MOCO - County Wide Upzoning, Everywhere
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Anonymous
Sure. The project that was approved at Forest Glen and most new apartment buildings on Wisconsin Avenue. |
Anonymous
That's silly. It's safe to say the builders believe the buyers are willing to pay for the parking spaces. However, you're making two big assumptions. 1. Most people just purely love driving. 2. Our transportation policy should enable people's love of driving. I think the first assumption is factually incorrect, and the second assumption is wrong. I drive a lot. It's the only way I can conveniently manage the transportation my family needs. Out of four adults in my family, two are non-drivers. If we had non-car options that worked as well as my driving, I would never drive again. |
Anonymous
The county changed parking minimums roughly two months ago. How many site plans have you seen submitted since then? |
Anonymous
They were submitting plans with spaces above the minimum before the elimination of minimums, so the minimum was irrelevant to how many spaces were actually being included in new housing development. How many site plans have you ever reviewed? |
Anonymous
I think you're making a lot of leaps here about what I am assuming. My statement is true if people prefer driving as the least bad alternative. That's far from assuming people love driving. There's strong demand for parking, to the point that units would not be marketable to the higher income households that are targeted by new development without dedicated parking. |
Anonymous
So if they are presented with a better alternative, they may start taking it, right? |
Anonymous
Yes, of course. That’s obviously implicit in what I said. But a better alternative is not just a transportation problem. It’s also a jobs problem. (Funny how the county’s vision for 15-minute living never includes jobs.) As long as the job growth is concentrated in Tysons and the Dulles corridor, there’s going to be very strong demand for parking and driving in MoCo. We are decades away from having a good mass transit solution for getting people from MoCo to Tysons/Dulles but we could attract jobs and rebuild the county’s economy much faster than that. Until then, people will prefer driving. There are other draws for driving — such as recreation facilities not being served by quality mass transit — but jobs are really the primary driving factor. |
Anonymous
DP. You're right, it's not just a transportation problem, it's also a land use problem. Most of the trips that most people make are not the commute to work. Transportation policy focuses on the commute to work and ignores all other trips. If people who currently use their cars for everything, including the drive to work, continued to drive to work but switched to a different mode for their other trips, we would already be in a much better place. |
Anonymous
YIMBYs love quoting this fact and it’s true when you measure the number of trips. But a lot of people spend 10 hours or more a week commuting to and from work and the only way they can get there in that amount of time is by car so it’s not really relevant to how people live. If you need a car for work, you need a car and a place to park it so all of the parking that developers build is a reaction to that. Very few people spend 10 hours driving to errands over a week. The world would be a better place if people could walk or bike for other trips but it’s hard to get the kind of retail density you need to enable that without a lot of high-paying white collar jobs in the neighborhood. With those jobs in the neighborhood, retailers have traffic throughout the day so you can get more retailers in the neighborhood. That MoCo’s jobless urbanism was going to result in neither the housing nor the retail to enable any version of 15-minute living for all but a small number of people was obvious from the time they started on it. If you’re supporting the status quo approach to land use in MoCo for environmental reasons you need to focus on what land use can do to promote job growth — along with other economic tools. If jobs come, housing and retail will follow, and car dependency will diminish. Otherwise, start lobbying for a more walkable Tysons because you’ll make more progress in achieving your goal. |
Anonymous
It sure is. Also, when the car is parked, it's not contributing to the car traffic that the other posters are raising alarms about. It is actually not hard at all to get retail density without a lot of high-paying white collar jobs in the neighborhood. There are plenty of examples right now, right here in Montgomery County. It's just that most of this retail density is unfortunately accompanied by overly large parking lots. And it's also in areas where posters in the typical DCUM demographics don't go. |
Anonymous
As with housing, the retail density has parking because it’s necessary to make the location work. There aren’t enough people within 15 minutes to support the retail unless you add car trips into the transportation mix. You’ve proven my point but you seem to keep wanting to try jobless urbanism. It’s not going to work, so shrinkflation and stagflation will continue to rule the housing market, making everything worse for everybody. |
Anonymous
Not that much parking. Unless you're saying the location can't work for retail unless it has a parking lot that's never more than half or two thirds full? But that would be a silly thing to say. Thing about all of the neighborhood shopping centers with grocery stores. Have you ever seen those parking lots be full? They're not even full on the day before Thanksgiving. Meanwhile people who walk to the store, or take the bus to the store, are invisible. Builders don't know, store owners don't know (except Megamart), you don't know. We've been building for cars, so we get cars, so we see cars, so we have to keep building for cars... |
Anonymous
Believe me: They know. Developers’ ROI is based on how effectively they monetize land, so those who waste space on underutilized parking don’t attract new capital and won’t be in business for long. Demographics has gotten really sophisticated at predicting pattern of life. Same for retailers. It’s all about location and optimizing land use at good locations. You may not know, but they know. |
Anonymous
No, they don't know. They think they know. That's not the same thing. And even if they did know, that doesn't do anything about the large empty parking lots that already exist. |
Anonymous
If they think they know but are frequently wrong then they will go out of business. They haven’t gone out of business, so they probably are right most of the time. A lot of these large empty parking lots exist because the location is failing. I’m thinking of places like Hillandale and Viers Mill Village where disposable income in the immediate has fallen in real terms. The parking lot isn’t empty because more people are taking the bus. The parking lot is empty because fewer people are going there. Part of the problem with cars is that if people have one they’re probably going to use it and they’re going to think of their pattern of life in terms of where they can get in car. You try to take wins in eliminating short trips but you’re not eliminating most of the time people spend in cars or the reason for owning a car. You’re shooting for a rec league participation trophy when we need to be trying to win the World Cup. Why do you resist job growth so much? |