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Parking lots as economic drains
- rimbo789 9mo agoCars, and in particular, parking, kills cities. Parking is sponge that sucks all the life out of places. The High Cost of Free Parking is an incredible book that shows exactly how awful parking has been for society.
- okr 9mo agoNot in my city. Business is all dying, everyone avoids to go to the centre, everywhere the city fights cars, handy man charge extra just for comings, nah, it's basically gated communities now, well, they can have it, but life happens somewhere else then, where it can expand freely.
- starsep 9mo agoWhat is your city? What anti-car policies were implemented? Did city offer viable altenatives to driving?
- rimbo789 9mo agoCars do not allow life to happen or expand freely. Cars are prison, trapping people and communities in congestion. Cars are very very very dangerous devices.
- danny_codes 9mo agoWhere do you live? I’ve never found a counterexample to the benefits of de-car-ing, would love to learn more
- xakumazx 9mo agoMakes a bold claim without stating the city.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo ago> Cars, and in particular, parking, kills cities. Parking is sponge that sucks all the life out of places. What's your solution to it then?
- Night_Thastus 9mo agoMixed-use developments, walkable neighborhoods. When you make it easy to walk or bike to any place people need to go, parking is not necessary. Plenty of cities do it just fine, just not in the US. Then invest in public transit (trains, mainly) for whatever isn't within walking distance.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo agoOkay, so cities that are only accessible to people who live there? It would be better to just get rid of cities. They're a drain on resources that we can't afford.
- Night_Thastus 9mo agoI think you'll find that the cities that do this manage to have travelers from other areas just fine.
- rimbo789 9mo agoIf you built for cars you get traffic and congestion: if you built for people (transit, bike lanes, pedestrianization) you will get community Also ban free parking
- N_Lens 9mo agoJapanese cities have extensive train networks making it easy, quick and cheap to get around. Most people living in Tokyo or other major Japanese cities don’t own cars. This makes the cities much more liveable and community oriented.
- b0rtb0rt 9mo ago
- tristor 9mo ago> Cars, and in particular, parking, kills cities. Parking is sponge that sucks all the life out of places. Yes, and. If you start charging for parking to try to fight against this without also improving public transportation, it just kills cities faster. I avoid going into downtown cores where I will pay $25-$40 to park for an hour or two to eat at a restaurant, which means those restaurants can only support their businesses off captive people during the work day, which means that moving to remote work widely across society devastated downtown cores in a way you would not have expected. All because I can get downtown in 15 minutes from my house in my car but it takes 3 hours and 20 minutes by bus and there is no other public transport in the 7th largest city in the US by population. Cars are the enemy, sort of, but the biggest enemy is the complete lack of any reasonable public transport in almost every major US city, which needs to exist to fairly ratchet up on parking.
- chrisjj 9mo ago> exactly how awful parking has been for society. Not parking would be worse. Just think of the injuries from jumping from moving vehicles.
- fwip 9mo agoRelated: there's currently a bill in the NYS legislature which would allow cities to switch partly to a land-value tax. This is a pretty good local article about it: https://centralcurrent.org/how-a-state-bill-with-support-from-sen-rachel-may-could-reshape-property-taxes-in-syracuse-and-spur-development/ https://centralcurrent.org/how-a-state-bill-with-support-fro...
- danny_codes 9mo agoAmazing. That would be an astonishing win for sane people
- bryanlarsen 9mo agoParking minimums prevent developers from free-loading on a commons, that commons being street parking. So eliminating parking minimums by themselves will create nasty side effects. But of course the correct answer to tragedy of the commons is pricing -- price the street parking appropriately and it won't be abused so you won't need worse solutions like parking minimums.
- twelvechairs 9mo agoOr just do what the Japanese do - remove unlimited (and overnight) on-street parking in urban areas and require anyone owning a car to prove they have a private parking spot to house it
- stronglikedan 9mo agoThat's pretty drastic, and would probably only be the best alternative on a densely packed island. Seems like overkill for any other situation.
- seanmcdirmid 9mo agoPrice parking appropriately and make people pay for it. If land is cheap, parking is cheap, so not a big deal. If land is expensive, then no freeloading on the streets, which can be put to better use anyways (sidewalks, bike lanes, outdoor cafes etc...)
