To my complete surprise, in Bavaria in Germany it’s illegal to use your garage for anything else than storing your cars. I mean it’s not checked a lot but still…
Where I live in Australia many new apartment buildings don’t even provide a single carpark space for the cheapest units anymore- just a bike spot. All the streets around these buildings become choked with cars of residents and visitors, which negatively impacts the lives of people who already lived in the area. Nothing is done to improve public transport, and now we’re being told that the few car spaces they have to provide should be scrapped…to drive down rents? I call BS. It would only maximise profits of developers to do even less than they currently do. I don’t know where they got their data for this report but it’s clearly not in my suburb.
If developing property becomes more profitable, there will be more competition in the market.
That aside, underground parking spaces are ridiculously expensive to build and requiring every apartment resident to pay for parking spaces regardless of how many they use just drives up car ownership, which is what really drives down the quality of a city.
Every street in my suburb is choked with parked cars because everyone has filled their garages with shit and decided the road is for personal long-term vehicle storage.
Even the 2-bed units have two cars each and at least one is on the street.
Seems more like a problem with the local streetscape devoting space to long term storage of vehicles.
One thing councils are competent at is issuing parking fines, if only the appropriate restrictions were in place.
My personal preference would be to see residential access roads transformed into communal green spaces with basic access paths for pedestrian/cycle/emergency/utility purposes.