5 ms·

The Overparked States of America

45 points by prostoalex 8y ago

bb2018 8y ago
I'm a bit confused by a lot of the metrics in this piece. First, it tries to use city population as a metric to get per capita cost. It seems to suggest that households are on the hook for a significant portion of these spots. First, a city like Jackson Wyoming is mostly tourists and therefore the spots pay for themselves easily. Second, most spots are privately funded. Second, the estimate of "cost of replacement" is pretty silly. It used 7100 as an estimate per spot. I doubt the large parking spots in a ski lodge base are going to cost anywhere close to 7100. And even if a spot in a city actually cost 7100 to pave, if it then lasted 20 years is the cost anywhere close to what the article suggests? Doubtful.
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  In addition, the number of residents with cars in those cities is wildly different but must not be a dependent variable with those costs that are listed (Jackson must have had too low a population to be in these stats in 2016 http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-vehicles-by-city-map.html http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-v... ) New York ~50% households have a car Philadelphia ~70% have a car Seattle ~84% have a car Des Moines ~90% have a car.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  I’m somewhat confused by your criticism! It’s talking about cost mainly in terms of land value. If the parking spot was lost and had to be rebuilt in a similar location, what would that cost? In the centre of a city the cost of tarmac isn't going to be the dominant issue! Using city population for a per capita calculation seems perfectly reasonable as long as that’s understood, even in most tourism cases. For instance it’d be a perfectly reasonable economic calculation to look at the tourism income brought into a city per head of the resident population, it gives an idea of how valuable that is to an ordinary person, even if they don’t work in the industry themselves. The calculation being made here is similar. This only dramatically falls down where the land value is dominated by car-borne tourism value, for instance for a stop off on a long distance road route, reducing parking spaces by 50% might well reduce income by 50%. But that doesn’t apply in the central areas of most cities.
  - bb2018 8y ago
    As others have noted the number for Jackson seems wildly inflated. I suppose that figure and also the $7100 for cost of a spot lead me to believe this is either a poorly done study or a study done by someone with a vested interested in getting high numbers here. Perhaps the largest issue is with the statistic in the study named "parking cost per household". This figure suggests strongly this cost is somehow a cost which is a burden to each family's taxes or own money. However, this study includes all parking spots. This leads me to believe the majority of these spots are in parking garages which in almost all cases are privately funded (and those public may still have fees which pay for themselves).
tomhoward 8y ago
An earlier article/discussion about the same study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562972
boxcardavin 8y ago
My company is working on self-delivering bikes so citylab always pops up in our network, they do some great work. Not quite sure why they are so prolific.
- zhoujianfu 8y ago
  What’s your company (if it’s not stealth)?
  - UncleEntity 8y ago
    This one it seems => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16972672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16972672 Judging by the number of stripped shared bikes I see around town it'll certainly be interesting...
- adrianN 8y ago
  Bikes that deliver themselves?
kbsletten 8y ago
The Jackson thing is cracking me up. It's like saying that there are 100 hotel rooms for every resident of Maui, what are they doing with all those hotel rooms? Jackson is probably the biggest tourist destination in our tiny little state, so yes, we leave extra room for visitors.
- eesmith 8y ago
  The report (not the summary from citylab) says: > Jackson’s plentiful parking supply was underutilized. Despite its small land area and population, millions of visitors drive through the city every year so it is plausible that Jackson needs a lot of parking. But a Jackson-commissioned parking occupancy study of the residential core and midtown areas during peak tourist season in 2017 by Kimberly-Horn found, on average, 68 percent of parking stalls were empty in the residential core, and 61 percent were vacant in the midtown area. Occupancy peaked at 43 percent for the residential core and 51 percent for midtown. These low occupancy rates could suggest that parking is overpriced in Jackson, but at the time of this study, all parking in Jackson was provided at no cost. The conclusion must be that Jackson has an oversupply of parking. I am unable to find the original study, cited as "Town Of Jackson Parking Garage Challenges to Success" from http://townofjackson.com/ http://townofjackson.com/ services/police/pr/parking-garage-challenges-success/ . EDIT: in looking around, I found this Reddit comment - https://www.reddit.com/r/JacksonHole/comments/6bpvhl/town_of_jackson_wy_is_officially_renting_parking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JacksonHole/comments/6bpvhl/town_of... - that the town has such a housing crunch in summer that they will be renting out parking spaces as housing. That fits in with the thesis that there is too much free parking in Jackson.
  - kbsletten 8y ago
    That's well and good, but the article linked here is still garbage because of how meaningless the idea of parking spaces/resident actually is. I'm not saying Jackson is a good place to live, but just because you can make up a stat, doesn't make it insightful. The authors of the summary in question clearly didn't try to think about the situation holistically, just chuckled to themselves about their silly number.
  - 8y ago
Animats 8y ago
Where did the author get their numbers for Jackson, WY? Looking at the aerials, there are no huge parking lots. No parking structures. The biggest mall has about 300 spaces. There's an RV park, but it's not huge. There is no way that town has 100,119 parking spaces. That's five times as much parking as Disney's entire Orlando operation.
- topspin 8y ago
  Have to agree. Did some math; given 9'x18' spaces ('standard' outdoor slot size supposedly) the entire land area of Jackson WY can contain 172K parking spaces. I don't know what the correct figure is, but it's also clear the majority of Jackson parking spaces belong to private residences, not part of some vast paved hellscape.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  Downtown Philadelphia also doesn't seem quite as parking-rich as the source paper would suggest. I also wonder how many of the parking spaces in Jackson, WY are lost to piles of snow during winter months.

