An End to Parking?
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
...Amsterdam?
> Take New York City, where there are roughly 102,000 public parking spaces below 60th Street—taking up roughly 18.4 million square feet, a space equal to about half of Central Park.
> "San Francisco is going bananas for new housing, and Manhattan is always looking for space, and here we have this sitting in front of us," Samaras says. "That's what autonomous vehicles can do."
You don't actually ned autonomous cars to do this. Just get rid of the parking (or, start charging market rate for it, and use the money to fund transit).
There is an MTA trunk line on almost every avenue, and I'd argue that the ones without subway lines, as well as the major crosstown streets, should be turned into Portland Transit Malls. Enough with being nice to people that drive personal cars into Manhattan.
Might as well get rid of the people too while you are at it.
You do know there are real, actual, humans that use those parking spots right? It's not like the car needs the spot. A person needs the spot.
The goal of a city is to provide services for the PEOPLE. One of those services is parking, because PEOPLE need to park.
> Enough with being nice to people that drive personal cars into Manhattan.
Yes, definitely, kick all the people out. Who needs them, right?
For some of the population, cars probably are a necessity; commuting may not always have a convenient transit option into the city and as such these people have a legitimate need. What the article, and likely the commenter, are suggesting, is that the "need" for parking is a result of a want for cars, not a need for cars, and the article is suggesting the trend is reversing. I think the commenter is suggesting is that it's time to start discouraging those who would take a car when they really don't need to, especially in high density urban populations with substantial public transit presence, and that with an alternative on the horizon, it's time for cities to start reclaiming space that was formerly given to parking.
Tangential to this response, I am pretty glad to see that the article takes a more realistic look at the future with self-driving cars. I have been reading comments and articles for a long time where people envision "their" self-driving car, but I've always thought it far more practical to have fleets of these cars instead that are summoned rather than owned by an individual.
So I was mocking the idea that making things harder for people who already have no choice about driving is a good idea.
It's not.
You want less cars? Then make the alternatives better, people will automatically drive less. To try to change things from the other end is just a way to torment your fellow man.
It is in fact the case that if you take your child and toss them into the middle of the pool, you do force them to either sink or swim. But that isn't the same thing as actually getting them to swim.
What about New York makes it so different that driving is an absolute necessity as opposed to say, London? And what creates the need for ownership as opposed to a fleet of automated cars handling the movement around the city? I can envision how a car might be important for occasional living errands, like groceries, etc., but car ownership as a need? Could not the majority of New Yorker needs be filled by either street services like Car2Go/Zipcar or by a fleet of summonable self-driving cars?
New York attracts workers from all over, many from places without trains etc.
London is also jam packed, I'm not sure it's any different.
There's no reason that the preparation can't start happening sooner, especially since an intermediary step towards self-driving cars exists and that's car share fleets.
The whole point of self-driving cars is less about the tech itself and more about the cultural shift that it permits. Parts of that shift can be happening now - the problems with parking, congestion, costs of road maintenance, car accidents, and everything can be addressed and affected now.
The proposed changes work just as well for a fleet of shared cars as they do for self-driving.
London's population density is far less than that of NYC, with London having nearly twice the total area and nearly half the population density. My reason in mentioning the density is that even though London does have a large car population, far more people take transit in a place that has a larger population and a larger area. NYC, which is smaller and more population dense, should see its citizens having easier access to essential stores and location just due to proximity, where as a London citizen may need to travel considerably further.
There is a very good reason. Without the actual cars the preparation makes things worse for everyone. So why do it? It's like saying "I'm going to get a bike to go to work, so I better stop driving now, even though I don't actually have a way to go there."
On top of that, despite all the excitement in the tech field it'll actually be many many decades before general purpose self driving cars exist. We don't need 30 years of preparation.
At first they will only be used on long distance highway trips, with specially prepared and marked roads, with the human taking over for city driving and for roads not prepared.
But these preparations are about city driving, which won't be automatic for a very very very long time. (How does a self driving car, without true AI, know what to do when there is an illegally parked car in the road? Or a stopped garbage truck, and the works are waving you to go around them?)
> NYC, which is smaller and more population dense
The greater NYC area is not smaller than London. People come from a hundred miles away, every day, to work there.
Are you focused excessively on people living in Manhattan? They already take public transportation.
3/4s of Manhattanites do not even own a car, let alone drive it in the city as their main form of transportation.
Yes, enough with catering to Jersey and LI people that are for some reason unwilling to use the perfectly fine NJT, PATH, and LIRR trains. If they will not use mass transit and expect to store their personal vehicle on some of the most expensive real estate in the world for free, yes, "kick them out".
Wouldn't a sizable portion of the electorate in San Francisco object in the name of affordable housing to building new housing in the space left behind by unused parking?
