9 ms·

Why “free” street parking could be costing you hundreds more in rent

88 points by jseliger 4y ago

blamazon 4y ago
Donald Shoup, as featured in this article, wrote 'the book' on this, if you're interested in a deep dive on the topic I recommend it: > The High Cost of Free Parking > Publication date: March 1, 2005; 2011 (Revised Edition) > Media type Print (Hardcover) > Pages: 733 > ISBN: 1884829988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
renewiltord 4y ago
No problem with parking set to ground rent cost + amortized parking spot maintenance cost, then. But once you've given someone something you can't take it away. In SF, for instance, there's a place you can park in the middle of the street during church services. No other religion is granted this exemption. It is no surprise that a city named after a Christian saint permits this, of course, but it is yet another example in which American separation of Church and State is mostly textual and not defacto.
- bsimpson 4y ago
  I don't know what's weirder: that cops let churchgoers in SF doublepark, or that you're trying to make a thread about parking into your gripes with religion in America.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    I think what's even weirder is that you consider those two things in the same ballpark. But my problem isn't with religion in America. That was a description of how granting things to people means you can't take them away even though those grants violate the highest law of the land: the Constitution. Of course, the problem is that religion is a sensitive subject so when used to illustrate, this is inevitable. I couldn't think of another example where a grant to the people violates the Constitution but if there is, and you suggest it within the edit period, I'll swap it in. After all, the point is that parking's biggest advantage is that it is a subsidy and those are hard to remove.
jMyles 4y ago
It really is an unreal subsidy. Imagine if you had a product that you really wanted to sell, but were having trouble because every sale required 110 square feet of earth to be set aside. And then, miraculously, the government, with an insanely heavy hand about it, terraforms the fucking planet to achieve compatibility for hundreds of millions of your devices. I'm not sure any class of corporate operation has ever gotten a more exacting and widespread easement for its business model. In 2020, there was a newly houseless guy (unemployed in the early pandemic panic) on my block who a few of us knew. He set up a tent in a street parking spot. And when the cops came and forced him to move on (with, I will point out, what seemed like empathetic body language), I remember pantomiming their position as, "You can't live here - this is where the person who lives <there> (points to nearby house) puts their car when they aren't using it."
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
  You aren't even capturing the tiniest fraction of the scale. For one, it's not just street parking... it's the roads/streets themselves. Roads and highways have been a multi-trillion-dollar subsidy for Ford, GM, and Chrysler since the 1920s. It's bizarre how blind everyone is to that.
  - narcindin 4y ago
    In defense of Ford, GM and Chrysler; it is also a subsidy to BMW, Toyota and Tesla.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
      Sure, today. They weren't around for the larger part of that time period though, at least not on this continent.
  - jMyles 4y ago
    Oh of course. Of course! I'm always amazed when someone thinks they've trumped anarchist political science by asking, "by who will pave the roads?!" Scaling back road pavement is one of the things to which I most look forward in the retracting state apparatus.
oftenwrong 4y ago
It's very difficult, politically, to take away something that people are accustomed to getting for "free". Easing mandates for developers is much easier than removing existing, free, on-street parking that residents have built their lives upon. One of the main drivers of NIMBY sentiment is the threat of having to share free, public parking with people who would live in new developments. Shoup's approach to this difficult political problem is the establishment of "parking benefit districts", which create an incentive to switch to market-rate parking.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  Not sure where you're at but where I live the opposite is true. There is massive public sentiment against public street parking because it makes it possible for people to come and go from the area at will. A significant fraction of property owners believe they own the road too. It's common enough that plenty of homeowners put up their own no parking signs, which are obviously un-enforceable. There is at least one sign that I'm aware that I think was put up by the city as pacification measure. There is no possible mechanism the city could use to enforce it, but it does appear to have been installed by the city.
  - masfuerte 4y ago
    In most places homeowners do own the road up to the centre line. This ownership gives them approximately no rights over it though.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      That's unique, my property line goes out to the curb. But my rights stop at the sidewalk approximately. I can put gardens between the curb and the sidewalk, but they tend to get dug up by maint. workers.
  - pandaman 4y ago
    A lot of places have permit parking, where permits are only available to the residents. Following this route seems to be more productive than making fake signs to me.
throwaway22032 4y ago
In the UK we have paid street parking in denser areas, residents pay a few hundred a year to park their cars. A significant minority want to end this (basically to create car-free cities). By rights the land is council owned, there's no reason it should be used for parking, and yeah, £300 a year is far under the market value of the land if you put even a camper van on it. But personally I think it'd just end up ghettoising the inner city all over again. Families and anyone who wants to do anything with loads larger than a suitcase would move out to the suburbs or out of town entirely. Some people probably consider that acceptable collateral damage. I think that places like London suffer from being too focused on single professional life as it is. A lot of the discussion on cars seems to revolve around what "can" happen in some theoretical abstract, without considering whether people actually want that to happen. It seems very, central planning, for lack of a better term.
