Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car | Hacker News Reader

Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

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265 pointsgwintrob435 comments

This topic is discussed at length in the book, "Green Metropolis". It's part of a bigger issue of always putting cars first. You can't build a large building without first doing a traffic study. If you bring too much traffic, you can't build it. Never mind that traffic is about the only cost in America that you can increase to make public transportation more appealing.

Generally U.S. building codes include a maximum building height, and require minimum parking spaces. Many European cities have maximum parking spaces, and minimum building height. The latter produces higher population densities which make public transportation possible.

We need to push back against suburban sprawl and the car-first design. No required parking, no free curbside parking, and a carbon tax on gasoline. Once cities get a population density >7 people per acre, public transportation becomes viable. Population density follows a logarithmic curve with miles traveled per person, so you get as much of a reduction from moving from 2 to 20 people per square acre, as from 20 to 200.

I don't think that many people actually want higher population densities.

I think you're painting your own preferences onto everyone else. Why does land cost more in the cities?

There are many jurisdictions which try to 'right-size', most notable among them is Portland. Many other cities have an implicit policy of preventing sharp increases in density through slow, restricted, and expensive zoning.

Why do they want to do that, though? A huge quality of my city (Dresden, Germany) is precisely the wild fluctuation between very dense areas and places that feel like villages (usually because they actually were villages that were annexed in the 20th century). It feels much more livable and diverse than e.g. http://www.dorisleslieblau.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/...

Actually, we are seeing a return towards urbanisation globally, which is a positive trends, since it's a vital component for curbing global warming. Residents of NYC use 1/3 as much electricity as their suburban counterparts, use a tiny fraction of the carbon emissions on transportation, and produce less garbage. All without convincing New Yorkers to recycle or drive electric cars. Environmental responsibility is baked into the city's design.

Residents of NYC pay $3000/mo for 1-bedroom apartments, while their suburban counterparts pay $1000/mo for 3-bedroom houses.

You could buy quite a few solar panels and lease several electric cars for less than it would take to move to NYC.

Housing prices are often a related to geography. Manhatten is an island, SF and Boston are peninsulas. You could have a high density city that didn't have a high cost of living.

Could you, though?

Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston aren't where they are because of random chance.

They all have world-class natural harbors. That was far more important for transportation purposes even 60 years ago (and certainly when these cities were established) than it is today. Population centers formed around places where large quantities of goods and people could be shipped from. And that meant harbors.

Good harbors used to create economic powerhouses and centers of immigration, which in turn created large dense cities. The sort of large dense cities that people naturally chose to build when unregulated but that modern policies prohibit (or at least pose obstacles to) in places that are not yet that dense.

Similarly, NY and Boston are situated on and partly limited by major rivers, which provided access to the interior in a time when travel by boat was much faster than over land. You'll find the same is the case for almost every major non-coastal city in the US and worldwide. That was less of an issue for SF, which grew in the railroad era.

There are of course many obstacles to attracting people to a NEW city. But specific types of geography that happen to typically be limited by water are no longer crucial to making a city dense. Access to ocean shipping is helpful, but it's now viable to import and export over land to and from a harbor town.

Edited to add: Boston isn't really a peninsula. The reason these cities are dense is largely about developing prior to the car. LA could be nearly as dense as Boston if it weren't so car-dependent. If it had become a major population center prior to the advent of the car it would have had to be by necessity.

People built dense because of limits on how far one could realistically travel on foot or by equine-powered means. That limited the size of a city far more effectively in Boston than geography did (this is also reflected to a degree in LA's older downtown).

New York was able to grow beyond downtown and midtown Manhattan largely because of rapid transit (elevated rail later displaced in favor of subways) but even that has limits that kept the city dense. (One of those limits of course being that it was less likely to get built in areas that weren't yet at least somewhat dense.)

Think how long it would take to ride from an outer LA suburb to its downtown in a mule cart. That density-enforcing function doesn't apply to the same degree when you have an automobile.

BUT there are limits on how long people are willing to travel to get places, be it by foot or by car. Even in LA, we're reaching the limits of car-enabled sprawl.

LA was built before the cult of the car. It sprawled when trolleys were the norm there. The reason: It's a desert. It made no economic sense to develop it in little bits. They had to develop large tracts at a time to defray infrastructure costs related to importing water.

> You could buy quite a few solar panels and lease several electric cars for less than it would take to move to NYC.

Neither of which is nearly as good for the environment as simply using less energy. Solar panels and electric vehicles take a lot of energy to make, and are not guarenteed to become carbon neutral during their usable life.

If we are going to impose a $24k/person/year tax to help the environment, is New York-style living the optimal allocation?

You could be very picky about sourcing food, and put the farmers using cheap but unsustainable methods out of business. Pay the premium for American-made products under American factory emissions regulations, to shut down some cargo ships and Chinese smokestacks. Every 5th American could be a $96k/yr researcher working on environmental problems, etc. We could all telecommute, and have our pay docked by $24k/year to compensate for the lost productivity.

If my kid gets run over by a car while cycling to school I don't really car whether the car was electric or not.

The high prices are an artifact of misguided past policies, defended by NIMBYs, to encourage suburban sprawl.

Some increase in per-square-foot prices are natural and expected, just due to right-sizing the environmental costs and benefits, but the very high prices are insane and fixable.

http://www.sfyimby.org

Or you could move to a city with more reasonable housing costs, like Minneapolis where 2br apartments <$2k/mo.

> more reasonable housing costs

Your "reasonable" housing costs are still double the price for half the space.

A lot of Americans just don't have an extra $1,000/month sitting around to throw towards rent. Even if they ditch their car, they'd still be $800/month short.

You can definitely get a place in Minne for $1k. I was just quoting median numbers. $2k for a 2br is in some of the more posh areas. But my point was more reasonable that NYC. Much more space for much let money. And the suburbs here would be even cheaper than the $1k.

Or you can live with better standard of living in the Twin Cities suburbs with a house and a yard, as I do, for less cost than living in small box in Minneapolis.

As a data point, I pay $2310/mo (total, not individual) for a 3-bedroom apartment in a safe, vibrant, reasonably commutable part of Manhattan. The NYC residents you're talking about are making poor decisions with their money.

Is it under rent control? (Otherwise I have totally misread the NYC housing market, thank you).

Rent stabilized (they can't change it more than some % per year), but in my experience not far off the market.

To be sure, there are $3000 1-bedroom apartments around as well.

Does that include the electricity used by the restaurants they eat at instead of cooking at home?

You do realise that lots of people all eating out at a restaurant is much more efficient than all those people cooking and eating at home right?

Depends on the restaurant. McDonalds', sure. Michelin 3-star, probably not. I don't cook like that.

So on aggregate you're saying that it'll use less energy? Or are you say on average people go to Michelin 3-star in cities?

Probably on aggregate it'll use less, fair.

My old Dad was in the Korean War. The soldiers said then that probably everybody would eat in 'mess halls' in the future, because it made so much sense. Of course these were farm kids seeing such things for the first time.

I do! I'm from Austria/Vienna and I love our high density cityscapes. There is no need for a car in cities since you can get anywhere with public transport. I usually use my bike, though, which has a huge part of the city within 20 minutes driving distance. In comparison, when I was working in Santa Clara, CA, there was virtually nothing within 20 minutes and the public transport was next to useless. I'm also not a fan of the huge expressways every other corner. Not my kind of city.

> There is no need for a car in cities since you can get anywhere with public transport

Visiting Vienna some time ago was the first time when I realized that if I ever were to move to another city from the one I'm currently living in (a capital city in Eastern Europe) that city would need to have a decent tramway network, just like Vienna does (trolley-buses also count).

Relying only on cars or Diesel-hungry buses for carrying people around a big city is barbarous. It also counts that I don't like taking the metro, as traveling 45 minutes - 1 hour per day underground doesn't fit my idea of "good travel".

Vienna is definitely an outlier in terms of awesome. It's one of the more "perfect" cities in terms of size and connectivity. I might argue that Zurich is right up with it. However, Paris is overrated in terms of transport -- summer on the RER or the metro is rather close to hell in my book. No air conditioning and sardine-like UX. Good luck if you have to go shopping, you had better go during off hours or you'll be unable to get your stuff on the train. But then again "off-hours" doesn't really exist in Paris since aside from stores in designated tourist zones, shops are required by law to close by 7pm. I think Berlin does a pretty good and London seems to manage the sprawl of the city rather well.

For non-European cities, Seoul is one of my favorites. Extremely extensive subway, though admittedly during rush hour, it's positively insane. But you never have to walk more that 200 meters to get anywhere it seems.

I want higher population density, BUT I don't want to give up my privacy or fresh air to do this.

Building codes should reflect proper sound insulation, windows opening up on to areas with clean air (and no exhausts anywhere near), even greenery (possibly an in door garden / atrium).

most people won't publicly claim that they want population control (e.g. one child policies or similar) either, so i think many people want a bunch of things that aren't compatible.

It's a tradeoff, of course. Hey, I want to live in a large country estate but still within walking distance of work, shops, restaurants, all kinds of leisure activities and whatnot. However, as this isn't happening unless I win the lottery (probably not even then..), I have to sacrifice some of that.

I also want the airport to be very close by, and great highway access too, all with no noise.

Well, if you get to share unsourced anecdata allow me to point out that I moved a third of the way around the world because I wanted to live in a city that was

* something resembling affordable (though it still ain't cheap)

* not auto-dependent.

Maybe you're just surrounding yourself with people who have expressed a preference for low density via their actions?

I do. If that were the case here we would have a much nicer town to live in.

I propose a fundamental principle that should be obvious, but apparently isn't.

Public policy should aim to improve average quality of life in the short, medium, and long terms.

We live in low-population-density areas because we get more, higher quality housing for less money, shorter lines, less crowded public places. We drive instead of taking transit because we get where we're going faster and more comfortably, sitting down, with our personal space bubbles intact.

Everything is tradeoffs. You can already make these tradeoffs for yourself by moving to SF or Manhattan, which is generally ill-advised unless you make so much that the astronomical housing costs don't hurt too badly. Why should the rest of us be required to make these tradeoffs? What are we getting in return? 'Cause it sure isn't better commutes or better homes.

If your argument is long-term sustainability, we have electric cars now and we've had nuclear power for quite some time, and a public policy kick in that direction is, I'd argue, critical to long-term quality of life.

Part of the purpose of a public place is for people to be around other people. Considering that, isn't it counterproductive to actively work to make them less crowded?

Many of the benefits you listed are good examples of how people are actually pretty bad at predicting what will make them happier. We have a lot of data on the subject.

- People think that living in a larger home will make them happier than a shorter commute. Cohort studies show the opposite is true. We adapt most quickly to things (good/bad) that stay the same (like the size of your house), and poorly to things that change (like the traffic situation from day to day).

- People think they will be more active if surrounded by parks and greenery, but city dwellers actually walk/bike more. People moving to the city lose weight within a few months (~3 lb. if I remember correctly)

- People think that cities are dangerous, but you are more likely to be killed young in the suburbs. This is because car accidents are far more likely than homicides, and you drive more in the suburbs.

We know people in cities are, on average, happier and healthier.

I think this depends vastly on the city. An unhealthy city won't have these kinds of benefits.

I think, particularly in the climate that I'm in, a /cave of steel/ style city WOULD have those benefits. If instead of streets for cars we had a mesh of (Babylon 5 style) 'zocolo' (sp) markets that had smaller storefronts and a lightly park like median.

It's a funny thing. I don't mind a long commute, of say, 1 hour each way mostly highway. I can use that time to listen to podcasts, audiobooks, or music. Things I rarely find time to in my daily life. But if I have 1 hour commute in heavy traffic, I feel that I'm wasting my time. The former I'm okay with, the latter I avoid at all cost, even if the net result is the same for me.

If you had a self-driving car, do you think the heavy traffic or even stop-and-go traffic would be as bothersome?

It's hard to say. Maybe not. When driving, I am 100% aware of what is happening in a self-driving car I would be focused on other things, perhaps work. In that case I wouldn't mind at all I think.

But it's the thought that I'm spending so much time, on what should take far less. In essence losing time compared what it could be if not for the external factors.

New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. have significantly higher commute times (including by public transit) than less dense cities. New York's subway riders have it particularly bad, spending an average of 7.5 hours per week on the trains [0]. This is despite those cities having some of the best transit systems in the country [1].

I'm aware of the finding that lower commute times are associated with happiness, but that makes the opposite of your argument. The lowest commute times are found in small, low-density, car-oriented cities. Even in New York, drivers and taxi-riders have shorter commutes than public transit users.

As you'll see in the report, a very lucky few have short walks, but it is not at all the norm. I surmise that if you can afford to live within walking distance of work in New York, you're likely an order of magnitude too rich to need to work.

Your other points are valid, but I'm highly skeptical that these benefits are worth the extra $2000/mo they bring in housing costs (when collapsing a 3-bedroom house family into a 1-bedroom apartment), particularly when we are talking about people who do not have $2000/mo.

I say this as a relatively new Berkeley to SF public transit commuter. I love my job, but I'd rather stab my eyes out than spend 80 minutes on overstuffed, lurching BART trains every day for the rest of my life. Fortunately, the gruesome death vs. BART tradeoff is available in the form of motorcycling, which I'm trying next.

[0] http://origin-states.politico.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazo...

[1] http://ao.umn.edu/research/america/transit/2014/index.html

But is driving the same as being in public transport? You can read a book, watch a video, and in general not pay attention to your surroundings (more or less). Meanwhile driving in traffic is half boring, half stressful.

Getting a seat is absolutely not the norm during commute hours. Two transit systems I use (BART and CTA) are actually migrating rolling stock to designs with fewer seats to free up more standing room.

Unless you board at the beginning of the line and show up well before departure, you're going to be standing. Likely pressed up against strangers, holding the overhead rail, trying to keep balanced while the operator does his best to knock you over with violent throttle and brake inputs. On rare, blissful occasions I'll get some wall to lean on. Usually stuck in the center.

I have tried to read this way, but it doesn't work well. It's hard to find a nook where there's enough space in front of me to hold a book. The one handed book grasp is awkward, and I always seem to choose the wrong moment to take my other hand off the rail to turn a page.

You can wear headphones, same as you can listen to the the radio while driving.

I wish I could not pay attention to my surroundings; that's pretty hard when in a hot stuffy smelly claustrophobic space trying my hardest not to make physical contact with strangers' bodies.

Healthier too, as much of that time is spent walking or standing instead of sitting on your ass.

BART is way over capacity and a terrible experience for sure.

Have you tried the transbay busses? I ride the F from North Oakland every day and I have a seat every morning and, with a little planning, a seat every night on the way home (get to the stop early).

A motorcycle will probably be faster, but a 40 minute "leisurely" commute on the transbay is a pretty nice option.

http://www.actransit.org/transbay-lines-in-east-bay-neighbor...

The Transbay buses are all standing room by the time they get to me, and I've been denied boarding several times. BART is somewhat easier to stand on then they are.

The one thing that definitely won't make people happy is someone else telling them they don't know how to make themselves happy. People want choice, even if that means making a few incorrect choices.

>We know people in cities are, on average, happier and healthier.

Some people really dislike cities. I need woods. I need open spaces. I need to see the stars at night. I need a place for my dog to run without some stranger screaming about leash rules. But I also need to work. Personal transport, my own vehicle to carry myself and my dog, allows me to both work and enjoy the open spaces. So I'm all for parking spots.

And yes, weather permitting, my dog does come to costco with me. She would much rather sit in the car than sit at home. If she wants we'll hit any number of dog parks on the way home. If I took the bus, or Uber, she would have to sit at home ... alone all afternoon rather than being with me. That's what having parking spots at Costco means for us.

And I don't have a problem with this, but I do have a problem with minimum numbers of parking spots, or giant parking lots that are unutilized during the night or while you're not at work.

Parking spots at place should like Costco are notoriously bad for the planet and aren't some of the least efficient things possible. At some point, the things you value (such as your parks and woods and scenery) are going to brush up against this suburban sprawl and you're going to be upset.

If you value green spaces, you should be encouraging the disuse of cars and mass parking lots.

America is extremely large, our economy is shrinking not growing, and our native population is not growing either.

Note that the above situation is fractal similar at different scales ranging from my state to the entire world. Similar but not identical.

If this is the case, it just shows we need to further urbanize.

> People want choice, even if that means making a few incorrect choices.

I don't agree. I often feel liberated when someone takes away a meaningless choice from me. If (and only if) the choices that are left are acceptable to me, of course.

