Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town

Like my Dad used to tell me, “If something is stupid and doesn’t make any sense, somebody is getting rich somewhere.”

I love that we have paved over every public space with these parking lots, but if you try to hang out in them and have a conversation the police will come and tell you that you can't be there.

I live in Amsterdam in the The Netherlands. And (as shown also in Just Now Bikes) the Dutch nearly turned the city into an automobile centric wasteland by hiring an American planner. Fortunately that idiotic idea got blocked and he went home. Thank heavens.

One of my biggest car-centric complaints is the town I live in has 4 bridges that go over the main river that bisects the town. Two of them have no shoulder or side walk AT ALL. So depending where you are in town you are either looking at literally 4 mile detour to cross the river safely, or you're walking in traffic on one of the busiest roads in town

Parking lots have gotten so big that people living in a 15 minute city probably walk less than those walking from their cars to the entrance of Walmart.

As a Greek, I think I finally understand why parking lots are mentioned so often in American anecdotes, insults, headlines, Reddit posts, etc.

Looking at aerial photos of downtowns from the 40s and then the 70s just makes me want to cry.

I work in hospitality development, basically buying or building hotels. The parking requirements in many areas are absolutely insane, and can go up to 1.5 spaces per guestroom plus employee spaces (aka 150% parking capture, nuts!) We tried to show them data from across every hotel we owned, surveyed, or managed the highest requirement for parking was 62% at most, and they still wouldn't budge. Cancelled the deal, and that lot has sat empty for the last 5 years since and counting...

favorite part is when the huge megastore is 'right across the street' from the other huge megastore but you HAVE to drive to the other huge megastore because of the massive parking lot separating the two of them

Thank you so much for the shoutout! Our mini-doc on Fayetteville is still probably the video I'm most proud of so far. -Mike

Thanks for tackling this huge but obscure problem! As someone involved with construction and development in DFW for over 20 years - there are a whole slew of additional problems you didn't even touch on this video. One time a developer was forced to pave then install curb and gutter on the portion of road in front of their business, on their dime - despite it being a rural road with bar ditches with the nearest connecting curb over 1 mile away. To this day there is a random 150' single-sided length of curb all by it's lonesome. :-/ You would be AMAZED how much of the development guidelines are simply "that's what someone said it should be" or "because that's what it's always been".

Yes, late, sorry. But this explains so much of why the US looks like it does, especially the very short, but IMO much underestimated point of "parking creates more parking". As a European, I'm used to walk - and happily so! - when I want to get somewhere, but will readily admit that in the US, walking between "points of interest" easily becomes a chore, often necessitating a car. And yes, at many places, the "way" from A to B is mostly parking lots. Funny if it weren't so disastrous on so many levels.

it makes me so sad that america wasnt even always this way. seeing past footage of hundreds of people walking around and taking public transit just for all that to be bulldozed for the car, in modern day. just a complete regression

As someone with a bachelors in mathematics and pursuing a masters in urban planning, the methodology of how they came up with how many parking spots to assign to a business absolutely blew my mind. Thanks for the new project idea.

I'm a retired nature center director. We had a grass-topped overflow parking area. It was the best location for me to install a solar array. So I installed an elevated solar array high enough to accommodate a school bus. The shaded parking became very popular for everyone to park beneath. Yes, it cost more to install an elevated array, but it also eliminated a need for a safety fence to keep people away from the direct current coming off the array. In addition, putting the array over a parking area kept us from shrinking the green footprint of the nature center land. This topic is worth covering in a future video. I've seen people greatly exaggerate the cost of elevated arrays above parking. At least part of the cost can be justified as a visitor amenity.

Great video. I live in Nuevo León, a big industrial state in Mexico, and being a 3rd world country neighboring a 1st world country, almost everyone thinks copying everything from the US is a good thing. Everyone complains about car traffic but we just keep building more 6 or 8 lane roads and giant parking lots (even our governor said his goal is making our city look like Texas), but I barely hear anyone talking about how that just makes our problems worse. Definitively, we need more content like this and educate people about how car dependency is destroying our cities and doesn't improve life quality.

As a child in the Netherlands I always wondered why they only ever showed the industrial areas of Los Angeles in tv shows and movies, because that is what I associated the low boxy buildings with parking spaces all around with.

I love that stores can have 300 parking spots but people circle the lot for 10 minutes trying to snag the closest spots.

You could literally make a 20 hour long video on all the issues we face and corruption and root causes, and all the stupidity we still deal with on a day to day. I've been reading and researching so much about what you and many other people are saying about how the country is run, how to even fix some of these issues. It's astounding how far down the rabbit hole you end up once you start connecting the dots between everything. We need people like you in politics, not just making youtube videos. We need people knowledgeable and ready to make changes, not old people set in their ways and unwilling to budge. I'd do the job of a politician for free if given the chance, simply because I want to see people happier and not suffering. I'd prefer not to.. as would most people, but if that's what it took. Sacrifice like that, to do a job like this. I'd do it without hesitation. I advise anyone reading this comment to start spreading the word about youtube channels, articles that people should read. Strong towns, Not Just Bikes, USA Mom in Germany. (probably some others I can't remember right now) The more people that know this stuff, the sooner and easier change can start happening, because people will ask for it. SHARE IT WITH EVERYONE. This is serious stuff that impacts our day to day, and our countries can all improve for the better. I'm tired of seeing seas of asphalt that only serve to be an empty eyesore, and the cause of higher local temperatures. The walmart in my small 4000 person town has enough parking spots to probably fit half the vehicles in this place. I'm not even joking either. And at night, there is so much light from the parking lot lights, that we get skyglow from it. A town of 4000 people can't even see the night sky. This shit has got to end.

Minimum parking laws are preventing a friend of mine from building a new store for the buisness they own. They live and work in a pretty small town, and that town, on top of the nensense parking laws, says they need to put 15 trees on the lot they bought because 50 years ago, a gas station was there. There isn't enough space for that, so the lot just sits empty while their current location continues to be too small for their expanding business.