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It’s not. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that did this and it was a nightmare. All street parking filling up by 4pm. Half hour walks to your car. Neighbors keying

It’s not. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that did this and it was a nightmare. All street parking filling up by 4pm. Half hour walks to your car. Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. Guests basically just being SOL - you’d literally be unable to have guests over because if you left to pick them up there’d be no spot when you got back, and if they drove themselves they’d never find a spot. Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).

_dain_ 3y ago
It sounds like the parking was underpriced. EDIT I am rate-limited so can't reply, but this part: "If you have 200 cars" This is only the case if the demand for parking / driving is perfectly inelastic, which would be quite extraordinary. Empirically, when you charge for parking or institute toll roads, traffic tends to fall, in some cases sharply (because many journeys are low value). I repeat: if the parking spaces are still congested, the price should be raised until they're not. Assuming the number of cars would stay the same is like the lump-of-labour fallacy. Lump of metal fallacy? Then there's the supply side: guess what, that's not inelastic either! If it's profitable to provide parking, someone will build dedicated facilities for it and charge for their use. This may be an alien concept for some of you, but only because parking minimums cause such oversupply that they can't be run profitably. In cities where parking is priced sanely, it's unremarkable to see this. "Cars will just overflow into adjacent neighbourhoods" okay, so charge for parking there too, until they don't. Duh. I don't see why cars should get to sit somewhere rent-free but a human being can't. Urban land is valuable; if you want to occupy it, pay what it costs, ya fuckin welfare queens. my language is harsh but it's hard not to be when I see so many americans (it's always americans) confidently claiming that life is impossible without free parking. but I live in a city without free parking and things work just fine. I can literally just look out of my window and it disproves all the doomsaying. every commute and trip to the supermarket is uneventful and not ruined in the slightest by a lack of free parking. you pay for parking and it's fine. it's literally just fine. I went to virginia one time, I saw literal acres and acres and acres of empty parking space, oceans of asphalt; nobody seemed to think anything of it but I thought it was mad, like some kind of braindead economic allocation fuckup from a communist country that we'd all laugh about. I wanted to shout: you are being terraformed by asphalt-based lifeforms! why do I have to explain to americans how a free market price mechanism works? on a forum for people to shill their california startups? I shouldn't need to tell you this!
- close04 3y ago
  Raising the price would just extract more value for the owners from a very limited resource. But the resource stays just as limited. If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously. The overflow ends up clogging the surrounding neighborhoods, on top of the outcome described by OP. Edit. @pc86, both points you make are valid but neither addresses or fixes the problem being discussed. They are an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion.
  - pc86 3y ago
    > Raising the price would just extract more value for the owners from a very limited resource. Yes. If you own a limited resource it's your right to make money from that. I know we like to pretend people making money from things they own is somehow evil but it's how all of civilization has been built and is an objectively good thing. > If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously. No, but is a point where 50 can park simultaneously and nobody who wants to park there and can afford to is denied that ability.
    - close04 3y ago
      Both points you made are valid but neither fixes or even touches on the problem being discussed: there are more cars than parking spots and this causes problems. The economic theory is an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion. Price is just about who gets to have one. Effectively you'll still have 150 cars that cannot be parked next to the owners' residence, that get dumped on the street elsewhere probably in the next lower cost neighborhood, and with the additional issues OP mentioned. Put it another way, if you want to solve the housing crisis and I tell you "owners can set whatever price they want for the house to extract maximum value and nobody who can afford that will be denied the house" am I wrong? But did I solve the problem?
    - autoexec 3y ago
      > No, but is a point where 50 can park simultaneously and nobody who wants to park there and can afford to is denied that ability. That sucks for the people who are denied the ability to park there because they can't afford it though. Telling people that they need to walk miles to get to a doctor or a grocery store and that only the wealthy deserve to have access to 90% of the city doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
coldpie 3y ago
> Without readily available and reliable public transportation Cool. Let's do that, too!
oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]
ericmay 3y ago
> Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. People need to stop being shitty to each other. > Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build). I don't think this is fair. Fewer parking spaces might mean higher profits for developers on a per-unit basis, but I'd rather them make money and provide more additional housing units that are sorely needed, especially in cities, than build apartment complexes with garages or parking which then necessitate higher taxes and more public spending to support roads, car crashes, and other related externalities. "But public transit costs money too" yes, just redirect state highway department budgets to transit 1-1 and then you're not spending any more and getting higher ROI.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  Further, we should move to a model where the highways are paid entirely by usage fees (gas tax, tolls, etc) instead of subsidized. They're for the benefit of private operators, so the private operators should pay for them. The investments should be in public transit instead.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    A great deal of highway spending is subsidizing truck shipping. Most of the damage done to highways comes from big trucks, and taxes on them don't come anywhere near paying for it. [EDIT] Incidentally, maybe we shouldn't subsidize truck shipping! But using usage taxes to pay for highways while not shifting the burden such that truck shipping is paying the lion's share of the cost and is no longer (so very much, at least) subsidized, would be making non-commercial drivers subsidize truck shipping (even more than they already are) which subsidy (to some degree) benefits everyone, including non-drivers, which seems like a weird and/or bad move to me.
    - arcticbull 3y ago
      Truck shipping has never made sense to me. It's significantly less fuel efficient than rail shipping, and paying people to just sit there and drive for their entire lives feels kinda torturous to me...
comte7092 3y ago
> Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. I don’t know how this is the fault of too little parking. Nothing excuses this type of behavior.
fzeroracer 3y ago
What neighborhoods, exactly? Parking minimums have been the de facto law for cities, it's only in the past decade that trend has been starting to be reversed in the US.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> if they drove themselves they’d never find a spot Rideshare. Also, this screams market opportunity for paid parking. (Unless, of course, the problem isn’t as consistently dramatic.)
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
My parents live in a residential, SFH neighborhood that's basically designated overflow parking for revelers. Especially during Pride Week, motorists will fill every street parking spot, only to stroll into the drunken debauchery, and then stagger back and attempt to locate their vehicles. They've also seen ZipCar type services where short-term rental vehicles are just abandoned. Once, I woke up to find a luxury Alfa Romeo sedan that had taken a joy-ride across the border and was abandoned in front of our place. The main street there dead-ends, and so the highest traffic is from lost motorists vainly attempting to hook up to the freeway. My parents jealously guard their prime parking spots, I mean insanely: they love to walk but if they need to tote cargo more than 1 yard out of the way, we never hear the end of their moaning, and I live hundreds of miles away. They participate in Neighborhood Watch and won't hesitate to get cars tagged, inspected and towed if someone tries to mess with their "public street parking" spots. (Recently renovated "garage" is full of junk.) As a holder of a driver's license who hasn't owned a car since 1997, I also never hear the end of their moaning about rude cyclists, oblivious pedestrians, City-sponsored transit lanes, or repainted roads to encourage sharing with pedestrians and multi-modal transport. Around here, most of the moaning and screaming is directed at light rail, without considering for a moment how it takes drunks and inept drivers off the road and completely out of their way.
0xfaded 3y ago
Unfortunately people will fight tooth and nail to maintain their existing expectations and will see public transit as a threat to their cars. You have to take away cars (parking) first so that they start demanding public transportation.
- FpUser 3y ago
  So you want to arm twist people to suit your agenda? It does not work this way. Personally I aways support and would vote for more public transport but not by forcing me to abandon my car. If that is the approach the only vote you'll get from me is fuck you. And I am a nicer guy who mostly uses EUC, bike and feet.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    Carrot vs stick is one of the most basis forms of influence. When the carrot doesn't work...
    - FpUser 3y ago
      It works both ways
  - LargeWu 3y ago
    Nobody is forcing you to abandon your car, you are just going start absorbing the true cost of the externalities (whether in tolls, taxes, inconvenience, etc). You can decide for yourself then whether using or owning a car is worth that.
    - FpUser 3y ago
      Sure. Foot me a bill since I am affecting other person's lives. Just make sure it is correct. Also do not forget to compensate me as I am affected by other people.
- chung8123 3y ago
  The problem with public transport is it serves too many masters. Is it a system to allow the disabled to get around? Is it a system to enable everyone in town to get around? Is it a commuting system? Should it be subsidized or revenue neutral? Trying to solve all these problems makes the public transport systems not work for any of them well.
tuna74 3y ago
The easy solution to this is to make (street) parking more expensive.
- chung8123 3y ago
  Street parking should have a price attached to it in my opinion. It is a public resource that should be charged for use everywhere, including out in front of your suburban home. We push these prices on everyone when it should be the people using them that pay.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Arguably property taxes, being the main way roads are funded in my city, pays for at least part of the access to the parking portion of those roads.