For example, I was going to shop for a new kitchen, and I hated the idea of it. Having to comb through dozens of wood and handle options, arguing all day about the layout, it sounded really dreadful. Then my brother moved into a new house that had a kitchen, so I just bought his old one and had it installed at my home. That was absolutely awesome. I didn't have to think about anything.

> takes away a meaningless choice from me

What is meaningless is completely subjective to every person, so there is no way to remove options without affecting someone.

Also, how do you buy a "kitchen"?

Classic case of cherry picking statistics.

> We know people in cities are, on average, happier and healthier.

I've lived in both and had a happy, healthy life in both.

When I was young, the city was definitely where I wanted to be. I loved the energy and the density. I was close to my friends and because of easy transportation, could get to them anytime I want.

Almost thirty years later, I'm now living in the 'burbs and I never want to leave. It's quiet and I have space to work on my motorcycle, I have a garden, I like my neighbors and I like that they aren't right on top of me. It's fantastic for dog walking and my office is a very scenic 7 mile bike ride from my home.

With self-driving cars on the horizon, I think the suburbs might go through some type of re-birth.

And I think everyone is OK with your choice, they just don't want to subsidize it.

I'm okay with taxes going up, but isn't that just how taxes are? Pacifists don't want their taxes to pay for the military. Pro-lifers don't want national healthcare to cover abortions. Some people think NASA is a waste of money.

The military, healthcare, and NASA are have at least some aspect of being a public good.

But that's not true of the suburbs, it's just a lifestyle choice. And it's just as weird as the federal government heavily subsidizing video game purchases.(ignoring externalities.)

The Quakers I grew up with might argue with you about the military, but I get what you are saying.

Maybe a better comparison would be the tax deduction for mortgage interest or agricultural subsidies.

> With self-driving cars on the horizon, I think the suburbs might go through some type of re-birth.

Suburban sprawl. I have several concerns with that. In places like San Francisco, there is no space to sprawl. It’s healthier for kids to use physical activity to move around. Only 7 miles from the office? When everybody goes to the suburbs, typical commuting distances are measured in the dozens of, or even over 100, miles.

But I haven’t seen an answer to the concern about economic sustainability. The tax revenues from the properties have not been high enough to maintain the infrastructure, and likely cannot be high enough with middle-class people living there. I can imagine Donald Trump, how would he solve it? Hire contractors to rebuild the infrastructure and then threaten to sue them when they present the bill? That’s how he built his own properties. I don’t think it will work for the rest of the nation.

http://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/

Even in mildly dense areas like San Francisco, revenues do not cover maintenance. The BART district just passed bonds to rebuild the tracks, but we haven’t finished paying off the bonds to construct the tracks. This entire region needs to become dramatically more dense, preferably gradually over the last 50 years, but now we might finally have the political will to do it; just so we can afford to maintain the infrastructure.

Quality of life is very difficult to measure. Average quality of life is probably worse than median quality of life. What about minimum quality of live? Should we make the life of the very poor worse if it improves the lives of the middle class?

I think the problem is a lot more difficult than what can be addressed with a single sentence.

> You can already make these tradeoffs for yourself by moving to SF or Manhattan, which is generally ill-advised unless you make so much that the astronomical housing costs don't hurt too badly.

The shoe is on the other foot. The reason why rent is so high in these places is because there's a lot of demand to live there - people do find it desirable.

If more cities were built like SF or Manhattan (i.e. there was more supply) then it would be more affordable to more people.

The reason these places should be built is because people clearly like it. That's the advantage.

> The reason why rent is so high in these places is because there's a lot of demand to live there -

No. Mere demand alone does not raise costs. There is a lot of demand for water, but it is still super cheap.

Prices are high when demand is high and supply is low.

The reason that prices in Manhattan and SF are high is because (a) lots of people want to live there, and simultaneously (b) government policies severely limit the ability of developers to generate more housing units there.

You've worded it better, so thank you, but I believe my main point stands.

Exactly, and since high density cities are more common in Europe it is also more affordable there.

I've heard stories about SF's housing problems, but not about Manhattan. I know Manhattan is expensive, but it's also full of some of the tallest buildings in the world, and more are built every day. Are there actually policies restricting housing in Manhattan?

Hugely. It's possible to build extremely tall buildings in certain specific areas of Manhattan (and New York in general, like in Downtown Brooklyn), but most of the city is "maxed out" to its zoning - that is, the tallest building that can be legally built is already there. Indeed, in many places, the existing buildings are taller than the zoning code allows - so if you demolished an old building, you'd have to build a shorter one in its place!

Actually, yes. If you look at an aerial view[1], you can see that there are only skyscrapers in two fairly small parts of the island. Much of the rest has zoning rules that don't allow taller buildings. Even when the taller buildings are allowed, there are things like setback requirements that lower the amount of floor space that the building can contain.

Frequently, the buildings that you can see aren't even representative of what the current restrictions allow. Many building in Manhattan were built long ago when zoning was less strict. Forty percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today because they don't meet zoning requirements[2].

[1] https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/9e/13/54/9e13...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...

SF isn't particularly dense, is it?

21st, although it's not a like-and-like comparison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

"people do find it desirable"

Americans are culturally completely blind to narrowcasting, in this case narrowcasted beliefs about lifestyle.

For example, millions of people are rabid extreme fans of the TV show "Survivor". Its economically important. Its culturally and socially relevant (well, to its super fans who insist on seeing life thru a "Survivor" lens). Enormous sums of money change hands over this one TV show, from its production to its marketing to small time betting. Large amounts of social signalling happen about this TV show. There's nothing wrong with this little hobby of theirs, and they should be left alone. And there's a lot of them.

Yet... yet 29 in 30 people won't watch that TV show for free. Regardless of its economic activity or price or value to an extremely small minority of the population, its value to 97% of the population is zero to negative. For 29 out of 30 people doing anything else is preferable to watching that free TV show.

Someone not blind to narrowcasting can hold both interpretations in their head at the same time.

I would theorize the numbers are not all that different with an analogy of urban living. You can slap any price you'd want on a NYC, SF, SV condo or house, and maybe even get it from another urbanite, but for 29 out of 30 people the value of that property would be zero to negative regardless of the price. That's kinda why almost no one lives there now. There's nothing "wrong" with living there although statistically roughly no one wants to.

I think that philosophical outlook mixes well with that 1984 style authoritarian streak that Americans have, "everything that is permissible must be compulsory" Because we're not going to disassemble and resettle the cities Pol Pot style, we must permit them, and if we permit something it must be compulsory for all, therefore all humans must be moved into cities for their own good regardless of their own opinions on the topic and any deviation from the party line that its a universal good with no downsides is double plus badthink not to be tolerated.

There is likely a lot of "crab pot" thinking where people suffering will do anything to stop others from ending their suffering. Every broken into car, every mugging, every raping, every shooting, all are proof we must stick together to keep everyone else in the city or else I'll have to run for it too. How dare he think himself better than us, we better drag him back down into this crab pot of a city.

I did not advocate for everyone living in cities. I advocated for more city housing, as currently it is unaffordable to many who do want to live in them due to demand outstripping supply. If you want to see my view as Pol Pot style authoritanrianism, well, I'm not even sure where to start.

We need more city housing because there's plenty of demand. I understand plenty of people want to live in rural areas, and I wish them well.

Decreasing the viability of suburban life will create more pressure for urban apartments as suburbanites get tired of crowded trains and move to the city center. If your more housing comes with an effective requirement for everyone who works in the city to live in that housing, we should expect the price to go up.

> If your more housing comes with an effective requirement for everyone who works in the city to live in that housing

What? Where did I require that?

I have recently moved to Miami from the UK. I am not enjoying the low-density lifestyle.

The lack of useful public transit (4 hours for a 20 mile trip because of cross scheduling). It feels like I live inside a ring of steel and rubber - if I want to leave my local area after work it is 2 hours for a 15 mile round trip.

No clustering of shops that generate footfall which builds a sense of community and opportunity for new business - drive to shop, buy thing, drive away. There is no discovery.

I haven't owned a car in the UK for 10 years, now I need one to buy groceries.

I do appreciate that I could move somewhere else and seek out those things in other communities but I am tied to my geography by work. If I was here long term I would certainly try and move jobs to get better quality of life.

I live in city, where there're problems with parking, everything is tight, no suburbs, etc. And US looks like a dream for me. Living outside this city, driving fast lanes? I would love to live there, I hate public transportations and I hate concentrated people.

You wouldn't know it from reading the comments here, but plenty of people in the US really enjoy the suburbs, myself included.

> We need to push back against suburban sprawl and the car-first design.

Yes, we should. Not going to happen though because Rich Folk(tm) don't walk or ride buses.

Edit: I mean this in the sense that the whatever colored glasses they are looking through when they design the buildings/cities/etc don't allow them to see anything other than what they know.

Meh.

You also pay for the cost of public parks even if you never use them.

You pay for the cost of government elementary schools even if you homeschool your kids.

etc.

Now, I'm an anarchocapitalist and would love to see all of these costs unbundled, so that we each pay only for what we use.

...but the other 99.9% of folks in our society think that it is reasonable to have one-size-fits-all solutions, where a single basket of goods is created and handed to everyone, regardless of whether they want it or not.

To say "yes, I still want that policy, but I want EXACTLY the bundle of goods that I want forced on everyone, not some other basket of goods" seems like special pleading.

I find this a little different than your examples since it is government forcing your actions within the private market, not forcing you to pay for its bundle of services. There is no cost to the system to stop doing this one, it just would make car drivers as frustrated as dog owners when they shop for an apartment in a metro area.

Given how much funding already goes to roads I would say enough is enough. But there is a risk of more long distance commuters, and it is hard to claw back the subsidies that make them.

>Now, I'm an anarchocapitalist and would love to see all of these costs unbundled, so that we each pay only for what we use.

Anarchocapitalism isn't anarchistic, as capitalism necessarily entails the establishment of at least two classes: the proletariat and bourgeoisie, defined in terms of the relationship to the means of production.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/daibhidh-anarcho-huc...

That seems unrelated to the discussion. If GP had said, "I'm a blueberry muffin and would love to see all of these costs unbundled...", could you have responded differently?

I think you're getting hung up on too specific an idea (unbundling costs). In the linked page on "anarchocapitalism":

"They use the term “anarchist”, but at the expense of their credibility — why? Because their self-definition doesn’t hold up to even the most rudimentary questioning."

Basically peddling "more of the same" and trying to sound cutting edge by adding "anarcho". It lacks intellectual honesty in the first place. We've been down the laissez faire path (a label pointlessly added before capitalism anyway given the traditional values upheld in capitalism; it wants to be left alone in the first place).

It was a disaster, and would be again if we allowed it anymore rope to hang us all with.

He's basically peddling that which he rants against: Monolithic economic policy that fits with his preferences.

I was picking up on a point or what I saw as a contradiction or misunderstanding. I see no problem with doing this. It is true that I was not directly attacking or agreeing with his or her position, but I do not see why I must do so when commenting. Ironically in the spirit of libertarianism, feel free to ignore my comment if you find it annoying or off-point.

Isn't people saying "I would like this government policy changed" an essential step in a working democracy?

I'm anarchocapitalist; I don't believe that "working democracy" is a thing. Or, perhaps, if it is a thing, it's not what you think it is.

I'm falling for the "someone on the Internet is wrong" trap, but neverthless: Anarchocapitalism is fundamentally flawed because it rests on the assumption that capitalist markets optimize for the best utility function. They don't. Further, even in the optimization they do provide, they are flawed. Capitalist markets are powerful optimization systems, but they routinely fail, in pretty well described scenarios. Namely:

1. Wherever there are externalities, capitalism fails. For negative externalities, individual entities are motivated to capture the positive value, burdening the whole with the negative. For positive externalities, individual entities are not motivated to absorb the negative value when they can't capture the positive one.

2. Capitalist markets are, on aggregate behaviour, short-term oriented. This is a risk reduction strategy, but society requires some long term investments. Some of these long term investments also classify as positive externalities.

3. Pure capitalist markets have no provision for wealth redistribution and tend to accumulate wealth. While this is morally defensible, huge disparities in wealth tend to produce revolutions. Revolutions are undesirable.

4. Due to (3), pure capitalist markets devolve into monopolies and oligopolies, producing local maxima in the resource optimization utility function usually associated with capitalism.

All in all, anarchocapitalism is a naïve view of capitalism, where a good optimizer is mistaken as the perfect optimizer.

"Externality" is a useful concept, but its mere existence doesn't mean that capitalism has "failed". Sure there are unfair conditions for lots of people, but in general there aren't too many Holodomors or Great Leaps Forward in capitalist societies. That's worth something.

That said, I'm no capitalist. So much seems so arbitrary. Like me, most people who advocate "radical" critiques of the status quo don't do so because they seek the most extreme disaster scenarios one can imagine resulting from those critiques. Rather, they see that current society isn't perfect, and could be improved by moving away from rigorously enforced neoclassical neoliberalism.

That’s an interesting comment so thanks (and upvoted). I’ve come across the term “externality” used to refer to capitalist enterprises off-loading part of the cost of their economic activity to wider society, e.g. dumping chemical waste into a river. However, I wasn’t aware of what the term specifically means or the difference between positive and negative externalities. I was going to request a follow-up comment to enlighten me but it turns out that there’s already a good Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

I don't think that's special pleading exactly. They're not saying "people should only pay for what they use, except for all these things I want and they don't", they're saying "people should be forced to pay for certain things, and those things should coincidentally be the ones I want". It's self-serving, but it's not an exception to a general principle.

"99.9% of folks in our society think that it is reasonable to have one-size-fits-all solutions,"

Yes, police, parks, fire, libraries, K-12 schools, air traffic control, restaurant health inspectors, everyone agrees ... Just don't bring up the seemingly tiny little detail of the financial structure of the health care system in the USA. And secondary side issue of roads full of cars.

Are police, parks, libraries and such federally regulated? I thought it was controlled more at the state level. I mean yeah, FBI is federal, but if I call 911, I'm going to get state-level police care.

Just in case someone wants to know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism is a political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favor of individual sovereignty, private property, and free markets. Anarcho-capitalists believe that, in the absence of statute (law by decree or legislation), society would improve itself through the discipline of the free market (or what its proponents describe as a "voluntary society").[2][3]

One aspect that concerned me:

In an anarcho-capitalist society, law enforcement, courts, and all other security services would be operated by privately funded competitors rather than centrally through compulsory taxation. Money, along with all other goods and services, would be privately and competitively provided in an open market.

Sooooooooo private security firms for law enforcement? Pretty sure we saw how that worked out in Iraq with Blackwater. No thank you. There's a ton of flaws with this philosophy once you start thinking about it and following certain aspects to their logical conclusion.

Such as:

>>> I'm an anarchocapitalist and would love to see all of these costs unbundled, so that we each pay only for what we use.

So you only use 2.5 miles of a highway to get to and back from work - right? Should you pay for the entire highway or just the parts you use? So what if other people only use "parts" of that same highway? Does that mean we suddenly have huge gaps in our highways since people are only paying for the parts they use?

You're describing toll roads, which of course work fine.

> Pretty sure we saw how that worked out in Iraq with Blackwater. No thank you. There's a ton of flaws with this philosophy once you start thinking about it and following certain aspects to their logical conclusion.

Blackwater contractors don't actually have to live in these places, they're just there for a short time to get paid, and then they get out. Arguably the incentives are different if you're an actual member of this society. I recommend Friedman's book if you want a proper introduction to anarcho-capitalism, instead of forming an overly simplistic view based on Wikipedia's introduction. His book addresses many of the naive counterarguments most people consider to be 'devastating' to anarcho-capitalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machinery_of_Freedom

>Sooooooooo private security firms for law enforcement? Pretty sure we saw how that worked out in Iraq with Blackwater. No thank you.

A firm hired by the government, using taxpayer dollars, to carry out government orders, is not a good example of anything an anarchocapitalist is proposing.

> So you only use 2.5 miles of a highway to get to and back from work - right? Should you pay for the entire highway or just the parts you use?

It would be bundled together the same way other goods are, determined by the balance between ease of charging and the scale of the good. Maybe a road company would charge a flat fee, or maybe a per-mile fee, or maybe a fee varying by congestion. All these things can be and are done now with toll roads. Road companies would have to determine the optimal scale, just like any other company.

> So you only use 2.5 miles of a highway to get to and back from work - right? Should you pay for the entire highway or just the parts you use? So what if other people only use "parts" of that same highway? Does that mean we suddenly have huge gaps in our highways since people are only paying for the parts they use?

