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Article's recommendation is just another meaningless tug in the tug-of-war over parking. Conspicuously unmentioned is the public pressure to deal with "you have

• guestbest 3y ago
  Just put the children in a pod and send them home through a pneumatic tube
  • smeej 3y ago
    It looks like you're getting downvotes, but most kids would think this was an awesome way to get to school!
• mwkaufma 3y ago
  FWIW, there's no parking requirements for schools where I live and the effect is giant traffic jams on the roads outside schools during pickup hour. Hardly more "family friendly."
  • awkward 3y ago
    How would parking requirements solve that? Would parents drive to the school and then leave the car with their preschoolers?
    • mwkaufma 3y ago
      In the burbs where I grew up, there were huge school lots so cars waiting for pickup didn't overflow onto the road.
      • SteveNuts 3y ago
        That seems like a huge waste of space for the 99% of time it's not being used?
        • taeric 3y ago
          In a very real sense, you just described housing, as well. And, really, many functional specs for anything. Your car, for example, has a ton of money and engineering put into it solely for the case of a crash. Heck, if you own a car, period, you spend far more time out of it than you do in.
          • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
            > In a very real sense, you just described housing, as well. But as a result of land use regulations. Historically it has been common for a family-owned business to have a shop on the first floor and living space for the family on the second. Then you, one, don't have to commute, and two, don't have to duplicate things like parking, kitchen/lunchroom, bathrooms, etc. But then we prohibit this through land use and make everything worse.
            • taeric 3y ago
              I wasn't intending my comment as anti-housing. More pointing out that "unused for most of the time" is a somewhat useless metric. Though, I am curious on your claim. I agree that feels like a common thing that almost certainly has happened. I am curious on how common it truly was? Yes, we have some overly restrictive rules nowadays. I agree with that. I am less open to believing that large percentages of families lived the way you are describing. Do you have numbers on it?
              • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
                Numbers only mean something in a context. Doing that is more efficient, but at the cost that if you change jobs you also have to move. So it tends not to happen unless either real estate costs are high (i.e. towns/cities) or employees are pressured into it for the efficiency benefit of a large employer (company towns). But the problem we have right now is that real estate costs are high, so many people would be willing to take the trade off if it was available. And in doing so would help to alleviate the high costs even for the people who don't, by reducing duplication and effectively increasing supply. "Unused most of the time" isn't a useless metric. It's possible to make higher use, and prohibiting that use is foolish when demand outstrips supply. Other times the cost of the inefficiency is worth it, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant or indistinguishable, it's just a trade off against something else. And even then there is no justification to prohibit it, because there is no need to prohibit someone from doing something they wouldn't have chosen to do anyway.
  • Lance_ET_Compte 3y ago
    Why are you DRIVING your children to school? If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school. I am so happy that I was able to walk with my son to/from his elementary school (and kindergarten) every day! It was consistently the highlight of my day!
    • mwkaufma 3y ago
      If you live somewhere hostile to walking, like Los Angeles, that's not an option. You're describing living somewhere that's already solved the car-oriented urban-hellscape problem a priori.
    • antiframe 3y ago
      > If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school. I think that depends on where you live. In my neighborhood, we do walk to school. But, that's certainly not possible in every neighborhood. I have friends that live near stroads of fast-moving & distracted vehicles. They don't walk to school, understandably so.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • testudovictoria 3y ago
      I don't live in the city. Aside from not being able to walk to school, mine would have to wake up roughly 45 minutes earlier (60 minutes if we want to be safe) to catch the bus. We are about 8 minutes from the school via car. Between the lack of housing density and ugly school zoning, taking the bus cuts significantly into their sleep.
      • brewdad 3y ago
        I had the same setup growing up. Lived about 3 miles from school but was one of the first stops on a 45 minute bus route through largely rural areas. I got a lot of reading done. Your kid won't be harmed by sitting on a bus every day.
  • two_handfuls 3y ago
    That seems better to me than paving a big parking lot just for the short time kids are dropped off. Plus this way we don’t subsidize those who drive at the expense of those who don’t.
    • mwkaufma 3y ago
      The schools are not located in places that have walking access, so that's a "subsidy" unavailable to anyone.
      • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > schools are not located in places that have walking access Busses.
