I agree with that, removing parking is just the first step, it's important the council then uses the extra money and space wisely.

>Claiming success after just the first one is potentially problematic…

But when it comes to this, the US has had problems with urban planning in most places for decades, Cambridge is the first in the state to remove parking minimums. It's understandable people are celebrating progress.

There are three recommended steps to solve this problem:

Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers. Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages. Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can make demand-based prices for on-street parking politically popular.

Claiming success after just the first one is potentially problematic…

Plenty of nice places in other countries don't have parking minimums and the citizens aren't asking for more "protection from selfish developers", at least when it comes to parking.

They're unnecessary and waste space that could instead be used to combat the housing crisis, or could be a shop, or literally anything else.

Bro really thought he could sneak Lexus in there

Well, technically I spent a lot of money to live somewhere based on what it had to offer. No one is forcing me to live here, true, but someone did just “take” a piece of the value I thought I was purchasing.

I’m not saying this was an evil thing, I’m just saying I have a right to be frustrated by the change since the beneficiaries of this aren’t residents like me - they are property developers, landlords, and current non-residents.

Edit: spelling

I wish you wouldn’t jump to such extremes. It makes people infer something that I am not saying. It isn’t evil, it just has an externality that no one is talking about, it benefits wealthy developers, and isn’t guaranteed to drive the intended results.

Existing landlords won’t drop rent because of this, new landlords will continue to charge market rates, and new owners will still have cars without a new place to park them.

Union worker UPS vs lowest bidder FedEx. Shockingly UPS seems to be much more reliable

I completely agree.

Cart before horse, taking away parking requirements before fixing infrastructure.

“Car traffic is awful… I wish we had thought of this before we allowed all this construction without parking” - everyone living in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Beijing…

Being a NIMBY isn’t bad if you are being reasonable. I think we can all agree a garbage dump or low-level nuclear waste site in Cambridge would be bad. We purchased homes or signed leases with a certain expectation of what the community was like. That is going to change in a way that is not favorable to the existing residents. Feeling annoyed by that shouldn’t be grounds for scorn or shame.

Omg they have all the amenities. McDonalds?! Dollar Tree? Two Walgreens? What the fuck am I still doing in Camberville? Also what is a Big Y? Don't answer that. The fact that I didn't Google it shows I don't care enough about the answer and don't deserve one. Who's moving to Holden with me?

I agree with your suggestion. They should have done that with this change together. By itself this change is bad because it makes the problem of Cambridge giving away parking even worse.

Adding residential property without parking, to a city where 2/3rds of the households have vehicles, is about disrupting the lifestyle and convenience of the majority of the residents in the city, wealthy or not.

Owning a car is not about wealth. It is about lifestyle needs and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that low income people are more likely to require a car than wealthy people.

UPS if more reliable. The drivers are paid better too.

My favorite thing is when people like you make assertions with no explanation or evidence and then expect people to agree with you. And then when they inevitably don't, you insult them and pretend they're the unreasonable ones. A true masterpiece

They care whether there are spots.

But you're one of those "let's make driving worse" sociopaths, so this is pointless.

https://imgur.com/a/UyCcqfJ

A Big Y, you say??? Honey, get those moving boxes!!!

That demographic leans more heavily towards public transportation users.

I also think that people who don't live in Cambridge probably don't care that much about whether the apartment buildings they don't live in have parking

This is a new argument and unrelated to our previous discussion.

Roads are communal and public. They may travel through communities, but they are not for the exclusive use of that community. This argument especially falls apart when looking at major thoroughfares such as Brattle. Why should the residents have any more say over those.roads than the people who use that road? There are many Cambridge residents that bike, walk, and scoot through that area daily. Why is their safety secondary to the concerns of the community on the road (concerns, which I may add, that are trifling compared to the daily threat of serious injury or death faced by vulnerable users of that space.)

Will this make it easier to add units in existing buildings? For example, if a single family or two family house has no yard space for additional parking, is this one less zoning hurdle to add a unit in the basement?

The people who can't afford to live in a city with median housing prices of 1M (I just checked) but still have to work there?

Tell me, who?

Guess who needs to park, dufus?

Thank you for this thorough answer! So strange OP is holden’ this sub hostage of all subs with these posts

That's true, and not at all a contradiction to anything i just said