14 ms·

How not to create traffic jams: Don’t let people park for free

213 points by uyoakaoma 10y ago

yarri 10y ago
The rise of punitive solutions is real. I was involved with discussions with local municipalities placing (private) local schools under restrictions for not providing sufficient carpool coverage -- levy fines based on percent of families carpooling. Would the inverse of these punitive solutions, ie., encouraging carpool / ridesharing, not also work? It always amazes me how relatively unutilized the HOV lanes are.
- jbangert 10y ago
  At least in the east bay, one reason why HOV lanes might run more effectively is that they are also express lanes (limited points at which you can merge in and out). On the other lanes, passing on the right/not passing in the left lanes is ok which slows down merging considerably. Also HOV lanes by definition have twice the (passenger) usage per car, so 2 HOV lanes and 4 regular ones are moving the same amount of people.
yazr 10y ago
Quadruple negative it is!
- MR4D 10y ago
  CLICKBAIT! They could have just stated "Free parking increases traffic, sprawl & pollution". But then we wouldn't have clicked on it.
  - emsy 10y ago
    I mean the conclusion is already cryptically hidden in the headline. It's just a terrible style. How I, as a non-native writer, would've written it: Charging money for parking prevents traffic jams Or something along those lines.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      The Economist likes to be clever with their headlines. It's definitely hard to parse but that was probably deliberate on the part of the editor.
toast0 10y ago
Certainly, if you make it less practical to arrive by personal car, less people will travel to places by car, and then you'll have less traffic. Unless this comes with a massive improvement in other means of transport, you'll probably have less visitors as well. The problem with alternatives to personal cars is that personal cars have many desirable properties: a) near zero latency to take a trip: if there's not a cab at my curb, I have to request it and wait -- or request it early and hope I'm ready when they are. Buses and trains are usually not waiting for me at the station. b) proportional penalty for leaving late: if you miss a bus or a train by 10 seconds, you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour. If you leave a couple seconds late in a car, you'll probably arrive a couple seconds late (around rush hour, it gets worse of course). If you don't make it to a requested cab in time, they may leave, and you have to wait for another one to come. c) availability: a personal car generally provides the same service during the day, at night, and can be used in rain and mild snow (heavy snow, if properly equipped). Busses, trains, and even cabs have less availability at night. d) flexibility/directness: a personal car can drive to almost everywhere, and can generally take a fairly direct route. Trains only go where there is track, and busses only go where there is a route. Cabs don't always pick up and drop off where you want to go. In case of an urgent change in circumstances, you can change your destination at will in a personal car or cab, but may not be able to easily redirect to where you're going in a bus.
- notatoad 10y ago
  All of those properties you specify are very true, but they are also very clearly luxuries. If you want immediate travel to anywhere at any time in any conditions, you should be expected to pay the cost of it - cities and property owners shouldn't have to bear the cost for you by subsidizing the costs of your travel and vehicle storage. If people are willing to pay the full costs of parking, the market should sort this problem out for itself as paid parking garages fill in the gap left behind by free parking. But what the article is saying is that in cities where parking is not free or not required by law, the market chooses to provide far fewer parking spaces that the minimum parking laws tend to require.
  - sokoloff 10y ago
tutufan 10y ago
This analysis seems to ignore the benefits of free parking, both for drivers and for the businesses they're driving to. Personally, in cities where I have a car, if ample parking (day or night) is not available near a business, I patronize someone else. I do prefer public transportation, but there are only a few cities in the US where that actually works.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  Right, because transportation land use is largely zero sum. If you have ample parking everywhere and wide roads for cars, every other mode of transportation is automatically worse.
  - sitkack 10y ago
    Including walking
- avar 10y ago
  This article is about parking requirements as they pertain to zoning, i.e. mandatory parking. Nobody's saying that you can't patronize a business that provides free parking, but if parking isn't mandated by zoning you'll on average pay more for the benefit compared to someone patronizing a business without ample parking. Removing the requirement from the zoning code allows people like you to vote with your dollars, and people who don't care about free parking to pay lower prices. It's a win-win.
bhauer 10y ago
Putting aside the awkward title, the article is confirming what we instinctively would expect: increasing the burden of commuting by car will reduce the number of people who commute by car. The cost of parking is an example burden. Obviously life needs to balance many things, and increasing the cost of parking in an attempt to shift commuters to alternative forms is also going to decrease the number of people who want to commute to the destination at all. I live in the Los Angeles area and significantly prefer living in and visiting cities that have free parking (e.g., the southern beach cities). I actively avoid cities such as Santa Monica that have costly and insufficient parking--and importantly, that means I don't spend any money at Santa Monica retail businesses. Alternative transit options are not appealing. Light rail, while expanding in this metropolitan area, is far too inefficient. Uber and Lyft are an additional cost friction that gets factored into any decision (e.g., where to go for a dinner out?). Plus I don't want to have to deal with an app to go somewhere. All that said, self-driving cars may be a big game changer for my lifestyle. I would be more likely to visit Santa Monica if my car could find a suitable parking structure and park itself. To my mind the cost of parking would be less of a nuisance if I didn't even have to think about the parking process.
