16 ms·

Part of "lowering the rent" in the city involves preventing people from paying for cars whether they use them or not. That "free parking" in the street is not

Part of "lowering the rent" in the city involves preventing people from paying for cars whether they use them or not. That "free parking" in the street is not free, it comes at a real cost in real estate value and road maintenance. Likewise policies that require a certain amount of parking per unit or square foot also makes people pay for cars whether they use them or not. Making buses or trains share the road with cars instead of giving them dedicated lanes with signal pre-emption, also makes non-drivers pay for cars.

closeparen 10y ago
As a contrarian defender of driving in these threads, even I hate street parking. Street parking serves no one well. Finding a spot near where you're going is unlikely, searching for one brings traffic to a crawl, and getting into one creates significant and dangerous disruption to the roadway, particularly for the bike lane. People who rely on street parking are incentivized to oppose density in the places they park. Mandatory minimum parking requirements result in wasted space, or facilitates car ownership for people who don't care about/benefit from it at the expense of those who do. Street parking for cars should be eliminated in favor of loading zones and motorcycle/scooter/bicycle parking, which packs much more densely. (Bias towards electric ones if you care to). At the same time, garages (with street-facing storefronts) should be only the list of things you can build by-right. Drivers should booking garage spaces with dynamic, demand-based pricing from their phones before departing, and should know exactly where they're going to park before setting out.
- davidw 10y ago
  > As a contrarian defender of driving in these threads I don't think anyone sane is suggesting that we should all stop driving from one day to the next, so there's no need to 'defend' driving. It's more about making driving one option among many, and eliminating some of the subsidies.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    Of course, no one is suggesting an overnight ban. I do see an alarming level of support for engineering a steadily increasing scarcity of parking, high tolls, and a deliberately under-provisioned road network in order to degrade the experience of driving until it sucks just a little worse than transit/cycling. I think we should address the reasons people live far from their destinations, rather than the mechanisms which let them lead reasonable lives while doing so. "It's too easy" isn't the reason. "The alternatives are too hard" is the reason.
    - ant6n 10y ago
      So uh, you're just gonna bury your head in the sand on all the problems associated with the utter dependence on the car?
      - closeparen 10y ago
        I'm not sure where you got that impression. You propose to degrade people's lives by eroding their access to something they depend on. I propose to erode the reasons people depend on it, so that demand falls naturally and an eventual lack of access will not hurt. Are you going to bury your head in the sand on the problems of crowded housing markets?
        AstralStorm 10y ago
        Until you provide proper transit and stop expanding roads and parking (which surely will degrade driving experience) and make new neighborhoods walkable (see above) demand for driving will not fall even if it becomes more expensive. Only the poor will be hurt. There are many roads overbuilt for the kind of traffic they face. Cutting them down to size is an excellent idea. Providing light and heavy rail is also great. Buses have limitations and still require expensive infrastructure for high level of service.
        ant6n 10y ago
        Your attitude seems to be that it's up to others to somehow 'fix' modes of transportation until the somehow compete with driving in terms of convenience, because your convenience is apparently much more important than considerations like the planet. And I guess if other modes can't compete well, apparently then driving must be inherently better, right? The main reason other modes of transportation suck is bad development patterns, centered all around driving. Unless you fix that, other modes won't be able to effectively compete. So discouraging driving is part of the multi-approach strategy to slowly change mode share and development patterns. Your attitude is reinforcing the broken status quo.
- the8472 10y ago
