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Comment by cballard | Hacker News Reader

> WHAT WOULD A CITY look like if it suddenly needed 90 percent less parking?

...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.

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I'll pick on Seattle, as that's where I'm currently living.

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.

> 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?

In Seattle you're going to get pretty wet biking to work a significant percentage of the time. Depending on your job that might be an issue. (Or it might not at all. Before I worked from home I used to bike to work and shower there; it was great.)

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.

The weather isn't that much different to Amsterdam or Copenhagen.

But in both cities, buses have the exclusive use of some road space. This ensures a reliable journey time.

They (or Amsterdam at least) also have amazing bike lanes everywhere. I actually lived and commuted by bike in Ghent, Belgium for a few months, which is very similar. I did indeed get soaked on the way to work fairly frequently, but was able to shower there. I also felt very safe doing so, as bike lanes are everywhere.

You are correct. I'm slightly out of shape and working on it, hoping to start doing that by summer.

People drive because there is no public transport and there is no public transport because everybody drives. Making parking really expensive and funneling the money into improved public transport would probably change the situation.

Maybe you should look at bike parking in Netherlands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWESiQlmOC0 .

Helsinki: with bus and train 45min to work. It's a lot, but it's never more than hour.

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.

That's not the commute in Helsinki, it's just yours.

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.

The point was that if you simply cut parking lots, the situation changes. Because then you need time for the "hunt a parking lot" while busses start to be on time as congestion decreases.

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.

Is that a discount price? I think one month is over 50e.

> "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."

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?

> object in the name of affordable housing to building new housing

Doesn't building more housing increase housing affordability? Why would they object?

Comprehensive sex education and access to contraception generally decreases rates of teen pregnancy. People still object to those two things in the name of avoiding teen pregnancy.

No, in fact neighborhood groups generally get upset if new housing goes up without parking as it is believed the new residents will put additional pressure on public parking spots.

> Just get rid of the parking

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?

I think the intent behind the comment was to suggest that the parking is a need based on a superfluous want, and is intended as a criticism of cities that do have major transit systems which capitulated to the demand for car access. NYC has pretty substantial public transit presence that could and probably should be the transit answer for far more people, however, people chose cars for a variety of reasons.

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.

Have you ever driven in NY? Anyone who drives a car there needs to, rather than wants to.

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.

This is an example of an approach to social problems I sometimes see that I'm going to call "sink or swim". It is a form of proposal framed in terms like "Well, if we do this, it will force $group to either $do_what_we_want or $something_really_unpleasant" and then assumes that everyone in the group will just choose to do what the proposer wants them to do, because the alternative is unthinkable and possible horrific.

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.

I find it difficult to believe that compared to cities of similar size and population density that New York citizens have a greater need for cars. The other similarly sized/populous cities all rely far more heavily on mass transit than New Yorkers appear to, many of the cities that are more populated/larger than New York also are far more mass-transit focused. (Not to say that cars/congestion issues do no exist in said cities, it's just that a greater % of the population rides instead of drives)

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?

You do know self driving cars don't actually exist yet? When they do we can make changes, but don't start getting rid of parking ahead of time.

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.

Yes...I'm not sure why you would think I suggested otherwise.

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's no reason that the preparation can't start happening sooner

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.

> Yes, definitely, kick all the people out. Who needs them, right?

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".

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