Doesn't building more housing increase housing affordability? Why would they object?
To bus to my office, I have a 30 minute bus ride on one of the rapidride busses, then transfer to a king county metro bus. The second bus takes between 0 and 30 minutes to arrive, normally gets stuck in traffic on the route it takes, and arrives near my office in 10 to 30 minutes. This is assuming neither bus is full and picks people up at either stop.
On the best day, I'm on a bus for 40 minutes. On the worst, 90. That's 1.5-3 hours a day dealing with a commute.
Alternatively, if I drive, I leave when I want to and normally arrive in 15-20 minutes. On a good day I save an hour a day driving, and on a bad one almost 2 hours.
I'm all for public transit, when it works efficiently. We currently do not have a rail system that reaches the majority of our population (its being planned though). I can't justify the additional time for my commute, because I'd always have to plan for the worst.
The bright side is sound transit is working on a proposal to expand their existing light rail. I'm all for efficient, timely, and reliable public transportation. I live 4 miles from work. It shouldn't take up to 90 minutes for me to get there.
That should be 20-30 min by bicycle :) is that an option?
Also though, not everyone is able or wants to power their own transportation, and although I think biking is great, I this choosing not to is also perfectly reasonable and should also be respected.
But in both cities, buses have the exclusive use of some road space. This ensures a reliable journey time.
By car? 30 minute drive because of the congestion. Then I either hunt 15 - 30 minutes for parking lot or pay 170 eur/month in a close by cellar of a mall. For comparison monthly ticker for the public transport is only 30 eur.
I, too, have one – with a car I drive about 15 minutes along the innermost “ring” road whereas any combination of public transport would require at least an hour for the worst case scenario. Yes, the trip takes longer in peak traffic; luckily I can avoid those times most of the time – and it's in any case way faster than with public transport.
It was comparatively worse when I had a much shorter commute to school years ago. The 3.5 km trip would consist of more than a kilometre of walking and would at worst take way more than half an hour with buses (including the switch, without one you'd have to walk more than half the distance). Needless to say, I did not prepare for the bad days, and was late quite often.
With a car, it was literally a five minute ride.
In Helsinki, especially before 550, certain trips are lot faster with car. Currenly my school comute is 25min by car and 1h by bus. The fucked up thing is that bus routes are so winding that they compete with bicycle in speed and reach.
But, I loathe people telling people how things should be and what should better. Things will change organically, just as they organically changed from sodden cow and horse manure filled roads to paved, car filled roads. So too will cars acquiesce to something else. But stop, stop the condescension and promulgation that all that is car is bad. When something better comes along, people will choose the better thing.
For good or bad, in the US, China, Japan, Europe and Africa, people choose cars when they're useful. Cars aren't foisted onto them. Yes, choices in development matter, but that's an altogether different topic.
Back to aesthetics, while I would enjoy fewer cars and parking spaces, I do not look forward to buildings built closer together like in the middle ages. They're nice when you're taking a stroll, but they are impractical for emergencies, when people need to evacuate, when emergency vehicles need access. I prefer wide streets even in the absence of cars [ever experience mid rises banging against each other in an earthquake?]
So decisions are taken about how to organise cities, and it's been this way for centuries.
See how Haussmann transformed Paris in the 19th century for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
And the predominance of parking everywhere in America didn't just happen. It was mandated by law.
First world cities with low parking requirements have much less than 5% as much parking as American cities do. Because that is what people will build voluntarily and pay for.
Speaking of low parking slot cities, ever enjoy having sidewalks and pavement taken up by parked cars. Slots or not, people park their cars.
But the easiest way to eliminate sidewalk parking is to install meters on the street spaces. Then the local authorities will promptly tow sidewalk parkers for meter evasion. The problem only crops up where parking is mandated and free.
It works absolutely great. The neighborhood has new cash to spend on improvements and there's legal space to park in for a price.
So when I walk there I have no place to sit because - well, why would anyone not drive and park to get their latte fix?
When I park my car at my workplace and I notice my badge fell out of my pants (or I forgot it), no problem, I can head back to the car and get my badge. If I take a cab I can always phone the cab central and have them ask the driver to look for the item (of course, this requires honest cab drivers and it will cost me a huge amount of money if the cab driver is already on the other end of the city by the time I notice). No way at all to do so with an autonomous car.
Also, a shift to autonomous cars would prevent another very common use case: after work I might want to do something else before driving home, like going to sports training. So now I'd have to carry my gun and ammo (or my sport gear, or ...) all the time around with me instead of leaving the stuff in my car.
Also, my own car still is freedom: public transport, even in Germany, shuts down after 2200 and restarts only at 0500, and if you're outside the city you rarely have time intervals for buses and trains lower than 20min - often it's more like 40min, 60min or even 120min. With a shared car system, I'd have to wait totally unpredictable amounts of time until a shared car is free, and there's nothing I hate more than waiting.
