Here's a good analysis of why parking requirements are the TRUE reason that downtown LA lacks compared to other world-wide cities:
http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/People,Parking,Cities.pdf
Here are some important passages.
"Take, for example, the different treatment given by Los Angeles and San Francisco to their concert halls. For a downtown concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, fifty times more parking than San Francisco allows as its maximum.
Thus the San Francisco Symphony built its home, Louise Davies Hall, without a parking garage, while Disney Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, did not open until seven years after its parking garage was built. Disney Hall’s six-level, 2,188-space underground garage cost $110 million to build (about $50,000 per space). Financially troubled Los Angeles County, which built the garage, went into debt to finance it, expecting that parking revenues would repay the borrowed money. But the garage was completed in 1996, and Disney Hall—which suffered from a budget less grand than its vision—became knotted in delays and didn’t open until late 2003. During the seven years in between, parking revenue fell far short of debt payments (few people park in an underground structure if there is nothing above it) and the county, by that point nearly bankrupt, had to subsidize the garage even as it laid off employees."
“The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots and garages,” Jane Jacobs argued in 1961, “the duller and deader it becomes … and there is nothing more repellent than a dead downtown.”
Pesto, this is for you"In the end, what sets downtown LA apart from other cities is not its sprawl, or its human density, but its high human density combined with its high parking density. If you took all of the parking spaces in the Los Angeles CBD and spread them horizontally in a surface lot, they would cover 81 percent of the CBD’s land area. We call this ratio—of parking area to total land area—the “parking coverage rate,” and it is higher in downtown LA than in any other downtown on earth. In San Francisco, for instance, the coverage rate is 31 percent, and in New York it is only 18 percent."
"Downtown LA has more than three times as many parking spaces as Phoenix, but it also has five times as many jobs. Compared to San Francisco, LA has fewer jobs but more than twice as many parking spaces. As a result, its parking coverage rate, at 81 percent, is higher than both of the other cities combined. Los Angeles is both car-oriented and dense; it approaches the human density of San Francisco but dilutes it with the parking supply of a suburb. Any benefits Los Angeles might derive from its density are offset by its relentless accommodation of the automobile."
As you said
Pesto, there was more parking availability in NY or SF? Please provide the support.
Thus, it's key to note that the increase/need for parking is absolutely false to make a vibrant center. Parking is our # 1 urban killer in Los Angeles. The reason Pasadena, Santa Monica, Venice, Hollywood, Spring Street, 7th street, etc... are vibrant are due to late night restaurants, bars, etc.. You can put all the parking in the world (i.e. Santa Clarita and the Valley), but if you are lacking the restaurants, bars, clubs..prime destinations, it's just a deadzone. Forget spending money on parking, like they want to spend $52 million to tear down more buildings for parking for Broadway, which is totally irrational, use it to build a new station portal for the new 2nd/Broadway station on the Downtown Regional Connector. Spend money on people, no more on the private automobile. Hasn't our downtown been destroyed enough?
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