The irony is that society would probably quickly realize that it's a lot more efficient to just build a road than pay for the overhead of managing so many small individual segments.

To be fair, I assume the OP's point was that they would rather see a tax based upon their actual distance driven.

To what granularity? Toll booths at each intersection? (Serious question.)

I shouldn't have to pay for the northbound lanes of I-580! I only ever take that road southbound! STOP TAXING ME! /s

Many tollbooths have been replaced by overhead transmitters/receivers that interact with in-car electronic devices. ISTM such a technology could continue to improve, to the point that eventually an exact accounting of road use would be practical.

And fully tracking every trip made in every car. That'd be an interesting database to compile

Sure, that would be the easy way to set up the system. Perhaps something more sophisticated and privacy-preserving could be done with blockchains...

That's probably wishful thinking, though. It would be wonderful if travel database access were limited to lawful court orders, but on current trends that seems impossible.

> You pay for the cost of government elementary schools even if you homeschool your kids.

Which means that your kids will live in society largely made up of people who have received some education. You could argue that there is more value in this than there is in providing parking.

The argument is that he is paying double: for homeschooling and for other kids in public schools. Other parents are paying only for public schools even though they benefit from living in a society where kids not attending public school received education as well. I sympathize with parent's views but I think early education (say up to high school) is a good thing to put in a common basket. If you want to home school you need to do well enough to be able to afford it which filters out people who shouldn't be homeschooling at least a bit.

Agreed. Pare it back to someone who doesn't have kids. If I had no kids I would still want a society where most people are generally educated. I benefit from that public good.

> You pay for the cost of government elementary schools even if you homeschool your kids.

Being a Floridian, we get a lot of retirees from other states (shocker, right?). A portion of these retirees don't like paying taxes for education. They say their kids are grown and they went to schools in other states, so why should they pay taxes for education?

Because they need the children of today to grow to be productive members of society who will fund the retirees' Social Security.

Too much education though, and they might become aware of the ponzi scheme they're being forced into.

> You pay for the cost of government elementary schools even if you homeschool your kids

and you receive the benefit of living in a society where most people have a minimum level of education. You can then hire these people and not have to pay to teach them how to read.

> You also pay for the cost of public parks even if you never use them

Maybe you personally somehow never enjoy seeing nature, I don't know. You still enjoy the benefit of a society where people get to see a little nature which is shown to make people happier and more productive, rather than everyone living in a bleak grey dystopian landscape.

In this case, people without cars benefit from parking lots at stores, because store wouldn't be able to stay open if they only catered to people without cars.

You still enjoy the benefit of a society where people get to choose their transportation and more be productive, rather than everyone living in a bleak grey dystopian city where everyone is riding the bus and can't control when or where they want to travel.

But the article doesn't argue for NO parking lots; it argues that FREE parking lots are the issue. The stores could stay open with paid parking, and could lower costs for non-drivers because they no longer needed to subsidize that free parking by charging everyone more.

"NO parking lots" is, in this case, analogous to "NO paying for parking lots."

Any store that tried to make people pay for parking would go out of business equally as fast as one without parking. (i.e. in some places that would fly, in most it would not.)

Your store or entertainment or whatever better be something absolutely unique and special for me to be willing to pay for parking.

The reasons cities require stores to build free parking is otherwise people park in residential areas and annoy the residents with extra traffic.

> To say "yes, I still want that policy, but I want EXACTLY the bundle of goods that I want forced on everyone, not some other basket of goods" seems like special pleading.

If everyone is pleading in this manner, then it isn't so special.

I think you've missed the point of the article. People who don't use public transportation subsidize those who do, but we're OK with that as a society in large part because many need to use public transportation; the young, the disabled, anyone who can't afford a car and or to live next to their work and a grocery store. Similarly, we subsidize schooling and school lunches. But subsidizing parking is the opposite of that: the poorer pay for the richer. No one would be concerned that the ultra-rich are forced to subsidize parking they're not using when they take their private jets instead of road-tripping.

No, you're doing EXACTLY what I was calling out.

You've got your own ethical / utility function and are explaining to me that basket of goods X is ideal bc it's exactly the basket that your ethical / utilitarian code wants, and basket Y is very bad, because it's the basket that other people want.

This is special pleading.

I find your argument utterly bizarre. You're saying "these are all members of a category, therefore you must accept ALL of them or NONE of them". But your choice of category is arbitrary! Why make it "currently executed subsidies" instead of "all possible subsidies" instead of "subsidies that were done in ancient Sumeria" instead of "subsidies that primarily aid those less well off"? I have no problem doing what you're calling out because what you're calling out is reality. You're proving far too much.

By that logic the current basket is special pleading and any basket is as good as the other.

"...but the other 99.9% of folks in our society think that it is reasonable to have one-size-fits-all solutions, where a single basket of goods is created and handed to everyone, regardless of whether they want it or not."

Oh the irony of calling everyone else out for their love of monolithic solutions, then peddling your personal preference for how the economy for everyone should work for everyone.

The 99.9% is just asinine. It's another ideological monolith. It's this over generalization, this "the world is against me" narrative that is peddled here, Twitter, Reddit...

How about some rigor in our discourse. Peddle your ideals with detail, not your emotional hangups and QQ's

They identified as being anarcho-capitalist. I'm willing to accept the premise that 0.1% of the population subscribes to that ideology. I suspect their claim is that there should be no 'economy for everyone', but I don't know much about an-caps.

Yes, we do each of those things because we want to strongly encourage their use. The unfairness is supposed to be outweighed by the social benefits to all by this encouragement. This is a good thing IF we think it's a good thing for people to:

- Go to parks more, and be more relaxed and healthy, benefiting everyone

- Get more education more, benefiting all of society

- Drive more.... thus creating more traffic, accidents, and pollution??

One of these things is not like the other!

At the very least, if you want to encourage people travelling (for some reason, not clear what the benefit is) you should be fair and equally subsidize car usage, transit usage, and bike/walk usage. (In much of the USA, parking is free, usage of most freeways is free, but trains and buses cost money and bike/walking is made difficult. The only conclusion to draw is that government wants to encourage usage of cars instead of non-car transport mediums, for unfathomable reasons)

Somehow I doubt your support of home schools. Even though the students perform better.

WTF? I didn't mention home schools. I'm in no way against them.

(I see your point though -- I think you are implying that since home school parents are not given any of the money that would be spent in the school district, this strongly encourages public schooling as opposed to home (or private) schooling. TBQH changing this to be fairer to home schoolers would be fine by me, seems like a parallel example. But whatever, I'm trying to have a conversation about transportation here, not education)

[I] would love to see all of these costs unbundled, so that we each pay only for what we use.

If you don't like subsidies, why make such a show of arguing in favor of this subsidy? (Sure, from a particular idiosyncratic point of view, you aren't so arguing, but you've deliberately left that quite ambiguous...)

There was a study a while back that showed that the USA has eight times as many parking spaces as it has cars.

At first that seems crazy, but it makes sense if you think about the fact that all the places you go in a day need to have enough parking to meet their peak demand all year, so places like malls have huge empty lots most of the year until Christmas rolls around. And then there is the spot your car is in at work that's empty at night and the spot you park in at home that's empty during the day.

Another nice benefit of self driving cars that are shared is the major reduction in the need to all this excess parking.

There is also the concept of “ground cover” in some places.

I have seen office buildings create gigantic parking lots just to “occupy” all their land so that the land cannot be taken away later. If land is completely undeveloped then it can be reclaimed in some situations, e.g. someone decides they want to build a railway.

Building a parking lot will in no way save you from the imminent domain powers of people who want to build roads and railroads. This strikes me as some kind of urban legend. Every place I've lived has mandated some ratio of parking to floor space in new office buildings, which is why office buildings are surrounded by parking.

Pedantic correction: The term is "eminent domain". In fairness, if someone exercises the power of eminent domain, the domain will imminently be theirs, but that's neither here nor there.

That said, under eminent domain the government is required to pay you the fair market price of the land it is taking from you. That's why it's in companies' best interest to not let their land sit undeveloped.

Maybe a railway isn’t a realistic example. A nature preserve might be a better one; they can’t decide to cordon off an area for wildlife if you’ve already destroyed all the trees, whereas untouched land might fall into that category.

The examples I can think of were in Texas and I’m sure the rules vary by region.

I highly doubt people in Texas are building parking lots to protect against a nature preserve. It's generally because of parking requirements established by building codes.

I think we wouldn't see things as being nearly this bad if all American cities didn't rip out their tram networks. Every city I've lived in, even small ones with ~100k people, use to have Streetcars. Today, cities like Cincinnati struggle to get a tiny segment put in.

Trams carry a ton more people than buses. People are more likely to ride them too. If American cities hadn't given in to GM and Ford and kept streetcars instead of replacing them with buses (that have lower capacity, use up more fuel, etc.) I think parking in the US, and car ownership in general, would be very different.

Not only that but the suburbs built up around these streetcar networks are typically the preferred places to live in cities these days, due to their walkable neighborhoods.

Shopping centers are rare because business is typically spread out along the length of the line.

I don't really get why trams are better than buses. Do they really carry a ton more people than buses? Why are people more likely to ride them?

Buses come in short/long/articulated/double-decker sizes and don't need to be on rails or require overhead electrical lines. The only argument I can think of is that you get a smoother ride and no need to burn fuel with a tram.

(I've only ridden the trams in one city, and they were pretty much slower buses on rails that happened to make a lot of dinging noises. Worked fine in the central district, I guess.)

One benefit is trams aren't subject to traffic, but theoretically you could have a dedicated bus lane to achieve that same result.

Here's an example of a good tram system:

http://dyob.com.au/sites/default/files/u9/96%20North%20Carlt...

It's separated from the traffic so it's fast, doesn't have associated tyre and asphalt maintenance costs, and each tram carries over 200 people maximum. The service is frequent - about every five to seven minutes - and much smoother and more comfortable than a bus.

My city don't have trams but there was a political push to build them. However, bus routes were upgraded instead. Result is better than trams IMO. Some key points we do:

- Popular buses run ever 5-ish minutes during peak times

- Some buses have extension and cary a crapload of people.

- Problematic spots have bus-only lanes.

What is better than tram:

- Buses that share only a bit of the route can use those lanes too

- Taxis can use bus lanes

- Some of the lanes allow cars with 4+ people to promote carpooling

- If there's an accident or emergency, cars can use the bus lane

- Bus lanes are frequently reused as designated right turn lanes

- Overall maintenance is cheaper when using a single mode of transport. Same backup vehicles can serve all routes - no need for separate backup trams and buses. Same for technicians, spare parts etc.

- No big upfront construction costs. Some bus lanes were snatched from regular traffic, some were built later on. Mostly by making other lanes narrower and widening the road just a little bit. Trams would require much more space and wouldn't even fit in some spaces without banning cars altogether. The'd still have to pave these bits to let emergency services use them.

- In tight spots, buses can easily merge with general traffic. Buses have defacto priority, so no delays during merge.

In my city, introducing trams would have been at least few years of city-wide construction works, lots of possibilities for wasting public money and/or corruption. Bus lanes were super cheap and are added incrementally wherever costs in that specific section can be justified by savings. They can be removed easily if they cause too much trouble or don't speed up buses much. Rails would be there forever.

Comfortwise, good tram and good bus ride equally well. Unmaintained, both trams and buses suck.

TL;DR Buses are much cheaper and more agile stepping stone into good public transit. Trams themselves ain't magic cure. Buses can be

Do you have to sit down on them like normal buses? One of the benefits of trams is the standing part so you can fit more people in. Last time I tried this on a bus the results weren't as good.

Well, I consider it a happy ride if I have a chance to sit down...

Yes, the buses have handles and everything for standing passengers. Wider aisles and stand-only areas instead of more seats too. The inside of the bus look like a tram/metro rather than long distance bus/train.

Yes, emergency stops are not comfortable. Some old lady falls and breaks her hand every few years. But trams have traffic lights and may have to do emergency stop too. Trams probably have less emergency stops per km travelled. But I never considered this a huge issue.

AFAIK, bus service regularly train drivers to drive "nice-to-passengers". Park close to curb, avoid emergency stops, start smoothly etc. I guess there's a risk for this problem, but it seems to be manageable.

Timetable rules may be a big factor too. I heard more bus drivers loose bonuses for driving faster than schedule than for being (unreasonably) late..

The interior of a bus doesn't need to be any different than the interior of a tram. Unless your city is repurposing coaches for public transport, the interiors of buses should have ample standing space.

In my experience trams trend to be wider than buses by a noticeable margin.

Here in the UK, trams (at least for Croydon[1][2], Metrolink[3], Newcastle Metro[4]) seem to be standardised at 2650mm width whilst the New Routemaster[5] is 2520mm wide. Probably not a noticeable margin (130/2650 =~ 5%).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CR4000 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variobahn#Variobahn_trams_for_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M5000 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne_and_Wear_Metro_rolling_st... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Routemaster

It's worth noting that buses often have space taken up by the wheel arches, engine and stairs which can make them feel a lot more cramped than a tram with a similar footprint, which have floors elevated to platform level.

Why should a taxi get to use a bus lane? That's essentially a single person car with a chauffeur. How is a taxi-driven car more worthy than someone else's car?

More people using taxis - less cars parked in busy parts of city? Lobbying from taxi tycoons may or may not have influenced this.

Bus lanes are relatively empty most of the time. There're not that many taxis to slow down buses. Maybe not win-win, but nobody looses either. To be honest, this is first time I hear somebody complain about this rule. Feels kinda natural over there.

I live in a city where taxis can use the bus lane.

Pros - similar to an express lane (HOV free, single-occupant vehicles pay a toll) it's handy when you're the one who's running late and REALLY need to get somewhere quick.

Cons - Buses deal with taxi congestion, cyclists deal with maniacal taxi drivers.

Not really. They do it many times a day, depending on how long the ride is. When people take busses and cabs, they aren't needing parking nor contributing to traffic. If 15 people take a cab instead of driving in a day, that is 14 less cars on the road. This is the main point in general. The traffic with cabs is a bit different - you know how many cabs work on any given day (on average).

I guess you'd be shocked to learn that here, not only can taxis use bus lanes, but so can electric vehicles to help encourage better choices.

Bus lanes are only as good as their enforcement. Which in my experience has typically been near zero. The de jure bus lane is the de facto parking lane.

You describe a political decision to make bus service suck. A police force that can't keep cars out of the bus lane when it is actually trying to do so is a police force that can't enforce any law.

Los Angeles had dedicated bus lanes seperate from traffic (orange line) which is almost as good as rail for a fraction of the cost of laying track.

> as good as rail for a fraction of the cost of laying track

It's really not. Even long/double decker buses carry a fraction of the people a streetcar can.

Streetcars are still faster given other things being equal (dedicated lanes).

The maintenance of streetcars is much better. You have no tyers, fully electric engines, high torque and lower energy consumption.

Buses are good for short term routes, but long term a rail network will always win out in capacity and energy efficiency.

Don't you get most of that with electric busses then? I can see the argument although for automation and how you can multicar trams with one driver.

>Don't you get most of that with electric busses then?

If you're going to put up catenary wires why not just make it a tram?

Because then you also have to lay track.

It's the 96 in Melbourne. That particular tram was made entirely in Victoria too. :)

Trams definitely carry more people than buses, even articulated ones. On top of that they produce no local pollution, as they run on power that is not produced locally (and which might actually come from clean sources of energy). As per for the "trams are slow" argument that doesn't really count. Most of the time cars are riding bumper to bumper during rush hour, while a tram has its own dedicated line which makes it get ahead of cars almost all the time.

Source: me, who's riding the tram to work and back most of the times.

I would add that an advantage of tram is that they actually stop at each stop, so you can take an unfamiliar line without fear of getting lost after missing your stop.

They also usually run much more frequently than buses, and don't suffer from delays due to traffic or traffic lights (or not as much).

One factor nobody has mentioned yet, social stigma. Busses in the US are often associated with poor people who can't afford a car or have lost their licenses. Trams do not have the same stigma.

> Busses in the US are often associated with poor people who can't afford a car

Also, to be blunt, black people. I live in a pretty white area. If I didn't ride the bus, I could probably not see a single black person for a week or two at a time. Riding the bus, it's every day. And I'm quite sure a lot more people prefer the former scenario than will admit it (not that they necessarily have any particular animosity, but a lot of people are "just not comfortable" inhabiting the same space as black people).

In part because the races are taught different norms about appropriate behavior in public. The black people sitting quietly aren't the ones everyone else is hesitant to be near.

"Trams do not have the same stigma."