  > particularly for the bike lane. If the bike lane is not between the parking space and the sidewalk there's something wrong with your roads.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    If you do it like that you have to be very careful how you design your intersections. Cyclists are even harder to see when they're hidden behind a row of cars. Like this for example http://www.protectedintersection.com/ http://www.protectedintersection.com/
    - osdiab 10y ago
      I take that over risking getting car doored, or cut off by an uber. Let the careful thinking happen at the design phase - or even better, let's have dedicated bicycle boulevards (they don't have to be wide to accommodate staggering amounts of bike traffic)
  - lkbm 10y ago
    I actually generally prefer bike lanes that put me more closer to the moving cars, despite said cars running over my bike twice so far. Drivers mostly know to watch for cyclists, though they're pretty bad at it. Pedestrians know to check for cars when entering the street, and cyclists benefit from that caution. But that bike lane with non-driving space to its right? People will blithely step into it, hop out of their cars into it, or stand in it, assuming it's a safe, non-vehicle space. Maybe it's just because it's so unusual where I live, or because it's in a pedestrian-heavy area, but I do not like it at all, and feel safer sharing the road. (My experience with these (as a cyclist) is mostly along the Drag in Austin, TX: https://goo.gl/maps/TPi9Yyj6SFn https://goo.gl/maps/TPi9Yyj6SFn )
- cbhl 10y ago
  > Drivers should booking garage spaces with dynamic, demand-based pricing from their phones before departing, and should know exactly where they're going to park before setting out. I used to believe this, but the one thing that drives me nuts about San Francisco is that all the garages close at night. If I want to park a car overnight (e.g. visiting a friend), the only option in my neighborhood is to park in a street parking spot.
  - MBlume 10y ago
    With less on-street parking (and with a denser city), you could make more money staffing your garage overnight
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
Here, I live in a small midwestern city. More accurately I live on the outskirts of a small midwestern city and commute 40 minutes into downtown for work. Owning a car here is mandatory. Public transportation sucks and the contents/attractions of my city are scattered. For example, from where I live my favorite trail, which I'd love to walk this Saturday, is 23 miles north. The Ikea, which I also need to go to, is 23 miles south. There is no public transportation to get me to those places. Even if I lived in the city there is no public transportation to get me to those places. How do I live a life where I don't throw my whole paycheck into rent AND have the freedom to go out and do stuff around the city? (Note: these seem like pretty reasonable expectations to me) I live where the rent is low and own a car. You need to make an alternate lifestyle for me cheaper, not my current one more expensive. Likewise, I already have to pay for parking for my job. You're going to restrict supply and make me pay even more? Come on man... We need to talk about solutions which are viable and not waste time trying to punish the rural/suburban middle-class and poor into a lifestyle which isn't even feasible for them.
- dashundchen 10y ago
  That's the problem. How does a small Midwestern city take 40 minutes to drive halfway across, except for utterly horrible planning and land use? Why is a single city 40 miles wide? It got this way through 60 years of low density sprawl. Sprawling further and asking people to drive longer and longer distances is not a viable solution - socially, environmentally or fiscally. We need to remove the barriers and even encourage mid-scale density on all levels of government. We need to be thinking of creative transit, design and tech solutions to retrofit our cities for something besides single passenger cars because our cities are choking on them.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - GauntletWizard 10y ago
    Or, you know, people like to live in houses with a yard, where there might be wild animals living around or a forest somewhere within an hour's drive, and prefer that over cramped hovels.
Terr_ 10y ago
> That "free parking" in the street is not free In many places it's often paid parking, and even then the "citizen tax bill" of maintaining those side-plots of low-speed road is probably negligible compared to the broader road/highway system or compared to operating public-transport. I'm all in favor of more public transport and better cities, but singling out parking spaces as the fat to trim makes no sense to me.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  Then you probably haven't noticed how every time replacing parking lanes with bike or bus lanes come up, many drivers scream bloody murder, even though a lane of travel is clearly more useful for surface land in a dense urban area. And there are quite a few cities where due to public ownership and regulations, car parking takes up a significant percent of land in the city.
