19 ms·

Parking kills businesses, not bikes or buses

247 points by kitkat_new 5y ago

rtlfe 5y ago
This has been shown in studies over and over, but seemingly most businesses thinks their situation is somehow special and actively lobby against their best interest. Even 5th Ave in Manhattan, one of the busiest pedestrian areas in the US has had street improvements indefinitely delayed because businesses are fighting to defend the vehicle lanes. https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/04/08/city-dot-still-mum-on-long-delayed-fifth-avenue-busway/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/04/08/city-dot-still-mum-on...
- sacrosancty 5y ago
  It depends on the location. Here's a business owner whose situation really is special: https://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/300528260/roadworks-during-peak-trading-season-leave-shannon-businesses-stranded https://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/300528260/roa... But even so, the business owners losing business shouldn't matter at all for such decisions. Business only exist to serve their customers. If customers don't want or need them, then they should disappear. The real concern is whether customers do still want shops there but are unable to access them because of lack of parking.
  - ry167 5y ago
    That article is about Shannon, a town of 1500 people on a state highway. There is a detour in place causing it to be entirely skipped by most drivers. It bears no resemblance car usage in cities at all.
    - sacrosancty 5y ago
      Yes. That's why it depends on the location. Cities with mostly high-rise apartment buildings will be different to single family home suburbs. You can't just take some research and assume it applies to any specific other case.
goodpoint 5y ago
Decades of evidence indicates how bad stroads, parking and car culture in general are for society.
- whiteboardr 5y ago
  You mean urban societies? Where do your groceries come from and how should these people taking care of ensuring you get to eat get around?
  - txru 5y ago
    An inner city road doesn't need to be 4 lanes wide if it's primarily carrying small box trucks to local stores. And I think it's pretty apparent that quite a lot of restaurant employees rely on public transit, or feed a substantial portion of their income to one car, whose breakdown causes loss of employment. Forcing people to need cars from arbitrary point to point is a regressive tax.
  - vmception 5y ago
    urban societies built within the 20th century are very different than urban societies built before then they both have roads, the only difference is that the 20th century ones were built around car culture. car culture is not talking about people delivering food for the residents.
  - user_7832 5y ago
    I don't exactly get your point. Stroads are generally more common in residential areas to the best of my limited knowledge. The bulk of commerical transport likely occurs on much larger roads and highways where trucks mainly ply. Short of last mile transport there isn't much overlap.
    - quantumwannabe 5y ago
      "Stroads" are in commercial areas by definition. A typical neighborhood designed after the car became popular does not have any multi lane roads inside of it. It will have them around it, but people who live in the neighborhood will not be directly on the arterial roads. The larger road used for commercial transport in low density areas is either a "stroad" or highway. Please take five minutes to look on Google Maps before commenting about neighborhood design in a country 5000 miles away.
belorn 5y ago
> A study in Berlin found that shop owners believed only about 12 percent of customers lived within 1km of a shopping street when more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance. This seem to imply that shops don't benefit much from parking when majority of customers lives within 1km of the store, and if that's the definition of local businesses then I don't see much problem eliminating parking. Local businesses catering to local customers. Non-local businesses, ie businesses where the majority of customers isn't with that 1km, should not be located next to shopping streets, which might require a new definition of shopping streets which centralize all kind of shopping to a specific street. This seem to somewhat match a trend that I have noticed here in Sweden. Stores catering to a larger audience seem to have started to move away from expensive city cores in the last couple of decades, with specific shopping street decreasing in importance as a result.
- rtlfe 5y ago
  1km is a good distance for walking, but you can expand it quite a bit if you have good bike infrastructure and transit. You can bike 5km in 20 minutes at a pretty leisurely pace, which I would gladly do for a good restaurant or specialty store.
- asdff 5y ago
  It really depends on the context of the building imo. If you have a grocery store with like a few spaces that are always full, vs one with a bunch of spaces, someone who is planning a big grocery load will probably opt to drive their car for two minutes to the big lot one vs walk 10 mins to the one without parking and walk back with a gallon of milk and all their groceries for their family of 4 for a week. What you find in other countries that are denser is that people not only buy less things per trip and take more trips, but they are also cooking fewer meals at home than Americans and tend to eat out more for their meals. I think two things need to happen for that behavior to happen with Americans: shorter commutes so you actually have time to run to the grocery store more often than once a week, and more buying power from wages so you can actually regularly afford food you didn't personally prepare. Until those things happen, most americans will continue doing their errands once a week when they finally have time, and saving money making things at home vs ordering more prepared food and having a therefore smaller need for so many groceries in the first place.
user_7832 5y ago
While thks article is quite interesting, I think it's worth pointing out the vast differences in non-car accessibility between countries, probably due to zoning laws. Large and low-density population places would require reliable modes of long distance transport (be it cars or buses or metro etc). From what I've heard North America practically requires car ownership outside medium sized cities. Here in the Netherlands you can mostly get anywhere in the country with a bike and a train (OV) card. Back home in India not too many people have cars so buses, trains and taxis and autorickshaws (aka TukTuks) substitute them. Not criticizing the point of the article, but I think a bit more nuance is needed when comparing Germany with Canada with New Zealand. Also, I'd highly recommend checking out Not Just Bikes on YouTube, and perhaps the more "radical" r/fuckcars on reddit.
- k8sToGo 5y ago
  Here in Switzerland it often takes 2x as much time to get anywhere if you take public transportation outside of big cities, compared to the car. Is it the same in the Netherlands? Also public transportation here is quite expensive.
  - user_7832 5y ago
    I can't comment on small towns, but I live in a medium-ish size place of around 100k people though it really depends how far you're going. If you're going just a few (<10) km then cars would be a bit faster. On Google maps I see that it takes 9 minutes to a store 6km away by car. It takes 36 minutes by public transport, however it takes only 20 minutes by bike (almost everyone has a bike here). However a lot of roads are bike-only or similar (esp in parts of the city centre), which (imo) makes it super frustrating to drive. On longer distances yes cars do get much faster. Amsterdam to Rotterdam by car is 52 mins (74km), vs 1hr18min by train, however this was station to station. Once you add the time to go from the station to your destination it's often longer. Edit - re:costs, it feels moderately expensive to me as an Indian. It's €5.4 from Rotterdam to Den Haag (Hague) station, which is 21km by road (20 min by road, 30 min by train). You get 20-30% off passes for monthly use I believe, though that's only useful if you use it a lot.
PopAlongKid 5y ago
>Replacing kerb-side parking with bus or bike lanes does not hurt local businesses, and in some cases, it can increase patronage. Bikes and buses don’t kill businesses - parking does. Where is the evidence to support the claim that parking "kills" businesses -- I read the article and don't see any. What about businesses whose products are too big/heavy to carry on foot or even on a bus? Where are all the pedestrians carrying 24-can cases of beverages? 40-pound bags of dog food?
- coolspot 5y ago
  The article is probably sponsored by some real eastate developer group who wants all those pesky parking requirements gone, so they can build 1k unit buildings with very few parking spaces allocated.
  - rtlfe 5y ago
    A developer would only build a parking-free building if there are people in the area who want to live without cars. Otherwise it would be a financial disaster for them.
    - thepangolino 5y ago
      Hence why the push for car free cities.
    - deepsun 5y ago
      Not true. Kyiv, Ukraine keeps building skyscrapers with almost 0 parking in it (althoug there are dedicated parking buildings within about 10-15 minute walk, not as convenient). And everyone hates it that way. People keep complaining. Developers keep building. As one developer told me -- that simply financially makes more sense for them to build an apartment instead of parking. Why should they solve other people's business? At first I was outraged, but now I kinda see a long term benefits of that, even thought it's harder for me to own a car. Hopefully that'd lead to improvement of public transportation or invention of new ways to move.
hilbert42 5y ago
"Studies from across the globe have found that shop owners consistently overestimate the number of shoppers that arrive by car and vastly underestimate the number of people who arrive by other modes." Perhaps the stats support this, we'll see (but I'm suspicious). What I am certain about is that I'll shop where there's parking for my vehicle—and that's how I go shopping. It would be difficult for me to estimate how many times I've bypassed certain shops/businesses because there's either no parking or the on-street parking is full up.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  How much do you want to bet that that study was funded/done by people who are against cars? I find it very hubristic to think that a single study is more valid than years of observation from people whose livelihoods depend on being right.
  - sacrosancty 5y ago
    Their livelihoods don't depend on being right. If it turns out parking doesn't matter for their business, and they're wrong to believe it does, their livelihoods will be fine. They have an existential risk from only one of the options, so their opinion will be grossly biased.
- azemetre 5y ago
  What if street parking was more reflective of the actual costs and drastically limited the amount of time you could park? This could mean the likelihood of a spot being available in front a story very high. I forgot what city implemented this (may have been San Francisco) but they made street parking triple the price and only for 15-30 minutes. As a result businesses in front of street parking got more customers. I'm trying to search this on google, it may have been a paper put out by strong towns. I remember an episode of econ talk discussing it here: https://www.econtalk.org/donald-shoup-on-the-economics-of-parking/ https://www.econtalk.org/donald-shoup-on-the-economics-of-pa...