- blell 9mo agoWhat do you mean freeloading? Do you know how many taxes do you pay to have a vehicle, gas, etc?
- bryanlarsen 9mo agoYou perhaps pay tens of dollars per month. Is that enough to fully cover all externalized costs of owning that vehicle? No.
- advisedwang 9mo agoI enjoy the image [1] circling parking lots to show the land wasted right next to maybe 2x as much land consumed by a highway. [1] https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/2f217632-e141-4acb-8fcc-cb6a4e402708_1600x958.png https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/2...
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoSolar panels is the answer. It keeps the people dry in the rain and the power can go right back to the city. Yes, it's not possible for all lots. For a vast majority of them, it's a net win.
- spankalee 9mo agoSolar panels do not solve the problem of parking lots being community dead zones. You can put solar panels on anything - it'd be better if it were housing, a store, a pub, etc. than a parking lot.
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoWalmart allows overnight campers on their lots. Add free power and you get a pop-up community.
- spankalee 9mo agoThere are almost no Walmarts in urban centers.
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoIs that a joke? There's literally thousands of Walmarts in cities. https://mapstack.io/map/VkEPZb/map-of-walmart-supercenter-locations-us https://mapstack.io/map/VkEPZb/map-of-walmart-supercenter-lo... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MY89q9pnrS-rB8t6Df4TuWZhdtRMkdTnYVbjZnDMpjQ/edit#gid=1468117388 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MY89q9pnrS-rB8t6Df4T...
- alamortsubite 9mo agoIf you stretch the definition of a "city" to include its suburbs, sure, but that's outside the context of TFA. There are no Walmarts in Syracuse, for example. There's one nearby, but not in the city. Adding solar to suburban lots is surely a win, but we're talking about urban lots here.
- davidrhunt 9mo agoThis is called out in the article as well but you're always welcome to join the party at https://parkingreform.org https://parkingreform.org It's a great group of advocates that are making impactful changes across the US and internationally.
- imoverclocked 9mo agoThis article goes too far and yet not far enough. By trying to build more buildings that increase parking in yet smaller footprints and then charge for the added expense of all of that, why not just eliminate cars in these districts altogether. Park outside of the city, walk/bike/scooter/mass-transit within the city. Now you aren't trying to extract value from the simple act of wanting to exist in a space leaving more value to core economic goods and services. We need to attack The Modern Moloch (99pi).
- okr 9mo agoIt is not convenient. It's freezing cold and icy, no walk, no bike, no scooter. Use mass-transit, sure, when you don't care about your life, when it's working, when it's coming regularly, when i don't have to exchange stations, but still, walking from home to a station and back, nah, it all sucks. Imagining sitting in a cosy, warm pod, driving in a tunnel autonomously, point to point, and you have my vote.
- antisthenes 9mo agoThat giant 5-level parking lot monstrocity could be a transport hub instead that has a warm metro stop, much better lighting and safety and perhaps even some light convenience retail. > Imagining sitting in a cosy, warm pod, driving in a tunnel autonomously, point to point, and you have my vote. They already have this. It's called a metro.
- rimbo789 9mo agoCars aren’t remotely cozy. They are incredibly stressful to drive, are a huge cost, and are dangerous to those inside and out. Every complain about public transit being unsafe is twice as true about cars
- okr 9mo agoNope. The first thing i do in the warm car, is to turn the music on, making a stop at my favourite coffee shop and then i hit the road, humming my favourite songs. I barely drive anyways, its all automatic. In mass-transit facilities all the people look at their screens, using headphones, waiting to be coughed on, scared to be not talked to, anxiety all around. Nope, not for me. Never looking into a dirty public toilet again, while the society yells: "but its free!". Progress, folx, not regress. Come out of your bubbles, ignore the voices, that tell ya, hundreds of human bodies efficiently transported in an iron can is progress! Live! Expand! Use everything!
- qq66 9mo agoMaybe surface parking lots aren't the answer, but I do know that if there are places that I can't easily park at, I just don't go there unless absolutely necessary. Nice to think, "the people will take trains!" but sometimes it doesn't work that way.
