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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine forking over several hundred thousand for a house and then a few years later finding out that you cannot park in front of your own home like you have done for years.

Unless you had some kind of legal guarantee to park in front of your own home, you never should have counted on being able to do so. If you feel bad when you can't do it anymore, it's because you had unrealistic expectations from the beginning. You just happened to be lucky that nobody else parked there.

If you want to guarantee that you will always be able to park in front of your house, buy a house with a garage or a driveway.

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There's an odd thing about driveways. If there are no driveways then anyone can park in any spot. (To within limits of residence parking permits, etc.)

But if there's a driveway, then no one can park in front of it, and only the owner can use the driveway. A driveway, therefore, effectively replaces a public street parking spot with a private, personal spot.

From a parking utilization standpoint, it only makes sense to allow driveways and garages if it's very likely that more than one car will park there at times when on-street parking is full. (For example, in one place I rented, we had two cars parked in the side yard and one on the driveway, and did the car shuffle when needed.)

Here's the math. http://www.drivewaytips.com/layout.html says "A single car driveway width should be 10' wide, anything less than 10 feet will be too narrow to drive or park on comfortably. 12' is often used for added comfort and assuring to get out of your vehicle without stepping on the lawn or landscape." Others confirm that 10-12 feet is pretty standard.

In many cities, no parking is allowed within 5 feet of the end of the driveway. Seattle is one, see http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/parking/drivewaymarkin... , where you'll see the 5 feet isn't from the width of the driveway proper but also includes the opening it makes when it reaches a curb.

(Other cities have smaller limits, even down to 0 feet, while others have higher, even 10 feet. 5 feet seems pretty common)

Therefore, a driveway takes about 22' of space on the curb, or perhaps a bit more.

The standard parking space for parallel parking is 24' long for standard or 21' for compact: http://www.danbury-ct.gov/filestorage/21015/21087/21123/2301... .

Effectively, each driveway takes away a public parking spot.

There's also an occupancy issue. Consider a worst-case scenario where someone lives near a park-and-ride train station, but needs to drive to work. In the morning there is a lack of parking spaces, because of people parking to commute into the city. In the evening, there's no problem to find parking. If the resident had no driveway then parking, for the most part, wouldn't be a problem because plenty of spaces are free. For the others, it means one extra spot is available.

Now, put the driveway in and the homeowner has a easier time (eg, call in sick, go to the doctor, and sometimes there's no nearby parking spot for the return), while every single day someone else has a harder time to find parking.

Driveways are taxed in Italy for this reason:

See that 'passo carrabile' sign? https://goo.gl/maps/yjGQ5i1wg222

That means you can't park there, but it also means you have to pay something to obtain the sign. No sign, no enforcement.

This is why we have alleys.

A street with driveways can/should be a lot narrower than a street with on-street parking, since it only needs to be wide enough for actual traffic.

This is true.

My block in Denver is weird in that the alley only goes half way down it. So half of the block has no driveways since they have an alley and the other half has driveways. The width is like everyone has driveways. It's kind of like driving down the barrel of a gun.

Residential parking permit programs are essentially designed to make sure enough street space available for residents near their homes. If you bought a house under a RPP program and then the government suddenly issued RPPs for 100 people living in six cars worth of street frontage, I'd say you have a right to be angry, though probably not a legal cause of action.

Wait, so when rents go up in a neighborhood as the desirability increases, driving out the current residents, that's horrible gentrification. But if someone wants to continue to park in front of their house as they've done for years, maybe decades, well, tough shit?

I never said gentrification was horrible.

> Unless you had some kind of legal guarantee to park in front of your own home, you never should have counted on being able to do so. If you feel bad when you can't do it anymore, it's because you had unrealistic expectations from the beginning. You just happened to be lucky that nobody else parked there.

That's not how most humans think - and if logic disagrees with people's moral intuitions, so much the worse for logic.

> That's not how most humans think - and if logic disagrees with people's moral intuitions, so much the worse for logic.

It's not just logic -- it's the law. The street is public property. Even in areas with parking permits, anyone with a permit can park on any part of the street, and you aren't guaranteed a spot in front of your own house.

Same thing though - if the law disagrees with people's moral intuitions, so much the worse for the law. People feel entitled to "their" parking spaces, law or no.

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