Solely because they're new. If they're heated or air conditioned they'll fill with smelly homeless just like a bus, unless they're more expensive.

The primary way they're actually being rolled out in the USA is conspicuous consumption. Yes a bus would do the job for a tenth the price, or a taxi for half the price, just like a $250/month apartment in the highest crime part of the inner city technically does the same job as this new $5000/month apartment on the tram line. The point of stainless steel appliance kitchens for people who can't cook is it prevents people who can't afford stainless steel kitchens from living there, like poor people, minorities and such.

Likewise the rails are convenient enough because most social media holiness spiral destinations are permanent. So you can brag about how you're going to the progressive art museum, or a book signing at the library, or the performing arts center, or the hyper trendy college hipster bars (although the tram service stops at sundown to avoid actual drunks), but you can't use the tram to do prole stuff like go to work or school or the food store or doctors office because there's no tracks there, proles go away keep out. Trams are only for special rich people doing special rich people things, the kind that pat themselves on their backs for their egalitarianism on a regular basis, if you have to ask you don't belong there on the tram. Ideally there would be no icky poor people anywhere along the tram rails, nothing but rich white faces as far as the eye can see. Maybe they could build a fence around the whole neighborhood, or just have the police keep the riff raff out of our special area for special people.

Trams require a different sort of infrastructure to install and maintain and are less flexible than a bus system.

Busses use much more of the existing infrastructure, which is one of the main reasons cities struggle to get a tiny segment put in. Busses are also much more adjustable to the city's needs. You can increase and decrease frequency on routs - or change routes by moving stops. Construction? Adjust routes. One bus down? Off the the mechanic and replace it with one of the backups.

And I'm not sure that would have helped parking and car ownership in the US. For some time, part of the dream was to own a car. A car meant freedom and it often still does as the us, as a whole, lacks decent public transportation outside of the larger cities. Sometimes the busses are stopped before the bars close, for example. Traveling from city to city? Good luck or prepare to be majorly inconvenienced. (overnight layovers, for example).

Interesting. Now you got me thinking more about what things might change with self-driving cars.

Will cars offer an "orbiting" mode where they keep driving in a circle until you are ready to be picked up.

Will stores offer a driving ring where cars can drive around in circles off the main street in the case where no parking slots are available?

Will cars be able to drop you off, and park themselves when a space becomes available? Will the cars notify you where they parked, or will they always come to your location? (And what if you are standing in an area that is impossible to drive to...where does the car go?)

I can't wait for self-driving cars. This will be a lot of fun to see how the world changes in both the large and small.

Cars moving take up more space that stationary parked cars. What you've stumbled on is actually a concern for transit planners - more traffic because self driving cars are circling without any passengers.

Well, I think this is probably a case where a bit of number crunching will save the day - considering a world in which driverless cars are the norm and fully embraced by the city, the coordination system can likely determine based on historical data and also current queue request pressure how many cars to launch into traffic at any given time to satisfy demand for a summon in less than 5 minutes or whatever target they want. When not summoned or being sent to meet demand, the cars return to an enclosure outside the city for maintenance.

Admittedly, there is a lot of planning that needs to happen for even a prototype of this to happen, as well as some major cultural shifts, but when it does happen, I think it will run pretty smoothly. The biggest issue in my mind isn't the logistics as much as the cultural attitude that will need to happen - right now everyone seems to assume ownership of driverless cars, but the more reasonable approach seems to be summoned fleets instead. I can envision something like the city owning the control infrastructure and leasing slots to competing companies, or even just competing companies and leaving the city controller out of the picture.

Hopefully enough by-the-trip rental that you don't need to own one, and that they are used by somebody else while you don't need it, so less need for parking.

Sort of what we do with airplanes. You never really think of until you need them to be all grounded:

http://m.imgur.com/7jGGZaT

"Orbiting" seems like a great way to add unnecessary wear and tear. I imagine an alternative is cars that travel to parking then come and pick you up when summoned.

There is also the possibility of having your car work for hire to help you afford to buy a new one sooner :D

Orbiting would turn the surrounding streets into a car park too.

All of your hypotheticals seem to still assume individually-used cars. This is much nearer term thinking than the real interesting stuff. Cars wouldn't need to circle or park themselves. They would just go pick somebody else up. When you're done, some other car would come pick you up.

Many people will prefer to keep individually used cars. Cars is not only transportation, but storage too. From children seats to umbrella to things you bought at previous stop.

The random self-driving car is pretty much the same as public transport. Individual cars seem to be still a thing, even though we have buses, taxis etc. Having random car pick you up is not some totally new idea that wasn't tried ever before.

It would be new: the price could be much lower, perhaps closer to public transportation, while the privacy and directness of pickup and drop-off would be like taxis.

The point about storage and kids is definitely interesting. Seems like potential for business opportunities if we ever find ourselves in this world.

They'd drive quite a lot of junk miles, which is virtually non-existant for public transit. And wouldn't have several passengers either. Taxis don't have economy of scale passengers-wise either, but they try to minimise junk miles a lot. Sometimes event rejecting travels to certain destinations or charging 2x to cover return.

I guess bottom line would end up ~ the same as current car sharing services. Cheaper if you want occasional use, but more expensive as daily driver. And availability issues at peak times.

I don't follow your logic here. Why would they need to drive more "junk miles" than taxis? It seems to me that there would be quite a bit more opportunities for optimization. How does the bottom line end up about the same as current car sharing services when you have removed one of the largest costs? Availability also seems easier to manage than with a fleet of people driving...

Over there, taxis refuse going out of city limits or even to remote parts of town where they know they won't have a passenger back. They have reserved spots for parking in many areas (just idle in grey-legal spots). There would be many autonomous cars and they'd follow rules more strictly I guess. So they'd have to drive off to find some parking. Then come back to pick up next customer. They'd drive a shitload of junk miles to pick up/drop off people to suburbs. Taxis either refuse such trips or charge $$$.

Current car sharing service (e.g. zipcar) is virtually the same as autonomous car sharing. You're not removing any large costs. Fleet balance is arguably the only cost removed. But it seems to be more or less solved problem even without autonomous cars. At least in my city, they no longer require to return (most) cars to the same lot. Wether car is autonomous or not, you still have to purchase the vehicle, pay insurance, gas, maintenance... Same price. The only change would be paying for idle car, it could drive back by itself. But user would have to pay for those junk miles. Which may be the same as paying for idling in the long run.

If car sharing service would want to have good availability at any time, they'd have a lot of overhead cars. Which would increase the cost. Otherwise they'd have to have reservations. And we get into a whole can of worms..

Future humans will laugh at this quaint preference for one's own generic auto. Perhaps there will still be a point to owning specialized vehicles that e.g. go over difficult terrain or have extra comfort amenities. The idea that one Hyundai Sonata could be preferred to another Hyundai Sonata, however, is very odd.

People already laugh at people who love their vehicles to death. They don't drive a generic car though. Those people can usually explain why they drive that specific vehicle with those specific addons in no less than an hour.

For the record, I drive a stock car. I like few extra comfort bits I got, but many cars got that these days. I'm fine with people having fun in a way I don't get though.

Driving in a circle still isn't free it either costs gas or electricity. When you park your car you are constrained to park it relatively nearby. Logically your car lacking a parking spot at your location will seek one nearby until it has traveled far enough that it is logical for it to turn around and drive back to you.

In some cases perhaps it will rejoin the pool of available cars and you will picked up by a different car.

Perhaps retailers will be yet more likely to offer to ship selected large or awkward items directly to your home after you have picked them out.

Perhaps retailers...

Yes they'll be happy to pay a premium for delivery trucks that require no drivers. Time-of-day flexibility will enable serving more customers with the same size fleet. Many customers will be more willing to use delivery when they can plan around working hours and don't have to worry about tipping. Service levels won't be subject to mistakes in shift planning.

Even at peak demand many spots are empty. The reason for so much parking is that it is legally required. Nothing more, nothing less. Many of the businesses will never make full use of their parking.

Places without parking requirement laws develop very differently, and if parking is provided at all, it's usually in far smaller quantities and it's not free.

Compare, say, third tier Japanese cities that lack subway systems to American equivalents. Parking exists, but it's not universally free, and there's less of it.

You should read up on parking minimum laws.

That might apply in cities, but I don't believe parking spaces at suburban malls are typically regulated.

You are probably incorrect. Suburbs generally have parking requirements in their zoning laws as well.

I'm talking only about malls.

You are actually not correct; suburban areas have more intense and all encompassing parking minimum laws. Manhattan, for instance, has either none or none below 125th Street IIRC.

Suburbs look like they do not because of preference but because it is not legal for them to look otherwise.

The idea in the 50s was:

A) Require cars to live and you will not have to live next to poor people or minorities since cars and maintenance of them are expensive, how great; Jim Crow without the legal challenges and we can co-opt non racist people B) Cars are the future and no one needs to walk, except maybe in parks C) Since this glorious future has yet to arrive naturally despite decades of mass produced automobiles, we'll need to legislate it into existence and massively fund highways D) Cities are the source of all ills

Other than the racist motivations, it's really just poor planning that is copy and pasted from one place to another.

A lot of cities are realizing it's stupid and removing or relaxing these laws.

In the 1950s vehicle ownership wasn't the significant financial hurdle you seem to think it was.

Car ownership today, as then, is actually a pretty big financial hurdle for the poor. Cars are probably the most expensive way of getting to work. Let's count how they are expensive:

1) Large initial capital outlay; back in 1950 this might be $1500 but your earnings might be $3300 a year. You'd either need to get a loan, save up a significant portion of your salary, or get a used car (which were less plentiful as car ownership was much lower and earlier cars were less reliable)

2) You need to pay for ongoing maintenance. Oil changes, tires, etc. all add up. In the 50s the cars were more mechanically simple, so probably the labor costs were much lower (you'd probably do at least a portion of it) but there was more work to be done. Oil changes were more frequent, things like points had to be adjusted, etc.

3) Gas is not free. In the 50s this was in the $2.00 per gallon range in 2016 dollars. Cheap, but again not free

4) Parking costs money, then and now

Compare that to the previous costs:

1) Buy bus / train / subway / streetcar ticket

2) Shoes

It's much easier to afford a single trip as there is no capital outlay involved.

You're thinking like a well off software engineer. Think like a poor person.

Several of my family members have trouble getting to work because of unreliable and expensive car based transportation. They work just above minimum wage.

Their town has no real public transit to speak of, except in one or two unreliable bus lines, so getting to work is an actual hurdle.

And unfortunately, related to all of the points you mentioned, this need of the poorer suburban/rural people to own their own cars is what spurs on the subprime auto finance market. If you're making minimum wage there's a good chance you have bad credit, and your only option to get to work is getting a vehicle financed at a smaller, less reliable dealership who charges huge markups on decade old vehicles with 100k+ miles, and exorbitant amounts of interest, and they won't hesitate to repossess if you miss a payment.

In the past couple of years in the US the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FTC have started working to help these types of car buyers and protect them against deceptive practices in advertising and unruly markups, much to the chagrin of the so-called "Buy Here-Pay Here" dealerships. The recent election and the deregulation culture surrounding it, however, does may not bode well for the consumers. I wouldn't be surprised if the CFPB is dissolved entirely.

Do you have a source for the broader claim (outside of NYC) that suburban malls in particular have more intense parking minimum laws? My comment was not talking about residential parking or standalone businesses.

Here's an example from Tyson's Corner, VA, which you might know as the home of the world's first Apple store:

http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/dpz/zoningordinance/articles/ar...

Example quote (in the context of commercial shopping centers and parking minimums that apply):

> 1,000,000 square feet of gross floor area or more: Four (4) spaces per 1000 square feet of gross floor area

EDIT: Note also that you get absurd scenarios like pools requiring a space per 4 people that can use the pool, or vets having to have at least 10 spaces, and so on and so forth. Absurd regulations

I'd be very surprised if shared self driving cars lead to a major reduction in excess parking, or lower the number of traffic jams.

People want to do the same things at more or less the same time: Having time off while your social circle is at work is not as fun. Many jobs require customers, and others require entire groups of people to be there together. This means the minimum capacity needed to handle peaks is not going to be very far off from where we are right now.

Think of your typical morning traffic: One side of the highway is in gridlock, while the other is doing well. In the evenings, the directions reverse. A lot of people want to be at the office at 8:00, so you need capacity for that. And what do the cars do now that it's 8:05 and they are downtown? Probably nothing, as there is no demand for that much capacity for most of the day.

Same thing with a sporting event: People will get to the stadium to watch the 49ers, but Santa Clara doesn't have any use for 40K+ cars for 3 hours on sunday morning. The most you can do is have the cars do some otherwise useless miles to park in a cheaper area further away from the stadium.

I'd love to be wrong on this, but this phenomenon would make it surprising if we got a double digit decrease in traffic with shared self driving cars.

The traffic reduction will come from two sources -- fewer cars and the fact that the cars can drive at optimal speed, reducing unnecessary slowdowns.

That being said, while some cars would need to be stationary, there are plenty of people moving around all day long.

Do we know there will be fewer cars? Self Driving cars allow all non-drivers to use a car.

Yes, that's so, although I think it's fair to assume that many non-drivers don't use a car because of the cost, not because they're unwilling to drive or incapable of driving.

On the other hand, the cost of car ownership could be reduced with self driving cars.

>I'd be very surprised if shared self driving cars lead to a major reduction in excess parking, or lower the number of traffic jams.

I agree. Years ago in a certain Asian city when chauffeurs were still common for well off families, traffic around luxury department stores was bad even during day time.

A chauffeur would drop off the housewife for a shopping trip, and than he would drive around and around until her shopping was done (because parking is hard to find).

I expect same thing to happen with self-driving cars.

You're still assuming that everyone owns their own self-driving car, though. Given that the average person only uses a car for one hour per day it's silly that you'd keep idle a car that can drive itself for those other 23 hours. It makes sense to share the entire fleet. So after you get dropped off at the mall, the car is off to pick up its next passenger, and you get whatever self-driving car happens to be closest when you're done shopping.

One of the reasons I love having a car is storage. I can go chain-shopping and store items I bought in the car. Getting a random self-driving car would make me carry all the stuff I bought with me. Kinda sucks.

Same with commuting or going to mass events. I keep some drinking water (fuck stadium/concerts pricing) in my car. I keep some gloves in case weather is colder than expected and to make sure I didn't accidentally forget them at home. Ditto on umbrella. I always got some reusable shopping bags in my trunk. Fuck paying for shitty plastic bags at grocery shop.

My mom's trunk is literally full of random crap that she uses maybe twice a year. But she loves having it there.

Using random cars (wether self-driving or not, e.g. regular taxi) would have to be much better to payoff for loosing this advantage.

You would still be able to go chain-hopping with a self-driving car, you would just be paying to keep it engaged the entire time, rather than getting a separate car for each hop and only paying while you're actually in it.

As for everything else, I totally get that not being able to keep stuff in your car is inconvenient. But there are billions of people out there who don't own cars who already deal with these issues every day, and they can be overcome. For instance, I live in NYC and I don't own a car. When I'm out of the apartment for longer periods of time I bring a backpack with me, packed with water, a Kindle (for amusing myself on subway rides), additional clothing suitable for the day's weather, an Anker battery pack to recharge my phone, and other stuff.

The big advantage is that you are no longer paying the substantial costs of car ownership, which should more than make up for the slight decrease in convenience. If it doesn't for you, you could always buy your own self-driving car.

I totally get you and I'm not saying that car sharing doesn't work. We already got taxis and shared cars that we drive ourselves.

Some people seem to be very hyped up by autonomous driving and think that most people would jump on that bandwagon. I'm giving perspective that a big chunk of population have reasons to buy their own cars. It'll definitely boil down to price of the service. Would I drop convenience of having my own car for 80% car budget saving? Yep. 10%? Meh.. 50%? Maybe.

The "substantial costs of car ownership" depend on car. If you want to have (almost) new car, then yes, that's expensive. But after the car is paid off (or you just buy used with cash), car ownership isn't that expensive. Car sharing seems cheap compared to new(ish) car only. It's worth to own new(ish) car if you drive a lot and/or car must be available immediately 24/7. But car sharing service won't cut it for you then. Or if car is more than a mean of transportation. Car sharing won't fit the bill either. Unless autonomous car sharing would be few times cheaper than current car sharing. Even including all the junk miles.

Except the issue with traffic is commuting which occurs at roughly the same time.

You don't have much problem with Saturday shopping traffic .

The idea that everyone needs to commute in a separate vehicle is an outdated notion whose time has past. It especially makes no sense with shared self-driving cars, which are more like small buses than privately owned passenger cars in function. The total number of vehicles on the road would end up drastically reduced.