- zippergz 10y ago
  I know this wasn't your point (and I completely agree with what you're saying), but I actually find Santa Monica to be one of the easiest places to visit in LA, because they have a bunch of reasonably cheap city-run parking garages. I've never had a major problem parking in Santa Monica, and if I did, I'd got there a lot less often.
kevinburke 10y ago
A concrete thing you can do about this is email your local City Council or Supervisor and ask them to reduce parking requirements for new buildings. Send them this article. Many local municipalities require absurd amounts of parking per new housing unit, and many Baby Boomers show up to meetings to complain about how there's no parking and thus a new project should be denied.
- salesguy222 10y ago
  City Council is there to make money. Free, non permitted parking = no tickets/fees/etc = no money I hope it works but I wouldn't be optimistic that it would
daodedickinson 10y ago
I avoid places that don't have free parking almost as assidiously as I avoid places that don't have public restrooms. It's a sign that a place is not for people like me.
daodedickinson 10y ago
I avoid places that don't have free parking almost as assidiously as I avoid places that don't have public restrooms. It's a sign that a place is not for people like me.
mrbabbage 10y ago
This article didn't touch on the interaction between free parking and public transit, and I've seen a few comments here talk about the dearth of good public transit options as justification for free parking. I believe it's worth pointing out that free parking causes bad public transit: - free parking siphons away would-be bus and train customers, which deprive the transit authority of revenue (leading to less frequent service, older vehicles, etc.) and also reduce the political impetus to deliver high quality transit. - subsidized parking leads to lots of drivers circulating looking for an open spot, causing congestion and pollution -- the article mentioned that 53% of SF residential parking permit holders spent more than five minutes looking for parking at the end of their most recent trip. This congestion makes surface buses and trams run slower and with greater schedule uncertainty, making transit even more unattractive. Obviously I would like great public transit in America yesterday, but I don't think the current state of transit is good reason to preserve subsidized parking. Preserving subsidized parking is going to keep transit in America as unattractive as it is now.
- ianbicking 10y ago
  Traffic compounds the problems of public transit, but public transit is really bad even on its own. It's slow on its own, total cost is high, it's inflexible for many purposes, it doesn't respond to changes in the city, it's run monolithically, it's not aligned with its customers (customers are a liability), it's designed to encourage points of failure. It has such a multitude of problems, making cars less attractive won't go far to making public transit more attractive.
- mamon 10y ago
  >> deprive the transit authority of revenue I think that most of the time public transportation must be subsidized anyway. In fact some cities in Europe make public transport completely free, because subsidizing 100% of the cost it not much worse than subsidizing (on average) 75%, especially considering that you can greatly reduce traffic jams this way.
  - sitkack 10y ago
    Afaik in most transit systems, the fare only covers 20-30% of the budget.
wanderr 10y ago
Why does everyone think that the solution to traffic problems is to first make driving even more terrible and then oh yeah maybe get around to improving or even providing public transit? Why can't we swap the order, especially when it takes years to implement public transit improvements? Also, we need to resist the temptation to assume that low utilization of a half assed public transit solution means that nobody wants it. In my small town, we had a bus line that had almost no utilization despite going between two desirable locations; an area with tons of apartments oriented towards students and the university itself. The city was talking about killing the line but someone convinced them to try making the bus run more frequently, and continue running later into the day as a trial. The line went from having the lowest ridership to the highest. Not every improvement will be that dramatic of course, but I think often times public transit is underutilized because it's not meeting the needs of the population.
- stouset 10y ago
  We have tried swapping the order. There's no will for good public transit solutions when people can expect to drive everywhere because the current state of things has disproportionately favored cars.
  - dbcurtis 10y ago
    True, that. So how about instead of mandating parking spaces, mandate an area set-asside for public transit right-of-way. Then allow the right-of-way area to be used for parking until the transit authority exercises it's right-of-way. At first, there will be islands of disconnected right-of-way that make no sense for build-out, and they get used for parking. Eventually, re-development fill-in will connect adjacent regions, and then the transit authority can build a reasonable sized segment.
    - mjevans 10y ago
      Your city doesn't have bus lanes or a dedicated transit street? Seattle has both. It doesn't really address the issue, though it does make service for the rush hour suburb / city commuters better. (which is really all the current public transit infrastructure in the Seattle and surrounding areas is optimized for). Nor does it address the issue of it being expensive to extend the service in a way that meaningfully empowers, E.G. those working a late shift somewhere, to get home at 2AM.
mcguire 10y ago
That's funny, I thought congestion charges were how to prevent traffic jams. Could someone parse out 'The Grand Tour' chart for me? I have no idea what it is trying to present.