_dain_ 3y ago

It sounds like the parking was underpriced. EDIT I am rate-limited so can't reply, but this part: "If you have 200 cars" This is only the case if the demand for parking / driving is perfectly inelastic, which would be quite extraordinary. Empirically, when you charge for parking or institute toll roads, traffic tends to fall, in some cases sharply (because many journeys are low value). I repeat: if the parking spaces are still congested, the price should be raised until they're not. Assuming the number of cars would stay the same is like the lump-of-labour fallacy. Lump of metal fallacy? Then there's the supply side: guess what, that's not inelastic either! If it's profitable to provide parking, someone will build dedicated facilities for it and charge for their use. This may be an alien concept for some of you, but only because parking minimums cause such oversupply that they can't be run profitably. In cities where parking is priced sanely, it's unremarkable to see this. "Cars will just overflow into adjacent neighbourhoods" okay, so charge for parking there too, until they don't. Duh. I don't see why cars should get to sit somewhere rent-free but a human being can't. Urban land is valuable; if you want to occupy it, pay what it costs, ya fuckin welfare queens. my language is harsh but it's hard not to be when I see so many americans (it's always americans) confidently claiming that life is impossible without free parking. but I live in a city without free parking and things work just fine. I can literally just look out of my window and it disproves all the doomsaying. every commute and trip to the supermarket is uneventful and not ruined in the slightest by a lack of free parking. you pay for parking and it's fine. it's literally just fine. I went to virginia one time, I saw literal acres and acres and acres of empty parking space, oceans of asphalt; nobody seemed to think anything of it but I thought it was mad, like some kind of braindead economic allocation fuckup from a communist country that we'd all laugh about. I wanted to shout: you are being terraformed by asphalt-based lifeforms! why do I have to explain to americans how a free market price mechanism works? on a forum for people to shill their california startups? I shouldn't need to tell you this!

close04 3y ago
Raising the price would just extract more value for the owners from a very limited resource. But the resource stays just as limited. If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously. The overflow ends up clogging the surrounding neighborhoods, on top of the outcome described by OP. Edit. @pc86, both points you make are valid but neither addresses or fixes the problem being discussed. They are an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion.
- pc86 3y ago
  > Raising the price would just extract more value for the owners from a very limited resource. Yes. If you own a limited resource it's your right to make money from that. I know we like to pretend people making money from things they own is somehow evil but it's how all of civilization has been built and is an objectively good thing. > If you have 200 cars and 50 parking spaces there's no price point at which the 200 cars can park simultaneously. No, but is a point where 50 can park simultaneously and nobody who wants to park there and can afford to is denied that ability.
  - close04 3y ago
    Both points you made are valid but neither fixes or even touches on the problem being discussed: there are more cars than parking spots and this causes problems. The economic theory is an interesting, albeit completely parallel discussion. Price is just about who gets to have one. Effectively you'll still have 150 cars that cannot be parked next to the owners' residence, that get dumped on the street elsewhere probably in the next lower cost neighborhood, and with the additional issues OP mentioned. Put it another way, if you want to solve the housing crisis and I tell you "owners can set whatever price they want for the house to extract maximum value and nobody who can afford that will be denied the house" am I wrong? But did I solve the problem?
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > No, but is a point where 50 can park simultaneously and nobody who wants to park there and can afford to is denied that ability. That sucks for the people who are denied the ability to park there because they can't afford it though. Telling people that they need to walk miles to get to a doctor or a grocery store and that only the wealthy deserve to have access to 90% of the city doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

coldpie 3y ago

> Without readily available and reliable public transportation Cool. Let's do that, too!

oldpersonintx 3y ago

[dead]

ericmay 3y ago

> Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. People need to stop being shitty to each other. > Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build). I don't think this is fair. Fewer parking spaces might mean higher profits for developers on a per-unit basis, but I'd rather them make money and provide more additional housing units that are sorely needed, especially in cities, than build apartment complexes with garages or parking which then necessitate higher taxes and more public spending to support roads, car crashes, and other related externalities. "But public transit costs money too" yes, just redirect state highway department budgets to transit 1-1 and then you're not spending any more and getting higher ROI.