        • taeric 3y ago
          And just don't ever have events at the school for families to go to? Or are we talking not just "school busses" at this point? I'm all for public transit. Is a heavy lift for a lot of urban locations, though. And certainly not in the budget control of most schools.
          • brewdad 3y ago
            My kid's middle school had a small lot for staff and about a dozen additional spaces. Overflow parking was on the street. Zero need for a giant parking lot. If grandma can't walk the two blocks, then drop her off closer. Everyone else is less than 5 minutes from the school the handful of times a year there was a schoolwide event. The high school had a giant parking lot but it was completely filled with student's cars and had a waitlist for permits.
            • taeric 3y ago
              The schools I remember from denser city living would have had you parking far more than 2 blocks away. Sadly, there was also a fair bit of crime not far away, either. :( Some of the schools I remember, had neighborhoods that would get swamped with people parking all over the street. Many of the locals would get rather annoyed with it. Thankfully, this wasn't that common. Even in the rural districts I'm in, now, there is no legal parking for many blocks around. Thankfully, nobody cares and the street becomes the overflow parking. Note, I am not complaining on this. I like that nobody gets into a fuss over the few times a year people park on the street like crazy.
  • dublinben 3y ago
    This wasn't a problem when students rode school busses instead of being individually chauffeured. Alternatively, Paris solved this problem by closing the nearby streets to cars, so the students can safely walk to school.
    • mwkaufma 3y ago
      The busses aren't running because our spendthrift government "cut spending" to enable property tax cuts. This is a big unspoken part of the charter-school transition.
    • Jach 3y ago
      How far back are you going? It was a problem in the 90s and early 2000s, even with multiple buses. It doesn't take very many parents to pick up or drop off at once to create a traffic jam. What amazed me was how many parents just accepted the jam instead of dropping off or picking up about a block away.
  • occz 3y ago
    Pickup hour is a concept that does not exist in countries with reasonable urban planning. It's self-inflicted harm.
    • mwkaufma 3y ago
      No disagreement here, but the question is how to escape the world we're in, not just dismiss it as someone-else's-problem.
      • davidw 3y ago
        By eliminating parking requirements. You can't make meaningful progress on other things while continuing to force one mode of transportation on everyone.
      • badwolf 3y ago
        Schoolbusses are one option to mitigate this specific issue...
      • jellicle 3y ago
        Just... stop self-inflicting? Double school bus spending, ban parental pickup or drop off, organize walking school buses for closer kids, give out free child transit passes... poof! The morning and afternoon traffic jams go away.
        • MichaelZuo 3y ago
          > ban parental pickup or drop off Have you never attended a school board meeting? Even if you had a hundred times more influence in this world and spent the rest of your life focused solely on this goal, I wouldn’t wager higher than 50/50 odds for actually implementing this in the typical school district, for more than a few weeks.
        • cafard 3y ago
          But the swim team practices at 6 am, the football practice runs until 5 pm, and band kids have to be back at school at 6:30 for a 7:30 concert.
  • seszett 3y ago
    In my place (a large city in Europe) there is no parking for schools and only a handful of parents sometimes come with cars, presumably because they drive on to their workplace afterwards. Most people by far come on foot, the rest with bicycles (in my case, for some reasons we didn't pick the school closest to us so it's about 5 minutes away by bike, 15 minutes by foot). In my home country (more car-centric, but still in Europe) many cities now close the school streets to cars during drop off and pickup hours. I'm thinking maybe your place has much fewer but larger schools, so people cannot simply come by foot to the school. It's economically more efficient, but I don't think it's better for the children.
    • mwkaufma 3y ago
      In our region of the US, charter schools have come in and fucked up the whole process so we can't even make those kinds of reasonable municipal policy choices.
      • seszett 3y ago
        I think here in Belgium private schools are just a bit more common than public schools (56% private from a quick Google search) but I don't think they are very different. (although in my opinion the very existence of private schools is weird, as they're not that common where I come from). Why would they affect anything in particular? Here I think they are slightly fewer, so spaced further apart and larger than public schools, but not by a very much. They are not totally independent though (no schools are, even the really private ones that don't receive any subsidies, like the French school around here, they still have to teach mostly the same things as the others).
