In cities with high land values & building costs, adding garages to store wheelie bins can add significant cost to apartments. It hampers good urban design. Rolling them out weekly increases labor costs, leading to higher rents & HOA dues. How much could shared public containers at the curb save?

American urbanists should pay more attention to trash. I've attended dozens of conferences on urbanism, but can't think of a single one that offered a session on the pros and cons of shared containers on the street, versus forcing every residence to store and roll out private wheelie bins.

Under current policies, what share of California’s existing development & construction workforce could earn a living building affordable housing? At current taxation levels, if market-rate homebuilding went away, it seems like most in the industry would have to find a different line of work.

"The historic heritage of Wheeling is one of its main assets - wanton destruction, especially to make parking lots, transforms this historically important place to an uninteresting collection of buildings along the interstate." historic-wheeling.org/wiki/Demolis...

In Laguna Beach, non-residents pay $1-3/hour for curb parking near the beach. The revenue funds clean-up, lifeguards, etc. Residents pay $40/year for the same spots. It may seem distasteful, but it was a politically-winning way to get beyond the status quo of "free parking for everyone forever."

There's another big problem with parking subsidies. When governments subsidize parking, people buy more cars, drive more, pollute more, increase traffic jams, and cause more traffic fatalities and injuries. Most social safety net programs don't have this terrible flaw, so we should fund them first.

Free curb parking is a poor social welfare policy because: 1️⃣About half of all low-income Americans don't benefit at all from it, because they don't have a car. 2️⃣Most of the benefit of this subsidy program goes to middle class and rich people, because they own more cars and drive more.

Politicians decided to give curb parking away for free. Off-street garages charge fees. So at peak hours, curb parking is jampacked, garages are mostly empty, and customers complain. #Seattle has a parking MANAGEMENT problem, not a parking supply problem. It's politicians can and should fix it!

This apartment building garage at San Carlos & 18th in SF has been converted into an artist's studio. It's one block from high-frequency bus lines on Mission and 3 blocks from a BART station. Does anyone seriously think that improving transit would make residents here stop parking on the street?

It's no wonder that surveys in city after city (Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.) find that in neighborhoods with curb parking that is underpriced and overcrowded, a very large share of the small garages (in single-family homes, townhouses & small apartment buildings) are NOT used to store cars.

In Portland, residents can pay ~$248/month for a ground-floor storage unit the size of a one-car garage that is NOT conveniently located where they live. Or, they can store their private cars on public streets, often for free, and fill their garages with junk. www.publicstorage.com/self-storage...

If you want desirable homes and eyes on the street, any apartments placed close to the street should be elevated by enough to put seated residents above eye level with passersby. What about accessibility? For one thing, lobby for elevator reform to make installing them cheap. Ramps can work too.

On the ground floor units' doors & windows, the shades are drawn and blinds are closed. On the upper floors, most are open, providing natural light, views, and eyes on the street. Why? If homes are close to the sidewalk but not elevated, people close the blinds to gain privacy & feel secure.

On the other hand, one might say #PaloAlto is returning to the natural course of evolution it was on in the 1920s, when midrise, mixed-use buildings like the Medico-Dental Building were built to accommodate the growing population of faculty, staff, students & others drawn to this college city.

It's more like Paris-izing: midrise apartment buildings, some over shops and restaurants, and some with views of the one unusual tower nearby. In #Paris, that’s the Eiffel Tower. In #PaloAlto, it’s Hoover Tower.

Requiring 1 on-site manager for any building with >16 units is a great way to discourage little buildings and encourage big ones. Why? It makes giant buildings more cost-effective because you can spread the cost of the manager across many units. If you like behemoth buildings, it’s the way to go!

"For decades, local governments could require developers to build a minimum number of parking spaces based on the size and type of a project. Beginning Jan. 1, that decision will largely be left to developers and market demand." www.wcnc.com/article/mone...

The few who still defend minimum parking requirements seem to have one thing in common: they're nearing retirement.

"After controlling for differences in socioeconomic and built environment characteristics, I find that the presence of bundled parking is associated with a 27 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled."

Digital chatbots may not work for Chevy dealers, but the parking industry is another story. American park free on 99% of all trips, so getting a dollar for every one would be huge!

Building wide roads in every subdivision requires more asphalt, more base rock, and more land. That's more expensive & less sustainable. It also worsens traffic safety. I don't know the right building material choice for every situation, but I know we need to think about city building holistically.

To cope with worsening wildfires, heat waves and other severe weather, should we build highly-combustible buildings or noncombustible ones? Given the huge variance in building materials from place to place, I wonder how carefully humans have thought this through.

We’re heading for a music festival powered by the sun, under clear blue skies. Remember ‘76, when the air was filthy? Progress!

4. Make a depaving plan. Draw up a plan for depaving and replanting some unneeded asphalt. Once you have a plan, you can recruit neighbors and do it yourselves, push your city to do it, or seek funding from foundations and/or government. When this heat wave passes, you can be ready to get started!😎

Is your city suffering under America's huge heat dome? Want some relief? Parking lots create massive heat islands. We can do a lot to fix that. If you can, grab a cold drink, find a cool spot, and make a plan to depave your neighborhood. Here are four steps to get started.

"Using the models we derived, observed differences in density and transit can explain over 3 : 1 variations in vehicle miles driven per household for a constant level of income and household size.”

Note: in the figure above, "VMT" means vehicles miles travelled and "Hh/Res Acre" means households per residential acre. What does 90 households per acre look like, compared to three or one? Here are a few examples.

Holtzclaw et al found that “urban design and transportation infrastructure have a highly significant influence on auto ownership & distance driven for neighborhoods in 3 large U.S. cities, even after the correction for household size & income effects."

I'd like to see good research on the carbon pollution caused by parking. I assume that the pollution caused by building & operating parking is buried in the "residential & commercial" and "industry" sectors in these EPA charts. If it were broken out, we could see how much parking reform helps!

Before the invention of exclusionary single-family house zoning, great neighborhoods — housing thousands of people from all walks of life — grew up around great universities. We should make that legal again.