  - hilbert42 5y ago
silverpepsi 5y ago
Am I the only one bothered by articles of this nature never really clarifying that nothing they say has any meaning below a certain very specific population density and in very specific areas with permissive zoning allowing commerce near to housing? "Parking is, however, just a symptom of our massive car addiction." It's especially hard to take seriously with comments like the above. I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1/10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up, but the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.
- ericmay 5y ago
  > I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to Right. That’s like calling water wet. Of course we live this way, we designed our cities to make us live this way… I’m not sure what you’re talking about w.r.t Europe. Even if you have friends that drive everywhere that just is not how most people live day-to-day.
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    Best thing about living in older European cities is they don't have this stupid zoning, they mixed commercial and housing because that's how people chose to live before planners got invented after ww2. Now planners are patting themselves on the back for recently inventing the 20 minute community, Which is exactly the same thing. My one major thing I want in life is to never ever live in a suburban development with zero to do except drive to places.
    - smusamashah 5y ago
      And I thought it's only software UI designers who like to watch the world burn.
CommanderData 5y ago
Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all. I've seen certain areas in North London with no parking on very busy roads die within months of opening, repeat cycle of new shops that come and go, I can't imagine the costs to outfit some of these places. My thinking was the area just isn't right but less than 200 meters down plenty of free short term parking and the area is bustling with businesses that have been around longer than I can remember.
- rtlfe 5y ago
  > Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all. Presumably those are areas that don't have the bikes and buses the article talks about. You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    > You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives. This sums up my complaint about Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes, etc. They want to do things that will make driving impossible (or at least miserably difficult) now, and only maybe later do things that will provide alternatives for everyone.
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      You can make this argument for any change that would improve cycling and transit though. Take street A, a street that right now is hostile to both; it only has car lanes, traffic is fast enough that it's intimidating to bike on, and buses get stuck in traffic. You'd like to get to street B: a street that people feel safe to bike on (protected bike lanes) and that enables transit to be fast and reliable (dedicated bus lanes or streetcar right-of-way). Now how do you get from A to B? At some point during that process, you'll have to take away space from cars. This might mean removing travel lanes, and it might mean removing on-street parking, but regardless, that is a necessary step to get to street B. That point is where people complain, "you're making driving impossible!" But you can never get to street B if you never make that step. And at the point you do, there generally also won't be that many people biking or taking transit, because you haven't changed the street yet.
angmarsbane 5y ago
I spent two years commuting by bike and bus and by doing so I was much more aware of the stores within a 5 mile radius of me. I wanted to stop and spend my money and time BUT it wasn’t worth missing my bus or risking my bike getting stolen so I never stopped. This was in Los Angeles. If buses were more reliable & enjoyable I would have stopped or gone back on weekends, and if I could trust my bike to still be there those businesses would have benefitted.
- asdff 5y ago
  I do a lot of commuting via bus and bike in LA. You can always bring your bike into the doorway of the business and throw your ulock around the frame and rear wheel to prevent it from being ridden. I find if there are at least other bikes in the rack I feel better about leaving my bike out, and if its something like the front entrance or a parking lot where there is foot traffic I don't mind leaving the bike out on a rack while I'm inside and its during business hours, but I would never leave it out on a rack overnight. The bus is pretty annoying for getting things done, however. You can't exactly string together multiple errands unless shops are nearby, but luckily LA is dense enough where I can find redundant shops of a given category in every neighborhood. The bus was great for my commute though. No transfers, 30 mins on a bus that comes every 10 minutes vs the 20 min drive where I didn't have a parking space at work (and thus had to hunt or pay). It was on a route with a rapid and local bus line too, so really a bus came every 5 mins due to them being staggered. Transfers really kill a bus commute but sometimes even with the transferring, it remains the fastest way around. Certain parts of LA like the less bar heavy portions of the west side, you could be waiting 30 minutes at least for your ride to even be accepted, then it might be 15-20 mins before they slog through traffic to get to you. Rideshare is pretty spotty in LA outside of Santa monica, downtown LA, lax, weho, or hollywood, because the drivers rarely want to venture out beyond these areas and would rather stick to where the ride frequency is the highest due to the traffic. I do use the bus quite a bit for going home at the end of the night since its so cheap compared to surged rideshares. It seemingly runs until 4am and there are a surprising amount of people using it still at that time (I assume mostly third shift workers but a good amount of people who clearly are coming from the bars like me).
  - 5y ago
Invictus0 5y ago
Off topic, but I have never seen the "kerb" spelling before.
- robocat 5y ago
  New Zealand English tends to be closer to UK English, with it’s own quirks. However, it is trending towards US English due to media influence. Asking low quality questions is poor form. Generalisation about questions: You usually improve the conversation if you do some work: for example google your questions, and post your answer if you think it is interesting to others. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=kerb+or+curb https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=kerb+or+curb
melenaboija 5y ago
I don’t think a lot of research and articles are needed, visiting any European city (or small town) is enough.
- readams 5y ago
  I have visited European cities and doing anything requires huge time investments and careful planning.
  - wasmitnetzen 5y ago
    Having lived in several European cities: You'll learn it by heart in about three months tops. If course it's trickier for a tourist.
  - melenaboija 5y ago
    Your huge time investments and careful planning (which I guess you mean planning more than: I have to go to my yard take my car and drive from X to Y and that objectively is harder than walking or taking public transportations) can be beneficial for the environment and local businesses.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  I was trying to figure out how I'd get to, around, and back from Hungerford, UK without renting a car, and concluded I'd be doing a fair amount of walking and a lot of waiting for the train. And a not insignificant amount of buying expensive rideshare transportation. I think if I lived there I'd definitely own a car.
Toutouxc 5y ago
I'd just like to add some context: People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas. If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind. I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US/Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a "city" to look like.
- thanatos519 5y ago
  I dread the idea of moving back to .ca from .nl for exactly this reason. Hellscape is right.
- pm90 5y ago
  Absolutely. Cities can be beautiful and livable and affordable and pollution free. Currently most US cities are not. Most Americans have to own cars or other vehicles just to get around. It doesn’t have to be that way.
- ericmay 5y ago
  I agree. I don’t see why we have to force ourselves to live with 2-3 car households, insane taxes to pay for the upkeep of roads, and dependency on oil, gas, plastic, car manufacturers, and all of this other stuff when we could just build better neighborhoods. It’s mind-blowing. Americans in particular go to Europe “wow it’s so awesome here I could totally live here!!” And then it’s like they land back home and their mind is wiped clean. We don’t have to not have cars either. Why not 1 car per household for most people and most of your day-to-day activities within a few miles? You could bike, ride a street car, walk, any number of things. You can still live in rural areas and have a truck. I like trucks and acreage too! Just stop dictating that we have to have life this specific, obviously bad way.
  - Victerius 5y ago
indymike 5y ago
Let's be honest. Lack of parking and paid parking kills businesses.
- antattack 5y ago
  Precisely, if we cannot find parking near-by we go to find another restaurant.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  Demonstrated not to be true in Toronto, Canada: * https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/the-latest-evidence-that-bike-lanes-are-good-for-business-f3a99cda9b80 https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/the-latest-evidence-that-bi... On two separate streets (Bloor above, Queen below): * https://www.fastcompany.com/3067515/why-local-businesses-shouldnt-worry-about-eliminating-on-street-parking https://www.fastcompany.com/3067515/why-local-businesses-sho... Making it easier for cyclists and transit users has often been found to increase business: > Despite longstanding popular belief, bicycle lanes can actually improve business. At worst, the negative impact on sales and employment is minimal, according to a new study. Researchers studied 14 corridors in 6 cities -- Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Memphis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis -- and found such improvements had either positive or non-significant impacts on sales and employment. Essentially, adding improvements like bike lanes largely boosted business and employment in the retail and food service sectors. * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200422151318.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200422151318.h... Meta-review: * https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01441647.2021.1912849 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01441647.2021.19...
  - indymike 5y ago