You're underestimating all of the ways self-driving cars will increase efficiency relative to parking, which are multiplicative.

1. Much higher occupancy per car. Based on my personal observations, at rush hour the average occupancy of a car is something like 1.3. I don't see any reason that can't increase to 2.6 or more without significantly slowing anyone down -- 2x

2. Yes, a lot of people need to get to work at 8, but normal working hours start at different times for different people, anywhere from 6:30-9:30 is fairly typical in a U.S. city. If the average person has a 30-40 minute commute, and there is a reasonable amount of reverse commute demand, a car should be able to make 2-3 round trips per day at least -- 2.5x

3. Cars driving more efficiently with quicker reaction time and less mistakes will speed up commutes a lot. Hard to say how much but I'd say at least 30%. This directly increases capacity, since shorter commutes mean each car moves more people in the 6:30-9:30 window -- 1.3x

4. If self driving cars can communicate with each other to park, they can pack themselves very closely, and make room for a car to get in and out, removing the need for oversized parking spots, space between cars for doors to open, and aisles between cars. This should improve parking density by at least 3x.

5. Cars that are on-demand and self-driving can be smaller than typical cars we drive today. Since you can order any sized vehicle based on what's needed for an individual trip, there will be many fewer empty seats. Without the need for a steering wheel and controls, interiors can make much greater use of available interior space. This should reduce the exterior size of the average car at least 1.5x.

6. Cars can find parking in more remote areas. If parking is not available within a block of the office, the car can drop you off and park a few blocks away. This increases utilitzation, say 1.2x.

So, multiply it all together, and you get 35x better parking efficiency. It's going to be a huge win for dense cities.

Do you think people will prefer to use a self driving car that gets them to the office ten minutes faster or one that meanders around picking up other people and dropping them off?

Well like uber pool / uber X, it will have 2 price points and people can choose what is more important.

Also with more people using it, the less meandering it does. If everyone uses the "uberpool" system, it will probably pick up everyone in about 5 minutes in a 2 block radius and drop you off at one spot 1 block from your work. The more dense it is, the more efficient it gets.

For many people, that meander will save them more money than they will earn in any other 10 minute slot of the day. And sitting in a robocab is smartphone media consumption time (or time for a printed newspaper, if you're a Vicky), it's not terribly hard to tolerate minutes that way. A well designed (and sufficiently dense in usage) shared autonomous car system could also support usage patterns a lot more dynamic than rigid door-to-door pickup: instead of sitting around idle, waiting for a car to divert into the cul de sac maze of their suburb, users might prefer a little walk towards the next through road, with the app auto-negotiating a rendezvous point. Not only because taking a little walk through your neighborhood is less annoying than sitting idle on call for pickup, but also because it would actually be faster. With that usage pattern, pickup overhead for the occupants would be much lower

I say "could" instead of "will" because all this is more a question of cultural development than a technological/economic one. If individual car usage does not go out of fashion, robotic driving will only continue the trend towards ever bigger commuter castles.

> if you're a Vicky

What does that mean? Like someone from the victorian age? I think they are all dead.

Just guessing, but maybe a reference to Neal Stephenson's novel, _The Diamond Age_. If I recall, "vicky" is a slightly derogatory term used to describe (wealthy) residents of New Victoria, who are shown to buy things like handmade furniture (where mass-produced machine-made furniture is cheaper if not also higher quality).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

Sorry for the confusion. Like the other answer said, as in neo-Victorian, the retro-tribe from The Diamond Age. I was hoping that the reference was buried deep enough in a tangent to be harmless, and you mostly figured it out from context anyways.

Depends on the cost. If cost were not a concern, everyone would take a private cab.

And if 1 occupant per 2-ton-vehicle becomes the norm, dense cities will implement congestion pricing or surtaxes to force multiple occupancy or public transport usage - if 1 million driverless taxis try to deliver people into the square mile of the City of London, everyone will have a bad time. (Ditto for Manhattan, SF, downtown Boston, Hong Kong Midtown etc.)

Yes, a lot of people need to get to work at 8, but normal working hours start at different times for different people

The other factor is school. While I can show up at work, more less, whenever I want, my daughter has be at school by 8.10 at the latest, as does everybody else's kids. If we don't add flexibility to school starting times times then, to many people, it won't matter what sort of flexibility they have with work.

So, have self-driving minibuses that can pick up ~10 kids and ferry all of them to school.

Children are straight up evil, so you're still going to need a supervising adult on each minibus to keep them from murdering each other.

And destroying the bus. Idle hands and all that...

One answer is unshared cars, or shared only within a possibly extended family.

Not all Americans are atomized urbanites. Many are in families.

My MiL, wife, myself, and my two kids could easily share one self driving car although the number of miles traveled would likely be staggering.

If my kids destroy "dads car" they are in big trouble, and "dads car" has "car alexa" and she will yell at them for awhile if they misbehave and god help them if "car alexa" has to resort to facetime dad at work to mediate a child argument. "Wait until your father gets home" worked on gen-xers when they were kids, but now we have facetime and dozens of equivalent systems.

The mileage used and CO2 footprint will likely be much higher than individually owned cars because every trip everyone takes will be twice as long upfront, plus my kids will be car mobile which means much less sitting at home (Hey, you want your allowance, have the car drive you 10 miles to grandma's house and rake her leaves while mom and dad at work and behave yourself because Car Alexa has her eye on you and I will ask her). Also my senior citizen MiL would never road trip at her age and driving ability but a self driving car would result in a lot of visiting rural relatives and doing stuff in the hypercongested and terrifying to drive in downtown. Heck if I had the car at my beck and call why would I ever eat lunch at my desk when I could hang out at a nice park instead and never care about parking or driving. Hey why drive the whole family to the library when you can just send all four separately at their convenience, each of which takes twice as many miles because its pick up and drop off service unless no one else needs it, for 8 times the number of miles driven. I need a head of lettuce for dinner tomorrow, normally I'd get it on the way home from work for "free" ecologically speaking, but my son is just doing homework on his ipad so I'll send him out shopping on a special trip because he can do his math homework for 90% of the time while the car is driving him.

I would realistically estimate we're doing about 25000 miles per year across three cars and if we replaced it with one extended family self driver, I think it quite reasonable we'd knock out 60000 miles per year. Given that the self driver is likely to be staggeringly more expensive than any of our three cars, it probably cheaper and better for the environment to have separate cars, at least until self driving is so cheap its "free".

In what way are self driving cars different from Taxis/Uber? Why are the people who own cars today preffer to share them when they become self-driving?

I ask as someone who doesn't own and doesn't want to own a car. Where I live, public transport is good, and even taking a Taxi everyday is cheaper than car ownership if you only use it for your commute (not by much, but it's competitive). Still people love to own and use their cars. I would love to see people share them, but I fail to see how self-driving would be an incentive for that.

It floors me that businesses are allowed to keep their parking lots off limits during non business hours. That alone would go a long way to freeing up spaces.

A property owner that allows the public onto their property needs to have insurance against claims that members of the public were injured by the property owner. Such claims can arise out of accidents that happen in the normal course of walking. The claim process itself is expensive to use for settling claims, regardless of the outcome, therefore the insurance premiums are significant.

It is cheaper therefore, to only admit into the parking lot the cars that belong to the customers of the property owner, because there will be less people who could press claims against the owner. When the owner's business is closed, it behooves the owner to enclose the parking lot to keep out people who aren't customers.

I suggest that non-free parking that belongs to a parking company would be preferable, on the above reasoning. Plus fewer spaces would be needed since the company would have no reason to make you move your car if you wanted to patronize a second business.

I patronize a bar where I have to find on-street parking most nights. It is across the street from a supermarket that has a mostly-empty parking lot. I understand why the bar patrons are not permitted to use the supermarket parking lot, and I believe it were best that that parking lot was instead a paid lot open to all drivers. I think about this as I walk to my car.

I've seen places where this situation exists, and the supermarket will charge some amount of money to park in the lot, but make it free if you shop in the market. Seems like a reasonable solution. The paid parking covers the extra insurance and maintenance. Maybe you should suggest it to the market across from your bar. :)

>I suggest that non-free parking that belongs to a parking company would be preferable

I'd be totally fine with this. As is, the space just sits empty and wasteful.

>At first that seems crazy, but it makes sense if you think about the fact that all the places you go in a day need to have enough parking to meet their peak demand all year

"Need to", because, god forbid if people:

(a) take the public transit (or build a decent public transit in the first place),

(b) park a little further down (e.g. half a mile or so), and walk to the place you want to go.

God forbid that these are suburban areas where public transit effectively makes no sense for the loosely-packed population- you might as well be blowing away $ building parking spaces half a mile away.

Places which (b) happen already have (a) and vice-versa.

>God forbid that these are suburban areas where public transit effectively makes no sense for the loosely-packed population

God forbid people didn't create environmentally disastrous and socially ho-hum suburban sprawls...

> Another nice benefit of self driving cars that are shared is the major reduction in the need to all this excess parking.

I would think that applied to any shared cars, including taxis and ride-hailing services. Why would the self-driving feature reduce parking demand beyond that?

It does, however self driving taxis can be operated far cheaper than human driver taxis.

So if the cost of running your car is say $5000 a year and you can get an subscription robocar service for $100 a week then a large number of people will switch.

At the moment it's only cheaper to go car free if it's possible for you to walk/ride/catch public transport to work Mon-Fri and catch the occasional taxi when needed.

Robocar for $100 a week would be $5600 a year. So individual car would be still cheaper in such case... :) Unless you start factoring in time that you were away for vacation and didn't pay for that week etc. But that'd be some Adobe-level subscription madness...

Average owned car cost is $725/month according to the AAA[1].

[1] http://exchange.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Your-Driv...

Just pointed out a math flaw in parent post. It's obvious where both numbers were pulled from...

Many people would pay a premium not to have to pony up a down payment or deal with oil changes.

What percentage of population? 5%? In mean time, people buy used cars for the amount of down payment, if not less. And do oil changes themselves because it's cheaper.

There're already services that cater to those people. Full-service car leases, regular car sharing etc. People who want that already use them. But they don't seem to get that wide adoption. If shared autonomous cars would be adopted as widely, they wouldn't change traffic flow much.

Most people own cars. One the anticipated benefits of self-driving cars is that they can be shared rather than owned. If they are shared they can be constantly in use rather than parked and when parked do not need to be parked where they were last used.

Why are self-driving cars more easily or more likely shared than human-driven cars? Someone else pointed out that they cost less to operate, but I wonder how much will change. People like owning things, including nice cars.

A fleet of self driving cars equal to the maximum needed simultaneously can move around ferrying first one person then another to their destination.

Car ownership requires at worst 1 car per person.

Carpooling requires a lot of planning and only works for with individuals with similar scheduled routes and requires the humans to include the time to drop off additional passengers or pass control of the vehicle to another for additional legs of the trip. Totally aside from the logistical nightmare it requires people to trust others with an asset worth thousands or 10s of thousands of dollars.

Imagine you pick 10 people. Getting them all to and from work shopping etc requires 10 cars at worst in the ownership strategy.

Imagine that carpooling might reduce it to 8 or 9. Its extremely likely that a route could be plotted for 3-5 cars to take all to their desired destinations both by moving back and forth for trips that don't coincide and by making slightly longer trips that move multiple parties.

Now imagine that you have the entire population and can match all the rides that coincide and include an entire range of vehicles including buses to get everyone from A to B maybe you can reduce this to 1-2 per commuter.

> A fleet of self driving cars equal to the maximum needed simultaneously can move around ferrying first one person then another to their destination.

A fleet of taxis or cars from similar services could do the same. I don't see how the self-driving aspect changes the situation, other than possibly reducing cost by eliminating the driver.

More than 50% of the cost of operating a taxi is the driver.

Most people can't afford to commute via taxi and commuting by bus is hindered by routes that are geographically and temporally limited.

Self driving cars by displacing the driver may eventually be cheap and flexible enough to compete with ownership.

The reason you and I can't share a human driven car right now is because I need it to drive to work and so do you. But I leave for work at 6:30am, usually, and you might leave at 8:30. We could share a self driving car that drops me off and then goes back to pick you up.

It becomes even easier with a bigger pool.

Also, it breaks the driver/car connection since you are no longer a driver.

Finally, the real reason. Without a cab driver to pay and tip, cabs are actually cheaper than ownership. This is Uber's end game.

Also roads are built for the peak consumption. Outside the peak, there's generally excess capacity quietly eating away space from pedestrians and human beings.

This is VERY MUCH a falsehood. Have you ever commuted during the very ironically named 'rush hour'. (Everyone would much rather go fast, and it usually takes much longer than an hour)

Just because it was originally built for peak demand doesn't mean peak demand won't eventually exceed that as the population grows.

It's called "Induced Demand". That combined with "drive until you qualify" lead to over congestion on roads that were built to "peak" demand.

Roads are built for average consumption. If they were built for peak consumption there'd be no such thing as rush hour or traffic jams. You could make the same argument about sidewalks -- at 4am, sidewalks have excess capacity eating away space that could be instead planted with foliage and serve as a habitat for animals. Unless there's 24/7 equal use of everything, there's always going to be excess capacity at some point. Your bathroom is unused probably 90% of the day, so why not open it up for neighbors to share? That would be far more efficient than having every house with their own bathroom.

I sleep less than 12 hours per day... I only type on my keyboard maybe half the day, so I could share a keyboard at work to save huge amounts of capital on a world wide basis.

The dystopian world of the future looks like life on board a nuclear attack submarine, where no one owns a car, everyone works at home, two people have to share a bed (involuntarily, mostly), no one is allowed to cook their own food, only a tiny percentage of the population have the intelligence and social skills to survive it but everyone is united that everyone should be forced at the point of a gun to live exactly this way, all your time and your entire life is planned out by big brother with little to no care about your own personal concerns, living density is extremely high, no one can have kids, the whole lifestyle is financed by hand waving and ridiculous unsustainable and unscalable financial scams, constant uncontrollable interruptions, energy all comes from green (ish) sources which are ecologically harmless unless some pipe springs a leak and then an entire village dies horribly, apparently people do nothing when off duty and have no personal hobbies other than getting drunk in cheap dive bars as often as possible, your life depends on a minimum of 500 CPUs all programmed by the lowest bidder with a literal army of people trying to crack security which would result fairly inevitably in your rapid and painful death. But other than that, its pretty awesome.

The fact that we can't physically nor practically build ourselves out of congestion (and that demand is always induced to become the higher the more roadspace we build) doesn't change the fact that it's exactly the rush hour traffic that warrants the construction of new roads, bypasses, ramps, and is used to validate road widening.

No city would be building more capacity without the pain that is the rush hour traffic.

We don't even need self-driving cars, we need connected cars

Most of the commenters on this thread don't appear to have lived in a country with the opposite problem. Consider what happens when development and car ownership expands in a country without adequate government parking mandates.

You routinely find at least two road lanes blocked by parked traffic because buildings don't have adequate parking. This leads to very slow bumper to bumper traffic (try Bangalore, Mumbai, Cairo, Manila), higher air pollution leading to a public health crisis, waste of time, higher green house emissions etc. When calculating "rental increases", articles like these conveniently forget externalities that would result from jot providing for parking.

I'm afraid that you are comparing pears and oranges.

If you want to be fair, compare American cities with European cities. In Barcelona or the center of Copenhagen, there are not free parking spaces. And I can assure you that there are not the traffic issues that you are mentioning in your comment... It's quite on the contrary, actually.

Well if you want to compare that way to the cities mentioned in the list, the only appropriate comparisons in Europe are London and Paris which definitely have parking, traffic and pollution issues (or had till they started banning vehicles in the center of the cities). Paris even considered banning diesel altogether contrary to the rest of Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_agglomerations_by_po...

Barcelona and Copenhagen arr about an order of magnitude smaller and likely don't even make it into the top 100 cities. In India in casual conversations we would call places with such populations "small towns" :-)

Parking and traffic issues aren't issues if you're not driving, and most people in those places aren't.

I mean, flying a helicopter around the city sounds like great fun but that doesn't mean everyone else should be forced to build places for me to store said helicopter.

I have to disagree here. I spent some time in Dhaka recently and they have some of the worst traffic problems on the planet, through a combination of incredible population density, lack-of-infrastructure, and partisan-political strong-arming.

Everyone suffers because of it, whether they are actively utilising the roads or not - because the people who are using the roads are their customers/staff/suppliers/whatever. If half of my staff can't get to work on time, my business suffers. If my customers can't get to me, or don't feel the time investment is worth it (I've done 3km in 3 hours in Dhaka), my business suffers.

