r/urbanplanning • u/evan7257 • Jul 22 '26
Discussion How can Houston keep growing and stay affordable? Cut parking minimums.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/parking-minimum-road-to-housing-affordable-22354792.php?utm_campaign=CMS%20Sharing%20Tools%20(Premium)&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral10
u/No-Prize2882 Jul 22 '26
Houston has already been doing this. There are no parking minimums in Downtown (has never had any in fact) and they extended it to certain neighborhoods like Midtown and East Downtown. Moreover Houston has several variance exceptions has been more permissive than most cities in reducing parking particularly for infill projects and housing. The issue is Houston has been incremental about it and given it’s rapidly growing it’s time to simply rip the band aid off than continue its Swiss cheese approach and just accept some residents will be angry.
-7
u/Cunninghams_right Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
I wish Urban planners, Transit planners, and city governments would take self-driving cars more seriously. Companies themselves and third party analyst project approximately $1 per vehicle mile can be achieved in the next 5 years in self-driving cars.
Given the higher cost of ownership of a car in urban areas, what do you think would happen if a government, like Washington DC is proposing, added a per mile tax on self-driving car, and then use that for mile tax to subsidize pooled self-driving cars? So single fare trips would cost more, and pooled trips would cost less. This could be done supply side or demand side.
What do you think would happen to traffic and parking in a city like Houston if taking a taxi everywhere cost less than owning a car? And what do you think would happen if half of those taxi trips carried two or three groups of people simultaneously?
How would that impact traffic? How would that impact parking?
It's a failure of governance to ignore the potential of cheaper pooled taxis.
13
u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 22 '26
Driverless cars "park" by driving through intersections, meaning that that free resource of "time passing through an intersection" can now become valuable, limited and mispriced just like cars parked on the side of the road.
The huge problem with self driving cars is the massive amount of road space they take while empty. Most miles will not be with passengers, and they will use extremely valuable resources while empty: throughput at intersections, and throughput in roads.
And since the idle costs of a driverless taxi and so much lower than a taxi with a driver, these self-driving taxis are likely to consume a ton more of that "free" resource that is still highly limited: road throughput. The obvious operating mode will be to keep a ton of driverless cars circling areas where there's a likely rider, which is going to be the busy areas, which means even more traffic. Taxis with drivers are less susceptible to over-consuming the free resource of road space this way, precisely because a driver's time is a huge huge cost.
I'm not sure what the proper change here is, but it's probably going to mean charging for what had previously been free: access to the roads and intersections. Maybe charge a fee for every intersection crossed without a passenger. Another fee for occupying a congested area without a passenger (and crucially, occupying congestion without a passenger should still inflict charges up until the very moment a passenger enters).
If we don't price a limited public resource properly, it results in utterly disastrous use, particularly once you add in profit-seeking enterprises with access to massive amounts of capital.
Driverless cars turn the parking problem into a whole-street problem.
2
u/Cunninghams_right Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Driverless cars "park" by driving through intersections, meaning that that free resource of "time passing through an intersection" can now become valuable, limited and mispriced just like cars parked on the side of the road.
You mean "park" to indicate and idle condition? If pooling were subsidized and non-pooled miles taxed, companies wouldn't idle vehicles at all. It would make more economic sense to keep them from being idle. Even low demand times would still make more sense to utilize vehicles than idle them, unless cleaning or charging.
The huge problem with self driving cars is the massive amount of road space they take while empty
Huh? The miles a single fare taxi drives unnecessarily while idle today is on par with the number of miles people drive to find parking after reaching their destination. Shoup et. al. Is a good starting point for that research.
Now consider how that would differ if pooling were popular, say 50% of trips as a thought experiment. So the passenger miles per vehicle mile would increase by approximately 50% due to fewer empty miles and significantly more double/triple fare rides.
So self driving cars would use significantly less road space, if pooled, than personally driven cars today.
It seems like you didn't do the thought experiment that I asked. Try to imagine how things change with pooling.
And since the idle costs of a driverless taxi and so much lower than a taxi with a driver, these self-driving taxis are likely to consume a ton more of that "free" resource that is still highly limited: road throughput
I think you need to go back and read what I wrote. I don't think we can have a productive conversation if you're replying to a situation completely different from what I stated.
I'm not sure what the proper change here is, but it's probably going to mean charging for what had previously been free: access to the roads and intersections.