    I live in Indianapolis and we added bike lanes and more parking at the same time. The real driver in retail sales has been the increase in residential units downtown. Mass transit in Indy was and still is terrible ... It takes 1.5 hours to go 6 miles.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  Yeah, a work/shop/live area near me instituted paid parking 5 years ago, after 25 years of being free. It had some serious negative effects on business and they rolled back the paid hours to just weekdays and just 9-5 for the garages, but it still has not recovered. Many of the businesses have moved out, although others have moved in. Some customers just park in the nearest free spots, clogging up other commercial or residential parking, and walk. It's been 5 years and places are still closing as their leases expire. The place never really recovered and people are still complaining about it. https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/02/14/reston-town-center-paid-parking-controversy/ https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/02/14/reston-town-center-... https://wjla.com/news/local/merchants-association-weekday-parking-fees-still-hurting-reston-town-center-businesses https://wjla.com/news/local/merchants-association-weekday-pa... https://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/sp6hfr/clydes_reston_closing_may_21/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/sp6hfr/clydes_reston_...
nine_zeros 5y ago
Anyone who has visited major Asian cities already knows that grocery businesses and customers both prefer dense cities - because everything happens on an app and a delivery system. You don't even have to worry about weather or biking or bulk groceries because of modern technology. Suburban parking hellholes are a human aberration that needs to be left for the history books.
TheChaplain 5y ago
Expensive and sparse parking kills businesses. I've seen a city center with hundreds of shops die out because businesses shut or moved to the newly built mall outside the city that has a huuge parking area. There is no reason to go into the city anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands at the mall.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  It seems like the future, at least in America where land is plentiful, is multi-core metropolitan cities. With smaller cores, not so many silly skyscrapers.
- Toutouxc 5y ago
  Yes, if what you already have is a car-dependent society and a generally unwelcoming city center, people will do exactly that. And there will be even more accidents, pollution, traffic jams, stress, further loss of green space and social contact. And together this will cost the society more than making the original city center walkable and convenient to do business in. > There is no reason to go into the city anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands at the mall. Consider this: There is no reason to build a mall anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands in the CITY. It's funny how the alternative for having an actual, functional city center is letting it die (or not building it in the first place) and then building an alternative city center called "the mall" where people can socialize, walk around without the fear of being crushed by a 2-ton SUV, window-shop, have a lunch or watch a movie.
jeffbee 5y ago
I think the bias come from a pretty obvious fact: people who drive do 100% of the whining about parking and traffic. People who walk to the shop just come in looking happy and well-adjusted and ready to spend money. So the only thing the shopkeeper ever hears about transportation is how bad traffic and parking are.
- asdff 5y ago
  Its also from who the business owners perceive as their customers. They probably associate car ownership with higher income levels and would prefer to make their business as accommodating for that customer as possible vs someone who takes the bus and is perhaps perceived as having less disposable income to spend at the business. Sometimes businesses reserve their parking for the most high income customers e.g. when they make it valet with a high price vs first come first serve.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Right, but the research shows the other thing: people who drive spend less. Perhaps because their transportation costs are so high.
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      Is this research comparing spending at the same store, or just car owners vs non-car owners buying every day things? If the latter, I would think it's more that if you don't drive, you likely live in a more expensive area and things cost more.
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        These are surveys of individuals as they walk out of shops. Not large-scale statistical inference.
robocat 5y ago
That is an awfully biased article. > “A study in Berlin . . . more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.” So what? Even in Berlin, businesses care about the 49% of car travellers. Plus, a study in Berlin not that relevant to Auckland: Berlin has a population of 3.6M (area 892 km² with 1.2M passenger cars and a metro system), Auckland 1.6M (area 1,086 km² with 0.74 passenger vehicles per capita and no metro system). New Zealand has a population of 5M. Personally I know lack of parking affects me. I live in the suburbs of Christchurch where a car is necessary. I rarely go shopping in town, because our city council has been making the city centre more difficult to access (expensive parking, congestion due to slow zones and newer slower traffic signals, removal of street-side parking). I love pedestrian zones, but there needs to be a way to get to them.
- munchler 5y ago
  It’s not even logically consistent with itself. The article starts by saying that we have a “massive car addiction”, then talks about a village where only 4% of business customers arrive by car. If true, this leaves totally unaddressed the question of where all the car addicts are actually driving to, and what to do about it.
- verve_rat 5y ago
  Indeed, the city near me, that I used to live in, has a CBD that is dying a slow long death. The council keeps doing initiatives to try to prop it up, but at the same time keeps making it less and less car friendly, while the public transport continues to suck. Meanwhile the large outdoor mall on the city outskirts is thriving, because of the easy parking. It doesn't need to be much, decent size parking building with an arterial access actually in the CBD would work. Let people drive to the CBD and wonder around when they get there.
- matsemann 5y ago
  Making it harder to access by car is a feature. You're not boycotting the city centre because you find it hard to park, it was actually them throwing you out. The people living there decided it's not worth it to cater to the few individuals demanding to drive everywhere to the detriment of others. Rather safe, living and cozy streets for the inhabitants, than easy access for the suburbians.
carlospwk 5y ago
A question for all those in favour of street parking: If parking right in front of the store is so vital for business, why don't they do it in shopping malls? Why do you have to park your car somewhere else and then walk to the stores? I've never even gotten an answer, just silence.
- nelsondev 5y ago
  Shopping malls often have attached parking garages?
  - carlospwk 5y ago
    Why?
    - shukantpal 5y ago
      Probably because customers aren’t going to malls for a short trip and taking 5-10 mins extra to park isn’t a big deal compared to them going to a small shop for 5 mins and getting out of there.
      - carlospwk 5y ago
        I don't know why you've come to that conclusion? I do the exact opposite. I got to malls to buy something specific, but there's no reason to spend anymore time there than necessary. City centres are the opposite.
  - asdff 5y ago
    In denser areas they do, but honestly most new development malls are looking like that now a days with huge garages and an effort to maximize the developable land. I think Easton in Columbus, OH is a fair example of one of these newer malls with garages, and outside of a big city too way out in the exurbs not too far from cornfields. There are some lots but as the area has been infilling they've been adding garages.
- asdff 5y ago
CodeWriter23 5y ago
Meanwhile in America, Old Town revivals in like every small city in the United States has used abundant free parking as a key driver to get customers into businesses.
- asdff 5y ago
  Because sometimes there aren't even sidewalks from the suburban tract to the Old Town they are reviving, much less a safe way to bike let alone a bus route with any reasonable level of frequency. So they have to do it because There Is No Alternative. That's why actually having alternatives on offer are important.
dwighttk 5y ago
I just got an ebike with the intention of riding to and from work. So far I have chosen not to do it for the 5 work days I’ve had the bike: Weather is an issue: what do bike only people do when it is raining? Cold? First couple days it was still dark when I was about to head out… I’m hoping that goes away soon. I’ve misplaced my bike lock keys so I need to get a new one if I want to ride anywhere else. Even if roads were changed tomorrow to be 100% bike friendly, at least 80% of my car trips are too distant to bike without a major shift in my schedule. And that is with most of my long trips cut off since Covid. The electric motor does help with arriving super sweaty and some of the safety issues, but there are quite a few problems won’t be solved by removing some parking and nicer bike lanes.
- dwighttk 5y ago
  (One thing with the bike lock is I can get a pretty nice one for the price of a tank of gas)
- Misdicorl 5y ago
  You wear gloves and use less of the motor when it's cold. You bring a change of clothes when it's raining and learn to enjoy the rain
  - dwighttk 5y ago
    Gotcha… don’t ride anywhere I can’t change clothes when it is raining. And I need a rain proof backpack. And I need to add even more time to my transit when it is cold.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      I may not have bought an expensive bike in a rainy location, but cold in itself is not the issue. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
      - dwighttk 5y ago
balozi 5y ago
What are the chances that millions of business operators across the world and over the course of decades are completely wrong about how traffic, including parking, affect their businesses? We could choose to believe that business interests are not public interests so to hell with what businesses want, but lets not harbor the lie that the businesses are mistaken in their experience.
- carlospwk 5y ago
  Same as doctors not thinking washing their hands was useful until somewhere around the mid 1800s.
nsxwolf 5y ago
As a midwestern suburbanite, these threads remind me that urban dwellers spend a lot of time thinking about me and the way I live, while I never think about them at all. This is probably dangerous.
- asdff 5y ago
  The only urban dwellers who are spending time thinking about the midwestern suburbs are the ones who grew up in the midwestern suburbs and transplanted themselves to somewhere urban and saw a different way of life.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  To be fair, a good portion of these urban dwellers are in one of like three cities in the US, and are vastly outnumbered by suburbanites. Or they're in Europe, which makes them pretty much irrelevant to US politics. I guess I don't blame them for thinking about it a lot, since in a particular niche circumstance it is probably disruptive and worth worrying about. But for those of us living in suburban cities, it's really not something on the radar.
tomkat0789 5y ago