- CalRobert 9mo agoYou might not go there, but the people who live in the homes you build where the parking garage used to be will go there.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- qq66 9mo agoSure, removing parking essentially requires the neighborhood to become more self-sustaining. This works in really dense cities like New York and San Francisco but it requires enough desirability to fill the housing with people who have enough disposable income to replace the far bigger "catchment area" that the parking used to serve. Which in turn affects the kind of economies that the new development can support. A car dealership? Needs parking and a large catchment area. Burrito shop? Probably not getting much destination traffic and can support itself on locals.
- bluGill 9mo agoThose people may not be enough to support them. Cars take up space, but houses take up even more space. It is really easy for a Downtown to go into a downward spiral if you take away the ability of people to get there. It need not happen, but all too often simple answers are wrong.
- CalRobert 9mo agoSure, but this is why it makes sense to do it gradually. Things get built slowly and if the new buildings are taller they may actually take up less space (per person) than a car does, when considering ingress, egress, the road itself, etc.
- jessecurry 9mo agoThis is such a terrifying vision of the proper scope of government. We shouldn't use government to hurt people, and making someone's property too expensive to continue owning is definitely hurting them. If you're really concerned with surface parking push the government to stop making it so expensive for companies to develop self-driving technology or to offer transportation services. If it's easier and less expensive for individuals to use transportation that they don't need to park anywhere the need for surface lots vanishes and those owning the property will look for something else to do with it.
- Ajedi32 9mo ago> those owning the property will look for something else to do with it Not if there's a law mandating they maintain a certain amount of parking. Eliminating such laws is part of what the article is advocating for. Other than that I agree.
- jakelazaroff 9mo ago> We shouldn't use government to hurt people, and making someone's property too expensive to continue owning is definitely hurting them. But we are using government to hurt people — we are incentivizing (or worse, requiring) land owners to harm the surrounding community by not developing their property. A land value tax would simply shift some of the cost that is already burdening the rest of the community onto the unproductive property owners.
- fwip 9mo agoSo, the thing here, is that the property you're worried about is the guy who owns a parking lot, and not the people who are being overcharged on their personal homes to subsidize mister-surface-parking.
- danny_codes 9mo ago“Overcharged” relative to what? Certainly not to land value, unless you live in a truly undesirable location
- hamdingers 9mo ago
- Ajedi32 9mo agoParking maximums would be just as stupid as parking minimums. Instead of oversupply with inefficient use of space you'll get under supply with businesses starved of customers who can't find a convenient parking space. Let the market decide how much parking is needed. It'll do a much better job than you ever could.
- ramblurr 9mo agoNary a mention of parking garages / underground parking? Austrian cities have way more parking than one would expect, but it's nearly all underground and costs € The benefits are huge, you have have dense commerical areas where you drive in, park underground, pay for some hours, then walk between the shops to do all your business.
- miltonlost 9mo ago> Nary a mention of parking garages / underground parking? Yes, they're mentioned in the article. You clearly only checked out the title.
- bluGill 9mo agoIf you don't like parking you need to start with cars: give people a reasonable alternative. Too many are looking at this from a standpoint of "lets just get rid of parking" - without asking what people will do instead. All too often the answer is they will drive someplace in the suburbs instead where they get free parking. If you want your downtowns to not have parking you need an alternative. In most cases that means you need to improve your transit in the entire city so people can get there.
- pclmulqdq 9mo agoMany cities that have a dense core will have big municipal lots and garages to enable people to park somewhere they can walk from. Of course, the first thing urbanists go after is the presence of these lots in "high-value" real estate.
- hamdingers 9mo agoIt's a chicken and egg problem. If you retain the parking but build transit, people will keep doing what they've always done. Partly because people are resistant to change, partly because the areas you can take transit to are still mostly parking lots. Places like Los Angeles are grappling with 30+ years of investing in transit with minimal changes in modeshare, because they continued investing in automobility at the same rate. The carrot is great, but we need the stick too.
- bluGill 9mo agoIt takes decades for good transit to change habbits. Others have written about mistakes LA has made on the way, but still transit is making a difference even if small.
- magarnicle 9mo agoI think you have to start a step back from cars: the people buying them. At least where I live having a large (and getting larger) 4wd seems to be a source of identity for them, and integral to their lifestyle.