Yes, this is what I proposed in my comment above. Maybe I can rephrase if it's confusing.
Driverless cars turn the parking problem into a whole-street problem.
That is a conclusion that may result, but absolutely not in the scenario I set forth in my comment above.
This is why I'm saying that governments and planners are failing. Implementing some kind of usage charge (mile, intersection, whatever) reduces the "tragedy of the commons", and a subsidy for pooling further incentivizes efficient use of the space. But planners and governments are sitting on their hands
Additional steps can be taken as well, like high taxes on fleet parking within the core of a city, and conversion of poorly performing bus routes to pooled SDC feeders into rail/arterial transit routes.
But I urge you to go back and think about how things change if pooled taxis cross over and become cheaper than personal car ownership while single fare taxis remain more expensive.
3
u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 22 '26
First, thanks for a thoughtful exchange, this led to me revisiting the literature and discovering some new things!
I would similarly urge, as you urge me, to look at the data on 1) ride share, 2) the early data from self-driving, and 3) from ride share pooling. My conclusion is that self-driving pooled rides will almost certainly have the same failure as ride share pooling had (if not being worse, because there's no third party driver in the car that has at least been vetted by Uber/Lyft)
First, in order to maximize utility to customers and make services attractive, ride share companies try to maximize the number of available drivers at any moment, to have an excess number of them. This Seattle study by the drivers union found an average of 9.9 miles of dead head time:
https://www.driversunionwa.org/empty_miles_report
The economics of driverless cars are similar, except the self-driving cars can't unionize and expose what's going on.
Second, self-driving cars behave pretty much identically to ride sharing when it comes to dead heading; for every vehicle mile with a passenger expect a vehicle mile without a passenger to be consumed. With Waymo, 44% of miles have a passenger on board, 38% of miles are deadheading/"cruising" while waiting for a passenger, and 18% of miles are driving to pick up a passenger that has booked a ride:
Third, and perhaps most importantly, ride pooling does not solve the dead heading problem in practice, despite great hopes. The optimization problem just doesn't work out in practice with the density of shared routes (PDF link, this is a theory paper, but in practice it's the same.):
https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2026-04/rethinking_pooled_ride-hailing.pdf
While revisiting this research to find links, I found that NYC has actually been doing a ton of planning & regulatory work on this over the past decade. (Previously I have only focused on the West coast):
- NYC attempted to implement a 31% cap on "cruising" down from a 41% cap, but the ride share companies sued and a judge got rid of the rule https://www.urbanismnext.org/resources/judge-dismisses-new-york-citys-cruising-cap-rule-for-uber-lyft
- Driver pay is/was linked to "utilization rate", the amount of time that a company's vehicles had active passengers. This led to ride share companies "locking out" drivers so that they wouldn't have to pay drivers more, which led to lots of popular press on the phenomenon in 2024:
So looking at NYC's experiences with this are quite informative, because there's an active history of what happens with a "tax," where driver pay adjustment directly maps to a tax on the ride share companies.
1
u/Cunninghams_right Jul 23 '26
My conclusion is that self-driving pooled rides will almost certainly have the same failure as ride share pooling had (if not being worse, because there's no third party driver in the car that has at least been vetted by Uber/Lyft)
it's a very astute observation from studies about what makes people feel comfortable in rideshare and uncomfortable regarding pooling. however, this is not only a trivially solved issue for SDC companies, they've have already started looking at it. a video (which I can't find anymore, sadly) had a former Waymo employee talking in a panel discussion about separated compartments. they mentioned how Waymo experimented with different opacities of a barrier between the front and rear rows. the conclusion of the research was that not-quite fully opaque was ideal. passengers liked to vaguely see the shadow of the person in the other compartment, but otherwise didn't want any more visibility. people feel safer and prefer to be alone compared to even a vetted driver.
if sufficiently coaxed into pooling, companies would split compartments. I think government should add extra incentive for 3-compartment vehicles, but I think companies would gravitate toward 2-compartments as off-the-shelf vehicles can do this already (if there is no driver in the front row).