paulsutter 10y ago
It's 2017 and we're debating about parking? Shouldn't we be remarking how quaint that the Economist can't see what's coming?
- jdavis703 10y ago
  What is coming? Where will autonomous vehicles park themselves?
  - dbcurtis 10y ago
    Well, in theory an autonomous taxi never parks, or if it does, it parks far out of town at the maintenance/livery facility.
Proven 10y ago
But that's not inclusive
seangrogg 10y ago
Chances are this would have the desired effect for me: I would simply not shop during those times. I enjoy purchasing items in a store and going to the theatres, but I hate paying for parking or dealing with public transit. So I would just stop patronizing stores and movie theatres and instead use Amazon and Netflix more than I do now.
mrfusion 10y ago
Titlegore. I'm having trouble parsing all those negatives in the headline.
noddingham 10y ago
Two things I'm seeing reading the comments: Anyone referencing European public transportation should realize that over half the countries in Europe are smaller than the state of Iowa, and none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas. You're comparing apples to oranges. Second, not one of the comments below mentioned the Auto lobby. If your beef is with the number of personal vehicles on the road vs. public transportation, you should probably look there first. Tell your billionaire friends to start outspending the $61 million spent in 2016 by Automotive[1] industry lobbyists (compared to the $1.4 million for Misc Transport[2]) and maybe you'll start seeing a difference. [1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=M02&year=2016 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=M02&yea... [2] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000047007 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00004700...
- wtallis 10y ago
  > Anyone referencing European public transportation should realize that over half the countries in Europe are smaller than the state of Iowa, and none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas. You're comparing apples to oranges. Completely irrelevant. Nobody is talking about providing public transit for rural Texas. The important factor is density on a local scale, not overall size.
- recoil 10y ago
  > none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas I don't know where you got this bizarre notion. The populations of Russia (~144m), Germany (~83m), Turkey (~80m), France (~67m), The United Kingdom (~65m), Italy (~61m), Spain (~46m), Ukraine (~43m), and Poland (~38m) are all quite a lot larger than Texas (~27m).
  - ars 10y ago
    Physical size, not population. Public transport only works well in small areas. The higher the population density the better it works. There are a lot of people in the US who would not be willing to live in a place with a population density high enough to support public transport.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
It seems to me that you have two choices when dealing with traffic: 1. Make the location less desirable. 2. Make the transportation more efficient. Obviously nobody wants to do the 1st option, but the 2nd option is more difficult so they stick to the 1st. It seems a little backwards to me, like the goal is simply having less cars regardless of secondary or tertiary negative impact.
jankotek 10y ago
Allow remote work; all that transportation is irrelevant anyway.
- sitkack 10y ago
  Mandate remote work.
crispytx 10y ago
This is a stupid article. You already have to pay to park when you go downtown.
post_break 10y ago
"Ohh. Ok. I didn't realize we were doing trick questions. What's the safest way to go skiing? Don't ski!" Basically the argument here is to stop traffic jams from happening just make it so annoying that people won't drive. Well here in Texas you literally can't get anywhere without driving. Buses don't really run, there isn't public transportation to utilize, and you're going to tell me on a 100F day to ride a bike 15 miles?
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  Funny, here in Manhattan I have no problems going anywhere without having to drive my own passenger vehicle (that I don't have). Texas made its choice, New York City made a different one, and you can easily compare the outcomes. If you think one is better than the other, then you need to actually take steps in that direction.
  - post_break 10y ago
    New york city has the public transportation and population density of Japan. If Texas made its choice by being the size of Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Austria combined, sure I agree completely...
    - hrydgard 10y ago
      You can choose to build practical denser cities even in huge states. There'll just be more space between them.
      - h3st 10y ago
        Which means more wilderness & biodiversity, or more farmland, depending on the area. In Oslo you can ride the subway to the edge of the forest & hiking trails. Some people want to replace the hiking trails with suburbs and detached housing. They're not popular people.
    - CydeWeys 10y ago
      New York City is actually not a good location for a modern, dense city. The preponderance of rivers is problematic, and makes transit a lot more expensive than it would otherwise be (just look at the cost of new rivers and bridges). Manhattan, Staten Island, and Brooklyn and Queens (on Long Island) are all islands. Houston and Dallas have much more amenable geography for becoming denser, larger cities with better mass transit. Yet they haven't, because they chose not to. And there's plenty of unused space in New York state, anyway. It's big and only moderately populated north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. Compare New York with Texas: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/New_York_Population_Map.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/New_York... https://i.redditmedia.com/cn1OstwGd24Katakx1DFdC8cVzAjUVyOFhld5up3iwA.jpg?w=600&s=b567ca1261fa946c5c81fa9187dc70e5 https://i.redditmedia.com/cn1OstwGd24Katakx1DFdC8cVzAjUVyOFh...
xyzzy4 10y ago
Honestly we should aim to replace free parking with free Uber's.
