14 ms·

I think non-residential street parking, paid or not, should probably be illegal. Or at least eye-wateringly expensive and limited to a few minutes at a time (e.

• criddell 5y ago
  > we need a lot of investment in transportation alternatives. Some small changes can have a pretty minimal investment. The city of Austin lets motorcycles use street parking for free.
  • forty 5y ago
    I live in the Paris, France area, and I think most people here that are not themselves driving such things are hoping that motorized two wheel vehicle gets outlawed. I'm not sure why, but people driving those seem to completely ignore driving laws (red lights, stop sign, lanes, etc) which makes them very dangerous and annoying. Not to mention the noise (for those which are not electric)
    • criddell 5y ago
      In Austin, motorcycles generally follow the same rules as cars. The two wheeled vehicles that seem to annoy most people are bicycles and for the reasons you state (except noise).
      • decafninja 5y ago
        I think you'll find this true in most places, at least in the US. The main differentiating factor is probably the consequences - or lack of. Disobey traffic laws and get caught in a car or motorcycle - you face consequences that can range from harsh to at least significantly annoying enough that you'd rather not. Do the same in a bike, and most people don't care beyond giving you the finger or a nasty look. Even cops don't care more often than not. True - you don't have a cage of steel surrounding you like in a car so you also risk being killed or maimed, but I've found most cyclists also have a sense of invincibility until they actually get hurt. I am guilty of this myself.
      • forty 5y ago
        Yes, bicycles too, maybe worse. But I tolerate them better because at least it's good for our planet. Also when I drive (very very rarely), I have been much more annoyed by motorcycles which are passing on the right or driving between cars than by bicycles which tend to only be in areas where you can to drive really slow anyway, do it's much less dangerous.
    • cinntaile 5y ago
      It would be nice to see them outlawed in city centres but for a completely different reason. Pollution. Those 2-stroke engines pollute a lot more than cars nowadays and with the rise in food delivery services these vehicles have been on the rise. Likely undoing the effects of banning old cars from city centres.
• ars 5y ago
  > I think non-residential street parking, paid or not, should probably be illegal. Or at least eye-wateringly expensive and limited to a few minutes at a time So basically you don't want me to go there. Ok, I won't. I'll take my business somewhere else. I personally never shop at small local stores in my area because of lack of parking. I go to the huge stores 10 minutes away that have parking lots.
  • davidw 5y ago
    That's the market at work, isn't it. Different businesses make different choices. Get rid of parking regulations and let each business figure out what works best.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    I'm not sure why this is a controversial take. I absolutely make decisions about activities, where I shop or eat, etc. based on whether--if I drive into the city--I can find parking and, if so, how expensive it is. Cities (and to a lesser degree businesses) can absolutely decide they don't care if they discourage people from coming in from outside. And I'll act accordingly. Which is fine.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • ajford 5y ago
      Same. I entirely avoid Downtown Austin for this reason. I used to go when I could park for free at the state parking garages after-hours (was a state employee at the time), but now it's just expensive and/or tedious to park there. I even passed on a job offer for a downtown office when I was informed they didn't have a parking lot/garage but would instead provide a monthly parking allowance. Wasn't interested at all in hunting for parking on-street or around various garages every morning.
  • tzs 5y ago
    He was specifically talking about street parking.
• kspacewalk2 5y ago
  >The lack of visibility street parking creates in densely developed areas is a major safety hazard for all. I believe that when used right*, "lack of visibility" can be a very useful design feature to get drivers to Slow The Fuck Down. In general, North American fetishization of "clear lines of sight", leading to removal of supposed "obstacles" like trees, bushes, etc., leads to streets that are far easier to speed on. Places where planners know how to plan properly (i.e. not North America) use everything at their disposal to make it intensely uncomfortable to speed, with features that send speeders to the auto shop before they gain enough speed to send pedestrians and cyclists to the hospitals. Parked car lanes on alternating sides of the street can be judicially used to force a previously straight street to meander, for example. It's not as good as other solutions, but it can be useful. * For example, grade-separated cycle lanes, placed between the parked cars and sidewalk (rather than between parked cars and the street) significantly reduces, and with enough of a buffer completely removes the dooring risk for cyclists.
  • paganel 5y ago
    > "lack of visibility" can be a very useful design feature to get drivers to Slow The Fuck Down. That's why I personally do, as I live in such a city with cars parked literally everywhere so that in order to drive safe I need to slow down. As you imply, it's almost a feature, not a bug.
• decafninja 5y ago
  I'm wondering if there are cultural practices in play regarding your mention of SFH being used as "overcrowded communal living situations". For example, it's not uncommon in Asia to find multiple generations living in the same household. AFAIK California has a lot of Asians. While not in California, the town my parents live in has had an influx of Chinese immigrants the past decade or so. This has resulted in situations like the above, where multiple generations (grandparents, parents, grown children, grandkids) are living in the same SFH. Often times all three adult generations are driving, so that's at least 3 cars. Even more if say, each working individual have their own cars. The result is that the street in front of my parents' home is jam packed with parked cars that would not fit in these homes' driveways/garages. I don't not-sympathize, being an Asian myself, as I also happen to think the American obsession of kicking out adult children out of the household ASAP regardless of circumstances is stupid (or from the other side, clawing tooth and nail to achieve so-called "independence" from parents regardless of circumstances). At the same time, the street parking situation is not sustainable.