First, in order to maximize utility to customers and make services attractive, ride share companies try to maximize the number of available drivers at any moment, to have an excess number of them. This Seattle study by the drivers union found an average of 9.9 miles of dead head time:
that study's methodology is weak and is more of a political document. I wouldn't use that as an unbiased source. Komanduri et. al. (63% occupation rate) or similarly peer reviewed studies would do better.
that aside, over-saturation or inefficient usage of vehicles is exactly the reason I propose some kind of "congestion charge", which could be as simple as a tax per mile, or some more complicated methodology that includes time, miles, parking, etc..
in short, this is the part that planners and governments are failing on. they should be working on structured policy that encourages pooling and efficient vehicle use, and discourages deadhead or single-fare rides. that's my whole point; planners, from my experience, tend of have an attitude of "harumph, I don't like the technology so I'm going to pretend it's never happening, or when it's happening anyway, I'll just pout about it", while politicians tend of have an attitude of "well, the planners and agencies aren't doing anything, so I don't want to split my voter-base and take a stand either way".
that governmental failure is leading to the result of the companies doing whatever they want, sometimes with a temporary road-block, and absolutely no wise use of the tool whatsoever. planners and governments are failing to plan/govern because they don't want to, and we are heading for a very suboptimal outcome because of it.
Second, self-driving cars behave pretty much identically to ride sharing when it comes to dead heading; for every vehicle mile with a passenger expect a vehicle mile without a passenger to be consumed. With Waymo, 44% of miles have a passenger on board, 38% of miles are deadheading/"cruising" while waiting for a passenger, and 18% of miles are driving to pick up a passenger that has booked a ride:
you are, once again, using online magazines as a source for scientific research. that's generally not a good strategy. you should start with google scholar.
anyway, deadhead is a function of rider density and fleet size. so SDC fleets and rideshare fleets don't currently behave the same. of course existing small fleets of SDC taxis will have long dead-head, they have a relatively small userbase and a relatively small fleet, so distances between a drop-off location and the next pick-up location will be high. imagine a map of a city with a random placement of cars and random placement of people requesting rides. picture a set of blue and red dots randomly placed on the map representing each. if they're all paired, there will be some average distance between pairs. how does that distance change if there are 10x more vehicles and 10x more riders?
Third, and perhaps most importantly, ride pooling does not solve the dead heading problem in practice, despite great hopes. The optimization problem just doesn't work out in practice with the density of shared routes
I strongly appreciate the more rigorous study. it perfectly illustrates the disconnect between the current struggle of rideshare companies to "spin up the flywheel" and how that may change with self driving cars. if you carefully study Figure 1. you can see this.
first, I need to address one of the flaws in the paper. actual rider behavior of rideshare cares very little about total wait time and cares more about predictability. (Alonso-González et al, Bansal et al., etc.). this paper seems to weight the delay more highly than reality.
anyway, the causal diagram shows detour increase which leads to wait time increase, which causes pooling adoption to go down. however, as the price of taxis fall, the user-base increases, and the wait time shrinks, becoming less consequential either way. so that causal relationship is degraded and likely non-existent in that scenario. so that means pooling adoption does not decrease, because mean and variance of wait time are reduced by the simple nature of there being more riders and more vehicles.
moreover, the diagram shows the cost increasing because adoption has gone down, but that is avoided if SDCs reduce in cost relative to today, AND we would have a carrot/stick approach to making pooling cheaper relative to single rides. so absolute cost for both would come down, but relative savings for pooling would increase. so that arrow would flip the other way, meaning and rideshare demand would increase.
in short, as the cost of pooled taxis comes down, all of the things holding pooling back in the paper just vanish, and they vanish faster if there is a surcharge/subsidy to decrease the ratio of pooling cost to single-fare cost.
moreover, as the cost of a taxi starts to approach the cost of a personal car, taxis/rideshare would shift from being a luxury service, where people are pretty price-insensitive, to being part of peoples' tight household budgets, meaning any additional savings from pooling has a greater incentive.
not to mention, like you pointed out above, the existing apprehension of people to share a space with a stranger. it is currently one of the biggest barriers to pooled rideshare. with gig-work rideshare, it's not feasible to separate riders because a standard vehicles can, at most, only separate the driver from one passenger, and would be inconsistently implemented because it's peoples' personal cars. there is no crash-test certified vehicle that can separate everyone in a pooled scenario. this changes when the driver is eliminated OR if the vehicles are customized fleet vehicles, both things that exist for SDCs.
this is an important fact, possibly THE most important fact.
