How not to create traffic jams: Don’t let people park for free
economist.com
economist.com
The problem with alternatives to personal cars is that personal cars have many desirable properties:
a) near zero latency to take a trip: if there's not a cab at my curb, I have to request it and wait -- or request it early and hope I'm ready when they are. Buses and trains are usually not waiting for me at the station.
b) proportional penalty for leaving late: if you miss a bus or a train by 10 seconds, you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour. If you leave a couple seconds late in a car, you'll probably arrive a couple seconds late (around rush hour, it gets worse of course). If you don't make it to a requested cab in time, they may leave, and you have to wait for another one to come.
c) availability: a personal car generally provides the same service during the day, at night, and can be used in rain and mild snow (heavy snow, if properly equipped). Busses, trains, and even cabs have less availability at night.
d) flexibility/directness: a personal car can drive to almost everywhere, and can generally take a fairly direct route. Trains only go where there is track, and busses only go where there is a route. Cabs don't always pick up and drop off where you want to go. In case of an urgent change in circumstances, you can change your destination at will in a personal car or cab, but may not be able to easily redirect to where you're going in a bus.
If people are willing to pay the full costs of parking, the market should sort this problem out for itself as paid parking garages fill in the gap left behind by free parking. But what the article is saying is that in cities where parking is not free or not required by law, the market chooses to provide far fewer parking spaces that the minimum parking laws tend to require.
What this article is positing is that the conditions you describe are emergent, not determining. Change the policies and the conditions will adjust after a brief, albeit painful period.
This is an unproven assertion, which in my view is most likely political dogma rather than analysis.
Take a look at parking and alternative transportation in Philadelphia, for instance. It's nothing but pain for everyone and has been for at least 30 years.
City zoning codes requiring off-street parking on a per-dwelling or per-sq foot basis at least has the aspect of not letting the situation deteriorate into unlivable squalor, with no good alternatives. It may be that this pushes the problem to the transportation network, true, but that's a different problem to solve.
If you want to take away, or let developer profit-driven markets take away a major quality of life issue then you'd better provide a better, cheaper, more individually useful alternative first.
So cities should remove all parking minimum laws, and let apartments and businesses decide how much parking to build. That's exactly what the article is saying.
Instead of investing money in parking, they could have spent that money on private buses, public bus passes for employees, bike parking, bike subsidies, Uber subsidies, sponsored carpools, bike paths, or nearby high density corporate housing.
As for freeway capacity, if we reduce free parking, that will cause less people to drive, making the freeways more clear.
So the natural response to that is to force businesses to have greater value? Is this not exactly what market forces would do naturally? A business with insufficient parking would have less value than one with, and would therefore compete less effectively.
If you need to go downtown, Seattle buses are great. Anything else (especially east/West corridors to the north) is a huge joke.
Needless to say, I take BART, because ~$4 in fares beats spending ~$25-30 in parking and tolls for the privilege of sitting in traffic half the trip.
Of course those places you don't just pay for parking, you pay congestion charges, high gas prices and steep registration prices (HK) as well. Oh and toll roads.
It's quite stunning the amount of things that are under costed in the US to enable our car economy.
Is it 90 minutes inside of rush hour?
If I go in my preferred slot it's 45 minutes max, usually 33 minutes. If I go 10am, 6:45 pm, it's 22 and 20 minutes. Fastest I've ever made it is 19 minutes and that was doing well over the speed limit the whole time on a motorcycle.
If anything its drivers that do stupid stuff like block bus lanes, don't know how to merge, etc... that are a bigger problem to public transit.
Please consider people living in other circumstances and with other responsibilities before making blanket statements for all based on the experience of yourself and your close social group. It's entirely possibly that you and your group do not encompass all the situations that may be found. For example, having a child makes not having a car extremely problematic. Being 30-60 minutes late to pick up you child is often unacceptable, and in many circumstances (such as childcare) may net you quite large fees if it happens often.
And how does that compare to average income around you ?
This is the argument everyone in SF makes. "Just move into the city. Use an (electrical) bike. Yes there's the homeless but you learn to steer around them quickly". And then you look at the rent, and the average income. Needless to say, this is not a reasonable suggestion.