__m 10y ago
You would think that traffic jams are a deterrent themselves, a fair one.
johan_larson 10y ago
Here in Toronto we don't have per-unit parking requirements. Developers are constantly putting up towers with less than one parking space per unit. It surprised the hell out of me when I bought a condo apartment. No parking spot included.
droithomme 10y ago
First, the double negative is simply terrible. Title should have been "How to create traffic jams: Let people park for free" so their point would be more clear. Second, I'm no fan of cars or Apple, but if Cupertino doesn't want their largest employer there who is paying more taxes than everyone else combined, they should just kick them out. If they do want them there, and there's traffic problems, they should use the tax money to build gigantic boulevards so the Apple employees can drive wherever they want. They are taxpayers and their taxes pay for roads like everyone else. The city takes charge of building roads so they should do their job and build roads, or public transport, to serve the people paying taxes, especially those paying the most.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  I read the damned title three or four times, trying to parse out its meaning, and still wasn't entirely sure I had a hold of it. That's some serious title gore.
Paul-ish 10y ago
This article paints an overly rosy picture of self driving cars. A significant cause of traffic on our roads is single occupancy vehicles. Opening up the gates to zero occupancy vehicles could cause the number of cars on the road to skyrocket, because you are no longer bounded by the number of people.
- Xorlev 10y ago
  It could also lead to greater ownership sharing. If cars are self driving, at that point it's more like a taxi.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    One thing we can be certain of, if self-driving / autonomous cars become a reality, is that there will be unintended consequences. Predicting the intended consequences is hard enough.
- tim333 10y ago
  They'd probably put some sort of tax on them rather than letting me have ten empty cars cruise about for fun.
  - Paul-ish 10y ago
    That would probably be a good solution. We will see if it is politically tenable.
Mz 10y ago
I would really, desperately like to agree with this article, but I hit this point and may not read further because this is a completely clueless statement: If they do not also change their parking policies, such efforts amount to little more than window-dressing. There is a one-word answer to why the streets of Los Angeles look so different from those of London, and why neither city resembles Tokyo: parking. I wanted to be an urban planner and I have done a fair amount of related reading. Los Angeles sprawled before it became known for being so car oriented, back when people took the tram and walked everywhere. It sprawled because it was built in the desert. The fact that water has to be imported to the area means that you had to develop large tracts of land in order for the financing to make any sense. It has to do with how much it cost to develop the necessary underlying infrastructure. It's layout is somewhat unique due to the environment and circumstances in which it was built, the way that Venice is unique for being built in a swamp. If you don't study the history of the place, you can't understand how it came to be the way it is. I would love to see the U.S. become less car centered. I would love it if we stopped whoring our cities out to the cult of the car and built more walkable communities and provided better public transit. But arguing for some particular approach and basing that argument on completely made up facts without understanding the history behind the places used as examples does not in any way impress me.
Jerry2 10y ago
>How not to create traffic jams: Don’t let people park for free This title is horrible because it uses a double negation. Here's one without it: >How to create traffic jams: Let people park for free Doesn't that read much less confusing?
oculusthrift 10y ago
sounds like a regressive tax that keeps poor people from visiting public places.
CodeWriter23 10y ago
I think if two key driving skills were taught, traffic would be greatly improved. The first, efficient merging, which means, no, you don't stop in your lane to move to the right, you speed up a little and leverage the accordion effect of the slower traffic on the right to find a spot big enough for your car to fit in and then merge. More efficient utilization of the space on the roadway, while keeping the lane you're leaving and the one you're entering moving at their respective speeds. Second, speed up when you get out in front of the jam. This is well studied and found to mitigate the traffic jam behind, when enough drivers do this.
mankash666 10y ago
There already exist considerable barriers to car ownership - 1. Cost of car, which in itself is a perpetually depreciating asset. 2. Insurance 3. Recurring service fees 4. Non open market for parts and replacements 5. Price gouging of insurance if found liable in an accident In my honest opinion, any design that doesn't attack the root cause is an improper one. Please make public transit a clean, safe, affordable and sufficiently widespread in coverage instead of increasing barriers to car ownership and ridership.
chrismcb 10y ago
Is there free paying in New York city? I thought parking rates there were astronomical AND the city has a decent public transportation system, and yet traffic is so poor... So there may be more to it than free parking
- notirk 10y ago
  Depends where you are, but where I live in Queens, and I think in Manhattan, parking is often free on the streets, cheap on the avenues (a buck or two an hr), and the parking garages (privately run) are astronomical in price. So, as you can imagine, drivers spend a very long time circling to find a free spot before biting the bullet and paying for a parking garage. This circling of course adds to the traffic problem. I'm of the opinion that if all street parking spots were metered, and prices were higher than they are now, traffic would be reduced significantly. Then again, I haven't had a car since living here (10+ years) and don't plan on getting one.