Getting people off individual cars would require absolutely massive investment in public transport. Might work out in cities, but in rural areas there's no way you can get people to abandon their cars.
Regarding hours... realizing the bus to your hotel in Iceland is no longer in service at 2 AM in a snowstorm in March is super excitng.
How can you say that when they aren't even a thing yet? They could easily have a hotline to call in case of a situation like this, where they can manually pull it out of the queue and send it back to your location. It wouldn't be complicated or costly.
Thanks but no thanks.
Folk who do live in rural areas won't be impacted much by cities transitioning to fewer cars. If their work requires commute into the city, I'm not sure why or how the commute would be any worse once self-driving cars are introduced. The idea is to reduce car dependence and the control cars have within cities. Assume for a moment that self-driving cars can participate nigh-perfectly in traffic with human drivers, and that they become the majority within cities. Would this not mean that as car ownership in cities goes down, available parking may decrease, but the demand for parking will also decrease?
As an introvert myself, I don't really have an issue with mass transit, since most everyone just wants to mind their own business. Once there are self-driving cars or once city culture shifts from car ownership to fleets of available cars, nothing is stopping you from having complete privacy as you travel if you desire it.
What I'm saying is that these concerns aren't incompatible with the share ideas. Your normal routine might be slightly different, but your wants and needs are not incompatible with the ideas at all.
I dislike downvote/upvote systems for discussion for the very reason you're expressing; it creates echo chambers, but it also expresses their position. I disagree with you, but I will tell you that it's because I think your wants and needs can be met perfectly if cities shift to less cars. Others apparently would rather just down vote to express their disagreement.
Oh they will because non-automated cars will have their insurance rates rising (once again, a tax on the poor, because rich people tend to concentrate in urban areas while poorer people will be outpriced to rural), they will be banned from driving in urban areas, and there will be no parking in the cities for them.
Of course there are all kinds of little assumptions in our daily lives that would suddenly change and have to be addressed. In this case though, do you really need 170 sq. feet to store whatever you are carrying with you? Opening parking lots to development will generate enough value to provide a couple 12x18x72 inch lockers for each space removed. That still clears up over 98% of the square footage currently being taken up by parking spaces, and it would obviate the need to use cars for personal storage.
It might even lower theft since a big component of theft from automobiles is that a thief can look into a bunch of cars and only break in when something valuable enough is identified. And since lockers could be located inside where the people are, it would probably opportunities for would be thieves to have alone time with valuables.
> people like to forget stuff in their cars
If cars begin to be produced primarily for the purpose of transporting a single different person over and over again all day (with a smaller number of multi-passenger vehicles being produced for the relatively rare case of multi-passenger rides), then I imagine that eventually they would evolve a design that makes it more obvious when you drop things you are carrying. Currently cars[1] have all kinds of nooks and crannies for your wallet to fall into, because it's not that big a problem in most cases when you do that. But it would be fairly trivial to add a little fiber glass hip that sits flush with the seat. You would have to relocate the seat adjustment controls, but a lot of vehicles have already centralized those controls on the main console, and ridesharing vehicles would actually see enough benefit to consider such a change.
[1] this includes taxis because taxis fleets are made up of essentially consumer vehicles. This makes sense, because you always have at least 2 people in a taxi, so you can't really comfortably make it that much smaller. But if there were fleets of rideshared self-driving cars everywhere, most cars would only need to carry a single person, and you can drastically reduce the size of a one-person car without sacrificing comfort.
Edit: added third paragraph and the accompanying footnote
You clearly have no children. Most people do though. Multi-passenger rides are hardly rare. Going to work is not the only thing people use a car for.
Objectively, the majority of driving is single passenger during commute time. I said multi-passenger trips are "relatively rare", that is, less common. I don't even see what could possibly be offending you in my comment. Yes, many people have children, and most of them drive mostly alone in one of their two cars 15 miles both ways to and from work. I don't see this as controversial. I'm not being remotely hyperbolic.
Do you take your kids to buy groceries? To ship a package? You don't have to take them, but kids like to go.
To reiterate, I am saying that more miles are driven single passenger (excluding hired drivers) than multi-passenger, and that is the only claim that I am making on the subject.
I trust we have that cleared up now. It means that once it makes sense to have driverless car fleets chauffeuring people around in cities, it will likely make economic sense to make a lot of those vehicles single passenger, because they can be made much more cheaply and run more efficiently. This is not really possible with the current consumer car industry, because consumers want the capability to drive more than one person (whether they have kids or not), even if most of the driving they do is alone. Likewise taxis are always moving at minimum two people when it's making money.