I’m reading this while vacationing in Barcelona. We’re staying in the city’s Gothic Quarter, which has this labyrinth of narrow medieval streets. This evening we realized that the whole week of our visit we never got into a car, not even a cab. I can see the reason why people walking around spend more than people in cars. Today while returning from a tourist site a little early, we remembered there was an ice cream store we wanted to try, which turned out to be close to our subway station. On the last part of our walk back, we randomly noticed a unique indoor mall and walked around it just to pass the time (Malda Galeria? Turned out it has lots of board games, anime merch, and other “nerd” stuff!). I had made a purchase the day before on a similarly casual browse, so I resisted! Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time. Even if we did see something interesting (unlikely while flying through Houston’s confusing highways), there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff. How are you supposed to catch the notice of passerbys if you’re a little shop keep? The fun stuff we did required planning, paying for parking, traffic, etc. Another YouTube channel that might convince you cars are horrible for cities: CityNerd is some sort of urban planning professional and has great videos about induced demand and a particularly good one about how expensive paying for a car is when you consider the full accounting (it’s something like $10k a year). Bothering my local politicians about bike infrastructure has been on my to do list for months. I need to get to it!
- udkl 5y ago
  > there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff That's probably why the concept of malls is popular in the US. Get to a single shopping destination and walk around the complex for variety.
  - asdff 5y ago
    It's like, you hollow out your town making it as efficient as possible to leave rather than spend any amount of time. So then you have to build this artificial downtown where you actually can have that interaction space, because you destroyed your original interaction spaces. Only the more insidious problem with this is how malls suddenly control the entrants. Notice how most malls are filled with major chains who can actually afford the rent on these sprawling retail spaces rather than small owner-operated businesses like what used to make up these interaction spaces around the main street or square in these small towns. Plus you can't exactly add a shop to this mall. It's one giant hulking thing. Whereas back in the day, if you lived near the town and wanted to open a shop, you might have built one yourself in the setback in front of your house.
locallost 5y ago
This is pretty obvious at least for some cases. Of course it depends a lot on the structure of the street / city. I haven't been much in the US, but I can imagine it's not affected by some issues as much as other places. It comes down to space, and how you use it. I spent a couple months living in a busy street of a European city. The amount of parking space took easily 2-3x that of the sidewalk which was only maybe 2 meters wide. It was a busy street for pedestrians also and it was pure hell even walking there, but especially just stopping to see a shop window. You would automatically become an obstacle for all the other pedestrians, so almost nobody would ever do it. You can imagine that this is terrible for business - cutting down on the parking space would give space to pedestrians and they would have an easier time checking out shops and spending money there.
tomohawk 5y ago
If the advocates are so positive about it, then they shouldn't mind putting money in escrow to be paid out to any business that are negatively impacted by this. Do any of these advocates have an ownership stake in any properties or businesses in the affected area?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
modeless 5y ago
A whole article about this without a mention of self-driving cars is silly. Even if you think they're still a decade away, they are coming and they are going to change everything about parking in cities.
- carlospwk 5y ago
  What are they going to change?
lhorie 5y ago
> In a study of Parkdale Village in Toronto, a quarter of business owners estimated that over half their customers drove to their business – in reality, just 4 percent drive. Come on, Parkdale is just behind Little Portugal and near Dufferin Mall, all very walkable areas, how is this a surprise? Repeat the study w/ Yorkdale Mall near highway 401 and those car numbers will shoot through the roof. The reality is that areas closer to downtown that are a hassle to park at will attract downtown folks and more suburban areas with big parking lots will attract suburban folks with cars. What's the point of cherrypicking one area and try to draw general conclusions about parking from that?
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  Because even in city centres where most people walk, there’s a perception among business owners that they would lose a big part of their customers if parking were replaced with for example bicycle lanes, while the truth is the opposite.
- a2tech 5y ago
  The point is to drive their preferences and thoughts on how things should be home and reshape urban landscapes to fit a vocal minorities views on how things should be with the hopes that if they impose their will on the landscape it will reshape people into sharing their viewpoint.
karaterobot 5y ago
Since this discussion is mainly US-centric, and not NZ centric, I feel at liberty to ask this question even if it's not strictly about the article: I understand the argument that the U.S. is reliant on cars, because it is so spread out, and spread out because it is reliant on cars. This may be due to an alliance by automakers, marketers, and the government. Stipulated. But given that that it is already the case, how would a plan to get people to ditch their cars actually work? Is there a plan that describes how to consolidate a sprawling population of hundreds of millions of people, who already own houses and property all over a massive country? Do the people in suburbs who drive everywhere just demolish their homes and move into apartments in the city? I say demolish, because in this scenario there are enough disincentives that nobody chooses to live in the suburbs anymore, like they have historical, so all these homes would lose their value. Maybe we still have those suburbs, but we imagine a mass transit infrastructure that replaces cars. That could work, but we don't have it, and it seems hand-wavey to me. Does anybody (not in this thread, just anywhere) actually have a detailed plan for how it would work? And the answer isn't "yeah: Europe!" because, as stipulated, the U.S. is currently laid out radically differently, in a way that just wanting it to be like Europe won't solve. I'm not arguing that cars are great, I'm just trying to figure out to what extent this is based on wishful thinking / science fiction, versus whether there's a serious plan behind it.
- belval 5y ago
  It's a process that will take 50-100 years+. Like it or not there is no real incentive for people to stop living like they currently do. All you can do is tax fuel/carbon and stop adding car lanes to make people converge closer to the city. In practice though, this is where remote work can help. Most traffic in a city isn't people going shopping. It's people going to work. If we push for remote work as an alternative, and improve the quality of transit, the situation will improve.
- kitkat_new 5y ago
  Here a comparison is outlined between to ways of making cities less car centric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI-1YNAmWlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI-1YNAmWlk still, probably not as extreme as US standard...
jimmytidey 5y ago
I have a theory: small shop owners are disproportionately likely to be car drivers, and when they say parking is essential for their customers, what they are really worried about is measures that will make it less convenient to drive them selves.
- randyrand 5y ago
  Most definitely. A friend owns a restaurant and their van is the lifeblood of getting food to the store.
danbmil99 5y ago
I've lived half of my adult life in Manhattan and the other half in Silicon Valley in a suburban environment. It's nonsensical to assume that a place like Silicon Valley could ever give up their cars and the parking necessary to go to stores restaurants etcetera. It simply cannot happen. In New York, all of my friends lived in apartments within a quarter-mile of the subway system. If I was living on the upper west side and wanted to meet my friends in the village, a 35 to 40 minute train ride was by far the easiest way to get there. No one owned a car (many of us didn't even have licenses). Before Uber and Lyft, we took taxis if it was the middle of the night or freezing snow; otherwise we took the subway. In Silicon Valley towns, people live a mile or more from the city center. There is absolutely no practical way to get to shops and restaurants other than to take your car and park near the center of town. Once in a while on a whim if the weather is nice, I suppose a family a bit nearer than average to downtown might bike together to brunch on a weekend. But if you need to get a quart of milk to make coffee, or get some food for dinner, you use a car. There's no other option. The future I see plausible would include low carbon impact cars, small electric vehicles, self- driving, like an army of Lyft and Uber at very low cost. I think that's the best future we can hope for without a radical restructuring of Suburbia, which is simply not in the cards.
- multiplegeorges 5y ago
  Cities and towns can update their zoning to encourage denser town centres that make walking and cycling viable. That doesn't amount to a radical restructuring of life and increasing dependency on cars, EV or not, is not a way out of the problem of spread out, lifeless towns. Suburbs are antithetical to good communities and the faster we can develop away from them, the better.
- kijiki 5y ago
  My wife and I live in Mountain View, which is arguably the heart of the valley. I had to buy a trickle charger for our car's battery, so we wouldn't have to jump it around once a month whenever we went to drive somewhere.
  - danbmil99 5y ago
sremani 5y ago
Cars are C++ of the transportation world, every body bitches about them but the entire cities and sub-divisions are planned and built around them.
asdff 5y ago
People who are perplexed about why a business would not want a bike lane need to take a look at the history books. It was business owners who were pushing for streetcar lines to be paved over into stroads like Geary blvd in San Fransisco. They see their clientele as one traveling by private car over one reliant on public transportation, and probably feel they don't even want to be associated with public transportation and the image of who typically rides it. You see the same tired dog whistle arguments come up today. "Who is going to even use it?" the residents of Beverly hills might say to the purple line subway extension under their city limits, whose arteries carry some of the highest levels of bus traffic in the country. I think the subtext is clear who they don't want to be building infrastructure for when you look at the demographics of who is and isn't currently using public transit in a place like Beverly Hills.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Yeah I think lots of cities in the USA will eventually figure this out. Even if parking is limited people will find a way to get to these businesses.
kazinator 5y ago
> Both the Toronto and Berlin studies found that people on foot, on bikes or taking public transport spend more money when they go to local shops and visit much more often than those who travel by car. In the case of Berlin, people who did not drive were responsible for more than 90 percent of weekly spending. That makes perfect sense. People who drive far are looking for better prices. They will buy one or two things they know are usually cheap or often on sale and then get other things in some other store that's along their route to wherever they are going. The walkin' locals are going to be the more captive customers.