Losses from Dhaka's traffic nightmare: http://print.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/old/more.php?news_id...

https://newrepublic.com/article/118416/what-dhaka-bangladesh...

> Barcelona and Copenhagen arr about an order of magnitude smaller and likely don't even make it into the top 100 cities.

Barcelona makes it into spot #92, actually. It's really not that small, the metro area is a bit over 5 million people.

> Barcelona and Copenhagen arr about an order of magnitude smaller and likely don't even make it into the top 100 cities.

Barcelona is not an order of magnitude smaller than any US city, unless you can think of a city in the states with a metro pop of 50 million.

A factor rarely mentioned is heat.

People in tropical climate do not enjoy walking even relatively short distance because of its hot and humid weather during most of the year. Middle-class people in dense tropical cities with traffic problems still buy a car as soon as they can afford it. Coupled with barebone funding for and low quality of public transportation, the traffic problem gets worse and worse as people become more affluent and cities get denser.

Bangkok was a legendary example, where its skytrain only recently helped mitigate the problems for those rich enough to afford a place to stay close to one of its stops.

It works the other way around too. In countries where the temperatures drop down to -20C, you really don't want to be standing outside waiting for a bus or a tram, even if it's "only" 30 minutes. Any shitty old car is better than waiting outside.

Here in Berlin most buses run every 5-10 minutes.

Blocking lanes to park cars is illegal. It's just a problem of enforcing the rules.

Yes it's tempting to say that but it doesn't solve the underlying problem which is the development didn't create sufficient parking space. It didn't create because the government didn't mandate. A parking lot is not a high value salable area for a property developer and so unless he is building it for the 1% who value and pay a premium for such, there is no incentive fir him to do so. So as people become wealthier and buy vehicles, they park on the street and impose negative externalities on the society.

The article appears to argues that Government mandates of parking space per bedroom etc. are wasteful and should be avoided. I'm pointing out what happens when these mandates are not put in place.

But you said it yourself - the way to solve the externality is to forbid them from parking on the street. How is that so difficult? Rather than the government trying to plan the optimal amount of parking for every possible time and use and density, they can just say, "don't park on the street. Figure out your own parking requirements."

Let me refer you to this part of my comment: "A parking lot is not a high value salable area for a property developer and so unless he is building it for the 1% who value and pay a premium for such, there is no incentive for him to do so"

You appear to be commenting from the POV of the US or Canada where land is plentiful and people build independent houses in towns and suburbs.

In the cities I mention, owning an independent house means your wealth is in tens of millions of dollars (mere millionaires would struggle to afford independent houses). The average middle class person is very much dependent on developers constructing multi storey apartments - and it's not in their economic interests to solve for parking requirements unless compelled as I explain above.

I live in a metro area of 6.5 million people. The level of condo/apartment tower construction is huge, and is the majority of housing growth in the region. Developers demonstrably do construct parking - even expensive-to-build underground parking - but generally they do not demand to build more than they need. Recently a tower was finished, directly above a subway station, without any dedicated parking for 400+ units. All the units sold, no problem, because those buyers don't have or want cars. Other towers are built with parking, but frequently the minimum required. Indicating that it's not in high demand for that tower.

The cost of building a parking space doesn't evaporate just because it's required by the government. And builders will include parking if it's in sufficient demand, just as they include any other amenity in their buildings.

This is anecdotal (though Im sure I could find some supporting evidence if I wasn't lazy), but Thailand is an example of a country that is shifting to a car culture without the infrastructure.

I first went to Thailand in 2005 and I saw a lot of people on motorbikes in Bangkok. Which is great because the streets are narrow and there is not a lot of traffic. It was quick to get around Bangkok on a bike or Tuktuk.

I went back in 2012 and 2014 and I notice a lot more cars on the road and a lot less bikes. It appears that as the country has become more wealthy, more people can afford a small Corolla-type sedan. However, it does not appear infrastructure has been built to support all these new car owner so traffic is considerably worse in Bangkok.

Ok stopped getting lazy... the number of registered cars has doubled since 2009, probably quadrupled since 2005 according to the trend line. Only 37% of new registrations are for bikes these days.

[0]http://bk.asia-city.com/city-living/article/bad-bad-drivers-...

You don't even need to live in another country to see that problem. That happens right here in the USA.

In Michigan, lots of new buildings are exempt from parking minimums, as part of pretend initiatives to be "transit-oriented". But there's no actual public transit, everyone still has to drive. So, for businesses/residents in these buildings, people now just park their cars anywhere

Along both sides of streets? Cars. On top of sidewalks and bicycle lanes? Cars. In other people's front yards? Cars. If you live in the neighborhood, your struggling to get in and out of your own property because other people's cars now block you in -- cars from buildings that were supposedly so "transit-oriented" that they didn't need their own parking.

"But that's illegal" you say. Sure, absolutely. But that stops no one -- your still required to drive to go anywhere or get anything done, so it still happens, regardless of how strict enforcement gets.

---

Parking minimums aren't some evil plot to waste land or sell cars. Parking minimums are an attempt to prevent buildings from shoving their parking costs onto other citizens -- which is what happens in 95% of America without those rules.

It's not hard to enforce the rule "don't park on places marked as not-for-parking". In fact it's quite easy. The problem is mainly that nobody tries actually enforcing them with sufficient strength, because they get pushback. In my city, they were having huge problems with parking on the sidewalk, in bike lanes, during no-street-parking times, etcetera. How'd they solve it? First they started giving out $120 tickets. Then they started doing immediate towings on the arterial streets. Amazingly, people suddenly learned not to park on the street when and where they weren't supposed to.

I don't disagree with the analysis on how free parking makes things more expensive, but if you carry that argument forward, it gets kind silly.

Credit cards make everything more expensive when the poor often can't use them due to bad credit.

Putting grocery stores in really upscale areas makes the groceries cost more (across all stores), even though the poor don't shop at the fancy stores.

I'm sure what this article is arguing for.

I think the argument is that city planners (the State) requires a minimum amount of parking for all structures, thereby raising the price of all goods. It's not that expensive things are bad, but that maybe the State should focus on affordable housing for the poor.

enacting the regulations has no direct cost to the public. Public housing is a line item on the government budget. Some towns purposely dont want to vary from the public standard b/c if something where to happen they would not have to justify them altering the standard.

How could that possibly be the case? Suppose the regulation states every new unit needs 10 parking spots--now that single unit must carry the cost of those additional parking spots.

I think sfall means "cost to the public purse". It's like any minimum requirement that the government sets - it imposes costs, but doesn't require the raising of taxes, so it's easier to do politically.

Ding ding ding.

Under the modern American consensus, regulations on residential/commercial development are acceptable but public spending on housing is "socialism".

Public housing is all downsides but the costs of urban sprawl are distributed among the community and commercial development costs primarily affects developers (and it's a lot cheaper to build parking lots than subway service at a reasonable density per unit area).

> Credit cards make everything more expensive when the poor often can't use them due to bad credit.

This makes sense.

> Putting grocery stores in really upscale areas makes the groceries cost more (across all stores), even though the poor don't shop at the fancy stores.

This does not. You've transitioned to talking about averages for some reason.

They're not arguing against free parking, just against regulations that require certain amounts of parking to be built

Unfortunately insufficient parking is also a big issues; one in which these regulations are an attempt to solve. One could prevent less parking to be built but that would put more pressure on public roads. If you've ever been to an area with insufficient parking, it's pretty horrible. More so for people with cars but it affects those without cars as well.

Is it, really? Or is cars as the default transportation the problem?

Come to Tokyo, you'll see how well things work with effectively no parking in general.

Its an American problem, but it isn't one you just solve banning cars or something. Post-war US built up all its major metro areas on the hype for the automobile. Where European and Asian cities are walkable, American ones are not, and to try to retrofit car cities into public transit / bike / foot traffic is insanely expensive.

Add to that America has a systemic car culture (there is a reason cars are all bigger in the US, and why it is pretty much the only market for pickup trucks) and you will never be in a position politically to transition elsewhere without destroying your favorability.

"... pretty much the only market for pickup trucks"

I thought, huh? 'cuz where I live it's pickup trucks as far as the eye can see. Turns out that my country has the highest per capita ownership of pickup trucks [1]

[1] http://wardsauto.com/industry/pickup-trucks-reign-thailand

> Its an American problem, but it isn't one you just solve banning cars or something.

We're discussing a law that forces people to provide excess parking whether they want to or not, and your counter example is banning cars?

There's a universe of options in between those two extremes.

Not all cities in Asia are walkable.

I was in Thailand recently and I found it's cities incredibly difficult to walk around. Roads often don't have sidewalks, often have many lanes, and pedestrian crossings are just marked on the road - without traffic lights - and are ignored by the traffic. The level of traffic makes the roads extremely difficult to cross.

Everyone in Thailand, even the very poor, seems to have a moped. If they don't have a moped they have a pickup truck. Tourists are forced to take taxis - the locals think you are weird for wanting to walk even 200 metres to a shop.

Judging by photos of the crowding on Tokyo public transit, staggeringly poorly.

But when parking sucks, isn't that an incentive to take transit? My sister was married in Toronto this past summer, and explicitly requested on the programme that people leave their cars at the church and take the subway across to the reception location (at Bloor/Dovercourt, where parking is horrible).

Obviously having a decent transit option available is a prerequisite, but at least in that one case, it worked wonderfully.

I can buy myself a car. I can't buy myself a train. That's the problem.

Why? So you can customize the paint? It’s not like you have access to the interesting control systems of a modern car, anyway.

Donald Trump does bring up a legitimate point: The train can be operated by a corrupt entity. With a car, you have options. With a train, you are stuck.

However, I prefer to arrange my life so I can use bicycle.

Biking in the US mostly sucks too, almost entirely due to car-oriented legislation at all levels of government.

Insufficient parking is a problem which is so vigorously solved in many places that it leaves a lot of always-empty parking spaces.

" If you've ever been to an area with insufficient parking, it's pretty horrible."

So are places with excess parking. Do you _enjoy_ sauntering through your local big-box shopping center's acres upon acres of parking?

Also, if parking is so valuable why is it free? Charge market rate for the land and let people build parking on it if the market will pay. If the market doesn't pay, maybe they don't want the parking that bad after all.

> So are places with excess parking. Do you _enjoy_ sauntering through your local big-box shopping center's acres upon acres of parking?

You'd typically park in one of the closest open spots, so you don't need to walk through the excess spots.

And the person who walked there?

> One could prevent less parking to be built but that would put more pressure on public roads.

Yes, and if demand on public parking exceeds supply, you just do the obvious: charge for it until you hit equilibrium.

> If you've ever been to an area with insufficient parking, it's pretty horrible.

It's actually not, you're just thinking with a very American mindset, assuming that everyone will drive everywhere, all the time. I recently moved to Munich, a place that, by American standards, has relatively little parking. It's fantastic, because you can actually walk and bike and take transit places, and it's comfortable and convenient.

Now I know what you're thinking: what does that have to do with offering parking? But the thing is, land use is mostly zero sum. Forcing everywhere to have huge streets and parking lots means that everything is spaced further out; not a big deal when you're in a car, but a very big deal for walking, biking, and transit. Requiring parking helps cars at the expense of other modes.

Credit cards make everything more expensive

Full stop. Credit cards provide a service and that service isn't free. It gets factored into prices.

https://www.merchantmaverick.com/the-complete-guide-to-credi...

I'll add that Visa charges 1.43% - 2.4% of the transaction. I'd be curious to know what the cost of a cash transaction is as a percentage of the transaction. I doubt it climbs that high.

Handling cash ain't free. At a minimum, a certain amount must be kept on hand to make change. Then theres insurance on that cash. Then theres the safe (and registers) you have to buy to store the cash. Then theres the transport of the cash to the bank.

Also, better hope your cashiers never make a mistake or accept a forged bill.

These aspects also have some advantage - being handled on site means having employees that spend that money locally. All the credit card fees are effectively removed from the local economy.

So you think that companies who only take cash will pay higher wages thus keeping that money locally? I would assume that lower cost would lead to lower prices rather than higher wages.

No, I think they would pay a net higher local labor cost and lower remote processing fees.

Or it just means wasted work on deadweight loss activities, instead of doing something useful to increase the value of the shopping experience.

So that's the basis of a comparison. Cost of cash vs cost of credit cards over the economy.

I can't resist an aside. A buddy of mine was in a well known cash business. You can imagine. Anyways, hanging out with him, we'd be driving around and he'd need gas. He'd pull out 2 or 3 $20s, hand them to the attendant pump gas and go. Some gas stations gave a cash discount.

It seemed to me that credit cards were supposed to be fast and convenient, but if you're choreographed for cash, it ain't so.

> It seemed to me that credit cards were supposed to be fast and convenient, but if you're choreographed for cash, it ain't so.

This is very apparent in (many parts of) Europe. Cash is so much faster there than in America, for a few reasons. The primary cause, I think, is the fact that the prices are generally round numbers, with tax included. This means that you can, in most cases, pay with a small number of coins or bills. In the USA you'd be wrestling with pennies.

Euro notes also have different colours and sizes, making it much easier to get the correct ones right away. I find Euro coins more useful, too (highest commonly used denomination is 2€ vs 25¢). I'm annoyed by the 1 and 2 cent coins, though, and am in favour of abolishing them. They only clog wallets.

I can dip my credit card in the pump faster than I can walk into the station and hand over cash. Never mind what happens when I'm topping off before a trip and don't need $20 in gas, requiring change. That's not the best example of how cash is supposed to be fast.

In the UK the bank charges us to pay in cash (weirdly cheques were free, haven't had any for a while, may have changed) such that payment by card costs about the same when you factor in our micro-businesses staff having take the money to the bank. How the banks get away with charging to be given money I'm not sure.

Re your last point: it's probably a similar risk for us as charge-backs.

Customers offer to pay cash thinking it saves us money, they're wrong.

> Handling cash ain't free.

But it's so much cheaper than handling credit cards that many small stores in Germany won't accept any cards at all.

Germany becoming the anti Sweden?

It's the same in SF. There are so many "cash only" places that I now routinely check Yelp before going just about anywhere unless it's a relatively high volume place or franchise.

Don't German stores accept debit cards?

The cost is much lower on a debit card transaction.

Yes, debit cards are more widely accepted than credit cards, but many places take neither. Not just stores, bars and restaurants as well.

It's quite uncommon for stores not to accept debit cards in my experience, but next to nobody pays by card in bars and restaurants.

Thwy accept German EC cards, which is an entirely seperate network from MasterCard and Visa (and it's the E in EMV).

Mostly because their fees are even 10 times lower than MasterCard's debit card fees.

The "E" in EMV is for Eurocard which is something different (and now merged with MasterCard).

The fees for the German Girocard system (which is what colloquially is still called EC) are lower than MasterCard's fees but not by that much anymore nowadays. MasterCard debit should not be 50% more expensive than Girocard considering all fees (which of course still is more) if you shop around a bit. Even Aldi takes them now and they try to save money wherever they can.

> Even Aldi takes them now

Well, Aldi only takes some type of MasterCard debit - only the Chip + PIN edition Maestro cards, not any of the actual MasterCard network, nor mixed credit/debit cards.

They take all MasterCards, including credit cards. I paid with one just this Saturday in Germany.

Things have changed considerably in the last two years and whatever one knows about cards, acceptance, and fees from before 2015 can safely be forgotten.

Gas stations and car mechanics give cash discounts, sometimes as high as 10%.

That has to be for nefarous reasons other than the cost of CC trasactions

Avoiding taxes on checks is unlikely.

Bezos owns WP. He doesn't like the fact that the city forces him to build built-in parking for his imported drones so they're not clogging the locals' ability to live in their own city.

Seattle locals are opposed to parking for exactly the reason the WaPo explains -- it's a subsidy paid by non-drivers to support drivers. Locals would do better if parking lanes were gone and buses had those lanes.

> Credit cards make everything more expensive when the poor often can't use them due to bad credit.

Does the government force businesses to accept credit cards?

> Putting grocery stores in really upscale areas makes the groceries cost more (across all stores), even though the poor don't shop at the fancy stores.

Does the government require this?

> I'm sure what this article is arguing for.

Leaving parking mostly up to the market, because there's no compelling public interest in forcing businesses or individuals to subsidize driving.