- ignormies 4y ago
  > Families and anyone who wants to do anything with loads larger than a suitcase would move out That's where carshare (like Zipcar) comes into play. Carshare allows residents to be able to access a full vehicle when they need to "do anything with loads larger than a suitcase", without using public property for their own personal, subsidized, private car storage.
  - throwaway22032 4y ago
    Theoretically, yes, in practice, if I couldn't get a permit for my street, I'd sell the house and move out to the suburbs to somewhere where I can actually park, or get a house with a drive, rather than spending my time and money renting cars every time I want to do anything like going to a DIY store, visiting family, going camping etc. I have a Zipcar account and it's just a big faff. Limited miles, super expensive, car is always damaged and a bit smelly, you have to hope that it's available for the times you need (almost never is if that's more than a day) it's just a mess. It just about works for picking up large items from FB marketplace or house moves, but even for that I'm considering just buying a van to avoid the fuss. As I mentioned - it's not like it's theoretically impossible, it just changes the make up of the city and who lives there. I'd gladly buy the parking spot outside my house if the council were willing to sell it...
Eric_WVGG 4y ago
A related article was published in the NYT today — apparently the city is going to take another try at moving to "containerized garbage." (For anyone who hasn't been here, the trash is just piled up literally everywhere. It's incredible.) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/nyregion/garbage-containers-nyc-adams.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/nyregion/garbage-containe... This will be at the "cost" of 150,000 parking spaces… out of three million. Our car-owning minority will fight tooth and nail for their right to cover our sidewalks in sacks of trash, which of course makes sense given that they don't walk anywhere.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Lots of us here have experience in "containerizing garbage" :)
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  I'm still baffled that a city like NY can't make the switch.
  - asdajksah2123 4y ago
    It's a political issue. As the article states, parking is the "3rd rail" of local NYC politics.
    - mcv 4y ago
      I thought nobody in NYC had a car.
      - notatoad 4y ago
        8 million people, 3 million parking spaces. compared to most places, that is "nobody"
      - yitianjian 4y ago
        Nobody drives in NYC, there's too much traffic But realistically, plenty of folks have cars in NYC. With a metro area of over 20M people, enough people commute into the city, or aren't close enough to LIRR/MNR/NJT, or prefer driving to visit, or just are needed for commercial/industrial/institutional uses to clog the city's roads. Double parking is infamous in NYC, as are aggressive drivers and terrible roads and parking situations.
broof 4y ago
“No shortage of parking has occured” this is definitely not true where I live. A lot of the dense new housing has essentially zero guest parking often making it difficult to visit my friends. To be honest, I do think that this trade off is worth it because affordable housing is more important, but I don’t think it’s honest to say that these areas don’t have shortages of parking
- jseliger 4y ago
  making it difficult to visit my friends It would be more difficult to see your friends if they couldn't afford to live in that area t all.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    In a lot of US cities this is break-even at best or simply untrue - often if you go 3, 5, or 10 miles into more suburby there's once again ample parking. So then the person in the new suburban apartment building with big parking lots instead of the new more-central building is much easier to visit by car.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Is driving the only way to get there?
- conscion 4y ago
  > A lot of the dense new housing has essentially zero guest parking often making it difficult to visit my friends difficult to visit your friends ... for free. There's probably paid parking somewhere nearby willing to take your money in exchange for storing your car
maerF0x0 4y ago
This is going to get downvoted into oblivion but I honestly believe it's the truth. People are going to cling to their cars until they have a viable substitute that offers all of the following: 1. Psychological safety - that they wont be robbed or assaulted, wont have to encounter people they dont want to, wont be uncomfortable temperature wise, wont be late due to unreliable operation (including the apathy of unionized workers), wont have to smell things they dont want to smell 2. Similar experience to cars - Get them within 1/4 mile of their destination (~5 minute walk). Anything more means adapting fashion to the elements. 3. Does not have seasonal variability in usability - The bus in Calgary, AB is amazing in the winter, and sucks in the winter (waiting for a late bus in the cold means you have to dress for 40 minutes in -20c weather, when it might only be 2. And then you're inside a 20C bus with far too much clothes on. And it's hard to end up at work presentable. This is probably far less important now with rise of remote work for many. 4. Is not a tax line item that is absurdly expensive per user mile. Right now a lot of public transit is under utilized meaning it's actual price per user mile is very high. I get that it's a chicken / egg challenge. How do you get people to use a sparse system unless you build out a full suite of routes. How do you build a full suite of routes without having them be underutilized, at least at first? 5. Works 24/7 for their needs. 6. Works well for families. Getting groceries with 2 kids, going to urgent care acceptably fast, pickup and drop off at 2 different schools (elementary / middle for example). All sorts of patterns that work with 1 parent and 2 kids each having a diff destination. Ultimately I think with autonomous cars the whole landscape will change rapidly if the gov't & unions allow it. Parking isn't an issue if my car goes home to my garage during the day (or can park itself within an inch of the next car because no one is getting in/out and the cars can coordinate to unblock each other in a truly packed parking garage). Even more so if the autonomous car is not mine and it simply goes to pickup another rider. Now we have controlled environment for just me and the car can be a small 2 seater like a smart car.