247 points by kitkat_new 5y ago

This has been shown in studies over and over, but seemingly most businesses thinks their situation is somehow special and actively lobby against their best interest. Even 5th Ave in Manhattan, one of the busiest pedestrian areas in the US has had street improvements indefinitely delayed because businesses are fighting to defend the vehicle lanes. https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/04/08/city-dot-still-mum-on-long-delayed-fifth-avenue-busway/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/04/08/city-dot-still-mum-on...

sacrosancty 5y ago
It depends on the location. Here's a business owner whose situation really is special: https://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/300528260/roadworks-during-peak-trading-season-leave-shannon-businesses-stranded https://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/300528260/roa... But even so, the business owners losing business shouldn't matter at all for such decisions. Business only exist to serve their customers. If customers don't want or need them, then they should disappear. The real concern is whether customers do still want shops there but are unable to access them because of lack of parking.
- ry167 5y ago
  That article is about Shannon, a town of 1500 people on a state highway. There is a detour in place causing it to be entirely skipped by most drivers. It bears no resemblance car usage in cities at all.
  - sacrosancty 5y ago
    Yes. That's why it depends on the location. Cities with mostly high-rise apartment buildings will be different to single family home suburbs. You can't just take some research and assume it applies to any specific other case.

goodpoint 5y ago

Decades of evidence indicates how bad stroads, parking and car culture in general are for society.

whiteboardr 5y ago
You mean urban societies? Where do your groceries come from and how should these people taking care of ensuring you get to eat get around?
- txru 5y ago
  An inner city road doesn't need to be 4 lanes wide if it's primarily carrying small box trucks to local stores. And I think it's pretty apparent that quite a lot of restaurant employees rely on public transit, or feed a substantial portion of their income to one car, whose breakdown causes loss of employment. Forcing people to need cars from arbitrary point to point is a regressive tax.
- vmception 5y ago
  urban societies built within the 20th century are very different than urban societies built before then they both have roads, the only difference is that the 20th century ones were built around car culture. car culture is not talking about people delivering food for the residents.
- user_7832 5y ago
  I don't exactly get your point. Stroads are generally more common in residential areas to the best of my limited knowledge. The bulk of commerical transport likely occurs on much larger roads and highways where trucks mainly ply. Short of last mile transport there isn't much overlap.
  - quantumwannabe 5y ago
    "Stroads" are in commercial areas by definition. A typical neighborhood designed after the car became popular does not have any multi lane roads inside of it. It will have them around it, but people who live in the neighborhood will not be directly on the arterial roads. The larger road used for commercial transport in low density areas is either a "stroad" or highway. Please take five minutes to look on Google Maps before commenting about neighborhood design in a country 5000 miles away.

belorn 5y ago

> A study in Berlin found that shop owners believed only about 12 percent of customers lived within 1km of a shopping street when more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance. This seem to imply that shops don't benefit much from parking when majority of customers lives within 1km of the store, and if that's the definition of local businesses then I don't see much problem eliminating parking. Local businesses catering to local customers. Non-local businesses, ie businesses where the majority of customers isn't with that 1km, should not be located next to shopping streets, which might require a new definition of shopping streets which centralize all kind of shopping to a specific street. This seem to somewhat match a trend that I have noticed here in Sweden. Stores catering to a larger audience seem to have started to move away from expensive city cores in the last couple of decades, with specific shopping street decreasing in importance as a result.

rtlfe 5y ago
1km is a good distance for walking, but you can expand it quite a bit if you have good bike infrastructure and transit. You can bike 5km in 20 minutes at a pretty leisurely pace, which I would gladly do for a good restaurant or specialty store.
asdff 5y ago
It really depends on the context of the building imo. If you have a grocery store with like a few spaces that are always full, vs one with a bunch of spaces, someone who is planning a big grocery load will probably opt to drive their car for two minutes to the big lot one vs walk 10 mins to the one without parking and walk back with a gallon of milk and all their groceries for their family of 4 for a week. What you find in other countries that are denser is that people not only buy less things per trip and take more trips, but they are also cooking fewer meals at home than Americans and tend to eat out more for their meals. I think two things need to happen for that behavior to happen with Americans: shorter commutes so you actually have time to run to the grocery store more often than once a week, and more buying power from wages so you can actually regularly afford food you didn't personally prepare. Until those things happen, most americans will continue doing their errands once a week when they finally have time, and saving money making things at home vs ordering more prepared food and having a therefore smaller need for so many groceries in the first place.

user_7832 5y ago

While thks article is quite interesting, I think it's worth pointing out the vast differences in non-car accessibility between countries, probably due to zoning laws. Large and low-density population places would require reliable modes of long distance transport (be it cars or buses or metro etc). From what I've heard North America practically requires car ownership outside medium sized cities. Here in the Netherlands you can mostly get anywhere in the country with a bike and a train (OV) card. Back home in India not too many people have cars so buses, trains and taxis and autorickshaws (aka TukTuks) substitute them. Not criticizing the point of the article, but I think a bit more nuance is needed when comparing Germany with Canada with New Zealand. Also, I'd highly recommend checking out Not Just Bikes on YouTube, and perhaps the more "radical" r/fuckcars on reddit.

k8sToGo 5y ago
Here in Switzerland it often takes 2x as much time to get anywhere if you take public transportation outside of big cities, compared to the car. Is it the same in the Netherlands? Also public transportation here is quite expensive.
- user_7832 5y ago
  I can't comment on small towns, but I live in a medium-ish size place of around 100k people though it really depends how far you're going. If you're going just a few (<10) km then cars would be a bit faster. On Google maps I see that it takes 9 minutes to a store 6km away by car. It takes 36 minutes by public transport, however it takes only 20 minutes by bike (almost everyone has a bike here). However a lot of roads are bike-only or similar (esp in parts of the city centre), which (imo) makes it super frustrating to drive. On longer distances yes cars do get much faster. Amsterdam to Rotterdam by car is 52 mins (74km), vs 1hr18min by train, however this was station to station. Once you add the time to go from the station to your destination it's often longer. Edit - re:costs, it feels moderately expensive to me as an Indian. It's €5.4 from Rotterdam to Den Haag (Hague) station, which is 21km by road (20 min by road, 30 min by train). You get 20-30% off passes for monthly use I believe, though that's only useful if you use it a lot.

PopAlongKid 5y ago

>Replacing kerb-side parking with bus or bike lanes does not hurt local businesses, and in some cases, it can increase patronage. Bikes and buses don’t kill businesses - parking does. Where is the evidence to support the claim that parking "kills" businesses -- I read the article and don't see any. What about businesses whose products are too big/heavy to carry on foot or even on a bus? Where are all the pedestrians carrying 24-can cases of beverages? 40-pound bags of dog food?

coolspot 5y ago
The article is probably sponsored by some real eastate developer group who wants all those pesky parking requirements gone, so they can build 1k unit buildings with very few parking spaces allocated.
- rtlfe 5y ago
  A developer would only build a parking-free building if there are people in the area who want to live without cars. Otherwise it would be a financial disaster for them.
  - thepangolino 5y ago
    Hence why the push for car free cities.
  - deepsun 5y ago
    Not true. Kyiv, Ukraine keeps building skyscrapers with almost 0 parking in it (althoug there are dedicated parking buildings within about 10-15 minute walk, not as convenient). And everyone hates it that way. People keep complaining. Developers keep building. As one developer told me -- that simply financially makes more sense for them to build an apartment instead of parking. Why should they solve other people's business? At first I was outraged, but now I kinda see a long term benefits of that, even thought it's harder for me to own a car. Hopefully that'd lead to improvement of public transportation or invention of new ways to move.

hilbert42 5y ago

"Studies from across the globe have found that shop owners consistently overestimate the number of shoppers that arrive by car and vastly underestimate the number of people who arrive by other modes." Perhaps the stats support this, we'll see (but I'm suspicious). What I am certain about is that I'll shop where there's parking for my vehicle—and that's how I go shopping. It would be difficult for me to estimate how many times I've bypassed certain shops/businesses because there's either no parking or the on-street parking is full up.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
How much do you want to bet that that study was funded/done by people who are against cars? I find it very hubristic to think that a single study is more valid than years of observation from people whose livelihoods depend on being right.
- sacrosancty 5y ago
  Their livelihoods don't depend on being right. If it turns out parking doesn't matter for their business, and they're wrong to believe it does, their livelihoods will be fine. They have an existential risk from only one of the options, so their opinion will be grossly biased.
azemetre 5y ago
What if street parking was more reflective of the actual costs and drastically limited the amount of time you could park? This could mean the likelihood of a spot being available in front a story very high. I forgot what city implemented this (may have been San Francisco) but they made street parking triple the price and only for 15-30 minutes. As a result businesses in front of street parking got more customers. I'm trying to search this on google, it may have been a paper put out by strong towns. I remember an episode of econ talk discussing it here: https://www.econtalk.org/donald-shoup-on-the-economics-of-parking/ https://www.econtalk.org/donald-shoup-on-the-economics-of-pa...
- hilbert42 5y ago

silverpepsi 5y ago

Am I the only one bothered by articles of this nature never really clarifying that nothing they say has any meaning below a certain very specific population density and in very specific areas with permissive zoning allowing commerce near to housing? "Parking is, however, just a symptom of our massive car addiction." It's especially hard to take seriously with comments like the above. I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1/10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up, but the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.

ericmay 5y ago
> I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to Right. That’s like calling water wet. Of course we live this way, we designed our cities to make us live this way… I’m not sure what you’re talking about w.r.t Europe. Even if you have friends that drive everywhere that just is not how most people live day-to-day.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Best thing about living in older European cities is they don't have this stupid zoning, they mixed commercial and housing because that's how people chose to live before planners got invented after ww2. Now planners are patting themselves on the back for recently inventing the 20 minute community, Which is exactly the same thing. My one major thing I want in life is to never ever live in a suburban development with zero to do except drive to places.
  - smusamashah 5y ago
    And I thought it's only software UI designers who like to watch the world burn.

