the mist and where it came from who

benefits from it and how you can spot it in the wild it's

a lot of fun okay I think you're really gonna like it for real

but seriously for real it's really fun so you can check it out find

it in the description of the video

that was that was bad

ly thank you very much to Donald Trump and Henry gerbar

two consummate experts in parking policy

and two people who were incredibly helpful on making this episode we

got to talk to Donald Trump a couple of times he's

awesome I got their bios and their websites in the description check

them out buy their books follow

them they're very interesting and smart people all

right that's actually the end thanks for watching now if you don't mind I

have an appointment to get my eyebrows threaded for

real so bye I

have not tried marijuana

I have never used it at any time

thank you all right there's all