Nice. My pocket knives are Opinel, love those too.

Holy shit. I should know. What did i do, haha. But it is knives, right?

Haha, yeah I guess me too.

I don’t know, maybe by crudely cutting some real old bread, haha.

But yeah, that’s why i said that probably any bread knife is a bifl item, just this knife is hands down the best bread knife i have ever used, so i thought i’d recommend it.

I remember being a bit turned off when they recommended it to me in the shop, because of it being a Victorinox, but they told me it’s the standard bread knife for all the restaurants etc, so i thought why not, it was also only around 20€ or something. I bought it for my parents too, they somehow lost their old bread knife (how can you lose a bread knife?), they also like it a lot.

The bread is from a bakery.

https://bulle-baeckerei.de/

It is delicious, it’s a 100% wholegrain rye bread from a very good bakery.

Kinda proud to say that even though i recognize who this is, i don’t know any song they sang. Probably do when i hear it i guess, but i am not going to look up their songs now.

How the hell does this parking garage even work? Looks like a whole lot of the slots are being trapped by other cars or am I missing something here?

Not sure if I get it really, they are part of an actual route? I think this would be it then?

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Cycle_routes

That I believe is to mark an actual route, independent on whether it’s going along cyclepaths or whatever.

To 1: Where do you have the parking then, without the mandated parking minimum? On the street? Second row in the street? On the little piece of green that is there? On the sidewalk? In the bicycle lane? On the neighbours parking lot? Let’s assume the business wants to provide and pay for parking in good faith, with the minimal reasonable amount of parking for the demand: That should be the number of parking space you are looking at if your municipality sets a reasonable parking minimum! The municipality has no interested in letting developers build some crap that will not work or be an unbearable burden to the neighbourhood. These regulations also incorporate necessary bicycle parking, which i think may become a hotter issue where i live, because the demand is currently absolutely not there in the numbers that some municipalities require, miles away really. But if the municipality has the interest to push the means of transport in that direction, regulating these kinds of things is a way to do that.

To 2: I am not working with that assumption. I am working with the fact that people do have cars and do drive, not all of them, but it’s not a number to just brush under the carpet. If you have a reasonable minimum parking mandate all these alternatives you mention should play a role in what the number actually looks like. Let’s make a quick calculation how it would look like where i live for a business that has “ridiculous” minimum parking requirements (1 slot per 100 m² of storage space), as some other user here deemed. A storage space.

They have 30 employees and 10000 m² of storage space. The minimum car parking required is 1 slot per 100 m² of storage space. 100 parking slots, that is ridiculous! Oh wait, it is 1 slot per 100 m² or 1 slot per 3 employees. 10 parking slots, not that ridiculous anymore. Depending on how well the storage space is connected to public transit you can reduce the parking minimum up to 30%. Let’s say it is not very well connected, just a bus. You claim 10% off. 9 slots. Tell me this is not reasonable, if 78% of households here own at least one car. You can get more reductions if you build extra bicycle parking (bicycle parking would also already be at ten slots already btw), you can buy yourself out of the need to some degree, or have other kinds of ideas (but the municipality has to go along of course).

That would be a parking minimum calculation for a bland situation, where nothing special is going on, just some shitty public transit nearby, a place where you would build a storage space i guess. And my conservative guess would be that at least double the amount of employees will arrive by car, so the business gets to push half of their actual demand into the public space, for which you now pay for and get to look at when you stroll down the sidewalk.

The closer you get to something like “downtown”, the lower the base number for your calculations will become, because it will be more feasible for people to walk, cycle places, public transit is better too, the idea is to have reasonable regulation that tries to reflect (planned) reality.

If i build a housing complex with a minimum parking rate of, say 0.6 slots per appartment, the people who buy or rent late may end up not having any parking available in the complex. That’s how it goes, but there’d still be minimum parking regulation in place, even if there are no more slots available. That regulation should be reasonable, situational and try to reflect the actual or planned reality, is what one should demand from regulators. Regulating minimum parking requirements is not necessarily a bad thing and it is also being done all around Europe, even if people don’t know about it.

Yeah, no, as I read it, you do have some kind of parking minimum regulations, not just recommendations, developers are not free to do whatever they please.

Ok, well maybe this year we finally see a downturn for real, there were dips during covid as well, but in general there was still growth, and growth being expected. I would welcome it, that would be great!

But when a developer in my neighbourhood develops new housing, on a previously industrial barren area, they need to build parking space for their expected demand, because there is no space for cars left elsewhere, and people buying appartments usually do have (money for) cars. The fact that there is now a free parking lot wherever the people who move here moved away from, does not help the situation here.

I would guess that the rate right where i live would end up at around 0.6 slots per appartment (including appartments for families with 2-3 kids), as a regulatory requirement. To me this seems to be reasonable regulation, although it is most likely too low for the actual demand, at least if the appartments are being sold. Of course it will be underound parking in a dense area like this.

This subthread is about europe, people in Europe still have cars that are being parked somewhere. And the number is growing, not shrinking. Seems like this is an unpopular “opinion” to have here though lol.

You know, it does not need to be a one size fits all regulation, and at least where I live it isn’t. You get all kinds of exceptions for lowering the amount, like how good is the object connected to public transit, you can swap car parking for additional bicycle parking etc the actual location plays a big role in how much car parking is required in the first place.

The regulators rightfully expect a certain amount of people having cars and place the burden of finding the space and money for it on the developer.

Is it really a horrible concept per se, or do people in reality have cars and need to park them somewher, even in Europe?

This is most likely for businesses, not sure about your exact communal regulations, but it should really be something like 1 per 100m² or 1 per 3 employees. Not that ridiculous. There’s also minimum bicycle parking requirements BTW.

I can send you a picture from where I live when I’m back home, I’m sure it’ll make you feel better about your situation :)

Yeah that little ring road around the village was a pretty tough climb on the bike, haha.