- c22 4y ago
  Okay, but now the shared autonomous car that comes to pick you up has someone else's trash and vomit in it and we're back at point 1.
  - 4y ago
lngarner 4y ago
Completely dependent on driving is the key here. We're completely beholden to corporations and dangerous, dirty machines to conduct virtually every aspect of daily life -- if you're physically, financially, and legally able to do so. It doesn't have to be this way. Cars suck.
- falcolas 4y ago
  Cars are awesome. I'm protected (from people, vehicles, and weather), I can go where I need to on demand and on my own schedule. My car is personalized to me, and my car is beholden to nobody else. I can't imagine not having a car. And yes, I've lived in big cities with good public transportation. Public transportation is a great bonus if and when it's appropriate for use, but it absolutely can't replace a car.
  - blamazon 4y ago
    Counterpoint: cars are unpleasant. They're expensive, complicated, require constant maintenance and consumable wear items and a lot of space to store, they pose a substantial personal liability risk, incur significant taxation and insurance fees, you have to pay for fuel and manage the logistics of frequent refueling/recharging, they rapidly depreciate in value, they can be damaged, catch on fire, strand you in the middle of nowhere, you have to pay attention constantly while using them, etc. Yes, there are ways to defray these annoyances but those ways generally carry fractally nested annoyances of their own. To me, living without a car is the true freedom, one that I miss, that I yearn for every day presently. To have the most expensive thing I own be a bicycle would be splendid. I can always rent a car, carry an umbrella, hail a taxi for the edge cases.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      > They're expensive, Living is expensive. Housing is an order of magnitude more expensive on a monthly basis than cars are. Food is around the same as a car payment. EDIT: And in a pinch, a car can be used as housing. Sucks that this is a real thing, but there are definitely folks who prioritize their car payments over house payments. Gives them shelter and transportation so they can find work again. > complicated, No more complicated than working around public transport, IME. > require constant maintenance and consumable wear items About once a year, yeah, drop it off at a mechanic for a few hours. > and a lot of space to store, The space is built into most origins and destinations, the cost built into the location regardless of whether you drove or not. To be cheeky, why not use what I'm already paying for? > they pose a substantial personal liability risk, Not really? Your liability is generally managed by insurance, which leads to: > incur significant taxation and insurance fees, you have to pay for fuel These exist for most other methods of transportation, just usually hidden from you. You'll pay for it in fares and taxes. > manage the logistics of frequent refueling/recharging, Once weekly (give or take) I stop and refuel. If I had to do it daily, I might be a bit more annoyed by it. > they rapidly depreciate in value, they can be damaged, catch on fire, strand you in the middle of nowhere, you have to pay attention constantly while using them, etc. Can be said about every method of transportation, sans walking, in existence. :) Though... a broken leg could definitely strand you places too. > To have the most expensive thing I own be a bicycle would be splendid. My personal computer is probably worth more than 99% of bikes on the market. FWIW, living an ascetic life is not something most people on the planet aspire to.
TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
Cities and towns designed around the assumption that everybody is going to use cars for transportation is some of the most epic technical debt I've ever seen.
sicromoft 4y ago
https://archive.is/EKr6I https://archive.is/EKr6I
Tiktaalik 4y ago
Around the topic of allowing apartment builders to not necessarily build parking for every single unit, there's enormous anxieties and fears around a resulting explosion in people parking on the street and people not being able to find street parking. Maybe it's an imagined problem that should just be ignored, but if we wanted to tackle the hypothetical issue head on we could pivot toward a more comprehensive tracking of cars to parking spots, and only license cars if they have a known, associated parking spot, whether that be a garage on private property, or a license from the city to park on the street long term. I'm under the impression that Japan does something similar to this?
- milkytron 4y ago
  > Around the topic of allowing apartment builders to not necessarily build parking for every single unit, there's enormous anxieties and fears around a resulting explosion in people parking on the street and people not being able to find street parking. This already happens where I live, but the buildings provide plenty of parking and most of it goes unused. The reason is because a spot in the garage is not free, I think it's like $50 or $100 a month. So people just park on the street and the garages are mostly vacant. My city is now looking into paid street parking via permits, I'm sure if that gets adopted, people will start using the garages more and streets parking will become much more available. The way it works is that if you live in one of the neighborhoods that requires a permit for street parking, you can park anywhere as long as your permit is paid.