213 points by uyoakaoma 10y ago

yarri 10y ago

The rise of punitive solutions is real. I was involved with discussions with local municipalities placing (private) local schools under restrictions for not providing sufficient carpool coverage -- levy fines based on percent of families carpooling. Would the inverse of these punitive solutions, ie., encouraging carpool / ridesharing, not also work? It always amazes me how relatively unutilized the HOV lanes are.

jbangert 10y ago
At least in the east bay, one reason why HOV lanes might run more effectively is that they are also express lanes (limited points at which you can merge in and out). On the other lanes, passing on the right/not passing in the left lanes is ok which slows down merging considerably. Also HOV lanes by definition have twice the (passenger) usage per car, so 2 HOV lanes and 4 regular ones are moving the same amount of people.

yazr 10y ago

Quadruple negative it is!

MR4D 10y ago
CLICKBAIT! They could have just stated "Free parking increases traffic, sprawl & pollution". But then we wouldn't have clicked on it.
- emsy 10y ago
  I mean the conclusion is already cryptically hidden in the headline. It's just a terrible style. How I, as a non-native writer, would've written it: Charging money for parking prevents traffic jams Or something along those lines.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    The Economist likes to be clever with their headlines. It's definitely hard to parse but that was probably deliberate on the part of the editor.

toast0 10y ago

Certainly, if you make it less practical to arrive by personal car, less people will travel to places by car, and then you'll have less traffic. Unless this comes with a massive improvement in other means of transport, you'll probably have less visitors as well. The problem with alternatives to personal cars is that personal cars have many desirable properties: a) near zero latency to take a trip: if there's not a cab at my curb, I have to request it and wait -- or request it early and hope I'm ready when they are. Buses and trains are usually not waiting for me at the station. b) proportional penalty for leaving late: if you miss a bus or a train by 10 seconds, you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour. If you leave a couple seconds late in a car, you'll probably arrive a couple seconds late (around rush hour, it gets worse of course). If you don't make it to a requested cab in time, they may leave, and you have to wait for another one to come. c) availability: a personal car generally provides the same service during the day, at night, and can be used in rain and mild snow (heavy snow, if properly equipped). Busses, trains, and even cabs have less availability at night. d) flexibility/directness: a personal car can drive to almost everywhere, and can generally take a fairly direct route. Trains only go where there is track, and busses only go where there is a route. Cabs don't always pick up and drop off where you want to go. In case of an urgent change in circumstances, you can change your destination at will in a personal car or cab, but may not be able to easily redirect to where you're going in a bus.

notatoad 10y ago
All of those properties you specify are very true, but they are also very clearly luxuries. If you want immediate travel to anywhere at any time in any conditions, you should be expected to pay the cost of it - cities and property owners shouldn't have to bear the cost for you by subsidizing the costs of your travel and vehicle storage. If people are willing to pay the full costs of parking, the market should sort this problem out for itself as paid parking garages fill in the gap left behind by free parking. But what the article is saying is that in cities where parking is not free or not required by law, the market chooses to provide far fewer parking spaces that the minimum parking laws tend to require.
- sokoloff 10y ago

tutufan 10y ago

This analysis seems to ignore the benefits of free parking, both for drivers and for the businesses they're driving to. Personally, in cities where I have a car, if ample parking (day or night) is not available near a business, I patronize someone else. I do prefer public transportation, but there are only a few cities in the US where that actually works.

TulliusCicero 10y ago
Right, because transportation land use is largely zero sum. If you have ample parking everywhere and wide roads for cars, every other mode of transportation is automatically worse.
- sitkack 10y ago
  Including walking
avar 10y ago
This article is about parking requirements as they pertain to zoning, i.e. mandatory parking. Nobody's saying that you can't patronize a business that provides free parking, but if parking isn't mandated by zoning you'll on average pay more for the benefit compared to someone patronizing a business without ample parking. Removing the requirement from the zoning code allows people like you to vote with your dollars, and people who don't care about free parking to pay lower prices. It's a win-win.

bhauer 10y ago

Putting aside the awkward title, the article is confirming what we instinctively would expect: increasing the burden of commuting by car will reduce the number of people who commute by car. The cost of parking is an example burden. Obviously life needs to balance many things, and increasing the cost of parking in an attempt to shift commuters to alternative forms is also going to decrease the number of people who want to commute to the destination at all. I live in the Los Angeles area and significantly prefer living in and visiting cities that have free parking (e.g., the southern beach cities). I actively avoid cities such as Santa Monica that have costly and insufficient parking--and importantly, that means I don't spend any money at Santa Monica retail businesses. Alternative transit options are not appealing. Light rail, while expanding in this metropolitan area, is far too inefficient. Uber and Lyft are an additional cost friction that gets factored into any decision (e.g., where to go for a dinner out?). Plus I don't want to have to deal with an app to go somewhere. All that said, self-driving cars may be a big game changer for my lifestyle. I would be more likely to visit Santa Monica if my car could find a suitable parking structure and park itself. To my mind the cost of parking would be less of a nuisance if I didn't even have to think about the parking process.