- tdeck 9mo ago
- clickety_clack 9mo agoI lived in Vancouver for years, near the downtown, near the SkyTrain and it was amazing. Back then I thought I would never live anywhere but the downtown of a city. But, you know what, life changes. I know there’s hardcore folks out there who will cycle miles with their kids, or take them on transit, or even live with them in a 2 bedroom downtown apartment, but it is just too hard to live that way for many people. With a family, most people need more space, and they need to be able to get from their suburban home to some kind of shopping or work, in minimum time so that they can both take care of kids, maintain a career, and have a glimpse of a life for themselves. We don’t need to have surface lots right in the middle of every downtown, but there needs to be somewhere for people to park.
- stronglikedan 9mo agoHeck, I'm happy just parking close enough to walk to a downtown area, so parking doesn't necessarily have to be in the middle for me to use it, but there's no way I'm taking public transport to get close enough.
- webdood90 9mo agoJust sounds absolutely miserable to prioritize that way of living that is so car dependent. So many negatives come from it: - pollution - traffic deaths - heat generation from all the infra - inefficient use of space - ugly aesthetic of strip malls and parking lots It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better to build diverse housing in our cities, leverage space at the ground level for businesses, invest in our transit to make it safer and more convenient. Instead we just go with what's easy and continue to build roads and sprawl.
- bgnn 9mo agoSome European cities have car-free city centers. I live in one, which serves as the shopping center of roughly 1 million people living in the suburbs. If you want to shop in the city you need to park in one of the big underground parking lots and pay sth like more than 10 Euros/hour. Alternatively you can park just outside the city at a park & ride spot for 10 Euros/day and take the public transport included in the parking price. It's inconvenient for people, yes. It was inconvenient to drive and park in the narrow streets of a medieval city too. This is unfortunately not easy to implement in North America, as the cities are relatively new. What we have feels very privileged.
- dbvn 9mo ago"That is, how much value a parcel creates for the community compared to how much value it consumes simply by existing as land. Think of it like this: Net Contribution=(Economic Output in $)−(Land Value in $)" This calculation is shady. Land value fluctuates and already "bakes in" the predicted economic output... but multiplied across decades. Not to mention, land doesn't consume value by existing. the value never goes anywhere. Its opportunity cost, not a decrease in actual value. Yes, there is value "missed out on", but it hasn't been destroyed. Because it never existed. And that value wouldn't have appeared out of nowhere. it would've required using up other resources that the parking lot wasn't.
- jrowen 9mo agoI was also unconvinced by that hand-wavy analysis. Basically, "parking is negative value because I don't like it, look at this graph I made up." In the US most places that aren't already highly urbanized are based on car culture. The culture isn't going to magically shift to transit if you take away parking, people will just complain and go elsewhere. The article also completely abandons this angle later when it acknowledges that parking can be financially acceptable for the land owners. It also acknowledges that municipally mandated parking isn't the issue either. How many parcels in e.g. downtown Syracuse are just vacant? That represents a much lower value than surface parking. I definitely agree that parking in garages and integrated into buildings is much better but if you're unsatisfied with your downtown area I don't think targeting parking lots is the place to start. The real question is why don't people believe they can get more value out of it with further development? It's a little chicken-and-egg but you have to make the downtown a desirable place for those investments.
- legitster 9mo agoI cannot recommend this Road Guy Rob video enough: https://youtu.be/K1TFOK4_07s?si=IwCK4sxVgw5Konu4 https://youtu.be/K1TFOK4_07s?si=IwCK4sxVgw5Konu4 TL;DW: The difference in tax revenue between a surface parking lot and a business with subterranean parking is so vast, that cities can justify using value to underwrite the loans necessary for developers to do the work. (Called "Tax Increment Financing") This model is proving extremely successful with cities that try taking it on.
- alamortsubite 9mo agoI have a hard time with Road Guy Rob's style, but that's a great video. Thanks.
- trgn 9mo agoi live in one of these cities and it's impossible to explain.
- bryan_w 9mo agoI currently live in a downtown area, and "walkable city" policies like this is why I'm going to move to a big open suburb when my lease is up. It makes life much more of a hassle, especially in cold weather.
