I agree with your point, that it seems backward for bars to require parking spaces. But 1 space per 250 square feet hardly seems onerous. That's unlikely to even meet the needs of the bar's employees, right?

Having their own parking lots makes it possible for bars to provide a place where patrons who have over-indulged may leave their cars while they seek alternate ways to return home. It seems probable that people are more likely to leave their car and take a cab when they can feel confident that their car will not have been towed, or heavily fined, by the time they are sober enough to retrieve it.

True, it doesn't seem like that much here. I can easily imagine 4 legitimate DDs in a 1000 sf bar. It's certainly not as onerous as Long Beach, CA's 20 spaces per 1,000 sf.

Doesn't anyone go to a bar and not get drunk? Am I doing it wrong? I'm fat enough where I can sit in a bar for two hours, drink two or three PBRs and easily be under the limit.

The other side of the coin is that without those parking spaces, there's very little way for a lot of people to get home after a long night. The safe thing, of course, is to have a designated driver but if you go to a bar and have a couple beers over the course of a night, that's not too bad (and it's legal as well).

Taking a cab isn't affordable for most people and the only real way that you'll be able to reduce drunk driving isn't by curbing the amount of parking spaces a bar should have (people will just park down the street or whatever and walk) but by extending how late public transportation is open. The streetcar is a joke when it comes to this (and many, many other things but that's beside the point) and the MAX and busses only run until 12:30am, 1am-ish whereas last call is at 2:30am. Even then, service is pretty limited at these times as well. If there was an affordable, easy way home, maybe even just on Fridays and Saturdays, without having to drive drunk that would get people to not just stop drunk driving, but to encourage alternative transit as well.

This is why we need to re-enact the 18th Amendment.

Asking the wrong questions.
If MADD types provided free cab rides for people who blow over the limit there would be virtually no drunk driving.
Of course, that would eliminate the need for MADD types, so don't count on that ever happening.

@D: MADD has nothing to do with drunk drivers anymore; they're just a bunch of sandy-vagina temperance-movementers, and they've got the right idea.

It's less about the parking spaces and more about the fact that I can't get a bus home from the bar due to service cuts.

Don't want people to drive home drunk from the bar? Give them an affordable alternative... like a friggin' bus.