88 points by jseliger 4y ago

Donald Shoup, as featured in this article, wrote 'the book' on this, if you're interested in a deep dive on the topic I recommend it: > The High Cost of Free Parking > Publication date: March 1, 2005; 2011 (Revised Edition) > Media type Print (Hardcover) > Pages: 733 > ISBN: 1884829988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking

renewiltord 4y ago

No problem with parking set to ground rent cost + amortized parking spot maintenance cost, then. But once you've given someone something you can't take it away. In SF, for instance, there's a place you can park in the middle of the street during church services. No other religion is granted this exemption. It is no surprise that a city named after a Christian saint permits this, of course, but it is yet another example in which American separation of Church and State is mostly textual and not defacto.

bsimpson 4y ago
I don't know what's weirder: that cops let churchgoers in SF doublepark, or that you're trying to make a thread about parking into your gripes with religion in America.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  I think what's even weirder is that you consider those two things in the same ballpark. But my problem isn't with religion in America. That was a description of how granting things to people means you can't take them away even though those grants violate the highest law of the land: the Constitution. Of course, the problem is that religion is a sensitive subject so when used to illustrate, this is inevitable. I couldn't think of another example where a grant to the people violates the Constitution but if there is, and you suggest it within the edit period, I'll swap it in. After all, the point is that parking's biggest advantage is that it is a subsidy and those are hard to remove.

jMyles 4y ago

It really is an unreal subsidy. Imagine if you had a product that you really wanted to sell, but were having trouble because every sale required 110 square feet of earth to be set aside. And then, miraculously, the government, with an insanely heavy hand about it, terraforms the fucking planet to achieve compatibility for hundreds of millions of your devices. I'm not sure any class of corporate operation has ever gotten a more exacting and widespread easement for its business model. In 2020, there was a newly houseless guy (unemployed in the early pandemic panic) on my block who a few of us knew. He set up a tent in a street parking spot. And when the cops came and forced him to move on (with, I will point out, what seemed like empathetic body language), I remember pantomiming their position as, "You can't live here - this is where the person who lives <there> (points to nearby house) puts their car when they aren't using it."

NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
You aren't even capturing the tiniest fraction of the scale. For one, it's not just street parking... it's the roads/streets themselves. Roads and highways have been a multi-trillion-dollar subsidy for Ford, GM, and Chrysler since the 1920s. It's bizarre how blind everyone is to that.
- narcindin 4y ago
  In defense of Ford, GM and Chrysler; it is also a subsidy to BMW, Toyota and Tesla.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
    Sure, today. They weren't around for the larger part of that time period though, at least not on this continent.
- jMyles 4y ago
  Oh of course. Of course! I'm always amazed when someone thinks they've trumped anarchist political science by asking, "by who will pave the roads?!" Scaling back road pavement is one of the things to which I most look forward in the retracting state apparatus.

oftenwrong 4y ago

It's very difficult, politically, to take away something that people are accustomed to getting for "free". Easing mandates for developers is much easier than removing existing, free, on-street parking that residents have built their lives upon. One of the main drivers of NIMBY sentiment is the threat of having to share free, public parking with people who would live in new developments. Shoup's approach to this difficult political problem is the establishment of "parking benefit districts", which create an incentive to switch to market-rate parking.

sidewndr46 4y ago
Not sure where you're at but where I live the opposite is true. There is massive public sentiment against public street parking because it makes it possible for people to come and go from the area at will. A significant fraction of property owners believe they own the road too. It's common enough that plenty of homeowners put up their own no parking signs, which are obviously un-enforceable. There is at least one sign that I'm aware that I think was put up by the city as pacification measure. There is no possible mechanism the city could use to enforce it, but it does appear to have been installed by the city.
- masfuerte 4y ago
  In most places homeowners do own the road up to the centre line. This ownership gives them approximately no rights over it though.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    That's unique, my property line goes out to the curb. But my rights stop at the sidewalk approximately. I can put gardens between the curb and the sidewalk, but they tend to get dug up by maint. workers.
- pandaman 4y ago
  A lot of places have permit parking, where permits are only available to the residents. Following this route seems to be more productive than making fake signs to me.

throwaway22032 4y ago

In the UK we have paid street parking in denser areas, residents pay a few hundred a year to park their cars. A significant minority want to end this (basically to create car-free cities). By rights the land is council owned, there's no reason it should be used for parking, and yeah, £300 a year is far under the market value of the land if you put even a camper van on it. But personally I think it'd just end up ghettoising the inner city all over again. Families and anyone who wants to do anything with loads larger than a suitcase would move out to the suburbs or out of town entirely. Some people probably consider that acceptable collateral damage. I think that places like London suffer from being too focused on single professional life as it is. A lot of the discussion on cars seems to revolve around what "can" happen in some theoretical abstract, without considering whether people actually want that to happen. It seems very, central planning, for lack of a better term.

ignormies 4y ago
> Families and anyone who wants to do anything with loads larger than a suitcase would move out That's where carshare (like Zipcar) comes into play. Carshare allows residents to be able to access a full vehicle when they need to "do anything with loads larger than a suitcase", without using public property for their own personal, subsidized, private car storage.
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  Theoretically, yes, in practice, if I couldn't get a permit for my street, I'd sell the house and move out to the suburbs to somewhere where I can actually park, or get a house with a drive, rather than spending my time and money renting cars every time I want to do anything like going to a DIY store, visiting family, going camping etc. I have a Zipcar account and it's just a big faff. Limited miles, super expensive, car is always damaged and a bit smelly, you have to hope that it's available for the times you need (almost never is if that's more than a day) it's just a mess. It just about works for picking up large items from FB marketplace or house moves, but even for that I'm considering just buying a van to avoid the fuss. As I mentioned - it's not like it's theoretically impossible, it just changes the make up of the city and who lives there. I'd gladly buy the parking spot outside my house if the council were willing to sell it...