zippergz 10y ago
I know this wasn't your point (and I completely agree with what you're saying), but I actually find Santa Monica to be one of the easiest places to visit in LA, because they have a bunch of reasonably cheap city-run parking garages. I've never had a major problem parking in Santa Monica, and if I did, I'd got there a lot less often.

kevinburke 10y ago

A concrete thing you can do about this is email your local City Council or Supervisor and ask them to reduce parking requirements for new buildings. Send them this article. Many local municipalities require absurd amounts of parking per new housing unit, and many Baby Boomers show up to meetings to complain about how there's no parking and thus a new project should be denied.

salesguy222 10y ago
City Council is there to make money. Free, non permitted parking = no tickets/fees/etc = no money I hope it works but I wouldn't be optimistic that it would

daodedickinson 10y ago

I avoid places that don't have free parking almost as assidiously as I avoid places that don't have public restrooms. It's a sign that a place is not for people like me.

daodedickinson 10y ago

I avoid places that don't have free parking almost as assidiously as I avoid places that don't have public restrooms. It's a sign that a place is not for people like me.

mrbabbage 10y ago

This article didn't touch on the interaction between free parking and public transit, and I've seen a few comments here talk about the dearth of good public transit options as justification for free parking. I believe it's worth pointing out that free parking causes bad public transit: - free parking siphons away would-be bus and train customers, which deprive the transit authority of revenue (leading to less frequent service, older vehicles, etc.) and also reduce the political impetus to deliver high quality transit. - subsidized parking leads to lots of drivers circulating looking for an open spot, causing congestion and pollution -- the article mentioned that 53% of SF residential parking permit holders spent more than five minutes looking for parking at the end of their most recent trip. This congestion makes surface buses and trams run slower and with greater schedule uncertainty, making transit even more unattractive. Obviously I would like great public transit in America yesterday, but I don't think the current state of transit is good reason to preserve subsidized parking. Preserving subsidized parking is going to keep transit in America as unattractive as it is now.

ianbicking 10y ago
Traffic compounds the problems of public transit, but public transit is really bad even on its own. It's slow on its own, total cost is high, it's inflexible for many purposes, it doesn't respond to changes in the city, it's run monolithically, it's not aligned with its customers (customers are a liability), it's designed to encourage points of failure. It has such a multitude of problems, making cars less attractive won't go far to making public transit more attractive.
mamon 10y ago
>> deprive the transit authority of revenue I think that most of the time public transportation must be subsidized anyway. In fact some cities in Europe make public transport completely free, because subsidizing 100% of the cost it not much worse than subsidizing (on average) 75%, especially considering that you can greatly reduce traffic jams this way.
- sitkack 10y ago
  Afaik in most transit systems, the fare only covers 20-30% of the budget.

wanderr 10y ago

Why does everyone think that the solution to traffic problems is to first make driving even more terrible and then oh yeah maybe get around to improving or even providing public transit? Why can't we swap the order, especially when it takes years to implement public transit improvements? Also, we need to resist the temptation to assume that low utilization of a half assed public transit solution means that nobody wants it. In my small town, we had a bus line that had almost no utilization despite going between two desirable locations; an area with tons of apartments oriented towards students and the university itself. The city was talking about killing the line but someone convinced them to try making the bus run more frequently, and continue running later into the day as a trial. The line went from having the lowest ridership to the highest. Not every improvement will be that dramatic of course, but I think often times public transit is underutilized because it's not meeting the needs of the population.

stouset 10y ago
We have tried swapping the order. There's no will for good public transit solutions when people can expect to drive everywhere because the current state of things has disproportionately favored cars.
- dbcurtis 10y ago
  True, that. So how about instead of mandating parking spaces, mandate an area set-asside for public transit right-of-way. Then allow the right-of-way area to be used for parking until the transit authority exercises it's right-of-way. At first, there will be islands of disconnected right-of-way that make no sense for build-out, and they get used for parking. Eventually, re-development fill-in will connect adjacent regions, and then the transit authority can build a reasonable sized segment.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    Your city doesn't have bus lanes or a dedicated transit street? Seattle has both. It doesn't really address the issue, though it does make service for the rush hour suburb / city commuters better. (which is really all the current public transit infrastructure in the Seattle and surrounding areas is optimized for). Nor does it address the issue of it being expensive to extend the service in a way that meaningfully empowers, E.G. those working a late shift somewhere, to get home at 2AM.

mcguire 10y ago

That's funny, I thought congestion charges were how to prevent traffic jams. Could someone parse out 'The Grand Tour' chart for me? I have no idea what it is trying to present.

paulsutter 10y ago

It's 2017 and we're debating about parking? Shouldn't we be remarking how quaint that the Economist can't see what's coming?

jdavis703 10y ago
What is coming? Where will autonomous vehicles park themselves?
- dbcurtis 10y ago
  Well, in theory an autonomous taxi never parks, or if it does, it parks far out of town at the maintenance/livery facility.

