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> There are places that require you to have a parking spot for your car before you are allowed to register the car. There are no free parking spots, you park o

> There are places that require you to have a parking spot for your car before you are allowed to register the car. There are no free parking spots, you park on your property or rent a spot from someone else. That's addressed in the article. In the long run, these laws result in overproduction of parking spaces, driving down density, driving up car utilization, and accelerating (sub)urban sprawl. > I'm not a fan of externalities, so this makes sense to me, especially in an urban area where public transportation is available. A better approach is to provide public transportation and make car owners actually pay for parking spots (currently, street parking is completely free in NYC).

runnerup 3y ago
I think you're halfway talking past the person you replied to. The two of you agree that car owners should actually pay for parking spots. I think you may be thinking "require developers to build parking spots for planned occupants of (apartment/store/building)" but the person you replied to was advocating not for building more parking spots, but rather limiting the number of car registrations to the number of parking spots. I would only add that in a place like NYC, many of the cars are registered in a completely different state (NJ, for example) and still driven in Manhattan so I think you'd need a special permit/RFID tag/plate registration to drive through the bridges/tunnels to get to Manhattan.
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > I think you're halfway talking past the person you replied to. The two of you agree that car owners should actually pay for parking spots. From their reply, I think you're mostly right, in that we both agree that parking should not be free for car owners. > I think you may be thinking "require developers to build parking spots for planned occupants of (apartment/store/building)" but the person you replied to was advocating not for building more parking spots, but rather limiting the number of car registrations to the number of parking spots. The issue is that, unless parking spots are themselves capped (or extremely costly), this just encourages developers to build more parking spaces. It's not as bad as using public land for it, but it's still bad.
mikem170 3y ago
They do this in Japan [0], apparently the entire country. I didn't know that they had a problem with sprawl. In denser places, like Tokyo, people don't need cars like in most U.S. cities, they live in walkable neighborhoods full of multiuse buildings with transit connecting them to larger commercial areas and the rest of the country. Tokyo would be quite different if all streets in those walkable neighborhoods had to be widened for parking. Someone who wants a car can leave room on their city lot to park it, or rent space within walking or transit distance. Visitors would park in nearby pay-for-parking lots. I assume in less dense places in Japan it is not difficult to have a driveway to park in, just like in U.S. suburbs. I don't follow your connection as to how eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. To the contrary it seems like taxpayer subsidies in the U.S. for cars, which include free street parking, led to a lot of sprawl. [0] https://www.micklay.com/faq/parking-certificates/ https://www.micklay.com/faq/parking-certificates/
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > They do this in Japan [0], apparently the entire country. I didn't know that they had a problem with sprawl. This is a common fallacy: "X happens in Y, and Y has greater Z. Therefore, X increases (or does not decrease) Z". At its core, it's an issue of confounding variables: even if what you're saying is true (I don't know, because I don't know about Japanese parking policy), you can't use differences in macro results as a way to draw conclusions about the effects of micro policies. There's too much else that gets bundled up in that measurement and which isn't controlled for. > I don't follow your connection as to how eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. I didn't say eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. I said that requiring (or encouraging) the creation of parking spots without any external cap or limit on parking would lead to sprawl.

runnerup 3y ago

I think you're halfway talking past the person you replied to. The two of you agree that car owners should actually pay for parking spots. I think you may be thinking "require developers to build parking spots for planned occupants of (apartment/store/building)" but the person you replied to was advocating not for building more parking spots, but rather limiting the number of car registrations to the number of parking spots. I would only add that in a place like NYC, many of the cars are registered in a completely different state (NJ, for example) and still driven in Manhattan so I think you'd need a special permit/RFID tag/plate registration to drive through the bridges/tunnels to get to Manhattan.

chimeracoder 3y ago
> I think you're halfway talking past the person you replied to. The two of you agree that car owners should actually pay for parking spots. From their reply, I think you're mostly right, in that we both agree that parking should not be free for car owners. > I think you may be thinking "require developers to build parking spots for planned occupants of (apartment/store/building)" but the person you replied to was advocating not for building more parking spots, but rather limiting the number of car registrations to the number of parking spots. The issue is that, unless parking spots are themselves capped (or extremely costly), this just encourages developers to build more parking spaces. It's not as bad as using public land for it, but it's still bad.

mikem170 3y ago

They do this in Japan [0], apparently the entire country. I didn't know that they had a problem with sprawl. In denser places, like Tokyo, people don't need cars like in most U.S. cities, they live in walkable neighborhoods full of multiuse buildings with transit connecting them to larger commercial areas and the rest of the country. Tokyo would be quite different if all streets in those walkable neighborhoods had to be widened for parking. Someone who wants a car can leave room on their city lot to park it, or rent space within walking or transit distance. Visitors would park in nearby pay-for-parking lots. I assume in less dense places in Japan it is not difficult to have a driveway to park in, just like in U.S. suburbs. I don't follow your connection as to how eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. To the contrary it seems like taxpayer subsidies in the U.S. for cars, which include free street parking, led to a lot of sprawl. [0] https://www.micklay.com/faq/parking-certificates/ https://www.micklay.com/faq/parking-certificates/

chimeracoder 3y ago
> They do this in Japan [0], apparently the entire country. I didn't know that they had a problem with sprawl. This is a common fallacy: "X happens in Y, and Y has greater Z. Therefore, X increases (or does not decrease) Z". At its core, it's an issue of confounding variables: even if what you're saying is true (I don't know, because I don't know about Japanese parking policy), you can't use differences in macro results as a way to draw conclusions about the effects of micro policies. There's too much else that gets bundled up in that measurement and which isn't controlled for. > I don't follow your connection as to how eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. I didn't say eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. I said that requiring (or encouraging) the creation of parking spots without any external cap or limit on parking would lead to sprawl.