Eric_WVGG 4y ago

A related article was published in the NYT today — apparently the city is going to take another try at moving to "containerized garbage." (For anyone who hasn't been here, the trash is just piled up literally everywhere. It's incredible.) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/nyregion/garbage-containers-nyc-adams.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/nyregion/garbage-containe... This will be at the "cost" of 150,000 parking spaces… out of three million. Our car-owning minority will fight tooth and nail for their right to cover our sidewalks in sacks of trash, which of course makes sense given that they don't walk anywhere.

barbazoo 4y ago
Lots of us here have experience in "containerizing garbage" :)
sidewndr46 4y ago
I'm still baffled that a city like NY can't make the switch.
- asdajksah2123 4y ago
  It's a political issue. As the article states, parking is the "3rd rail" of local NYC politics.
  - mcv 4y ago
    I thought nobody in NYC had a car.
    - notatoad 4y ago
      8 million people, 3 million parking spaces. compared to most places, that is "nobody"
    - yitianjian 4y ago
      Nobody drives in NYC, there's too much traffic But realistically, plenty of folks have cars in NYC. With a metro area of over 20M people, enough people commute into the city, or aren't close enough to LIRR/MNR/NJT, or prefer driving to visit, or just are needed for commercial/industrial/institutional uses to clog the city's roads. Double parking is infamous in NYC, as are aggressive drivers and terrible roads and parking situations.

broof 4y ago

“No shortage of parking has occured” this is definitely not true where I live. A lot of the dense new housing has essentially zero guest parking often making it difficult to visit my friends. To be honest, I do think that this trade off is worth it because affordable housing is more important, but I don’t think it’s honest to say that these areas don’t have shortages of parking

jseliger 4y ago
making it difficult to visit my friends It would be more difficult to see your friends if they couldn't afford to live in that area t all.
- majormajor 4y ago
  In a lot of US cities this is break-even at best or simply untrue - often if you go 3, 5, or 10 miles into more suburby there's once again ample parking. So then the person in the new suburban apartment building with big parking lots instead of the new more-central building is much easier to visit by car.
Finnucane 4y ago
Is driving the only way to get there?
conscion 4y ago
> A lot of the dense new housing has essentially zero guest parking often making it difficult to visit my friends difficult to visit your friends ... for free. There's probably paid parking somewhere nearby willing to take your money in exchange for storing your car

maerF0x0 4y ago

This is going to get downvoted into oblivion but I honestly believe it's the truth. People are going to cling to their cars until they have a viable substitute that offers all of the following: 1. Psychological safety - that they wont be robbed or assaulted, wont have to encounter people they dont want to, wont be uncomfortable temperature wise, wont be late due to unreliable operation (including the apathy of unionized workers), wont have to smell things they dont want to smell 2. Similar experience to cars - Get them within 1/4 mile of their destination (~5 minute walk). Anything more means adapting fashion to the elements. 3. Does not have seasonal variability in usability - The bus in Calgary, AB is amazing in the winter, and sucks in the winter (waiting for a late bus in the cold means you have to dress for 40 minutes in -20c weather, when it might only be 2. And then you're inside a 20C bus with far too much clothes on. And it's hard to end up at work presentable. This is probably far less important now with rise of remote work for many. 4. Is not a tax line item that is absurdly expensive per user mile. Right now a lot of public transit is under utilized meaning it's actual price per user mile is very high. I get that it's a chicken / egg challenge. How do you get people to use a sparse system unless you build out a full suite of routes. How do you build a full suite of routes without having them be underutilized, at least at first? 5. Works 24/7 for their needs. 6. Works well for families. Getting groceries with 2 kids, going to urgent care acceptably fast, pickup and drop off at 2 different schools (elementary / middle for example). All sorts of patterns that work with 1 parent and 2 kids each having a diff destination. Ultimately I think with autonomous cars the whole landscape will change rapidly if the gov't & unions allow it. Parking isn't an issue if my car goes home to my garage during the day (or can park itself within an inch of the next car because no one is getting in/out and the cars can coordinate to unblock each other in a truly packed parking garage). Even more so if the autonomous car is not mine and it simply goes to pickup another rider. Now we have controlled environment for just me and the car can be a small 2 seater like a smart car.

c22 4y ago
Okay, but now the shared autonomous car that comes to pick you up has someone else's trash and vomit in it and we're back at point 1.
- 4y ago

lngarner 4y ago

Completely dependent on driving is the key here. We're completely beholden to corporations and dangerous, dirty machines to conduct virtually every aspect of daily life -- if you're physically, financially, and legally able to do so. It doesn't have to be this way. Cars suck.

