Your list of sprawling, car-based environments reveals your massive provincialism and, unsurprising for an engineer, lack of historical awareness.

To travel long distances in LA, sure, you absolutely need a car for traveling long distances and working – but why? Because the freeway system essentially replaced the electric railways and doodlebugs wholesale. And, further, those very same rails were surprisingly decentralized (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Relief_map_Pacific_Electric_Railway.jpg – note the lack of hub) so the skeleton of the city was already sprawled out.

But because of that substitution, do you need a car to go to the store? The movies? Several restaurants? Normal shopping? All the quotidian things that you shouldn’t expect to have to ride a streetcar to reach. Not necessarily because, once again, the bones of the initial settlement pattern left many, many streetcar neighborhood characteristics spread throughout the whole basin.

If you want to talk about sprawled out messes, have you visited Dallas lately? St. Louis? Atlanta? The latter two have had “modern” rapid mass transit longer than LA, by the way.

There are many horrible parts of LA but much of the city of LA itself (and immediately neighboring suburbs like Long Beach, Santa Monica, etc) first developed with streetcar lines (or in the case of Santa Monica with a bus line prior to widespread car ownership), so streetcar neighborhood characteristics are quite widespread. Which is not to say that the other places aren’t superior but I think leasing automobile spots happens in those places, too so attacking it as an “LA idea” smacks of… what’s that logical fallacy again?

Maximums probably make some sense in TOD areas and dense neighborhoods, but a tax can likely be just as effective in limiting parking.

We don’t need to draw people in, luring them with wide open parking lots. People want to live in the city – it’s the reason rents are much higher than the suburbs. What we’re trying to do is work with the limited space available in an urban environment to make life enjoyable. Encouraging less car use allows for less car infrastructure – which takes up a huge amount of space and makes pedestrian life difficult.

Think of a walk in L.A., an compare it to a walk in San Francisco. Or New York. Or Paris. I think you’ll find that of these cities, L.A. is the one where you’d never want to leave your car.

First, I’m not sure it’s needed. In places where we’ve removed parking minimums, we’re seeing some developments with very little parking. The Plymouth Housing project at 1st and Cedar is at the extreme end, with have 5 parking spaces for a 60 unit building, but some market rate projects (on Capitol Hill, if I remember correctly) are coming in at about half a space per unit.

Second, it’ll be fodder for more charges of social engineering by the transit/density crowd (i.e. us). Yes, I know, freeways and single-family zoning are also social engineering. But given that just removing minimums may be enough to accomplish the goal, why invite more anger and risk backlashes?

Third, there’s some risk, albeit small, that developers will be not be able to make otherwise good project pencil out given maximums. Consider, for example, a super high-end downtown condo project replacing a 70-space surface parking lot with a 30-story, 300 unit building with 300 parking spaces. I’d argue that such a project is good for the transit cause (those folks will at least walk and spend money in downtown, and likely will take at least some transit, even if it’s just light rail from Westlake to the stadiums), but the potential buyers may not be ready to give up on cars entirely. Given the cost of digging for parking downtown, I suspect developers try to hit as close as possible to the minimum parking they need to sell units.

And last, I believe private parking in housing isn’t nearly the car-use incentive that public parking at destinations is. The city can do a lot more to reduce car use just by pricing street parking closer to its actual value, as Don Shoup and others have recommended, and by slowly (don’t incite ire by doing it all at once) replacing parking with well-landscaped, fully separated bike lanes, as Copenhagen has done.

I’ve seen some complexes in L.A. that even had a separate section (separate entrances, fenced off inside.) for public parking. Some lots cost money (either hourly or monthly), some lots were free. And I saw other complexes that offered short-term guest parking (outside the secured gated resident parking).

Let’s make it really easy for someone to drive in to the area and park and take advantage of local businesses *and then* hop on transit and go somewhere else. Make the stops not just convenient for those who live nearby, but also a hub to draw in people who own cars, aren’t served by transit and want to use transit.

The car can be a short-haul substitute to get the bus-averse onto transit.

I’d prefer the city simply tell developers: build underground parking (ie make profit on the parking you build yourself).

And the city tell renters: want roadside parking? Buy a yearly/monthly permit from us.

And the city tell homeowners: here’s a parking tag you can use, but since you ought to have a garage, it really is meant for you to be able to entertain overnight visitors. Want another permit? See renter rule.