The code is a legal requirement. If the code did not set mandatory minimum widths for parking stalls, builders could still set them at 9 feet wide.
The point is that if you are builder who wants to build a 7 foot wide parking stall (or avoid parking stalls altogether and just have the cars park themselves as efficiently as possible) you are not legally allowed to do this.
I'm just saying that people should have the choice to build a building without parking if they think that it makes more sense to use the ground floor for other things. Currently, they do not - they are required to build 9 foot wide parking stalls and 16 foot wide parking aisles.
And you do not need to have an entire building of self driving cars to make a large dent in the building footprint that is currently dedicated to parking.
I don't really like being called dishonest, there's a pretty broad literature showing the potential gains of cross ventilation even with a small amount of wind. It's extremely rare to have a day without wind at even 2mph and even if such a day exists, running your hood or bathroom fan are also extremely effective ways to create a pressure differential and draw air into your house. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1755660/FULLTEXT...
"there is a reduction of 90% of hours of a possible use of mechanical ventilation, showing the feasibility to achieve thermal comfort within the house by using passive ventilation"
" Indoor thermal conditions were found to be within the comfort zone for more than 70% of the time under cross ventilation operation while single-sided ventilation provided adequate thermal conditions for only 1% of the time. Results from this study highlight a significantly better performance of cross ventilation over single-sided ventilation." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...
Sure. One thing we could do is waive requirements about how wide parking stalls need to be, and parking aisles, and how many parking spaces you need, and then let builders make those decisions for themselves.
The far bigger danger to kids from an abuse perspective is the adult driver in the front seat and from a safety perspective is the poor average quality of human driving.
And a self driving car is capable of locking all the doors, identifying threats, calling 911 etc.
Right, the difference is you can see from charts of miles driven by Waymo etc. that the technology is clearly ready. If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.
My sense is that parents are pretty tired of driving their kids to and from things and if it was possible for your kids to take a self driving car to school or to activities or to camp that would be a pretty attractive proposition.
The schools or daycares or camps could help figure out unloading on the other end.
It's extraordinarily difficult, and expensive, to convert parking garage space to housing - the heights are different, it's not designed with the same egresses, the floor material is concrete.
It also affects what the ground floor of buildings looks like - you can't have ten ground floor pedestrian exits or bike parking in the courtyard if the courtyard is on the third floor.
You've got this backwards - big elevators with union labor mean that they're an expensive undertaking that only large multifamily buildings can afford.
Smaller, more affordable elevators mean that they're less of a luxury item. You could put an elevator in your house, or retrofit an older apartment with an elevator, much more easily. This is incredibly common in other countries
I'm Googling for "Des Moines apartments" and clicking on any that I find that have double loaded corridors and so far I'm 0 for 4 on finding any that have a three bedroom apartment.
Walnut Creek is in PG&E territory where peak hour energy is 54 cents/kwh right now.
And the difference is A/C is paid by the renter not the building owner. If you want to address cost of living one thing we could do is make it easier to have the wind cool down apartment buildings.
With respect, people who drive used cars are not renting brand new apartments in downtown Walnut Creek.
It does not make sense to mandate parking standards in new buildings that assume 100% of cars will be driven by humans who park and then need to open the door to exit the car.
The point is the city's parking code assumes that every car has a human driver that needs to park and then exit the car. This informs the choices about how wide the spaces and how wide the aisles are.
Even if only some of the cars had the ability to park themselves - onsite or offsite - you could drastically reduce the floor space required for parking. Reducing the floor space reduces the building height, the construction cost, and the required rent.
We are going to be stuck with the choices we make now about how much space to allocate for parking for the next ~75 years or however long this building is there for. I don't think humans are going to be driving for a lot of that time.
The point is that if you are builder who wants to build a 7 foot wide parking stall (or avoid parking stalls altogether and just have the cars park themselves as efficiently as possible) you are not legally allowed to do this.