45 points by prostoalex 8y ago

bb2018 8y ago

I'm a bit confused by a lot of the metrics in this piece. First, it tries to use city population as a metric to get per capita cost. It seems to suggest that households are on the hook for a significant portion of these spots. First, a city like Jackson Wyoming is mostly tourists and therefore the spots pay for themselves easily. Second, most spots are privately funded. Second, the estimate of "cost of replacement" is pretty silly. It used 7100 as an estimate per spot. I doubt the large parking spots in a ski lodge base are going to cost anywhere close to 7100. And even if a spot in a city actually cost 7100 to pave, if it then lasted 20 years is the cost anywhere close to what the article suggests? Doubtful.

stevenwoo 8y ago
In addition, the number of residents with cars in those cities is wildly different but must not be a dependent variable with those costs that are listed (Jackson must have had too low a population to be in these stats in 2016 http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-vehicles-by-city-map.html http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-v... ) New York ~50% households have a car Philadelphia ~70% have a car Seattle ~84% have a car Des Moines ~90% have a car.
Brakenshire 8y ago
I’m somewhat confused by your criticism! It’s talking about cost mainly in terms of land value. If the parking spot was lost and had to be rebuilt in a similar location, what would that cost? In the centre of a city the cost of tarmac isn't going to be the dominant issue! Using city population for a per capita calculation seems perfectly reasonable as long as that’s understood, even in most tourism cases. For instance it’d be a perfectly reasonable economic calculation to look at the tourism income brought into a city per head of the resident population, it gives an idea of how valuable that is to an ordinary person, even if they don’t work in the industry themselves. The calculation being made here is similar. This only dramatically falls down where the land value is dominated by car-borne tourism value, for instance for a stop off on a long distance road route, reducing parking spaces by 50% might well reduce income by 50%. But that doesn’t apply in the central areas of most cities.
- bb2018 8y ago
  As others have noted the number for Jackson seems wildly inflated. I suppose that figure and also the $7100 for cost of a spot lead me to believe this is either a poorly done study or a study done by someone with a vested interested in getting high numbers here. Perhaps the largest issue is with the statistic in the study named "parking cost per household". This figure suggests strongly this cost is somehow a cost which is a burden to each family's taxes or own money. However, this study includes all parking spots. This leads me to believe the majority of these spots are in parking garages which in almost all cases are privately funded (and those public may still have fees which pay for themselves).

tomhoward 8y ago

An earlier article/discussion about the same study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562972

boxcardavin 8y ago

My company is working on self-delivering bikes so citylab always pops up in our network, they do some great work. Not quite sure why they are so prolific.

zhoujianfu 8y ago
What’s your company (if it’s not stealth)?
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  This one it seems => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16972672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16972672 Judging by the number of stripped shared bikes I see around town it'll certainly be interesting...
adrianN 8y ago
Bikes that deliver themselves?

kbsletten 8y ago

The Jackson thing is cracking me up. It's like saying that there are 100 hotel rooms for every resident of Maui, what are they doing with all those hotel rooms? Jackson is probably the biggest tourist destination in our tiny little state, so yes, we leave extra room for visitors.

eesmith 8y ago
The report (not the summary from citylab) says: > Jackson’s plentiful parking supply was underutilized. Despite its small land area and population, millions of visitors drive through the city every year so it is plausible that Jackson needs a lot of parking. But a Jackson-commissioned parking occupancy study of the residential core and midtown areas during peak tourist season in 2017 by Kimberly-Horn found, on average, 68 percent of parking stalls were empty in the residential core, and 61 percent were vacant in the midtown area. Occupancy peaked at 43 percent for the residential core and 51 percent for midtown. These low occupancy rates could suggest that parking is overpriced in Jackson, but at the time of this study, all parking in Jackson was provided at no cost. The conclusion must be that Jackson has an oversupply of parking. I am unable to find the original study, cited as "Town Of Jackson Parking Garage Challenges to Success" from http://townofjackson.com/ http://townofjackson.com/ services/police/pr/parking-garage-challenges-success/ . EDIT: in looking around, I found this Reddit comment - https://www.reddit.com/r/JacksonHole/comments/6bpvhl/town_of_jackson_wy_is_officially_renting_parking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JacksonHole/comments/6bpvhl/town_of... - that the town has such a housing crunch in summer that they will be renting out parking spaces as housing. That fits in with the thesis that there is too much free parking in Jackson.
- kbsletten 8y ago
  That's well and good, but the article linked here is still garbage because of how meaningless the idea of parking spaces/resident actually is. I'm not saying Jackson is a good place to live, but just because you can make up a stat, doesn't make it insightful. The authors of the summary in question clearly didn't try to think about the situation holistically, just chuckled to themselves about their silly number.
- 8y ago

Animats 8y ago

Where did the author get their numbers for Jackson, WY? Looking at the aerials, there are no huge parking lots. No parking structures. The biggest mall has about 300 spaces. There's an RV park, but it's not huge. There is no way that town has 100,119 parking spaces. That's five times as much parking as Disney's entire Orlando operation.

topspin 8y ago
Have to agree. Did some math; given 9'x18' spaces ('standard' outdoor slot size supposedly) the entire land area of Jackson WY can contain 172K parking spaces. I don't know what the correct figure is, but it's also clear the majority of Jackson parking spaces belong to private residences, not part of some vast paved hellscape.
jonhendry18 8y ago
Downtown Philadelphia also doesn't seem quite as parking-rich as the source paper would suggest. I also wonder how many of the parking spaces in Jackson, WY are lost to piles of snow during winter months.