  - osdiab 10y ago
    And not only that, but just consider the use of land. Do you think that a parking lot that charges like $40/day for its 40ish spots, or a mid sized or large tower with tens to hundreds of people paying rent, and businesses at the ground/lower levels pumping the economy make more money? To recoup the loss in investment would take a staggeringly high cost of parking.
    - rocqua 10y ago
      You can't just replace that entire low with buildings though. Those homes and buisineses still need some parking. No need to make that parking mandatory, but anyone building that stuff will want to include some parking. How much can be left to them. Maybe it makes sense to do underground parking, maybe that is too expensive.
      - TulliusCicero 10y ago
        > Maybe it makes sense to do underground parking, maybe that is too expensive. Interesting semi-tangent: so I recently moved from the states to Munich, and I live in a little apartment complex in a low-ish density neighborhood (Solln) that has 10 units. Somehow, this place has underground parking, which was initially shocking to me, because I don't think I've ever seen such a small apartment complex in the states with that; usually you'd only seen underground parking in far larger complexes in the middle of a downtown-type area. And my complex isn't unique, tons of small buildings here seem to have underground parking. So maybe it's not that expensive when it's a common thing to do.
AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> Part of "lowering the rent" in the city involves preventing people from paying for cars whether they use them or not. You have to be smart about things though. It's very easy to get into a mindset of "cars are bad, reduce cars any way possible" vs. people who have no viable alternative to a car who those policies hurt, and then you get into a fight that nobody wins. For example, tolls make basically no sense ever. Once you've paid for the road you might as well get as much use out of it as you can. Even congestion pricing is wrong because congestion should never happen if things are designed well, i.e. reasonable mass transit and low enough rents that people can live near work. If you've failed at those things the solution is to fix them, not penalize drivers to make driving as expensive as the failed alternative. But minimum parking requirements are a scourge. If the expense of having parking is justifiable then businesses and landlords will build it themselves, because parking is hyper-local -- you drive 100 blocks to get somewhere but a parking space six blocks away is useless. And minimum parking requirements prevent the density required to avoid needing a car, so the more parking you mandate the more you need. It's actively counterproductive. If anything street parking in high density areas should be converted into travel lanes, which both increases carrying capacity and reduces demand for cars there because it allows private parking to be appropriately priced by the free market. On the other hand, free street parking in lower density areas makes perfect sense, because you neither need the extra carrying capacity nor do you need market forces to price parking there because spaces aren't scarce there.
- ascendingPig 10y ago
  > For example, tolls make basically no sense ever. Once you've paid for the road you might as well get as much use out of it as you can. What about maintenance costs? Those are dependent partly on the level of use a road experiences.
  - MertsA 10y ago
    Yeah but a toll doesn't accurately reflect the amount of damage done to a road. A light econobox will do just about no damage to a road whereas a huge F350 with a curb weight of over 3 tons is going to do a great deal more damage even though it might only weigh twice as much. Adding to this, a large truck is going to make passenger vehicles look like a rounding error. Tolls could be made to reflect the estimated additional wear and tear on the road but effectively this would mean that passenger cars just pay a toll for the initial construction costs of the road and large vehicles pay the same plus an additional charge to cover all of the wear to a road. http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-state.edu/pviton/courses2/crp776/776-roads-handout.pdf http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-state.edu/pviton/courses2/crp776...

