Looks like Park Slope will be a great place for those from other neighborhoods to store their car for free when they travel out of town by air this summer. We’ll see how much of a paradise it is if people catch on.

Having gone to graduate school in city planning (84-85), I wouldn’t agree that parking is never discussed. But it is (was) discussed in terms of meeting the demand, not restricting it.

I don’t want to go over old ground, but the required parking doesn’t have the teeth people think it does in NYC, except in very low density areas. Parking is pushed by market demand, not regulations.

The question is whether the city might want to put some teeth in the maximums, which are pretty weak outside the CBD.

The good news — there is no enforcement in NYC to ensure “accessory” parking spaces are in fact limited to residents. There is nothing to prevent the developer of a building to lease the entire parking facility to Zipcar, for the use of the entire neighborhood.

What nonsense. People graduating from planning schools in 2008 most certainly discuss parking and are even assigned Shoup’s literature as readings.

“Planning departments” aren’t discrete entities that make choices as autonomous units. They are composed of individuals, most of whom have to please a huge array of constituents, and are like all bureaucratic organizations, directed by the late-career managers who went to school a long time ago, when nobody was discussing the idea of too much parking (including Shoup).

There are a ton of idealist greenhorn urban planners who want to rid people of their cars. But they’re the “assistant planning technicians” not the people in charge. Shoup should know this.

Working in Delaware, somebody once commented to me that the state’s Department of Transportation was “a couple retirements away from being pedestrian-friendly.”