  • jurassic 5y ago
    Thansk for the comment. I have no problem with multi-generational living. I'm not Asian but I lived with my in-laws for a few years while we were saving up to buy a home and it was great. The problem I have is when there are more people in a given housing unit than it was designed to accommodate and so you make up for that lack by consuming something in the commons, specifically street parking. The pattern I saw in the Bay Area was not so much multi-generational families as groups of multiple unrelated working adults moving into a single-family home together as roommates, each adult individual having their own car and quickly exceeding the 2 spaces provided by a typical Bay Area driveway. Maybe they could park more in the driveway but nobody wants to block in other vehicles so they park in the street for every car beyond 2. Pretty soon the neighborhood is fully parked up. This is unrelated, but there was also a guy in my Palo Alto neighborhood who hoarded junk cars. He had them parked in his garage, his driveway, yard, and when he ran out of space he started parking them all up and down the street near his house in front of neighbors houses. It was a real nuisance and the police never did anything about it that I could see. Behavior like that shows a real lack of respect for the commons.
• aeternum 5y ago
  While I understand the sentiment, this makes cities even more unfriendly to families with kids. How can grandparents or relatives visit for a weekend?
  • decafninja 5y ago
    I'll say it before someone else inevitably does - they're supposed to take public transportation and/or cabs.
    • nomel 5y ago
      When I was young, I didn't live in a big city, and I tried to believe someone who said "just take public transportation", rather than the 3 hours trip, by car. It was 13 hours and $60 by bus (the shortest/cheapest option). By cab, it would have been, literally, 5x my car payment. It wasn't a sane option.
  • donjoe 5y ago
    I guess we have to ask ourselves a different question if we truly want to create a sustainable urban environment: Why can grandparents only visit by car? Why are there no (better) alternatives?
    • donatj 5y ago
      Because when you live 75 miles from the nearest major city, in a township of a couple hundred, a bus line or really any sort of infrastructure for that matter isn't practical? I think a lot of people forget how sparse much of the country really is.
      • ghaff 5y ago
        Or to come into a city for an evening event. I'm actually quite close to commuter rail to the 40 mile away large city. Which I take if I'm going in 9-5 but it's completely impractical to use for going in for dinner and a show.
• tptacek 5y ago
  Residential bans on overnight on-street parking are essentially a tool for preventing new affordable housing from being built. It doesn't so much work against housing density as foreclose on it. I live in one of two Chicago suburbs notable for excellent connectivity to Chicago's transit fabric (we're on both the Blue and the Green CTA train lines, a major regional commuter rail route, and a zillion bus routes). But people have jobs all over the metro area; to live here, take a job anywhere but the center of the city, and rely on public transit, you'd have to commute downtown and then back out, adding 45-90 minutes to your commute each way. Even if you don't drive every day, most people still need cars. Taking one of the few existing affordable apartments here essentially requires you to kick in several hundred dollars extra per month for a parking spot somewhere else in the area. What really happens here is that, of course, most residents, working class or not, own cars. But if you don't live on an SFH lot with a garage, you scavenge for parking where you can find it, often parking on the street and getting cited for it; our overnight parking ban generates about $400k/yr, mostly from renters. Gross.† We've banned overnight parking here as well, and I've been working for years now to build a case against that ban. Many other Chicago suburbs have repealed their overnight bans and replaced them with sticker systems. Meanwhile, we enforce off-street parking requirements for new residential construction. The sufficiency of those requirements is probably the single most important lever in trying to get new developments rejected at the plan commission, and to ratchet up the cost of new apartments so that fewer are built and for wealthier people. The pattern is to make a case for requiring more parking spots than can reasonably be provided on a residential lot, and, when that obviously can't happen, demand fewer units and less density. The Planning Association article linked here seems to have things exactly right. What we should be doing is eliminating all off-street parking requirements --- developers can build them if they think the market needs them --- and then simply charging for convenient on-street parking (perhaps with means-tested subsidies for residents). It doesn't seem complicated. † I did a FOIA request on this a year or so ago and mapped the tickets out, and, because I didn't know the right FOIA request to find all the apartments, surveyed the area for multi-family buildings, and threw together a dumb static HTML page; I just got the 2021 batch of FOIA data and am throwing together an Elixir app to render it this week. https://oak-park-parking.fly.dev/ https://oak-park-parking.fly.dev/
  • dpark 5y ago
• celtain 5y ago
  I generally prefer to walk by a lane of parked cars than walk so close to a lane of moving car traffic. An extra-wide sidewalk with trees and other decoration or a well-protected bike lane can provide a similar benefit, but parking isn't the worst option.