arcticbull 3y ago
Further, we should move to a model where the highways are paid entirely by usage fees (gas tax, tolls, etc) instead of subsidized. They're for the benefit of private operators, so the private operators should pay for them. The investments should be in public transit instead.
- wharvle 3y ago
  A great deal of highway spending is subsidizing truck shipping. Most of the damage done to highways comes from big trucks, and taxes on them don't come anywhere near paying for it. [EDIT] Incidentally, maybe we shouldn't subsidize truck shipping! But using usage taxes to pay for highways while not shifting the burden such that truck shipping is paying the lion's share of the cost and is no longer (so very much, at least) subsidized, would be making non-commercial drivers subsidize truck shipping (even more than they already are) which subsidy (to some degree) benefits everyone, including non-drivers, which seems like a weird and/or bad move to me.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    Truck shipping has never made sense to me. It's significantly less fuel efficient than rail shipping, and paying people to just sit there and drive for their entire lives feels kinda torturous to me...

comte7092 3y ago

> Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. I don’t know how this is the fault of too little parking. Nothing excuses this type of behavior.

fzeroracer 3y ago

What neighborhoods, exactly? Parking minimums have been the de facto law for cities, it's only in the past decade that trend has been starting to be reversed in the US.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> if they drove themselves they’d never find a spot Rideshare. Also, this screams market opportunity for paid parking. (Unless, of course, the problem isn’t as consistently dramatic.)

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

My parents live in a residential, SFH neighborhood that's basically designated overflow parking for revelers. Especially during Pride Week, motorists will fill every street parking spot, only to stroll into the drunken debauchery, and then stagger back and attempt to locate their vehicles. They've also seen ZipCar type services where short-term rental vehicles are just abandoned. Once, I woke up to find a luxury Alfa Romeo sedan that had taken a joy-ride across the border and was abandoned in front of our place. The main street there dead-ends, and so the highest traffic is from lost motorists vainly attempting to hook up to the freeway. My parents jealously guard their prime parking spots, I mean insanely: they love to walk but if they need to tote cargo more than 1 yard out of the way, we never hear the end of their moaning, and I live hundreds of miles away. They participate in Neighborhood Watch and won't hesitate to get cars tagged, inspected and towed if someone tries to mess with their "public street parking" spots. (Recently renovated "garage" is full of junk.) As a holder of a driver's license who hasn't owned a car since 1997, I also never hear the end of their moaning about rude cyclists, oblivious pedestrians, City-sponsored transit lanes, or repainted roads to encourage sharing with pedestrians and multi-modal transport. Around here, most of the moaning and screaming is directed at light rail, without considering for a moment how it takes drunks and inept drivers off the road and completely out of their way.

0xfaded 3y ago

Unfortunately people will fight tooth and nail to maintain their existing expectations and will see public transit as a threat to their cars. You have to take away cars (parking) first so that they start demanding public transportation.

FpUser 3y ago
So you want to arm twist people to suit your agenda? It does not work this way. Personally I aways support and would vote for more public transport but not by forcing me to abandon my car. If that is the approach the only vote you'll get from me is fuck you. And I am a nicer guy who mostly uses EUC, bike and feet.
- brewdad 3y ago
  Carrot vs stick is one of the most basis forms of influence. When the carrot doesn't work...
  - FpUser 3y ago
    It works both ways
- LargeWu 3y ago
  Nobody is forcing you to abandon your car, you are just going start absorbing the true cost of the externalities (whether in tolls, taxes, inconvenience, etc). You can decide for yourself then whether using or owning a car is worth that.
  - FpUser 3y ago
    Sure. Foot me a bill since I am affecting other person's lives. Just make sure it is correct. Also do not forget to compensate me as I am affected by other people.
chung8123 3y ago
The problem with public transport is it serves too many masters. Is it a system to allow the disabled to get around? Is it a system to enable everyone in town to get around? Is it a commuting system? Should it be subsidized or revenue neutral? Trying to solve all these problems makes the public transport systems not work for any of them well.

tuna74 3y ago

The easy solution to this is to make (street) parking more expensive.

chung8123 3y ago
Street parking should have a price attached to it in my opinion. It is a public resource that should be charged for use everywhere, including out in front of your suburban home. We push these prices on everyone when it should be the people using them that pay.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Arguably property taxes, being the main way roads are funded in my city, pays for at least part of the access to the parking portion of those roads.