CommanderData 5y ago

Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all. I've seen certain areas in North London with no parking on very busy roads die within months of opening, repeat cycle of new shops that come and go, I can't imagine the costs to outfit some of these places. My thinking was the area just isn't right but less than 200 meters down plenty of free short term parking and the area is bustling with businesses that have been around longer than I can remember.

rtlfe 5y ago
> Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all. Presumably those are areas that don't have the bikes and buses the article talks about. You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives. This sums up my complaint about Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes, etc. They want to do things that will make driving impossible (or at least miserably difficult) now, and only maybe later do things that will provide alternatives for everyone.
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    You can make this argument for any change that would improve cycling and transit though. Take street A, a street that right now is hostile to both; it only has car lanes, traffic is fast enough that it's intimidating to bike on, and buses get stuck in traffic. You'd like to get to street B: a street that people feel safe to bike on (protected bike lanes) and that enables transit to be fast and reliable (dedicated bus lanes or streetcar right-of-way). Now how do you get from A to B? At some point during that process, you'll have to take away space from cars. This might mean removing travel lanes, and it might mean removing on-street parking, but regardless, that is a necessary step to get to street B. That point is where people complain, "you're making driving impossible!" But you can never get to street B if you never make that step. And at the point you do, there generally also won't be that many people biking or taking transit, because you haven't changed the street yet.

angmarsbane 5y ago

I spent two years commuting by bike and bus and by doing so I was much more aware of the stores within a 5 mile radius of me. I wanted to stop and spend my money and time BUT it wasn’t worth missing my bus or risking my bike getting stolen so I never stopped. This was in Los Angeles. If buses were more reliable & enjoyable I would have stopped or gone back on weekends, and if I could trust my bike to still be there those businesses would have benefitted.

asdff 5y ago
I do a lot of commuting via bus and bike in LA. You can always bring your bike into the doorway of the business and throw your ulock around the frame and rear wheel to prevent it from being ridden. I find if there are at least other bikes in the rack I feel better about leaving my bike out, and if its something like the front entrance or a parking lot where there is foot traffic I don't mind leaving the bike out on a rack while I'm inside and its during business hours, but I would never leave it out on a rack overnight. The bus is pretty annoying for getting things done, however. You can't exactly string together multiple errands unless shops are nearby, but luckily LA is dense enough where I can find redundant shops of a given category in every neighborhood. The bus was great for my commute though. No transfers, 30 mins on a bus that comes every 10 minutes vs the 20 min drive where I didn't have a parking space at work (and thus had to hunt or pay). It was on a route with a rapid and local bus line too, so really a bus came every 5 mins due to them being staggered. Transfers really kill a bus commute but sometimes even with the transferring, it remains the fastest way around. Certain parts of LA like the less bar heavy portions of the west side, you could be waiting 30 minutes at least for your ride to even be accepted, then it might be 15-20 mins before they slog through traffic to get to you. Rideshare is pretty spotty in LA outside of Santa monica, downtown LA, lax, weho, or hollywood, because the drivers rarely want to venture out beyond these areas and would rather stick to where the ride frequency is the highest due to the traffic. I do use the bus quite a bit for going home at the end of the night since its so cheap compared to surged rideshares. It seemingly runs until 4am and there are a surprising amount of people using it still at that time (I assume mostly third shift workers but a good amount of people who clearly are coming from the bars like me).
- 5y ago

Invictus0 5y ago

Off topic, but I have never seen the "kerb" spelling before.

robocat 5y ago
New Zealand English tends to be closer to UK English, with it’s own quirks. However, it is trending towards US English due to media influence. Asking low quality questions is poor form. Generalisation about questions: You usually improve the conversation if you do some work: for example google your questions, and post your answer if you think it is interesting to others. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=kerb+or+curb https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=kerb+or+curb

melenaboija 5y ago

I don’t think a lot of research and articles are needed, visiting any European city (or small town) is enough.

readams 5y ago
I have visited European cities and doing anything requires huge time investments and careful planning.
- wasmitnetzen 5y ago
  Having lived in several European cities: You'll learn it by heart in about three months tops. If course it's trickier for a tourist.
- melenaboija 5y ago
  Your huge time investments and careful planning (which I guess you mean planning more than: I have to go to my yard take my car and drive from X to Y and that objectively is harder than walking or taking public transportations) can be beneficial for the environment and local businesses.
rootusrootus 5y ago
I was trying to figure out how I'd get to, around, and back from Hungerford, UK without renting a car, and concluded I'd be doing a fair amount of walking and a lot of waiting for the train. And a not insignificant amount of buying expensive rideshare transportation. I think if I lived there I'd definitely own a car.

Toutouxc 5y ago

I'd just like to add some context: People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas. If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind. I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US/Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a "city" to look like.

thanatos519 5y ago
I dread the idea of moving back to .ca from .nl for exactly this reason. Hellscape is right.
pm90 5y ago
Absolutely. Cities can be beautiful and livable and affordable and pollution free. Currently most US cities are not. Most Americans have to own cars or other vehicles just to get around. It doesn’t have to be that way.
ericmay 5y ago
I agree. I don’t see why we have to force ourselves to live with 2-3 car households, insane taxes to pay for the upkeep of roads, and dependency on oil, gas, plastic, car manufacturers, and all of this other stuff when we could just build better neighborhoods. It’s mind-blowing. Americans in particular go to Europe “wow it’s so awesome here I could totally live here!!” And then it’s like they land back home and their mind is wiped clean. We don’t have to not have cars either. Why not 1 car per household for most people and most of your day-to-day activities within a few miles? You could bike, ride a street car, walk, any number of things. You can still live in rural areas and have a truck. I like trucks and acreage too! Just stop dictating that we have to have life this specific, obviously bad way.
- Victerius 5y ago

indymike 5y ago

Let's be honest. Lack of parking and paid parking kills businesses.

antattack 5y ago
Precisely, if we cannot find parking near-by we go to find another restaurant.
throw0101a 5y ago
Demonstrated not to be true in Toronto, Canada: * https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/the-latest-evidence-that-bike-lanes-are-good-for-business-f3a99cda9b80 https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/the-latest-evidence-that-bi... On two separate streets (Bloor above, Queen below): * https://www.fastcompany.com/3067515/why-local-businesses-shouldnt-worry-about-eliminating-on-street-parking https://www.fastcompany.com/3067515/why-local-businesses-sho... Making it easier for cyclists and transit users has often been found to increase business: > Despite longstanding popular belief, bicycle lanes can actually improve business. At worst, the negative impact on sales and employment is minimal, according to a new study. Researchers studied 14 corridors in 6 cities -- Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Memphis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis -- and found such improvements had either positive or non-significant impacts on sales and employment. Essentially, adding improvements like bike lanes largely boosted business and employment in the retail and food service sectors. * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200422151318.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200422151318.h... Meta-review: * https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01441647.2021.1912849 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01441647.2021.19...
- indymike 5y ago
  I live in Indianapolis and we added bike lanes and more parking at the same time. The real driver in retail sales has been the increase in residential units downtown. Mass transit in Indy was and still is terrible ... It takes 1.5 hours to go 6 miles.
mattmcknight 5y ago
Yeah, a work/shop/live area near me instituted paid parking 5 years ago, after 25 years of being free. It had some serious negative effects on business and they rolled back the paid hours to just weekdays and just 9-5 for the garages, but it still has not recovered. Many of the businesses have moved out, although others have moved in. Some customers just park in the nearest free spots, clogging up other commercial or residential parking, and walk. It's been 5 years and places are still closing as their leases expire. The place never really recovered and people are still complaining about it. https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/02/14/reston-town-center-paid-parking-controversy/ https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/02/14/reston-town-center-... https://wjla.com/news/local/merchants-association-weekday-parking-fees-still-hurting-reston-town-center-businesses https://wjla.com/news/local/merchants-association-weekday-pa... https://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/sp6hfr/clydes_reston_closing_may_21/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/sp6hfr/clydes_reston_...

nine_zeros 5y ago

Anyone who has visited major Asian cities already knows that grocery businesses and customers both prefer dense cities - because everything happens on an app and a delivery system. You don't even have to worry about weather or biking or bulk groceries because of modern technology. Suburban parking hellholes are a human aberration that needs to be left for the history books.

