I’d love to hear your idea to make sure said bike paths never intersect with pedestrian or automotive transit routes. That seems to be where these incidents happen.

Be careful. The unwritten first rule of r/CambridgeMA is that you don’t post anything that is critical of cyclists. They are watching. They will take away your internet points and then stalk you for weeks across multiple subs.

Agreed. This is an interesting step 1. Now further steps need of be taken to ensure this doesn’t result in a ton of new high prices development without actually solving the real problems.

When Boston passed a similar law, the made it only apply to low income housing. I would have liked that better since it drove the right focus.

Factually, 2/3 of households in Cambridge own cars. There is nothing to indicate that the people who move into these houses won’t follow a similar ratio. Even if only 1/3 have cars, it still means more cars than we currently have on the streets. In no scenario does this result in fewer cars in Cambridge.

I think I see the disconnect.

1. I think minimum wage is criminal and companies that can’t afford to pay their workers enough to live off of should go out of business.
2. No one should have to live that far away. The city should structure its housing so that the low income people who support the city can also afford to live there.
3. I don’t believe this law will have any impact on housing prices because it isn’t the full solution. It is an easy step 1 that drastically favors groups that are neither part of the short or long-term solution.

I think a lot of the new housing will bring people who actually do have cars and they will just depend on the streets to park them. That will put pressure on everyone already here because of the free parking that Cambridge offers anyone considered a resident.

There are three recommended steps to solve this problem:

Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers. Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages. Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can make demand-based prices for on-street parking politically popular.

Claiming success after just the first one is potentially problematic…

Well, technically I spent a lot of money to live somewhere based on what it had to offer. No one is forcing me to live here, true, but someone did just “take” a piece of the value I thought I was purchasing.

I’m not saying this was an evil thing, I’m just saying I have a right to be frustrated by the change since the beneficiaries of this aren’t residents like me - they are property developers, landlords, and current non-residents.

Edit: spelling

I wish you wouldn’t jump to such extremes. It makes people infer something that I am not saying. It isn’t evil, it just has an externality that no one is talking about, it benefits wealthy developers, and isn’t guaranteed to drive the intended results.

Existing landlords won’t drop rent because of this, new landlords will continue to charge market rates, and new owners will still have cars without a new place to park them.

I completely agree.

Cart before horse, taking away parking requirements before fixing infrastructure.

“Car traffic is awful… I wish we had thought of this before we allowed all this construction without parking” - everyone living in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Beijing…

Being a NIMBY isn’t bad if you are being reasonable. I think we can all agree a garbage dump or low-level nuclear waste site in Cambridge would be bad. We purchased homes or signed leases with a certain expectation of what the community was like. That is going to change in a way that is not favorable to the existing residents. Feeling annoyed by that shouldn’t be grounds for scorn or shame.

I agree with your suggestion. They should have done that with this change together. By itself this change is bad because it makes the problem of Cambridge giving away parking even worse.

Adding residential property without parking, to a city where 2/3rds of the households have vehicles, is about disrupting the lifestyle and convenience of the majority of the residents in the city, wealthy or not.

Owning a car is not about wealth. It is about lifestyle needs and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that low income people are more likely to require a car than wealthy people.

Nobody is forcing you to spend what it costs to live in Cambridge, and nobody should be making it easier for you to live here just because you yell the loudest.

I think you could argue they are a form of wealth segregation. I disagree and I think it is more of an attempt to maintain current community ratios for existing residence/voters rather than cater to a group of hypothetical non-residents or vocal want-to-be residents … but I can see an argument for it being deliberate wealth segregation.

You don’t have to play the race card every time. Not everything is about race.

Really, though, I think those regulations are all about preventing predatory developer practices that negatively affect current residents in ways that will last for decades after the developers have taken their profits and moved on.

Have you tried to park on the street in Cambridge recently? Time-value-of-money, you’ll spend more than $150/month trying to find street parking for your car.

Having a car isn’t a function of location. It is a function of life. If you have a job that requires you work from different locations every day, if you have kids, if you are old… People won’t stop needing cars.

This will make Cambridge more congested, harder to find parking, and drive out all but a few very targeted demographics.

Honestly, it feels like a few wealthy developers were able to fast-sell a young, single male to do something self-serving without thinking of the long-term repercussions.

I own in Cambridge (lives here 10 years) and I work in Boston. While I take the T to work every day, I have a car and parking, for which I am grateful, because I also have kids who have sports activities, trips to the zoo or the science museums, or just to the Fells for a day hike. We eat at local restaurants that we can walk to but we will also drive to places in the city that aren’t on the red or green lines.

I would think that Cambridge would want to encourage families like mine to want to put down roots in the city. This change does the opposite. I understand that all laws aren’t supposed to benefit one group or another but I don’t see how the only ones who benefit from this really are the real estate developers that can now flip a property that was previously not workable and then walk away from the problem they created.

There are very good reasons why it is illegal almost everywhere else. It isn’t to protect developers, it is to protect citizens from destructively selfish developer practices. I am not sure why we think we are smarter than everywhere else by making legal what they have all learned, painfully, should stay illegal.

This feels very shady. Real estate developers and landlords in Cambridge got a windfall today and I don’t think it will turn into lower housing prices or fewer cars. I do think a few connected developers will get a few more millions of dollars from properties they couldn’t develop before.

Wouldn’t that mean that for new developments (that no longer have parking spots) approximately 1/3 of new owners/tenants would have a car that doesn’t have any allocated parking any more, making the parking issues of the other residents even more difficult?

The issue is that now businesses aren’t forced to care about parking for customers and the burden falls on the local residential areas.