My city just passed a bond measure which includes $36MM for a 300 space parking garage for the high school and city hall, literally meters from where a new light rail stop will be built. 25% of the city's families don't own a car. I have trouble not seeing this as a forced, direct subsidy for the lifestyle of the employees of the city. And this is supposedly one of the most transit-friendly cities around (in the US). But this is an enormous cost, for the benefit of so few... plus it will add 600 trips per day to some of our busiest local roads.

Free parking has all sorts of problems, and when government gets in on the game it only raises more questions, in my mind.

[edited to clarify that the city in question is in the USA]

A reasonable concern, but a few thoughts:

* Increasing use of public transit benefits everyone, including by reducing greenhouse gas emissions

* Almost everything government does benefits some citizens more than others. Police help some more than others; some make more use of the water system, fire department, the courts, health care, other forms of transit, Social Security, etc. I want my society to provide those services to those who need them; I need some services myself some days.

"Increasing use of public transit benefits everyone, including by reducing greenhouse gas emissions"

Which would be a good reason to put housing and amenities near the station instead of parking...

That does nothing to help existing residents utilize the rail station.

In this case, the city is only 4.3 square miles, and there's enough homes within walking distance to saturate the new transit stop. The garage isn't a commuter rail parking lot. Rather, it's a parking lot for people working at the school and city hall, on the presumption that they won't want to take the light rail to work.

$120K per parking spot is ridiculous. Some construction firm must have very good ties with your city government.

It's a bit complicated by the location where they must be built - essentially into the side of a 1-to-1 slope rocky hillside. At least that's what the government claims is the reason for the expense. It still seems a pretty tough number to swallow given that its capacity can only serve less than half a percent of the city's population, and probably will be restricted to only city employees.

If it's structured parking on a difficult grade, that's actually a totally plausible price, no cozy cost-inflating required. Recall that you're not just building the area of each parking space, but all the aisles and space leading up to them, and that it has to be built out of reinforced materials to carry the weight. Standard aboveground parking garage spaces frequently run into $60k+ apiece.

I don't disagree with the numbers but you could make this same argument for literally any feature of a business that has the affect of making that business more attractive to customers with Y quality (where Y is not something all customers have).

Let's imagine that the parking lots of Walmart, $localSupermarketChain and other stores is cut to 1/4 it's present size. What happens then? I suspect the inability to draw wealthier customers from further away (because "why shop somewhere you can't find parking") would cause a price increase.

Exactly. Let the businesses decide.

They specifically talk about the fact that cities require a minimum number of parking to be built for businesses and residences. Now, if this requirement wasn't present then economical forces would take over, places without parking would be ideal for less wealthy people because the prices would be lower.

> Now, if this requirement wasn't present then economical forces would take over, places without parking would be ideal for less wealthy people because the prices would be lower.

On the other hand, wouldn't those places tend to have fewer customers because people who are not willing or able to get their without driving will go someplace with more parking, and so would have to charge more per customer to cover fixed costs?

Maybe, maybe not. But isn't that for the businesses to decide, depending on their needs? As it stands, large numbers of businesses (and residences, etc.) are required to have more parking than they ever need at any point. How does that make sense? Why can't the owners of a property determine how much it's worth to them?

Yes, and if businesses want to do that, I don't think anyone here is going to object. As you say, it could be like any other perk (albeit a very expensive one to provide).

But the status quo is that businesses are required to provide parking by the government. That's the real problem; even if the business would rather have lower prices or spend more money on different amenities, they have to provide that parking.

1. Stores that offer free parking have more customers

2. Stores that have more customers can offer better prices to all their customers (including poor people) due to greater sales volumes

I never shop anywhere I can't park at

I only step foot in the mall when I must. I much prefer to walk to the corner grocery store or take the train to a downtown shopping district. I suppose we cancel each other out.

You probably live in a walkable city with good public transit, the parent poster probably lives in the other 95% of the USA.

And the reason transit sucks and cars are way more convenient in 95% of the USA is exactly what we're discussing: mandates from the government that prioritize cars over other modes.

I think the problem is that to transition to a public transit model would require the transportation to be built first. It would also require the public transit to operate at a loss for a decade or two while buildings and people transition to this new mode of transportation. Many people are against this in the US because it's expensive and nobody likes tax hikes. Also people love their cars.

Transit already exists in the US, it just usually sucks. And you're never going to get radical, system-wide improvement in one shot in a car-dominant area. But there's nothing stopping us from releasing mandatory minimum parking requirements while gradually improving transit, biking, and walking. Removing the minimums doesn't erase parking overnight.

> It would also require the public transit to operate at a loss for a decade or two while buildings and people transition to this new mode of transportation.

Transit always operates at a loss, same as driving, or biking, or walking.

> Many people are against this in the US because it's expensive and nobody likes tax hikes.

Agreed, politically it's up in the air whether this will work. Mostly it is region-dependent, with a bunch of metros actually passing tax hikes to fund better transit the other day: http://www.railjournal.com/index.php/north-america/nearly-70...

> Also people love their cars.

Two things:

1. Again, this is largely a chicken and egg situation. Over the course of decades, we've created an environment that's good for cars and hostile to everything else. People are mostly pretty rational about their personal transportation choices, and they quite rationally prefer the method that's much better supported, because it works better. But when other modes work well, people will choose them too.

2. The younger generation does not like cars as much as previous ones. There's a steady shift underway.

What if parking were plentiful but cost $16?

Nah dude, that's too much logic for washingtonpost.com

Stores within walking distance of lots of customers have more customers, but we made that illegal so we could stratify neighborhoods by income.

In urban areas the parking actually doesn't attract many customers. It is often government mandated, not something the store necessarily would choose to provide.

Each space requires land, and in urban areas land is not cheap. Even worse, it's land that could be used for more retail, office, housing, etc.

I'm on mobile and don't have access to links, but IIRC each space costs like $10K to provide.

In many cities parking minimum laws stiffle growth by making new buildings impossible to build as the parking requirements are quite onerous. It's either get much bigger scale (also illegal) or get a waiver for parking (difficult for small scale property owners to navigate).

We're not even talking about environmental effects.

Honestly, if parking is so great and rational, why do we have laws requiring X spaces per Y square feet per Z use?

What? Increased demand does not generally lead to lower prices.

Increasing the quantity demanded at a lower price sufficiently can reduce the optimal, profit maximizing price for the seller.

Your thinking of usual asymptotic behavior of idealized competitive markets, which while it has some relation to the concerns of a single seller in a real market facing real changes in ranges where the factors which dominate in the asymptotic case aren't the only important factors, it's not a perfect guide for them.

If stores are helped by free parking, then we should be able to leave the parking space to the market: Let retail real state builders decide how much parking space they need, and let them act in their own best interest. However, that's not how it works.

A large majority of US metro areas mandate huge amounts of free parking that are enough to have space in Black Friday, whether they need it or not. For instance, there's a strip mall near me divided in two halves. One half has a neighborhood supermarket, three tiny stores (hair salon, gamestop, froyo), and two restaurants. That half has 400 parking spots. Typical number of spots in use? well under 100. It's not even half full when every line in the supermarket is working right before thanksgiving. But those 400 spots are mandated by area, just because the municipality finds all this parking space a great way to deter the least successful merchants to move in: Making sure all space is premium space is a way to make sure poorer people not only don't move to the municipality, but not even come here to shop. A bit like how municipalities also don't want public transport nearby.

Which places around here lack public parking? Urban areas where poor people live, as it's a way to tax non-residents.

Therefore, if this was really about what is good for stores, we'd see a lot less regulation, as opposed to what is good for the municipality itself.

Citation needed for the claim that mandated parking spaces are done to keep poor people away.

Isn't the more likely reason that urban areas lack parking is that it is ... an urban area with less available land?

Maybe this is true somewhere in the country but I haven't seen it.

Anecdotal evidence time. In my city, the "poor people" mall have the biggest and fullest parking lot. The most "premium" mall has shitty parking and best public transit access. And it's not in downtown.

The trucks that deliver the goods that poor people buy (and carry away the waste) are hard as hell on roads - you could say that the car drivers are subsidizing (through gasoline taxes) the massive infrastructure costs of maintaining a road network. I don't know how the numbers would balance out, but I'd bet that the benefits of that subsidy are greater than the costs incurred from free parking.

You're right and you're wrong - trucks generally don't pay the true cost of their road usage, but neither do motorists, at least through gas taxes and tolls. Much of our road funding comes from other sources like sales taxes and such. Which seems really funny when public transportation is constantly expected to pay for itself, but far more inefficient private motor vehicles don't have to pay their fair share.

Here in Canada that's generally not the case:

http://globalnews.ca/news/907665/ontario-motorist-fees-taxes...

"The report released Thursday found Ontario road users driving cars, minivans, SUVs and light pickup trucks are paying 70 to 90 per cent of the costs of the road through fuel taxes, vehicle registration fees and tolls, to the tune of $7.5 billion a year."

But the OP is a US article, so point taken!

Great point. Curious if that figure is talking about construction costs, maintenance costs, or a combination.

In the U.S. most of a state's transportation budget comes from the U.S. government, but the largest state-level source in my state is fuel taxes:

Source: http://www.modot.org/about/documents/FinancialSnapshot.pdf

(See the chart on page 3.)

Wow, drivers pay for a whopping 37% of transportation funding and receive only 96% of transportation spending. Truly they are paying their fair share /s

There is a more in depth interview about this subject in podcast form, if that's what you prefer: http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/episode-10-p...

The canonical opposite example of this is a nationalised healthcare system. Rich people pay for a healthcare system that they don't use.

Due to economies of scale the NHS in the UK costs less than half the money the American systems costs and has better outcomes. The government in the UK being very right wing are slowly trying to destroy the service. Numerous mostly Tory MPs are paid cash by private healthcare providers!

[1] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/selling-nhs-profit-full...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/03/healthcare-...

Parking shouldn't be free. If it's to entice customers at a store/shopping mall, they can be provided an hour of parking for every x dollars spent.

Under-utilised parking spots should be leased or sold. (They sell for 80-300k where I live)

80-300K for 1 parking spot or a whole lot?

For reference, a single car space in Sydney sold for over $100k[0]...

[0] - http://www.domain.com.au/news/kirribilli-car-spot-sells-for-...

Oh wow. That is insane. I actually agree with houses including parking. Just seems like a common sense thing to do. Don't drive, use your garage for a startup, a gym or game room I guess.

Its no good unless it's negatively geared.

It's crazy, but that's actually the typical price of a single space in Hong Kong. A single space here sold for 620k last month.

According to http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2014/06/09/how-much-is-a-p... depending on the location, a parking spot in SF can be worth anywhere from 25-100K. Anecdotally, this makes sense, since I've heard of parking spots costing $250-300/month to rent, which would be roughly the payment on a 30 year mortgage for 50-80K.

For 1 parking spot

There was a spot that went for 620k earlier: http://www.scmp.com/property/hong-kong-china/article/2040679...

It should be noted that car ownership is much lower here though.

Then poverty activists will vilify you for making it too expensive for poor people to shop at your store.

There are so many factions that will attack you for doing something, you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Is your point that both of these options have an equal or negligible effect on the poor, that one option is better but those damn "poverty activists" can't see which one that is, or that attempts to accommodate the poor shouldn't inconvenience businesses?

My point is that you can force any argument you want to fit your own narrative. So out of thin air you can pull whatever you want and spin it so that it's some form of oppression of the rich on the poor.

To blame parking spaces for raising prices is really pathetic and delusional.

The problem is that different factions of poverty activists will pick differing things to be offended by, so one group may think that having free parking space is the rich oppressing the poor, but if the store changes it to paid parking, other activists will say that is oppressing the poor. However it's reported the same way so it makes it sound like all poverty activists are in unison but they're not. But the media doesn't care as long as the rich are being vilified.

Given the choice between a mall with paid parking and a mall with free parking, I'm picking the mall with free parking.

Even if there's some sort of validation system if you buy something, dealing with the whole ticketing system on entry and exit is annoying, and in the circumstances where I don't end up buying anything I have to deal with paying for the parking. It's much less of a hassle to just avoid all that.

How much farther will you drive (wasting time and gas) to avoid paid parking? It's the 21st century, paid parking can be a radio transmitter in your car or on your receipt.

People assess visible and invisible costs very differently. We are, by nature, often penny wise and pound foolish.

> Given the choice between a mall with paid parking and a mall with free parking, I'm picking the mall with free parking.

Sure, and if enough people agree with you, then businesses will choose to provide free parking of their own accord. But they shouldn't be required to, is the thing.

What if the cost remained but the hassle went away, say with a pay-by-phone app with good UX and no fees tacked on top of it?

I'm wondering what are the myriad other ways that low-income folks are silently taxed?

higher interest rates, housing codes, regulatory compliance (leading to higher prices), and possibly even the minimum wage come to mind (I'm sure there's much more), thus always keeping "the basics" expensive enough to be out of reach.

<low-income folks are silently taxed?

I worked at a hotel and a woman asked to use the phone. She said she was robbed earlier and has no money. She called the local priest to get a ride. It was to the motel where she lived that night.

I drove her there and found out she worked at McDonald's. (Near the hotel).

When I talked to the priest he said she was homeless. That she had a network of people that help her.

That one instance made me realize how transportation especially a car was essential. Then - she uses same day places to cash her check. Keeps cash with her always since she has no bank. Has no phone number or address. How many silent taxes on her hurt entry back into my familiar society?

All of those things are substantial factors. Building codes are another big one - most of them have little to do with safety or health, but rather "buildings must be of such-and-such minimum niceness, and if you can't afford that, too bad, go somewhere else." And everybody standardizes on the same building codes, and pretty soon there is no "somewhere else" to go to.

So we could argue that drivers are subsidizing the cost of mostly unused handicapped parking spaces as well. I'll see a parking lot with dozens of these spaces almost chronically unused, but since the ADA requires a certain (arbitrary) number of handicapped spots, businesses are forced to build an excess capacity of these spots despite many of them sitting unused, except occasionally by the Jaguar owner who is friends with a doctor.

A strange thing is that you have handicapped parking requirements yet the NYC subway is still not even close to being Accessible for those in wheelchairs. A suburban Target is required to have something like 90 handicapped spaces (obviously I'm exaggerating,) but the NYC subway still has huge swatches of stations that are accessible only by stairs. How NYC gets away with this is beyond me -- they can force businesses to bend over backwards to accommodate the disabled, but they themselves don't do much of anything to improve the public transportation situation for the disabled. (or even moms with strollers and kids.)

If anyone wants to know why public transportation isn't a bigger thing for families -- it's because going to a grocery store with a kid(s) in a stroller via the subway is a nightmare. -- not even talking about carrying your purchases home. Buying a weeks worth of groceries and then carrying all that home on a crowded bus or train with a kid in tow? No thanks.

> So we could argue that drivers are subsidizing the cost of mostly unused handicapped parking spaces as well.

Sure, and we do this because there's a compelling public interest in requiring businesses to cater to the handicapped, where market incentives alone would probably not work.

What compelling public interest is there in forcing businesses to cater to all drivers that market incentives wouldn't work for?

Implicitly, the author assumes that a car would be the last thing this hypothetical poor person would purchase.

There are in fact, many impoverished homeless people who live in cars. In this case, they might find themselves parking in one of those abundant spaces.

I wonder when the last time she walked by a walmart was.

It's a catch-22, because they have to buy the car to get anywhere, and now that they have the car they can't afford to live anywhere, and because everyone else owns a car nobody will build places that don't require a car.

The irony in this post is tremendous. The whole reason so many poor people in the US still own cars is precisely because of these kinds of pro-car regulations! In western Europe, a poor person owning a car is much less common, because transit works well enough that they don't really need it, and driving is an expensive activity.

That's how these kinds of regulations frequently get ratcheted up.

A: "It's nice to have lots of parking available everywhere! Let's make it mandatory."

B:"But now everything is far apart, and I need a car to do anything."

A:"Hm, good point. Well, then we will make sure there's even more parking than anybody ever needs, so it doesn't cost you anything to park anywhere."

B:"What about letting the market decide?"

A:"The market? Why do you hate the poor?!"

Yes, it can embed the cost. However the problem solving approach should be social one; more tax from who can afford, which means in this case, the car owners. Without social, community based approach, the solution surely become less protective and more discrimitive to poor people.

And you know what? In countries with free healthcare the healthy pay for the care of the sick, even when they are healthy. Doesn't make it a bad system.

So are you saying that the poor are like healthy people, and the wealthy are like sick people who need the help of the poor?

Minimum parking requirements are also a mechanism to prevent businesses from declining to build parking and free-riding on their neighbors.

They also effectively ensure maximum density, which in some areas is an explicit government policy objective.