And for those that don't like living in that kind of population density, it's surprisingly easy to live in other cities. The public transportation system there is amazing...far better than even Europe can offer. The Tokyo Metro goes everywhere in the city and the transfers between the Metro and the high-speed rail lines are timed, so you don't waste time waiting. When we took the bullet train, I saw people commuting in excess of 100 mi to/from work. That may sound like a lot to an American, but it was around an hour of commute time with their infrastructure. And since they don't drive during their commutes, they can spend the time on the train doing something entertaining/productive.
It's really eye opening what can happen when you don't prioritize cars in a city. If San Francisco were similarly prioritized and we invested in transportation infrastructure the way the Japanese do, you wouldn't have to live there to work there. You could live in the Stockton area, where the median home price is under $300k, and you'd only have to dodge the homeless people on your way between the metro and your work. And you and your spouse could share a car instead of each needing one since you'd only need it for local trips around your home city rather than commuting.
Only when you make up some argument for me...
> A car is necessary under current driving conditions is not the same thing as a car being necessary under any driving conditions.
That wasn't my argument at all. I was simple stating that when making an argument using personal experience as the basis for what is and isn't "necessary" is likely to leave out a lot of people with valid concerns. My example wasn't to push an agenda for or against cards, but to show how some people may come to an entirely different conclusion about what is and isn't necessary, currently.
The point is: what are you going to do about it? Because clearly city populations are growing and people are exceedingly unhappy with vastly subsidizing a shrinking minority that expects to drive door-to-door, or better yet, lives in a cheap suburb but expects city dwellers to sacrifice money and space for their daily commute.
I think you will find in places that cater much less to cars people are very understanding if you miss a bus. Though likely they won't notice, because there are simply more buses and transit options around, so your delay won't be an hour. It seems getting rid of free parking, as suggested by the OP, is a good start, no?
As long as we're humoring city dwellers being tired of things, we will never have housing construction (they've got ownership or rent control already, and they're tired of tall buildings). As long as we're humoring what they want to pay for, we'll never have decent transit (they can walk or bike, why should they pay taxes for your bus?).
There are reasonable positions to be in which don't require parking downtown. Cheap housing in the center. Cheap housing near train stations and a quick ride in. Abundant parking at train stations and a quick ride in. Decouple cities from employment so that they really are luxuries and not crucial access to opportunity. Keep job growth in balance with walkable housing growth and don't allow development of suburbs.
Any one of those is a great thing to strive for. Eliminating parking by itself just makes the city less livable.
Honest question: is there really "paying for transit" hate? The only "transit hate" I've seen ranges around various forms of "it sucks" e.g. "never a bus when I need one" punctuated by "5 of the same bus at the same time" and "always late". I'm happy to pay for transit, just as I am up for sidewalks and bike lanes.
Also: how does one "decouple cities from employment"? And how does a surge of oasis-style job centers divorce an employee from needing a car to get there?
It is necessary to divorce employees from trying to drive (mostly) the same routes at the same times, because there is no solution to car transportation at scale without traffic jams. The "solutions" (congestion pricing, less parking, etc) are to reduce the scale. It is necessary to divorce employees from competing with each other for such tiny slices of the city where the commute is reasonable, because paying an extra $2000/mo just for land value is such a soul-crushing waste of effort and resources. It is necessary to aggressively migrate the fleet of cars to electrics.
Rush hour traffic in small town or city is still going 60mph, and living "downtown" isn't nearly so expensive because there's less competition, and little drastically wealthier competition. (Good look competing with tech workers for nicely located apartments in SF, or bankers for nicely located apartments in Manhattan, if you aren't one).
See: SF opposition to tech shuttles, Muni expansion, Caltrain extension. I guess those aren't really about cost, but there's a common thread of "I don't like the noise" and "I don't like the kind of people that transportation brings in to my quiet neighborhood" and "we shouldn't be making it more attractive for gentrifiers to live here."
I see this on NextDoor whenever VTA LiteRail improvements are discussed. Possibility of a Los Gatos [or Netflix] stop? "Criminal Homeless will invade our city". Maybe, but I won't see you complaining when you go to a 49rs game in person at the stadium and take VTA so you don't get stuck in car traffic.