TheChaplain 5y ago

Expensive and sparse parking kills businesses. I've seen a city center with hundreds of shops die out because businesses shut or moved to the newly built mall outside the city that has a huuge parking area. There is no reason to go into the city anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands at the mall.

rootusrootus 5y ago
It seems like the future, at least in America where land is plentiful, is multi-core metropolitan cities. With smaller cores, not so many silly skyscrapers.
Toutouxc 5y ago
Yes, if what you already have is a car-dependent society and a generally unwelcoming city center, people will do exactly that. And there will be even more accidents, pollution, traffic jams, stress, further loss of green space and social contact. And together this will cost the society more than making the original city center walkable and convenient to do business in. > There is no reason to go into the city anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands at the mall. Consider this: There is no reason to build a mall anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands in the CITY. It's funny how the alternative for having an actual, functional city center is letting it die (or not building it in the first place) and then building an alternative city center called "the mall" where people can socialize, walk around without the fear of being crushed by a 2-ton SUV, window-shop, have a lunch or watch a movie.

jeffbee 5y ago

I think the bias come from a pretty obvious fact: people who drive do 100% of the whining about parking and traffic. People who walk to the shop just come in looking happy and well-adjusted and ready to spend money. So the only thing the shopkeeper ever hears about transportation is how bad traffic and parking are.

asdff 5y ago
Its also from who the business owners perceive as their customers. They probably associate car ownership with higher income levels and would prefer to make their business as accommodating for that customer as possible vs someone who takes the bus and is perhaps perceived as having less disposable income to spend at the business. Sometimes businesses reserve their parking for the most high income customers e.g. when they make it valet with a high price vs first come first serve.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Right, but the research shows the other thing: people who drive spend less. Perhaps because their transportation costs are so high.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    Is this research comparing spending at the same store, or just car owners vs non-car owners buying every day things? If the latter, I would think it's more that if you don't drive, you likely live in a more expensive area and things cost more.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      These are surveys of individuals as they walk out of shops. Not large-scale statistical inference.

robocat 5y ago

That is an awfully biased article. > “A study in Berlin . . . more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.” So what? Even in Berlin, businesses care about the 49% of car travellers. Plus, a study in Berlin not that relevant to Auckland: Berlin has a population of 3.6M (area 892 km² with 1.2M passenger cars and a metro system), Auckland 1.6M (area 1,086 km² with 0.74 passenger vehicles per capita and no metro system). New Zealand has a population of 5M. Personally I know lack of parking affects me. I live in the suburbs of Christchurch where a car is necessary. I rarely go shopping in town, because our city council has been making the city centre more difficult to access (expensive parking, congestion due to slow zones and newer slower traffic signals, removal of street-side parking). I love pedestrian zones, but there needs to be a way to get to them.

munchler 5y ago
It’s not even logically consistent with itself. The article starts by saying that we have a “massive car addiction”, then talks about a village where only 4% of business customers arrive by car. If true, this leaves totally unaddressed the question of where all the car addicts are actually driving to, and what to do about it.
verve_rat 5y ago
Indeed, the city near me, that I used to live in, has a CBD that is dying a slow long death. The council keeps doing initiatives to try to prop it up, but at the same time keeps making it less and less car friendly, while the public transport continues to suck. Meanwhile the large outdoor mall on the city outskirts is thriving, because of the easy parking. It doesn't need to be much, decent size parking building with an arterial access actually in the CBD would work. Let people drive to the CBD and wonder around when they get there.
matsemann 5y ago
Making it harder to access by car is a feature. You're not boycotting the city centre because you find it hard to park, it was actually them throwing you out. The people living there decided it's not worth it to cater to the few individuals demanding to drive everywhere to the detriment of others. Rather safe, living and cozy streets for the inhabitants, than easy access for the suburbians.

carlospwk 5y ago

A question for all those in favour of street parking: If parking right in front of the store is so vital for business, why don't they do it in shopping malls? Why do you have to park your car somewhere else and then walk to the stores? I've never even gotten an answer, just silence.

nelsondev 5y ago
Shopping malls often have attached parking garages?
- carlospwk 5y ago
  Why?
  - shukantpal 5y ago
    Probably because customers aren’t going to malls for a short trip and taking 5-10 mins extra to park isn’t a big deal compared to them going to a small shop for 5 mins and getting out of there.
    - carlospwk 5y ago
      I don't know why you've come to that conclusion? I do the exact opposite. I got to malls to buy something specific, but there's no reason to spend anymore time there than necessary. City centres are the opposite.
- asdff 5y ago
  In denser areas they do, but honestly most new development malls are looking like that now a days with huge garages and an effort to maximize the developable land. I think Easton in Columbus, OH is a fair example of one of these newer malls with garages, and outside of a big city too way out in the exurbs not too far from cornfields. There are some lots but as the area has been infilling they've been adding garages.
asdff 5y ago

CodeWriter23 5y ago

Meanwhile in America, Old Town revivals in like every small city in the United States has used abundant free parking as a key driver to get customers into businesses.

asdff 5y ago
Because sometimes there aren't even sidewalks from the suburban tract to the Old Town they are reviving, much less a safe way to bike let alone a bus route with any reasonable level of frequency. So they have to do it because There Is No Alternative. That's why actually having alternatives on offer are important.

dwighttk 5y ago

I just got an ebike with the intention of riding to and from work. So far I have chosen not to do it for the 5 work days I’ve had the bike: Weather is an issue: what do bike only people do when it is raining? Cold? First couple days it was still dark when I was about to head out… I’m hoping that goes away soon. I’ve misplaced my bike lock keys so I need to get a new one if I want to ride anywhere else. Even if roads were changed tomorrow to be 100% bike friendly, at least 80% of my car trips are too distant to bike without a major shift in my schedule. And that is with most of my long trips cut off since Covid. The electric motor does help with arriving super sweaty and some of the safety issues, but there are quite a few problems won’t be solved by removing some parking and nicer bike lanes.

dwighttk 5y ago
(One thing with the bike lock is I can get a pretty nice one for the price of a tank of gas)
Misdicorl 5y ago
You wear gloves and use less of the motor when it's cold. You bring a change of clothes when it's raining and learn to enjoy the rain
- dwighttk 5y ago
  Gotcha… don’t ride anywhere I can’t change clothes when it is raining. And I need a rain proof backpack. And I need to add even more time to my transit when it is cold.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    I may not have bought an expensive bike in a rainy location, but cold in itself is not the issue. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
    - dwighttk 5y ago

balozi 5y ago

What are the chances that millions of business operators across the world and over the course of decades are completely wrong about how traffic, including parking, affect their businesses? We could choose to believe that business interests are not public interests so to hell with what businesses want, but lets not harbor the lie that the businesses are mistaken in their experience.

carlospwk 5y ago
Same as doctors not thinking washing their hands was useful until somewhere around the mid 1800s.

nsxwolf 5y ago

As a midwestern suburbanite, these threads remind me that urban dwellers spend a lot of time thinking about me and the way I live, while I never think about them at all. This is probably dangerous.

asdff 5y ago
The only urban dwellers who are spending time thinking about the midwestern suburbs are the ones who grew up in the midwestern suburbs and transplanted themselves to somewhere urban and saw a different way of life.
rootusrootus 5y ago
To be fair, a good portion of these urban dwellers are in one of like three cities in the US, and are vastly outnumbered by suburbanites. Or they're in Europe, which makes them pretty much irrelevant to US politics. I guess I don't blame them for thinking about it a lot, since in a particular niche circumstance it is probably disruptive and worth worrying about. But for those of us living in suburban cities, it's really not something on the radar.

