Does anyone lose if the project swaps parking spaces for additional affordable units? Sure doesn’t seem like it.

Swapping parking for more affordable housing sounds like a great idea, but why is De Blasio pulling this right before the project is going before the City Planning Commission? This is going to torpedo the whole thing.

Car-sharing for when a car is needed.

No they wouldn’t. If anything, garage users would park on the street when it’s convenient. Williamsburg can absorb plenty more car-free housing without issue.

Personally, after thinking of this issue, I’m now in favor of the Japanese solution to parking, it just makes sense. They have minimum parking requirements that are so low they might as well not exist, but the real policy here is that people need to have a proof of off-street parking when they register their car to get license plates (without plates, you can’t use the public streets). Meaning that individuals, not planners nor developers, are responsible for finding their own parking spot. This creates a market for renting out parking in cities.

Whereas the current policy is about controlling the supply of parking and subsidizing it, the Japanese policy is instead of creating a demand for off-street parking and having people who want cars pay the full cost of this parking. If people aren’t ready to pay for the parking, then they don’t get to have cars.

This also makes sure that on-street parking is under-used in residential areas, since every car owner has an off-street parking spot somewhere nearby where they will likely park, so only visitors will park in the street. Streets can be thus built much narrower as they don’t need to be wide enough to accommodate unbroken lines of cars parked there nearly 24/7.

But if you want to keep on-street parking, then you could sell a number of on-street proof of parking per street, for instance, if a street can have 40 cars parked on it, you could attribute say 30 proofs of parking for that street, available to residents living within say a half-mile radius through an auction. You identify these 30 spots as reserved to owners of a permit but only from 9 PM to 7 AM, the last 10 spots open to anyone at any time.

Off-street parking doesn’t necessarily mean garages, it also means driveways and parking lots.

From the suburbs I’ve seen (and the one I was raised in), though garages are not always used, the vast majority of people park their cars in their driveways at least. There are a few cars parked on the street, but generally these are parked there when an household has 3 cars or more and having them all parked in the driveway means that you would need to remove one car to allow another to get out. During winter though, garages are more used, but we get a lot of snow and ice buildup on cars left outside so that is a worse annoyance than having to open and close the garage door when arriving or leaving.

In Japan, single-family housing typically has a place for a car, whether a small driveway or garage, but there are a few parking lots here and there providing additional parking spaces to rent for people either with more than one car per household or for renters in low-rise apartments. That’s the result of the policy, by creating a demand, when a lot of people want to own cars and are ready to pay for it, some people will buy lots and turn them into parking, renting out the spaces.