This month, California enacts a state-wide ban on parking minimums. Housing developers and business owners in California will no longer have to include parking spots for residents and customers if there is a public transit option within a half-mile, according to CBS News, San Diego.
The goal of this new law is two-fold — to reduce emissions from cars and to build more affordable housing.
According to Wired, similar legislation is rolled out in Oregon, as well as in cities across the nation, like Anchorage, Alaska, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Nashville, Tennessee.
But Senate Bill 1067 has an exception in the case when a housing project dedicates 20% of its total units to very low, low or moderate-income households.
The regulation doesn’t apply to parking spaces that have EV chargers or are reserved for persons with disabilities.
As California leads the nation in taking control of the car-packed urban landscape, here is a look back at other strange, some even unpopular laws, that the state has enacted.
5 strange California laws
- California Penal Code section 185, enacted in 1872, makes it illegal for anyone “to wear … false whiskers (whether complete or partial) … for the purpose of … (e)vading or escaping discovery, recognition, or identification in the commission of any public offense.”
- You can get cited for driving too slowly in California.
- In Los Angeles, it is not legal to wash your neighbor’s car if you do not have their permission.
- Another Los Angeles ordinance banned a public bathtub to be occupied by more than one person — so, you can’t bathe two babies in a bathtub either!
- When Hollywood was an independent city, it was illegal to drive more than two thousand sheep down Hollywood Boulevard at a time, according to Los Angeles Almanac.