closeparen 10y ago

As a contrarian defender of driving in these threads, even I hate street parking. Street parking serves no one well. Finding a spot near where you're going is unlikely, searching for one brings traffic to a crawl, and getting into one creates significant and dangerous disruption to the roadway, particularly for the bike lane. People who rely on street parking are incentivized to oppose density in the places they park. Mandatory minimum parking requirements result in wasted space, or facilitates car ownership for people who don't care about/benefit from it at the expense of those who do. Street parking for cars should be eliminated in favor of loading zones and motorcycle/scooter/bicycle parking, which packs much more densely. (Bias towards electric ones if you care to). At the same time, garages (with street-facing storefronts) should be only the list of things you can build by-right. Drivers should booking garage spaces with dynamic, demand-based pricing from their phones before departing, and should know exactly where they're going to park before setting out.

davidw 10y ago
> As a contrarian defender of driving in these threads I don't think anyone sane is suggesting that we should all stop driving from one day to the next, so there's no need to 'defend' driving. It's more about making driving one option among many, and eliminating some of the subsidies.
- closeparen 10y ago
  Of course, no one is suggesting an overnight ban. I do see an alarming level of support for engineering a steadily increasing scarcity of parking, high tolls, and a deliberately under-provisioned road network in order to degrade the experience of driving until it sucks just a little worse than transit/cycling. I think we should address the reasons people live far from their destinations, rather than the mechanisms which let them lead reasonable lives while doing so. "It's too easy" isn't the reason. "The alternatives are too hard" is the reason.
  - ant6n 10y ago
    So uh, you're just gonna bury your head in the sand on all the problems associated with the utter dependence on the car?
    - closeparen 10y ago
      I'm not sure where you got that impression. You propose to degrade people's lives by eroding their access to something they depend on. I propose to erode the reasons people depend on it, so that demand falls naturally and an eventual lack of access will not hurt. Are you going to bury your head in the sand on the problems of crowded housing markets?
      - AstralStorm 10y ago
        Until you provide proper transit and stop expanding roads and parking (which surely will degrade driving experience) and make new neighborhoods walkable (see above) demand for driving will not fall even if it becomes more expensive. Only the poor will be hurt. There are many roads overbuilt for the kind of traffic they face. Cutting them down to size is an excellent idea. Providing light and heavy rail is also great. Buses have limitations and still require expensive infrastructure for high level of service.
      - ant6n 10y ago
        Your attitude seems to be that it's up to others to somehow 'fix' modes of transportation until the somehow compete with driving in terms of convenience, because your convenience is apparently much more important than considerations like the planet. And I guess if other modes can't compete well, apparently then driving must be inherently better, right? The main reason other modes of transportation suck is bad development patterns, centered all around driving. Unless you fix that, other modes won't be able to effectively compete. So discouraging driving is part of the multi-approach strategy to slowly change mode share and development patterns. Your attitude is reinforcing the broken status quo.
the8472 10y ago
> particularly for the bike lane. If the bike lane is not between the parking space and the sidewalk there's something wrong with your roads.
- adrianN 10y ago
  If you do it like that you have to be very careful how you design your intersections. Cyclists are even harder to see when they're hidden behind a row of cars. Like this for example http://www.protectedintersection.com/ http://www.protectedintersection.com/
  - osdiab 10y ago
    I take that over risking getting car doored, or cut off by an uber. Let the careful thinking happen at the design phase - or even better, let's have dedicated bicycle boulevards (they don't have to be wide to accommodate staggering amounts of bike traffic)
- lkbm 10y ago
  I actually generally prefer bike lanes that put me more closer to the moving cars, despite said cars running over my bike twice so far. Drivers mostly know to watch for cyclists, though they're pretty bad at it. Pedestrians know to check for cars when entering the street, and cyclists benefit from that caution. But that bike lane with non-driving space to its right? People will blithely step into it, hop out of their cars into it, or stand in it, assuming it's a safe, non-vehicle space. Maybe it's just because it's so unusual where I live, or because it's in a pedestrian-heavy area, but I do not like it at all, and feel safer sharing the road. (My experience with these (as a cyclist) is mostly along the Drag in Austin, TX: https://goo.gl/maps/TPi9Yyj6SFn https://goo.gl/maps/TPi9Yyj6SFn )
cbhl 10y ago
> Drivers should booking garage spaces with dynamic, demand-based pricing from their phones before departing, and should know exactly where they're going to park before setting out. I used to believe this, but the one thing that drives me nuts about San Francisco is that all the garages close at night. If I want to park a car overnight (e.g. visiting a friend), the only option in my neighborhood is to park in a street parking spot.
- MBlume 10y ago
  With less on-street parking (and with a denser city), you could make more money staffing your garage overnight

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago

Here, I live in a small midwestern city. More accurately I live on the outskirts of a small midwestern city and commute 40 minutes into downtown for work. Owning a car here is mandatory. Public transportation sucks and the contents/attractions of my city are scattered. For example, from where I live my favorite trail, which I'd love to walk this Saturday, is 23 miles north. The Ikea, which I also need to go to, is 23 miles south. There is no public transportation to get me to those places. Even if I lived in the city there is no public transportation to get me to those places. How do I live a life where I don't throw my whole paycheck into rent AND have the freedom to go out and do stuff around the city? (Note: these seem like pretty reasonable expectations to me) I live where the rent is low and own a car. You need to make an alternate lifestyle for me cheaper, not my current one more expensive. Likewise, I already have to pay for parking for my job. You're going to restrict supply and make me pay even more? Come on man... We need to talk about solutions which are viable and not waste time trying to punish the rural/suburban middle-class and poor into a lifestyle which isn't even feasible for them.

dashundchen 10y ago
That's the problem. How does a small Midwestern city take 40 minutes to drive halfway across, except for utterly horrible planning and land use? Why is a single city 40 miles wide? It got this way through 60 years of low density sprawl. Sprawling further and asking people to drive longer and longer distances is not a viable solution - socially, environmentally or fiscally. We need to remove the barriers and even encourage mid-scale density on all levels of government. We need to be thinking of creative transit, design and tech solutions to retrofit our cities for something besides single passenger cars because our cities are choking on them.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- GauntletWizard 10y ago
  Or, you know, people like to live in houses with a yard, where there might be wild animals living around or a forest somewhere within an hour's drive, and prefer that over cramped hovels.

