Hey I'm also not a fan of using taxpayer money to subsidize private vehicle ownership, but we have things like on street parking and have you ever tried getting rid of those or razing the fees to better account for the actual cost of maintaining our roads and putting that on to the drivers wallet and not the base tax payer? Good luck! We unfortunately already subsidize driving and the storing private vehicles on public land at all levels. From more indirect policies like exempt SUV from safety and emission regulations by classifying them "light trucks (bigger vehicles create more damage to the roads), tariffs and restrictions on certain types of foreign import (limiting competition), oil subsidize. To more direct ones like, not having adequate gas tax and user fee costs to account for the actual cost of road related expenses (right now a ever increasing amount of that shortfall is cover by property tax and other general fund sources, this also puts the cost indirectly on local residents as large commercial lot owner pay very little on taxes on their acres of parking lots that out of town users benefit from without much of a direct payment to the infrastructure cost that supports these lots) , all the unaccounted for public costs that heavy car use requires (sewer, utilities, safety, etc that don't get paid directly by users), and the parking mandates themselves (subsidizing car companies by creating a induced demand effect, increasing constructions cost, and influencing development patterns). So at this point who should bare the cost of it and how much government intervention are we supposed to bare? At least with some centralized parking garages we can aglomerate those cost on maintenance and collect fees towards reducing direct tax burdens on locals that might not even use the facilities, and if we then removal of parking mandates we open up ourselves to less government intervention and open our towns and cities up to more creative land use, as we take away one of the biggest financial burden to construction for large and small scale projects. And it's all very geographically driven, in more rural places developers will continue to build parking and these mandates make more sense, they know that is just not going to pencil if they cant draw people in. But in urban areas we shouldn't be forcing it.

We are just not really accounting for our current reality when we create these types of mandates. I'm currently helping a client develop a small 20 unit building in a downtown abandon lot on the Seacoast. It's located on a portion of street that has 60 under utilized pull in on-street parking spots, a large strip mall parking lot that is probably in the the high 100 range in spots, very underutilized probably sits at 30% occupancy at its average peak. Next to it sit a abandoned plant and mill that has almost 400 spots that get no use whatsoever. Then we have dozens or more on-street spots on nearby side streets and a few public lots that probably end up adding 60 more spots to this total. all at 5 min walking range from our site. In a area that, other than the unpleasantness of having to walk by so many empty parking lots, is has pedestrian access to transit, groceries, public services, and entertainment. But the town still requires us to have 2 spots per unit, that's 40 more spots and will account for over 60% of the building site and will probably account for 1/3 of the budget through the site improvements needed to create a surface lot. We had a pie in the sky discussion and she would love to spread does units out to multiple buildings on the whole site and make it a bit more scaled and create a bit more of a historic street front down the length of the site if she didn't have to dedicate so much just to parking. We are trying to see if it's even possible, and if she can't fit 20 units she will not build. In a area where housing, urban rehabilitation, and putting properties back into the tax rolls is sorely needed its seem like cars have more rights to housing than people.