Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cars per unit

[Howard Landman (howard]

>> We are asking to have our
>> parking area reduced to 1.5 parking stalls per unit.

> Based on our experience -- Don't do it.
> 
> The only predictable thing about the demographics of your final (after
> move-in) membership is that you can't predict it.  The present pattern in
> car ownership is likely to change.  Any pattern is.
> 
> Our founding members envisioned residents getting rid of their cars.  It
> hasn't happened.

Ditto that from River Rock.  We not only cut down on the number of spaces,
but also made them narrower than standard.  Easily the single worst blunder
of the entire project.  We're now getting ready to institute a permit system,
where each car needs to show a permit to park, and people with garages won't
be issued permits.  So if I want, e.g., to use my garage as a photo studio
sometime, I need to beg or borrow a permit from someone else in order to
park my car in one of our lots, even though I live here and have one of the
largest units.  I think we're expecting to have perhaps 3 or 4 guest spaces
total.  You can imagine how far that will go when someone throws a large
party ... and my 18-year-old daughter is considered a guest under these
regulations and will need to get a guest permit every night she's here.

We had a consensed policy that each garage must remain parkable.  It was
(and is) violated by some.  The community is unwilling to enforce that
policy.

We had a consensed policy that inoperable vehicles could not be parked.
It was often violated.  The community is unwilling to enforce that policy,
but by goodwill effort most of them are gone now.

Some people who routinely worked late (e.g. an astronomer) were unable to
park when they returned home.  We now have Reserved spaces for several such
people.  These spaces are unavailable for use by others at any time, even
when their owner is gone.  This is wasteful and makes the parking situation
worse.

The new permit policy (which is only a trial run) grants 2 spaces to each
unit, whether it's the smallest with only one person living in it or the
largest with a family of 4 or more.  Many people in the community, myself
included, have serious reservations about whether this is fair or reasonable.
The trial got passed largely because most of us, myself included, have faith
that we will manage to work this all out somehow, but the exact mechanism
by which we will do that has not been identified, nor has any serious
attempt been made to determine what *is* fair.

Some of us would like to think about a community vehicle someday, but we
can't really consider that now because there's no place to park one.

Having inadequate parking means, effectively, that we are being forced to
squabble about it.  I personally find this stupid and a waste of time.  My
advice: don't go there.

Note that I am not suggesting you have to pave over everything.  Look at the
Green Streets (51), Shielded Parking (97), and Small Parking Lots (103)
patterns in A Pattern Language for ideas about how to keep things sane.
And don't  forget Nine Per Cent Parking (11) ... :-)

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins, CO
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