Proven 10y ago

But that's not inclusive

seangrogg 10y ago

Chances are this would have the desired effect for me: I would simply not shop during those times. I enjoy purchasing items in a store and going to the theatres, but I hate paying for parking or dealing with public transit. So I would just stop patronizing stores and movie theatres and instead use Amazon and Netflix more than I do now.

mrfusion 10y ago

Titlegore. I'm having trouble parsing all those negatives in the headline.

noddingham 10y ago

Two things I'm seeing reading the comments: Anyone referencing European public transportation should realize that over half the countries in Europe are smaller than the state of Iowa, and none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas. You're comparing apples to oranges. Second, not one of the comments below mentioned the Auto lobby. If your beef is with the number of personal vehicles on the road vs. public transportation, you should probably look there first. Tell your billionaire friends to start outspending the $61 million spent in 2016 by Automotive[1] industry lobbyists (compared to the $1.4 million for Misc Transport[2]) and maybe you'll start seeing a difference. [1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=M02&year=2016 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=M02&yea... [2] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000047007 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00004700...

wtallis 10y ago
> Anyone referencing European public transportation should realize that over half the countries in Europe are smaller than the state of Iowa, and none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas. You're comparing apples to oranges. Completely irrelevant. Nobody is talking about providing public transit for rural Texas. The important factor is density on a local scale, not overall size.
recoil 10y ago
> none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas I don't know where you got this bizarre notion. The populations of Russia (~144m), Germany (~83m), Turkey (~80m), France (~67m), The United Kingdom (~65m), Italy (~61m), Spain (~46m), Ukraine (~43m), and Poland (~38m) are all quite a lot larger than Texas (~27m).
- ars 10y ago
  Physical size, not population. Public transport only works well in small areas. The higher the population density the better it works. There are a lot of people in the US who would not be willing to live in a place with a population density high enough to support public transport.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

It seems to me that you have two choices when dealing with traffic: 1. Make the location less desirable. 2. Make the transportation more efficient. Obviously nobody wants to do the 1st option, but the 2nd option is more difficult so they stick to the 1st. It seems a little backwards to me, like the goal is simply having less cars regardless of secondary or tertiary negative impact.

jankotek 10y ago

Allow remote work; all that transportation is irrelevant anyway.

sitkack 10y ago
Mandate remote work.

crispytx 10y ago

This is a stupid article. You already have to pay to park when you go downtown.

post_break 10y ago

"Ohh. Ok. I didn't realize we were doing trick questions. What's the safest way to go skiing? Don't ski!" Basically the argument here is to stop traffic jams from happening just make it so annoying that people won't drive. Well here in Texas you literally can't get anywhere without driving. Buses don't really run, there isn't public transportation to utilize, and you're going to tell me on a 100F day to ride a bike 15 miles?

CydeWeys 10y ago
Funny, here in Manhattan I have no problems going anywhere without having to drive my own passenger vehicle (that I don't have). Texas made its choice, New York City made a different one, and you can easily compare the outcomes. If you think one is better than the other, then you need to actually take steps in that direction.
- post_break 10y ago
  New york city has the public transportation and population density of Japan. If Texas made its choice by being the size of Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Austria combined, sure I agree completely...
  - hrydgard 10y ago
    You can choose to build practical denser cities even in huge states. There'll just be more space between them.
    - h3st 10y ago
      Which means more wilderness & biodiversity, or more farmland, depending on the area. In Oslo you can ride the subway to the edge of the forest & hiking trails. Some people want to replace the hiking trails with suburbs and detached housing. They're not popular people.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    New York City is actually not a good location for a modern, dense city. The preponderance of rivers is problematic, and makes transit a lot more expensive than it would otherwise be (just look at the cost of new rivers and bridges). Manhattan, Staten Island, and Brooklyn and Queens (on Long Island) are all islands. Houston and Dallas have much more amenable geography for becoming denser, larger cities with better mass transit. Yet they haven't, because they chose not to. And there's plenty of unused space in New York state, anyway. It's big and only moderately populated north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. Compare New York with Texas: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/New_York_Population_Map.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/New_York... https://i.redditmedia.com/cn1OstwGd24Katakx1DFdC8cVzAjUVyOFhld5up3iwA.jpg?w=600&s=b567ca1261fa946c5c81fa9187dc70e5 https://i.redditmedia.com/cn1OstwGd24Katakx1DFdC8cVzAjUVyOFh...

xyzzy4 10y ago

Honestly we should aim to replace free parking with free Uber's.

