The city council in Austin, Texas recently proposed something that could seem like political Kryptonite: getting rid of parking minimums.
Those are the rules that dictate how much off-street parking developers must provide — as in, a certain number of spaces for every apartment and business.
Around the country, cities are throwing out their own parking requirements – hoping to end up with less parking, more affordable housing, better transit, and walkable neighborhoods.
That’s the kinda the point though. They don’t want you driving in. They want you living nearby. And you can theoretically do that because it also increases housing supply and affordability and walkability.
Those businesses will get far more traffic from local residents who aren’t whizzing by them in their rolling houses.
If you look at the context of my point - this is basically saying to my reading “Hell yea, we should have no contact between us righteous city dwellers and those outsiders”.
It’s not saying that at all. That’s just a natural consequence of general welfare.
You’ll get stores closer to you once it becomes impractical to drive to the center of a major urban area and park there
The same stores that closed when you built too many roads and incentivized everybody to drive 15 miles to a store
Yes, that’s a slight rewording of what I said in the beginning. Though what I would suggest is likely to happen is just less and less physical stores and more Amazon deliveries, because many small physical stores closed because they cost too much and could not price match the bigger stores or online sellers.