“It’s not like the government is forcing you to buy a car!”
If you live in a city with parking minimums, yes they fucking are.
“It’s not like the government is forcing you to buy a car!”
If you live in a city with parking minimums, yes they fucking are.
You can’t just decide what’s legal and what isn’t.
A public transit stop serves more than just the property in question, making it a public project and not a private development. We can’t make private developers pay for public projects. It’s illegal.
Whereas a private parking lot is specifically for that exact development, so it can be mandated.
Planning isn’t a videogame where the perfect solution is achievable. We have to work within the confines of the existing legislative and legal environment.
The city could at least communicate with the development plans and purchase the required land for public stops. The city could mandate certain developments require this kind of transit inclusion to the planning process. The city can also mandate for denser zoning around major transit corridors.
The college I went to maintained a roundabout for buses. The college had to fully cover the costs of pavement maintaince and snow removal. It seemed worth it since tons of their students were arriving by bus, because it delivered them to the center of campus.
That’s why they could require it. The TIA showed that the university would have an impact on the public system and the city could require them to mitigate that impact, and the university chose to build a parking circle and dedicate out as city ROW as its mitigation measure.
A local restaurant generating maybe 200 trips a day isn’t going to have the necessary traffic impact for the city to demand infrastructure upgrades.
Now, a mega-development generating thousands of daily trips is a different story. They have to mitigate.
But they can still choose how to mitigate, and it’s usually a dedicated turn lane and a traffic signal. Because if a developer has the choice between saving 1 penny and building a development that truly serves the interests of the city and the future tenants, they’ll take the penny every single time.