And I don't see any reason there wouldn't still be plentiful multi-passenger cars. I'm not trying to banish multi-passenger car trips from society. I'm not against them! They are just currently "relatively rare" in practice. I could see electric cars potentially increasing adult carpooling, or reducing it. For instance, maybe a car service has a fleet of minvans, and offers discount rates, but fills itself to capacity on the way to your general destination. Or maybe carpooling among adults with different starting and ending points ultimately essentially goes away, like if tiny single passenger driverless vehicles in constant use end up being more efficient than carpooling once all the numbers are in. Even in that case there would still be multi-passenger cars, because there are always going to be people who want to go on dates, or out with friends, adults that need to accompany kids and any number of other reasons that people choose to travel together. Driverless cars don't get rid of the need for multi-passenger cars. They get rid of the incentives that cause people to waste full size cars on one person trips. They unlock the potential for cars to further specialize to improve efficiency.
A consumer car needs to be multi-passenger. A driverless fleet car doesn't. It makes sense then that the fleets that service a given area would tend to try to balance the number of single passenger and multi-passenger vehicles in their fleet to match the demand for these two types of trips. That's really all I'm getting at with this line of thought. I'm not making a strong statement about the single vs multi-passenger composition of trips.
You can't make up new definitions for things and expect people to understand you.
Relatively rare has the same meaning as rare, except that it's rare only in comparison with the compared event, but might not be rare on an absolute scale.
So, no, 49% is not relatively rare.
1% is relatively rare, yet 1% of car trips is still an enormous number so is not actually rare. That is the only change in the meaning when you add the word relatively.
Getting back to your actual point, which was derailed by an incorrect word.
Multi car trips are less common, but not enough to make single passenger vehicles economically worth it. The majority of the expense on a vehicle is not the cabin. Once you paid to make a car, adding a bit more space for additional people costs only a little bit more, but greatly increases the flexibility.
So I don't expect the basic size of a car to change much.
But yes, there will be self-driving taxis of all sizes, just like there are ubers and rental cars of all sizes now.
Thank God I won't ever become a teacher. I can already imagine kids saying "I forgot my homework in my taxi and couldn't call it back in time"...
But I think that there are a lot of people who would gladly cut down on the $8K-$10K/year of car costs.
And the amount of your stuff will seem miniscule once you have kids. Car seats for different ages, extra food, water, diapers, sets of clothing, iPad holders, random toys, sports equipment, school supplies, and the list goes on.
I'm pretty sure this problem isn't nearly as big as you think it is.
My response is that a restaurant works the same way. If you don't return or call before someone else sits there, you're stuff will be gone.
Addressing your point, taxis and buses immediately drive off after you step out of them. Do you avoid them because of this?
Here in Rome Car2Go have over 600 cars, so you are usually no more than 5 minutes walk from one. You can also leave it anywhere in the 'home zone', rather than having to find a specific car sharing parking space. There is also another service run by the city that has a similar number of cars. The prices are quite high, but if you just need it for odd trips (i.e. not commuting every day) it's still going to be cheaper than owning a car, and a lot easier than having to deal with public transport.
Or do you expect parents to attach car seats each time they call one up? And where do you put the car seats the rest of the time? Cary them along with you?
It would be nice if the cars came with them built in, but I don't think it's possible to make a seat that can accommodate every size child.
Not to mention that a society that gets away from being car centric would also grant more independency to children from their parents. In Japan, kids are used to go to school by themselves at age 5. In Berlin I see kids seemlingly from elementary school going around alone in the U-Bahn. Looks like parents not having to be kids' chauffeurs would be a net gain.
It would drive you to work, then it would drive itself home and park there (or at an out-of-town free space) instead of parking in the city.
Later, it drives itself back to your office to pick you up.
No shared car required, no parking space either.
I think for housing at least, building vertically is a good solution to storage of a car. Expensive of course but practical.
Underground parking for businesses would also be good, moving parking off the streets is always nice.
Unless, by moving parking away from streets you then just use it for more moving cars. That creats a very hostile and noisy environment.
Sometimes the parked cars are a nice buffer between the street and pedestrians.
Regardless, I wish our central city was nothing but walk and bicycle paths. It would be much more enjoyable and I would spend more time here.
Sure, but the current design of the sidewalk has to accommodate a car door opening at any point, as someone could park anywhere. When roads are no longer used for parking, sidewalks could be lined with a narrow strip of trees or something, with a gap every 100m for cars to load/unload passengers.
In Helsinki, less than half of households have cars. In many areas of central Helsinki, more than 60% are carless. I'd be surprised if car ownership was significantly more popular in other European cities. If there's good public transit and the city is walkable, a car is a waste of money for most people.
Typically, using the public transport in Berlin will be much quicker than taking the car.
[0] Sorry, article in German (and BZ..): http://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/immer-mehr-autobesitzer-aber-...