tomkat0789 5y ago

I’m reading this while vacationing in Barcelona. We’re staying in the city’s Gothic Quarter, which has this labyrinth of narrow medieval streets. This evening we realized that the whole week of our visit we never got into a car, not even a cab. I can see the reason why people walking around spend more than people in cars. Today while returning from a tourist site a little early, we remembered there was an ice cream store we wanted to try, which turned out to be close to our subway station. On the last part of our walk back, we randomly noticed a unique indoor mall and walked around it just to pass the time (Malda Galeria? Turned out it has lots of board games, anime merch, and other “nerd” stuff!). I had made a purchase the day before on a similarly casual browse, so I resisted! Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time. Even if we did see something interesting (unlikely while flying through Houston’s confusing highways), there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff. How are you supposed to catch the notice of passerbys if you’re a little shop keep? The fun stuff we did required planning, paying for parking, traffic, etc. Another YouTube channel that might convince you cars are horrible for cities: CityNerd is some sort of urban planning professional and has great videos about induced demand and a particularly good one about how expensive paying for a car is when you consider the full accounting (it’s something like $10k a year). Bothering my local politicians about bike infrastructure has been on my to do list for months. I need to get to it!

udkl 5y ago
> there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff That's probably why the concept of malls is popular in the US. Get to a single shopping destination and walk around the complex for variety.
- asdff 5y ago
  It's like, you hollow out your town making it as efficient as possible to leave rather than spend any amount of time. So then you have to build this artificial downtown where you actually can have that interaction space, because you destroyed your original interaction spaces. Only the more insidious problem with this is how malls suddenly control the entrants. Notice how most malls are filled with major chains who can actually afford the rent on these sprawling retail spaces rather than small owner-operated businesses like what used to make up these interaction spaces around the main street or square in these small towns. Plus you can't exactly add a shop to this mall. It's one giant hulking thing. Whereas back in the day, if you lived near the town and wanted to open a shop, you might have built one yourself in the setback in front of your house.

locallost 5y ago

This is pretty obvious at least for some cases. Of course it depends a lot on the structure of the street / city. I haven't been much in the US, but I can imagine it's not affected by some issues as much as other places. It comes down to space, and how you use it. I spent a couple months living in a busy street of a European city. The amount of parking space took easily 2-3x that of the sidewalk which was only maybe 2 meters wide. It was a busy street for pedestrians also and it was pure hell even walking there, but especially just stopping to see a shop window. You would automatically become an obstacle for all the other pedestrians, so almost nobody would ever do it. You can imagine that this is terrible for business - cutting down on the parking space would give space to pedestrians and they would have an easier time checking out shops and spending money there.

tomohawk 5y ago

If the advocates are so positive about it, then they shouldn't mind putting money in escrow to be paid out to any business that are negatively impacted by this. Do any of these advocates have an ownership stake in any properties or businesses in the affected area?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

modeless 5y ago

A whole article about this without a mention of self-driving cars is silly. Even if you think they're still a decade away, they are coming and they are going to change everything about parking in cities.

carlospwk 5y ago
What are they going to change?

lhorie 5y ago

> In a study of Parkdale Village in Toronto, a quarter of business owners estimated that over half their customers drove to their business – in reality, just 4 percent drive. Come on, Parkdale is just behind Little Portugal and near Dufferin Mall, all very walkable areas, how is this a surprise? Repeat the study w/ Yorkdale Mall near highway 401 and those car numbers will shoot through the roof. The reality is that areas closer to downtown that are a hassle to park at will attract downtown folks and more suburban areas with big parking lots will attract suburban folks with cars. What's the point of cherrypicking one area and try to draw general conclusions about parking from that?

Ma8ee 5y ago
Because even in city centres where most people walk, there’s a perception among business owners that they would lose a big part of their customers if parking were replaced with for example bicycle lanes, while the truth is the opposite.
a2tech 5y ago
The point is to drive their preferences and thoughts on how things should be home and reshape urban landscapes to fit a vocal minorities views on how things should be with the hopes that if they impose their will on the landscape it will reshape people into sharing their viewpoint.

karaterobot 5y ago

Since this discussion is mainly US-centric, and not NZ centric, I feel at liberty to ask this question even if it's not strictly about the article: I understand the argument that the U.S. is reliant on cars, because it is so spread out, and spread out because it is reliant on cars. This may be due to an alliance by automakers, marketers, and the government. Stipulated. But given that that it is already the case, how would a plan to get people to ditch their cars actually work? Is there a plan that describes how to consolidate a sprawling population of hundreds of millions of people, who already own houses and property all over a massive country? Do the people in suburbs who drive everywhere just demolish their homes and move into apartments in the city? I say demolish, because in this scenario there are enough disincentives that nobody chooses to live in the suburbs anymore, like they have historical, so all these homes would lose their value. Maybe we still have those suburbs, but we imagine a mass transit infrastructure that replaces cars. That could work, but we don't have it, and it seems hand-wavey to me. Does anybody (not in this thread, just anywhere) actually have a detailed plan for how it would work? And the answer isn't "yeah: Europe!" because, as stipulated, the U.S. is currently laid out radically differently, in a way that just wanting it to be like Europe won't solve. I'm not arguing that cars are great, I'm just trying to figure out to what extent this is based on wishful thinking / science fiction, versus whether there's a serious plan behind it.

belval 5y ago
It's a process that will take 50-100 years+. Like it or not there is no real incentive for people to stop living like they currently do. All you can do is tax fuel/carbon and stop adding car lanes to make people converge closer to the city. In practice though, this is where remote work can help. Most traffic in a city isn't people going shopping. It's people going to work. If we push for remote work as an alternative, and improve the quality of transit, the situation will improve.
kitkat_new 5y ago
Here a comparison is outlined between to ways of making cities less car centric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI-1YNAmWlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI-1YNAmWlk still, probably not as extreme as US standard...

jimmytidey 5y ago

I have a theory: small shop owners are disproportionately likely to be car drivers, and when they say parking is essential for their customers, what they are really worried about is measures that will make it less convenient to drive them selves.

randyrand 5y ago
Most definitely. A friend owns a restaurant and their van is the lifeblood of getting food to the store.

danbmil99 5y ago

I've lived half of my adult life in Manhattan and the other half in Silicon Valley in a suburban environment. It's nonsensical to assume that a place like Silicon Valley could ever give up their cars and the parking necessary to go to stores restaurants etcetera. It simply cannot happen. In New York, all of my friends lived in apartments within a quarter-mile of the subway system. If I was living on the upper west side and wanted to meet my friends in the village, a 35 to 40 minute train ride was by far the easiest way to get there. No one owned a car (many of us didn't even have licenses). Before Uber and Lyft, we took taxis if it was the middle of the night or freezing snow; otherwise we took the subway. In Silicon Valley towns, people live a mile or more from the city center. There is absolutely no practical way to get to shops and restaurants other than to take your car and park near the center of town. Once in a while on a whim if the weather is nice, I suppose a family a bit nearer than average to downtown might bike together to brunch on a weekend. But if you need to get a quart of milk to make coffee, or get some food for dinner, you use a car. There's no other option. The future I see plausible would include low carbon impact cars, small electric vehicles, self- driving, like an army of Lyft and Uber at very low cost. I think that's the best future we can hope for without a radical restructuring of Suburbia, which is simply not in the cards.

multiplegeorges 5y ago
Cities and towns can update their zoning to encourage denser town centres that make walking and cycling viable. That doesn't amount to a radical restructuring of life and increasing dependency on cars, EV or not, is not a way out of the problem of spread out, lifeless towns. Suburbs are antithetical to good communities and the faster we can develop away from them, the better.
kijiki 5y ago
My wife and I live in Mountain View, which is arguably the heart of the valley. I had to buy a trickle charger for our car's battery, so we wouldn't have to jump it around once a month whenever we went to drive somewhere.
- danbmil99 5y ago

sremani 5y ago

Cars are C++ of the transportation world, every body bitches about them but the entire cities and sub-divisions are planned and built around them.

asdff 5y ago

People who are perplexed about why a business would not want a bike lane need to take a look at the history books. It was business owners who were pushing for streetcar lines to be paved over into stroads like Geary blvd in San Fransisco. They see their clientele as one traveling by private car over one reliant on public transportation, and probably feel they don't even want to be associated with public transportation and the image of who typically rides it. You see the same tired dog whistle arguments come up today. "Who is going to even use it?" the residents of Beverly hills might say to the purple line subway extension under their city limits, whose arteries carry some of the highest levels of bus traffic in the country. I think the subtext is clear who they don't want to be building infrastructure for when you look at the demographics of who is and isn't currently using public transit in a place like Beverly Hills.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Yeah I think lots of cities in the USA will eventually figure this out. Even if parking is limited people will find a way to get to these businesses.

kazinator 5y ago

> Both the Toronto and Berlin studies found that people on foot, on bikes or taking public transport spend more money when they go to local shops and visit much more often than those who travel by car. In the case of Berlin, people who did not drive were responsible for more than 90 percent of weekly spending. That makes perfect sense. People who drive far are looking for better prices. They will buy one or two things they know are usually cheap or often on sale and then get other things in some other store that's along their route to wherever they are going. The walkin' locals are going to be the more captive customers.