__m 10y ago

You would think that traffic jams are a deterrent themselves, a fair one.

johan_larson 10y ago

Here in Toronto we don't have per-unit parking requirements. Developers are constantly putting up towers with less than one parking space per unit. It surprised the hell out of me when I bought a condo apartment. No parking spot included.

droithomme 10y ago

First, the double negative is simply terrible. Title should have been "How to create traffic jams: Let people park for free" so their point would be more clear. Second, I'm no fan of cars or Apple, but if Cupertino doesn't want their largest employer there who is paying more taxes than everyone else combined, they should just kick them out. If they do want them there, and there's traffic problems, they should use the tax money to build gigantic boulevards so the Apple employees can drive wherever they want. They are taxpayers and their taxes pay for roads like everyone else. The city takes charge of building roads so they should do their job and build roads, or public transport, to serve the people paying taxes, especially those paying the most.

SwellJoe 10y ago
I read the damned title three or four times, trying to parse out its meaning, and still wasn't entirely sure I had a hold of it. That's some serious title gore.

Paul-ish 10y ago

This article paints an overly rosy picture of self driving cars. A significant cause of traffic on our roads is single occupancy vehicles. Opening up the gates to zero occupancy vehicles could cause the number of cars on the road to skyrocket, because you are no longer bounded by the number of people.

Xorlev 10y ago
It could also lead to greater ownership sharing. If cars are self driving, at that point it's more like a taxi.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  One thing we can be certain of, if self-driving / autonomous cars become a reality, is that there will be unintended consequences. Predicting the intended consequences is hard enough.
tim333 10y ago
They'd probably put some sort of tax on them rather than letting me have ten empty cars cruise about for fun.
- Paul-ish 10y ago
  That would probably be a good solution. We will see if it is politically tenable.

Mz 10y ago

I would really, desperately like to agree with this article, but I hit this point and may not read further because this is a completely clueless statement: If they do not also change their parking policies, such efforts amount to little more than window-dressing. There is a one-word answer to why the streets of Los Angeles look so different from those of London, and why neither city resembles Tokyo: parking. I wanted to be an urban planner and I have done a fair amount of related reading. Los Angeles sprawled before it became known for being so car oriented, back when people took the tram and walked everywhere. It sprawled because it was built in the desert. The fact that water has to be imported to the area means that you had to develop large tracts of land in order for the financing to make any sense. It has to do with how much it cost to develop the necessary underlying infrastructure. It's layout is somewhat unique due to the environment and circumstances in which it was built, the way that Venice is unique for being built in a swamp. If you don't study the history of the place, you can't understand how it came to be the way it is. I would love to see the U.S. become less car centered. I would love it if we stopped whoring our cities out to the cult of the car and built more walkable communities and provided better public transit. But arguing for some particular approach and basing that argument on completely made up facts without understanding the history behind the places used as examples does not in any way impress me.

Jerry2 10y ago

>How not to create traffic jams: Don’t let people park for free This title is horrible because it uses a double negation. Here's one without it: >How to create traffic jams: Let people park for free Doesn't that read much less confusing?

oculusthrift 10y ago

sounds like a regressive tax that keeps poor people from visiting public places.

CodeWriter23 10y ago

I think if two key driving skills were taught, traffic would be greatly improved. The first, efficient merging, which means, no, you don't stop in your lane to move to the right, you speed up a little and leverage the accordion effect of the slower traffic on the right to find a spot big enough for your car to fit in and then merge. More efficient utilization of the space on the roadway, while keeping the lane you're leaving and the one you're entering moving at their respective speeds. Second, speed up when you get out in front of the jam. This is well studied and found to mitigate the traffic jam behind, when enough drivers do this.

mankash666 10y ago

There already exist considerable barriers to car ownership - 1. Cost of car, which in itself is a perpetually depreciating asset. 2. Insurance 3. Recurring service fees 4. Non open market for parts and replacements 5. Price gouging of insurance if found liable in an accident In my honest opinion, any design that doesn't attack the root cause is an improper one. Please make public transit a clean, safe, affordable and sufficiently widespread in coverage instead of increasing barriers to car ownership and ridership.

chrismcb 10y ago

Is there free paying in New York city? I thought parking rates there were astronomical AND the city has a decent public transportation system, and yet traffic is so poor... So there may be more to it than free parking

notirk 10y ago
Depends where you are, but where I live in Queens, and I think in Manhattan, parking is often free on the streets, cheap on the avenues (a buck or two an hr), and the parking garages (privately run) are astronomical in price. So, as you can imagine, drivers spend a very long time circling to find a free spot before biting the bullet and paying for a parking garage. This circling of course adds to the traffic problem. I'm of the opinion that if all street parking spots were metered, and prices were higher than they are now, traffic would be reduced significantly. Then again, I haven't had a car since living here (10+ years) and don't plan on getting one.