Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Parking (was Building with Equal Access & Preparing for electric cars on site)

[Diana Carroll (dianaecarroll]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 12:00 PM, Sharon Villines <sharon [at] 
sharonvillines.com
> wrote:

> The idea that parking near the CH will mean people will come in the CH has
> not proven true. And having a common parking lot I don't think has led to
> more interaction, perhaps for some. I don't drive everyday. But I don't
> think putting parking on the outside of the community requires having all
> the parking in one place. If it can be done without creating roads that
> have to be maintained, I think it would be preferable to have cars or other
> transportation near homes.


Site design is *SO* dependent on the physical topology of the site, how
many units there are, the surrounding area, and so on, I am not sure
there's really a rule of thumb about what works best.

On this page, you can see Mosaic's site from above:
http://mosaic-commons.org/site

(The brown roof is the CH...the others are units.)

As you can see, we have multiple parking lots, and *some* parking is close
to *some* units, but there are spots that are quite far from any units,
because that's where we had room to put them.  Despite that fact that we
had several acres to build on,  we also had numerous constraints including
storm water management, land grade, preservation of existing groves of
trees, wetland setbacks, natural gas piping, and dozens of other factors.

You'll have to just trust me when I say that there was no reasonable way
for us to make all parking spots equidistant to housing.

Diana