falcolas 4y ago
Cars are awesome. I'm protected (from people, vehicles, and weather), I can go where I need to on demand and on my own schedule. My car is personalized to me, and my car is beholden to nobody else. I can't imagine not having a car. And yes, I've lived in big cities with good public transportation. Public transportation is a great bonus if and when it's appropriate for use, but it absolutely can't replace a car.
- blamazon 4y ago
  Counterpoint: cars are unpleasant. They're expensive, complicated, require constant maintenance and consumable wear items and a lot of space to store, they pose a substantial personal liability risk, incur significant taxation and insurance fees, you have to pay for fuel and manage the logistics of frequent refueling/recharging, they rapidly depreciate in value, they can be damaged, catch on fire, strand you in the middle of nowhere, you have to pay attention constantly while using them, etc. Yes, there are ways to defray these annoyances but those ways generally carry fractally nested annoyances of their own. To me, living without a car is the true freedom, one that I miss, that I yearn for every day presently. To have the most expensive thing I own be a bicycle would be splendid. I can always rent a car, carry an umbrella, hail a taxi for the edge cases.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    > They're expensive, Living is expensive. Housing is an order of magnitude more expensive on a monthly basis than cars are. Food is around the same as a car payment. EDIT: And in a pinch, a car can be used as housing. Sucks that this is a real thing, but there are definitely folks who prioritize their car payments over house payments. Gives them shelter and transportation so they can find work again. > complicated, No more complicated than working around public transport, IME. > require constant maintenance and consumable wear items About once a year, yeah, drop it off at a mechanic for a few hours. > and a lot of space to store, The space is built into most origins and destinations, the cost built into the location regardless of whether you drove or not. To be cheeky, why not use what I'm already paying for? > they pose a substantial personal liability risk, Not really? Your liability is generally managed by insurance, which leads to: > incur significant taxation and insurance fees, you have to pay for fuel These exist for most other methods of transportation, just usually hidden from you. You'll pay for it in fares and taxes. > manage the logistics of frequent refueling/recharging, Once weekly (give or take) I stop and refuel. If I had to do it daily, I might be a bit more annoyed by it. > they rapidly depreciate in value, they can be damaged, catch on fire, strand you in the middle of nowhere, you have to pay attention constantly while using them, etc. Can be said about every method of transportation, sans walking, in existence. :) Though... a broken leg could definitely strand you places too. > To have the most expensive thing I own be a bicycle would be splendid. My personal computer is probably worth more than 99% of bikes on the market. FWIW, living an ascetic life is not something most people on the planet aspire to.

TYPE_FASTER 4y ago

Cities and towns designed around the assumption that everybody is going to use cars for transportation is some of the most epic technical debt I've ever seen.

sicromoft 4y ago

https://archive.is/EKr6I https://archive.is/EKr6I

Tiktaalik 4y ago

Around the topic of allowing apartment builders to not necessarily build parking for every single unit, there's enormous anxieties and fears around a resulting explosion in people parking on the street and people not being able to find street parking. Maybe it's an imagined problem that should just be ignored, but if we wanted to tackle the hypothetical issue head on we could pivot toward a more comprehensive tracking of cars to parking spots, and only license cars if they have a known, associated parking spot, whether that be a garage on private property, or a license from the city to park on the street long term. I'm under the impression that Japan does something similar to this?

milkytron 4y ago
> Around the topic of allowing apartment builders to not necessarily build parking for every single unit, there's enormous anxieties and fears around a resulting explosion in people parking on the street and people not being able to find street parking. This already happens where I live, but the buildings provide plenty of parking and most of it goes unused. The reason is because a spot in the garage is not free, I think it's like $50 or $100 a month. So people just park on the street and the garages are mostly vacant. My city is now looking into paid street parking via permits, I'm sure if that gets adopted, people will start using the garages more and streets parking will become much more available. The way it works is that if you live in one of the neighborhoods that requires a permit for street parking, you can park anywhere as long as your permit is paid.