  • smeej 3y ago
    How does parking fix this, though? The same number of cars need to arrive and leave at approximately the same time. Each car takes up the same amount of space. And it's not like children can all just run around the parking lot looking for their own parent's car, which is almost certainly in a different place than it was at drop-off, never mind the danger of having a parking lot full of lost children wandering around.
    • r00fus 3y ago
      Schools can stagger end times for various grades or subpopulations. My high school kid has this going on. Pickup is a non-issue.
    • taeric 3y ago
      Since you aren't expecting that many cars to be parked, necessarily, you can take advantage of the parking lot to provide a queuing area for the cars that are showing up. Yes, you probably want it done in such a way that cars can, in fact, also park during events. But it doesn't have to be a fixed configuration lot.
    • SkyPuncher 3y ago
      Larger parking lots collect the queue with them.
• mlavrent 3y ago
  There's a difference between parking mandates versus parking built at the developer's discretion. Parking mandates (what the article talks about) are onerous because they force the developer to build more parking they potentially would have otherwise (based on a rational assessment of the opportunity cost of the space parking uses vs. the benefit to their business). I think few people would argue against allowing developers to build as much parking as they want - but I think many would be surprised to find that developers in urban areas don't generally want to build as much parking as is mandated by the zoning requirements, since they assess that many people don't arrive in cars, so the benefit parking provides is less than the cost of it.
  • mistrial9 3y ago
    > developers in urban areas don't generally want to build as much parking as is mandated by the zoning requirements if you stop right there, your statement is far more credible
  • para_parolu 3y ago
    Remember living in 110 app building with zero parking. Wasn’t fun.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Remember living in 110 app building with zero parking. Wasn’t fun. Isn't the clear implication you shouldn't own a car?
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • davidw 3y ago
      So why did you live there instead of a place with a parking spot?
    • smegger001 3y ago
      Been there done that. with the added twist that all the parking lots were city owned and required a parking permit, of which there were a limited number, to get one of the limited number of permits you had to get on a waiting list by filing a form in person a city hall and then wait and hope someone let theirs lapse. eventually got a call about one after a few years when already planing to move. in the mean time had to park on the street about four blocks away as anything closer was 2 hour parking. Similar story with my home towns community college, where they had a habit of building new buildings on what used to be parking lots but refused for years to build new lots and when asked by the student counsel to build a parking structure the college president refused to consider it. I suspect if he hadn't had a had a reserved parking spot less the 30 yards from his office door his tune might have been different.
• kyawzazaw 3y ago
  Isn't that point of having car parking requirements is equal to car-oriented urban planning?
• ipaddr 3y ago
  Or overpopulated cities. Cities can be too large.
  • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Or overpopulated cities. Cities can be too large. There is zero evidence any city in America is even close to this point. We're still on the beneficial end of densification: marginal increases in density improve outcomes on practically every metric.
    • pishpash 3y ago
      What evidence do you need? NYC and Boston smelling like sewer in the summer is enough for me.
      • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > What evidence do you need? NYC and Boston smelling like sewer in the summer is enough for me Case in point: the densest parts of Manhattan don't smell. (Minus trash days.) Neither do Paris, Tokyo or Seoul.
        • pishpash 3y ago
          That's olfactory adaptation.
      • brewdad 3y ago
        Good thing that farm near my subdivision growing up never smelled. That would have been awful. Hint: It did smell. Every spring and a few other times each summer.
    • ipaddr 3y ago
      Zero evidence noise pollution affects health?
      • 3y ago
• pishpash 3y ago
  Stupid title, land use policies make everything that uses land expensive. I can assure you childcare being expensive is not bottlenecked by land, but by caretaker's wage levels driven by the fact that they need to rent in the same expensive location. It's equally expensive to hire someone into your home without the need of any extra land, but much less expensive if they live in.
  • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Which is still land use regulations making childcare more expensive. Otherwise the daycare solves the problem by providing an on-site apartment for its employees.
  • hollywood_court 3y ago
    Learning about the wages paid at my son’s daycare was the main motivation for my wife and I to keep him at home for the 18 months before he was old enough for pre-k. The teachers at his daycare were paid about 30% of the living wage required to live in our town. They were all driving from at least an hour away for the opportunity to earn a non living wage. There is no way I could reasonably expect any of them to be concerned with my child’s well being when they could even afford their own lives.