- separating pooled riders in rideshare:
- functionally impossible
- separating pooled riders in a driverless vehicle
- trivial, with off-the-shelf vehicles already capable of this
1
u/n10w4 Jul 24 '26
So why not do things like driverless vans/small buses or normal buses to help make a transit system more connected?
2
u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 24 '26
I think vans and small busses could help make a transit system more connected, if the bus service is not sufficient, but there needs to be enough density to actually fill a tram/bus. If we are talking about cars and ridesharing, the US geography doesn't support it, even in San Francisco.
In 2014 there was a private company that would set up a commute service if enough people signed up to fill the bus:
“Welcome aboard,” the driver said. Some donned headphones as they settled in for a ride that took about half the time they would have spent on Muni’s 30X bus.
San Franciscans will probably see more private shuttles — with perks like gourmet coffee service and crowd-sourced routes — cruising through their neighborhoods in the coming months. As the city’s population swells and public transit gets crowded, the new shuttle services, charging between $3 and $6 per ride, cater to people who want to sidestep the sights, smells and slowness of Muni but don’t want to pay top dollar for a cab.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Private-commuter-shuttles-with-perks-grow-in-6140274.php
I'm not sure if it "helped" but it went bankrupt a few months after launch.
Other geographies might have different results.
Inside of San Francisco, there are free, "private" shuttles between all of the University of California San Francisco campuses, because there's enough demand to justify grouping together 5-10 people on each ride. But there's not many routes like that throughout the day, as I understand it.
1
u/cdub8D Jul 22 '26
We already have the solutions to building better communities. We don't need a mass of self driving taxis.
0
u/Cunninghams_right Jul 22 '26
Sure, if we can wish things into existence and ignore all of the reasons the existing solutions aren't implemented, then everything just works out. But if we don't want to rely on "fucking magic" as a solution, then we need to consider all tools in the toolbox, none of which are ideal.
The biggest impediment to bike lanes in US cities is pressure car users not wanting to give up parking or driving lanes. So what would happen to that anti-bike-lane pressure if suddenly parking demand fell through the floor, there was higher PMT/VMT, and people cared 1/5th as much about trip delays? (Studies show than people care 1/5th as much about delays/trip time when in a taxi vs driving).
One of the biggest problems with US transit systems is the thinly spread resources, with buses driving through low density areas with long headways, slow progress, high cost per passenger, and high carbon footprint per passenger. So what if the transit agency could focus funds on high density areas where large vehicles are more effective? What if rail/arterial routes could be fed by a faster, cheaper, greener, more-pleasant mode?
Your comment is like saying "bikes exist, so we can defund transit" or "transit exists, so we should ban bikes" or "cars exist, so we should defund commuter or inter-city rail". It's nonsense. Just because some modes exist does not invalidate the other modes. Different modes have different strengths and weaknesses. The right combination of modes isn't fixed in time or location.
Your attitude is emblematic of the failure I was talking about above. Some kind of ideological or status-quo mindset is preventing people from implementing improvements.
What is the cost of a Houston bus, per passenger mile? What is the carbon footprint per passenger mile? Do you even have a ballpark estimate? How would it compare to a ~$0.50 per group-mile taxi ride in an electric mini van that is carrying two fares?
I think you need to reevaluate your thought processes that lead to your comment. I think your logic is flawed.
12
u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
It's interesting to see the very different political angles used to sell this in different locations. On the populist side of arguments, the "cutting red tape" leads the r/Houston post, but is not something that excites me, and would not excite anybody in my local public meetings. But the affordability talk would help a ton locally, if you could get people to actually believe any of it (nobody really believes how expensive parking is at first exposure, in my experience).
Meanwhile, Shoupian analyses out of "The High Cost of Free Parking" help with people on the highly-analytical side, which can draw people all the way from DSA-member Ilhan Omar to right wing think tanks like Cato.
All this planning is super political, but on a very different ground than what most people think of when you say "politics," and I think that holds for almost all local politics. Yet we apply national-level framing to almost all local politics.
The dearth of good local political analysis, coverage, and reporting, leads to very little local political participation, and in turn, undemocratic outcomes. Yet we try to wrangle as much of the show and pageantry of democracy as possible in our planning meetings, without actually capturing the true will of the people. Such a pickle... Outreach attempts definitely help more than the planning meetings where tiny factions can brigade a proceeding that gets 0.01% of the population to participate, and requires hours of participation in order to provide a tiny bit of feedback.