This is pretty obvious right?

A few years ago in the US there was talk about requiring the 1st checked airline bag to be free. This is the same thing. The bill was put forward by a respected politician.

These are the types of issues that make me think educating the public on this stuff is incredibly important.

Here in my part of the greater Los Angeles area, in the poorer areas, you will see most houses with more than a few cars in each house. In my area we have some people who have more than five cars/household for houses that are probably no larger than 1500 sq. ft.

So in principle WaPo or anyone else willing except that it is immoral to create regulations about X where people who do not benefit from X end up paying for it ?

Will WaPo argue the case to abolish things like college education subsidies where people who never even go to college end up subsidizing those who do ?

While WaPo is absolutely right in stating the facts it may or may not be bad for the poor people. I live in Sunnyvale and prefer to work around Sunnyvale precisely because of the ample parking spaces everywhere. If the regulations don't exist for those spaces I might consider moving to some other place where they have more parking space.

Poor people benefit by having well off people living around them for many number of reasons.

*accept

> So in principle WaPo or anyone else willing except that it is immoral to create regulations about X where people who do not benefit from X end up paying for it ?

No, it's a given that subsidies happen all the time. But there needs to be (or should be, rather) a compelling public interest in doing so. For forcing businesses to build parking all over the place, there isn't one; to the extent that their customers desire parking, businesses will build it so that they can get those customers. Requiring parking just means that in cases where they don't need to build parking, they still do, which is a waste.

...And I pay for public schools even though I do not and will not have children. I'm not complaining, mind you, but of the problems we could be trying to solve, this seems like a relatively low priority.

My state also passed a sales tax (you know, the regressive kind) intended to preserve natural resources and cultural heritage, and most of the money has gone to art projects in the major metropolitan area that are mostly unappreciated. The point here is, yes, governments waste money, but making parking easier is hardly the worst offense.

But it's a large deadweight on the economy. It requires the production of considerable amounts of parking that is never, or almost never, used or needed by anybody. It makes parking easier only by hiding the cost of parking in everything else, in a wholly regressive way. And it's not a "commons problem" like air pollution - it's just the government deciding that a particular private good is nice, and everybody should be forced to provide it. It's silly.

That precisely describes the example I gave (sales tax that funds pointless art projects noone likes), except the cost to the economy, and the impact on the poor, is readily quantifiable, unlike hypotheses of various opportunity costs regarding parking.

Saying all parking is funded the same way and has the same externalities is both reductionist and absurd. Furthermore, what value empty lots provide is entirely up to the people who control them; several around here are used for farmers markets and other activities outside of peak time usage.

We've got light rail and buses where I live; one of the light rail lines was poorly planned and is now subsidised somewhere around $20-30 per passenger per trip. Another was promised to ease traffic congestion and revitalize several neighborhoods along the path; it has done neither and has arguably made both worse (traffic has to stop when it goes by, and the horns contribute significant noise pollution) and driven down property values to a certain degree.

Basically, costs are relative, and arguing over parking is far less productive than what we could be working on in our communities.

I'm not saying "all parking has the same externalities" - obviously, the first parking spot at a house has different impacts than the tenth. And of course people can do creative things with parking lots. I never said that they couldn't. What I am saying is that mandated parking, above what property owners want to provide, is a deadweight loss and can't be ignored. And, as is common in many suburbs, when parking and roads is frequently one-quarter of total land use, we have to consider that this could have a significant impact.

If what you desire is a walkable or Main-Street-y type urban form, you have to tackle parking minimums. Likewise if you want compact row housing and multi-storey apartments. If you don't want those things, that's fine, no problem. But if you do, you should consider that the dense urban form of older downtowns and main streets is basically impossible to build with current parking regulations.

I haven't read the actual study, but I don't really buy this on the basis of the article alone.

Allocated parking that you're not using? Let it out.

Abundant parking at supermarkets? Pfft - only in locations with an abundance of space anyway. At least in the UK, I'd argue that supermarkets with plenty of parking have lower prices than those without - since they're not in city centres.

The problem is that the requirements are so high, and demand the creation of so much parking (indeed, parking lots for commercial uses are generally required to be larger than the buildings they serve) that the price for parking is driven down to $0. Most parking lots in the suburban US fill up either never, or on a single day per year.

The point is that forcing businesses to have excess parking imposes a real cost on them that they make up with prices increased over what they otherwise would have been.

Okay, I think I might retract my comment then, on the basis that this seems to be US-centric issue due to specific regulations.

Definitely sounds odd, why is it that way? (I generally believe that even the maddest of regulations had sound reasoning at some point in time or for some circumstance, even if hypothetical!)

Well, a lot of it originated around street parking. When cars were becoming very popular and common, they would generally be parked on the street. Of course, since most street parking spaces were not metered (that is, free parking) this meant that parking was constantly scarce. Huge parking congestion, conflict over spaces, etcetera. Even where the parking was metered, the price was usually set too low (since it was owned by municipalities, with no incentive to maximize revenue). So street parking was still congested everywhere, but the straightforward solution of just raising the price of street parking was too unpopular for most cities.

This led, mostly post-1940s, to urban planners requiring homes, businesses and offices to have a minimum amount of parking. However, the way they usually determined the "appropriate minimum" was to estimate the maximum probable use: measuring the busiest day of the year at a shopping mall, or requiring one parking space per bedroom in a house, etcetera. This basically ensured that, no matter where you go, there's almost always parking available. However, this also means that most parking is never used. The secondary effect of this means that everything becomes surrounded by large amounts of parking, causing everything to be further apart, making driving much more appealing. Also, people become very accustomed to free parking, so anywhere that there is a parking shortage, they demand not better pricing, but more mandatory supply. In the US at least, you will typically only pay for parking in areas built before 1940.

But it's not necessarily US-centric. While the US tends to have the most extreme parking minimums, they're common all over the world, from England to Malaysia.

Everything there is to know

"The High Cost of Free Parking" by Donald Shoup

Yes, heavy-handed government regulations (to which planning belongs) means that you pay, directly or indirectly, for a lot of things you never use.

I'm feeling more attuned than usual to the fact that I inhabit a filter bubble. Thus I observe the preponderance of anti-car posts on Hacker News and wonder, what's the other side of this issue? What are the arguments in favor of sprawl and car-first development? Surely it's more complicated than just "cars are evil, why don't we change this!?"

The same phenomenon applies to credit cards, for which all the merchants bake the processing fees into the prices of goods and services whether you pay with a card or not.

I'm not sure which instance of this phenomenon incurs the greater cost for most people, though.

Some shops in Germany require cash below a certain threshold (anywhere between 3€ and 10€) because of card transaction fees (which are in the 5-10 cent range as far as I'm told).

1) Any economist will tell you, NOTHING is "free."

2) Like it or not, one hand subsidizing the other is the DNA of any social contract. In a perfect world, it would be ideally otherwise. We don't live in a perfect world.

I used to believe this for a long time, but now I dont.

Here's why:

If there was a Walmart that had zero parking lots, only those without cars would do business with that Walmart. That'd probably be 1/10th or 1/100th the revenue compared to that of a Walmart with a parking lot. Its because people with cars come in and purchase more and larger stuff, revenue goes up. The increased revenue justifies the cost of building such a parking lot or a structure.

Now, this argument holds true, only if there's a Walmart that has a huge parking lot and is always empty.

fwiw: I think these are the types of articles paid for by TNCs like Uber and Lyft, to popularize the idea of getting rid of parking everywhere so that their market expands. (I'm not judjing, but this is my observation).

If Walmart needs parking spaces in order to make revenue, then Walmart will put up parking spaces, government-mandated minimums or not.

You are forgetting that if Walmart doesn't provide the parking spaces people will park in the nearby residential areas.

Thought the title was saying poor people buy parking to alleviate their feelings of not being able to afford a car. Seemed like an interesting sociological phenomenon.

i can't wait for http://www.seasteading.org to take off and live where there are no cars. Or maybe http://freedomship.com is what I need as long as it has free wifi.

>as long as it has free wifi.

"You may pay for the cost of free-wifi even if you never go online"

If you have an empty parking space in your apartment, well just rent the spot

Since excess parking is required by law, everyone will just park somewhere else rather than renting my spot.

If you can't see this article by the Bezos-owned Washington Post as a propaganda piece to push aside obstacles he faces in his redevelopment of Seattle, then you need to brush up on your critical thinking skills. Bezos gives fuck-all about the poor unless they're buying his products.

Come on, now, why was the title changed? The originally submitted title, "Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car," is the title of the article, and it's true, not click bait at all.

Because the 'poor people' angle is a red herring and thus arguably misleading, and perhaps clickbait as well since it makes the story more sensational. Those are the two reasons why titles should be changed on HN, as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The article's actual argument is that free parking forces people who don't drive to subsidize those who do. That's a sentence from the article, so it could make a legit title, but in this case we picked another representative sentence, from the article's second paragraph. Either of those seems fine to me.

Edit: ok, since we got other complaints and this is a borderline call anyhow, we've restored the "Poor people..." title.

Sorry, but no.

Although the sequence of words "You may pay for the cost of parking...." does appear in the article, it is at best a trite gloss of the article's thesis.

And as for the 'poor people' angle, the article runs 426 words according to the word count facility in OpenOffice Writer, of which ~100 are devoted to the effects on the poor. The article's title is neither misleading nor clickbait.

But the poor people thing is the main thrust of the article.

>"People who are too poor to own a car," Shoup writes in the University of California's ACCESS Magazine, "pay more for their groceries to ensure that richer people can park free when they drive to the store."

You could argue that the article is in itself overly sensational but the title is accurate.

Build wicked fast trains and tons of subways and people will use them when they make sense to use them.

A high speed along DC-Boston corridor that stopped in downtown of major cities would be full all day, every day.

I'm getting really sick of these media companies pushing their anti-rich agenda. Blaming rich people for parking that causes costs to rise for poor people is just insulting.

I didn't believe in much liberal bias in the media until this election. This is simply another extent of it, it's really eye opening.

Do you have any reasoning to accompany your emotion?

The news media of course has a an anti-status-quo bias. The status quo isn't news.

They most definitely do not have an anti-status quo bias. They have an anti-right bias.

The argument isn't blaming rich people for parking that causes costs to rise for poor people.

The argument is:

* mandatory parking is imposed by urban planners

* mandatory parking raises costs for all people

* poor people are less able to absorb the increased costs

Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking goes into a lot of detail and approaches it from the point of view of planning theory. It's a good read, I recommend it.

Also, traffic lights, fire stations, rural mail deliver.... everything makes society expensive to some degree.

The difference is that fire stations have some tangible benefit, like a form of mandatory insurance that pays out before your house and everything you own burns down.

...if you own a house.

Sure, but what compelling public interest is there in forcing subsidized parking? Other countries get by just fine with far less parking.

They aren't forcing subsidized parking. They're forcing the construction of parking lots and structures.

As for public interest. The idea is that without regulation, new apartments and condos would choose not build parking pushing their residents to park on the street. This causes congestion (cars circling trying to find parking) and makes going to these areas less pleasant. And I'm sure some would say these regulations remove preexisting subsidies, since they prevent new developments from using city streets as their parking lot.

How do these other countries deal with the lack of parking? I think simply suggesting better public transportation and redesigned cities does not solve problems that people are having right now.

Then just enforce the existing rules against parking on the street! This is not difficult. Indeed, it's easier than trying to centrally plan out exactly how much parking each house and business needs.

What rules against parking on the street? In many existing neighborhoods, houses don't have garages and rely exclusively on street parking. Should we disallow street parking and start making people rent garages? That would definitely affect the poor.

Well, there's a number of solutions. You can tie the properties to particular street locations, like immediately in front of their house. You can give parking permits to local residents, and disallow visitor parking in some or all areas. You can turn it into metered parking, for which local residents are reimbursed some or all of their costs (or from which they receive a share of the local parking fees.) You could even turn it into neighbourhood-owned "parking co-ops" where neighbours in an area determine the price and can trade shares in the co-op.

I mean, there's a large, obvious middle ground of solutions in between "nobody can park on the street ever" and "anybody can park on the street for free at any time". There are many options; you can ration it by price, by local ownership, or some other mechanism, quite easily. Indeed, almost everywhere in the city I live in where people rely on street parking, there's a resident-permit system. So, in effect, when people buy houses on that street, they're paying to buy a "share" of its parking too.

But these resident-permit systems are already in place in many cities, and we still have parking problems. And you want to remove minimum parking spot mandates on top of that, which will only reduce the supply of parking. I guess auctioning off street parking permits could work but it hardly seems any more fair than forcing new developments to provide their own parking.

Most of the problems of resident-permit systems come from the fact that they are inconstantly enforced, or that no spots are reserved, so that people arrive in an area where they have permits but cannot find a spot. This is a problem in the design of the particular resident-permit system - it does not mean that all such systems will fail. And, to me, resident-permits is indeed second-best to a system where the prices for parking are allowed to float, to balance demand with supply (and residents can be reimbursed by some share in the parking revenues.)

The only real problem with zero parking minimums is the possibility that people will park in places that other people were hoping to use (for parking, driving, biking, etc.) But all that means is that either rights have been unclearly assigned (as in street parking that doesn't officially belong to anybody), or a scarce good has been underpriced (as in 'free street parking' that's always full.) So, just assign clear rights, or adjust the price until there's free spots.

To me, it seems totally fair that the people who use parking should own it or pay for it (which are really the same thing). Why mandatorily bundle parking with other things if people don't want it?

> They aren't forcing subsidized parking. They're forcing the construction of parking lots and structures.

The part where they're required to build these lots virtually always results in subsidized parking. Yes, technically you could charge for spots, and then they wouldn't be subsidized, but in practice that's so much effort that it's much easier to just let the spots be free. For most businesses, running a paid parking scheme involves too much overhead to be worth it.

> This causes congestion (cars circling trying to find parking) and makes going to these areas less pleasant.

Then the city can charge; since they'd be doing it in many areas (and many cities already charge for this anyway in a section of their core), it's much less of a burden for them to do it than for individual businesses.

> How do these other countries deal with the lack of parking?

In Tokyo, you can't buy/register a car unless you can prove you have an off-street space.

> I think simply suggesting better public transportation and redesigned cities does not solve problems that people are having right now.

Well yeah, actually implementing those things is what's important.

Like you say, for most businesses running a paid parking scheme is too much overhead to be worth it. But you would remove requirements for minimum amounts of parking. So wouldn't you expect in areas with limited parking the issue to be exacerbated, since business would have less incentive to build parking? You say that the city can then charge for parking, but also that they already do it, so not much would change there...

Re-planning cities takes a long time. Do you suggest people just take taxis/uber for a decade until public transportation catches up? Might not be the worst idea.

> So wouldn't you expect in areas with limited parking the issue to be exacerbated, since business would have less incentive to build parking?

Yes. This is actually the natural outcome one would expect from the market; it takes a lot of resources to provide storage for cars, and those costs will result in things like, say, less parking.

> You say that the city can then charge for parking, but also that they already do it, so not much would change there...

Many (most?) cities do it in a small part of their urban core. I'm suggesting they could expand those areas. They can also adjust the price of parking as the supply:demand ratio changes.

Additionally, past a certain point, it becomes worthwhile for developers to create parking garages as a standalone business.

> Re-planning cities takes a long time. Do you suggest people just take taxis/uber for a decade until public transportation catches up? Might not be the worst idea.

Of course not. Removing parking requirements wouldn't result in massive change overnight. There would be plenty of time to improve transit (and walking and biking) as the number of parking spaces gradually declined.

"Anti-rich agenda" sounds like a phrase we'll soon be hearing a lot from the new Congress, President, and millions of temporarily embarrassed millionaires to avoid ever seriously discussing poverty and wealth inequality.

The true victims in America? The most powerful and influential, of course.

Fire code make everything more expensive. Why have them?

Because if your building catches on fire, the people inside could die and it could spread to other buildings. Classic externality problem. Nobody is going to die because the owners of buildings get to choose how much parking their building needs, any more than they will if they get to decide how many bathrooms their house has.

> pay more for their groceries to ensure that richer people can park free when they drive to the store.

That seems to assume that the richer people just park there "for free" and then don't buy anything.

How much volume would that store move without those customers, and what would that do to the prices? Hard to say. On the one hand, there would be lower demand. On the other, worse economy of scale.

Heaven fucking forbid that the poor pay even a tiny share for for something that doesn't directly benefit them.

Paying for this and that which doesn't benefit oneself: isn't that squarely the job of the working class? Don't foist that onto the poor, or the rich.

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