Terr_ 10y ago

> That "free parking" in the street is not free In many places it's often paid parking, and even then the "citizen tax bill" of maintaining those side-plots of low-speed road is probably negligible compared to the broader road/highway system or compared to operating public-transport. I'm all in favor of more public transport and better cities, but singling out parking spaces as the fat to trim makes no sense to me.

TulliusCicero 10y ago
Then you probably haven't noticed how every time replacing parking lanes with bike or bus lanes come up, many drivers scream bloody murder, even though a lane of travel is clearly more useful for surface land in a dense urban area. And there are quite a few cities where due to public ownership and regulations, car parking takes up a significant percent of land in the city.
- osdiab 10y ago
  And not only that, but just consider the use of land. Do you think that a parking lot that charges like $40/day for its 40ish spots, or a mid sized or large tower with tens to hundreds of people paying rent, and businesses at the ground/lower levels pumping the economy make more money? To recoup the loss in investment would take a staggeringly high cost of parking.
  - rocqua 10y ago
    You can't just replace that entire low with buildings though. Those homes and buisineses still need some parking. No need to make that parking mandatory, but anyone building that stuff will want to include some parking. How much can be left to them. Maybe it makes sense to do underground parking, maybe that is too expensive.
    - TulliusCicero 10y ago
      > Maybe it makes sense to do underground parking, maybe that is too expensive. Interesting semi-tangent: so I recently moved from the states to Munich, and I live in a little apartment complex in a low-ish density neighborhood (Solln) that has 10 units. Somehow, this place has underground parking, which was initially shocking to me, because I don't think I've ever seen such a small apartment complex in the states with that; usually you'd only seen underground parking in far larger complexes in the middle of a downtown-type area. And my complex isn't unique, tons of small buildings here seem to have underground parking. So maybe it's not that expensive when it's a common thing to do.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

> Part of "lowering the rent" in the city involves preventing people from paying for cars whether they use them or not. You have to be smart about things though. It's very easy to get into a mindset of "cars are bad, reduce cars any way possible" vs. people who have no viable alternative to a car who those policies hurt, and then you get into a fight that nobody wins. For example, tolls make basically no sense ever. Once you've paid for the road you might as well get as much use out of it as you can. Even congestion pricing is wrong because congestion should never happen if things are designed well, i.e. reasonable mass transit and low enough rents that people can live near work. If you've failed at those things the solution is to fix them, not penalize drivers to make driving as expensive as the failed alternative. But minimum parking requirements are a scourge. If the expense of having parking is justifiable then businesses and landlords will build it themselves, because parking is hyper-local -- you drive 100 blocks to get somewhere but a parking space six blocks away is useless. And minimum parking requirements prevent the density required to avoid needing a car, so the more parking you mandate the more you need. It's actively counterproductive. If anything street parking in high density areas should be converted into travel lanes, which both increases carrying capacity and reduces demand for cars there because it allows private parking to be appropriately priced by the free market. On the other hand, free street parking in lower density areas makes perfect sense, because you neither need the extra carrying capacity nor do you need market forces to price parking there because spaces aren't scarce there.

ascendingPig 10y ago
> For example, tolls make basically no sense ever. Once you've paid for the road you might as well get as much use out of it as you can. What about maintenance costs? Those are dependent partly on the level of use a road experiences.
- MertsA 10y ago
  Yeah but a toll doesn't accurately reflect the amount of damage done to a road. A light econobox will do just about no damage to a road whereas a huge F350 with a curb weight of over 3 tons is going to do a great deal more damage even though it might only weigh twice as much. Adding to this, a large truck is going to make passenger vehicles look like a rounding error. Tolls could be made to reflect the estimated additional wear and tear on the road but effectively this would mean that passenger cars just pay a toll for the initial construction costs of the road and large vehicles pay the same plus an additional charge to cover all of the wear to a road. http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-state.edu/pviton/courses2/crp776/776-roads-handout.pdf http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-state.edu/pviton/courses2/crp776...