- xvokcarts 9mo agoBuild it underground if feasible, or build a parking garage with high-economic-contribution units in upper floors.
- pjdesno 9mo agoCambridge MA was rezoned in the mid-20th century to suburban standards, in a city where land in a mid-range neighborhood now costs $350-$400 per square foot. Besides putting in floor area ratio requirements that required most of the existing housing to be grandfathered, they added a requirement of one parking spot per unit. If it's a traditional 1-car driveway that's about $70K worth of land, although in the end it's zero-sum because it takes away an on-street spot. Parking garages for larger developments probably cost as much or more per parking space - they use less land, but they're expensive to build. It's insane, and they're trying to fix it, and approving special permits left and right to omit the spots.
- cucumber3732842 9mo agoSo basically they basically took everyone's property rights for 50yr and now then give them back at the government's pleasure. Now, I know nobody not rich enough to play the game owns land in Cambridge, but even the something tells me the guy who had a Trump 2024 sign on his garage, the guy who owns a business that's at odds with the city, something tells me their permits require the most $1-10k engineering expenses, lawyers fees, etc, etc, to get approved.
- einpoklum 9mo ago> How can we get less parking lots? Switch from a culture of car use to walking, biking and public transport (buses, trams, light rail). And if people outside the city are coming in by car - let them park outside the town center and continue with public transport from there (while public transport is developed further afield; after that they would only drive their cars as far as the nearest train station, or even bike there).
- chrisjj 9mo agoI first thought this was a joke. E.g. > in economic terms, a parking lot doesn’t simply fail to add value; it actively subtracts value. Every year it sits idle Idle. Cars park on it, right? But no, it is sincere.
- danny_codes 9mo agoHe means that if you built something more useful on the land, it would increase that lands value but also the value of the land around it.
- chrisjj 9mo agoThat doesn't mean it subtracts value. Or that it is idle. What you've described is quite different. It is opportunity cost. If that is what he's thinking then he should say it... except such clarity would support scrunity that his conclusions might not withstand.
- eudamoniac 9mo agoHere's the thing - if I can't easily park somewhere, I won't go there. There is no public transit, but even if there was, I am not going to use it if it's anything like the NYC subway. You have to solve the problem of mentally ill people causing problems on the public transit, socially ill people blasting music from a bluetooth speaker, etc before anyone I know would ever consider using the public transit. It's just so much less pleasant than driving. In effect, reducing parking reduces economic activity. Even if you increase public transit use, those users are overwhelmingly poor and don't contribute greatly to the economic activity where they go.
- phkahler 9mo ago>> Our property tax policy punishes buildings and does not inflict enough cost on underutilized land. The result is a system that rewards holding valuable sites idle while penalizing those who invest, build, and contribute to the city’s productivity. This is the exact reasoning for cutting taxes on the rich and let the upper middle class pay the highest percentages. Maybe the family who has owned that lot for 80 years doesnt have the money to upgrade it for the "highest and best use" by someone else's standards, but the revenue allows them to live a little better. I've never understood why constant growth is so often a priority. The world is headed for population decline so governments better figure out how to shrink instead of growing. Im not against city planning, but this whole piece stinks of telling people what to do.
- danny_codes 9mo agoGeorgism separates land (and other natural resources) from capital. It doesn’t comment on income distribution, though such a separation seems highly likely to reduce inequality. Nor does Georgism care about growth. Socializing natural resources is orthogonal to growth or de-growth.
- metalman 9mo agolooking at the pictures.....Syracuse looks a lot like my home town... did, old buildings, low rise high rise, muddled look, sortof stuck, was a good place till the land bankers bought up stuff and waited, and now Halifax ,NS is the second fastest growing city in NA, and there is a forest of cranes and older sections of town are under the wrecking ball, 9 billion $ hospital going up, and some days my phone blows up for no particular reason, other than I suppose, everyone else has stopped answering there's. I have no idea what all the many tens of thousands of new residents are going to do, but here they are re-building my home town into a mini megalopolis. So, the comonality is the land banking parking lots, literaly, parking money, as an asset, that will beat holding costs and inflation, untill, BOOM! The secondary type is to by up lots, right at highway exits within 30 min circle of an area like this, cant loose.