Quote:
|
I suppose occupancy is not really a public policy concern, but do we have real, hard evidence that TOD occupants own fewer vehicles or drive fewer miles? The minimum parking rules we're so anxious to sweep away were, after all, put in place for a reason.
|
Yes, we do--in the sense that there's lots of evidence that people will own fewer cars and drive less if they have less access to free parking. I believe this has a review of some of the literature:
http://www.cnt.org/publications/stal...-affordability
Parking requirements were developed for "a reason," but that reason was certainly not an analysis of car ownership rates in 1950 or whatever, and an application of that level of ownership by neighborhood. Requirements have been mostly one-size-fits-all, and premised on fairly suburban levels of ownership: up until the TOD law, you had to build the same number of spaces next to the Wilson Red Line as on the city limits in Dunning.
On top of that, it's not a one-way influence: the number of parking spaces available greatly affects the number of cars people have. If we had never required off-street parking, obviously some developers would have built it anyway, but car ownership rates would probably be lower than they are now.