Woodside Terraces | 6 fl | U/C

[ijmorlan]

Or ban people who have space for two vehicles (garage+driveway). I remember a Cambridge household in the paper that was expecting the city to accommodate their 5 cars, without requiring them to even use their garage.

It shouldn’t matter what the house has as part of its property. It should be a matter of what is the policy for the street? Do houses have car storage on the street or not, and how much? Otherwise you create perverse incentives — if having a garage means you lose your street parking spot, then people are discouraged from building their own car storage. A variation on this could be OK: if you have a driveway, the curb space it replaces counts as “your” parking spot and you cannot park on the street (essentially, you are always using a parking spot). But whether or not there is a garage and how many cars can be parked on the driveway is irrelevant.

When a new subdivision is designed, the streets should either be narrow (no parking) or wide with parking, with a specific policy (e.g., each house is entitled to a parking spot). How wide the street is should be based in part upon whether or not there is parking. Ideally, there would not be constant tweaking of whether or not parking is allowed on an existing street. Development should not be required to include any particular amount of parking; but street parking shouldn’t be thought of as free. Having street parking means more pavement, a wider road, more maintenance, and higher construction costs.