> It is necessary to divorce employees from trying to drive (mostly) the same routes at the same times
How is this possible without massive and awesome public transit? Rush hour traffic exists because "every employer" wants "every employee" at their desk at 6-9am.
Use cars where they're the best option. Use public transit where it's the best option. Take 5 minutes to transfer in between.
If you find the Spartan lifestyle compelling, sure, bike to the train station. From a planning perspective, it's a no-brainer to put the infrastructure there to facilitate it.
Just don't force it on the rest of us. (My mornings would go from pleasant and relaxing to miserable, getting in an overcrowded train car while sweaty fucking sucks, and I would have to stop running - if I'm capable of cycling the next morning, I didn't run hard enough the night before. If only my area were a little flatter).
Also, you often don't need a whole car. Scooters and low-displacement motorcycles are cheap and fun. E-bikes are getting cheaper. I mostly ride my little Honda motorcycle to the train now, when the weather cooperates. BART's ample motorcycle parking is pleasantly surprising, and a very good idea.
Just yesterday I learned of the NYC hate against e-bikes. I hope that whatever red tape there is surrounding e-bikes gets cleared up and understood.
I suppose it would be nice to build tall, dense housing around the station, but people living in the suburbs are expressing their preference for more, cheaper space per person and lower building heights, and would be extremely unlikely to authorize a microcosm of the city inside their suburb.
If we can solve the "people don't want tall buildings" problem, why not put them inside the city where their occupants are in walking/biking distance, rather than relying on expensive trains?
I'm thinking that if we look at the numbers we might actually find it makes the problem worse, but in other areas. We have very heavy traffic areas currently, but spread over at least a few square miles, which allows that traffic to route to the available spaces through all the available roads. Giant parking structures at specific points along rail would move a large chunk of that traffic to those structures, but those structures are also much more condensed points for traffic
Simply put, if you think urban traffic is bad, imagine trying to get to a specific parking structure along with a couple thousand other people all at the same time. Instead of a thousand different businesses over a hundred or more roads, it's a few structures, each with limited ingress and egress routes, and limited entrances and exits. Worse than navigating the parking structure at the mall at Christmas, but every weekday as the new normal.
Much better, in my opinion, would be a fleet of autonomous buses and vans with ad-hoc ride-sharing. Since they use the normal road system, they can reach much closer to peoples homes. I actually ran the numbers on this in a comment a few months back (although not very thoroughly)[1].
Fair enough. I also like the walk//bike suggestion also made here for this consideration.
> I think you will find in places that cater much less to cars people are very understanding if you miss a bus.
I think you'll find daycares, which are businesses which employ people that they pay, are less inclined to keep one or two people on staff and extra thirty minutes for you because you're running late than you think they are. Most daycares I know of have it clearly outlined in the terms and conditions you sign, if you are more than 15 minutes or so late, they'll charge you anywhere from $10-$20.
They’re terrible for school-age children, the disabled, the drunk, the elderly, the poor; terrible for commuting solo to-and-from work in rush-hour traffic (causes huge anxiety for commuters vs. other types of commute); and terrible anywhere with high enough density that air pollution and traffic get concentrated.
Additionally they are a hugely inefficient use of a society’s capital and energy/carbon budget vs. other modes of transportation, tend to lead to municipal planning which is hugely inefficient and environmentally destructive, and crowd out other modes of transportation leading to horribly slow and indirect bus routes, etc.
Finally, they are tremendously dangerous, one of the leading causes of death among young healthy people.
On what grounds?
Often elderly people’s driving skill deteriorates before they realize it or they are unwilling to accept the loss of mobility, putting themselves and other people on the road at risk.
When elderly people do accept that they won’t drive anymore, in a car centric society they are suddenly dramatically hindered in their ability to lead a normal life. They become much more dependent on constant care and attention, and are often forced to move into a dedicated retirement home, further alienating them from their life-long communities of institutions and friends.
Places where it is possible to walk to the store, walk to visit friends, walk to the subway station, walk to coffeeshops and restaurants, walk to concerts and museums, etc. are much better for the elderly than suburban sprawl. People can remain independent much longer, because there is more available community infrastructure nearby.
Additionally, maintaining a routine with a decent amount of daily walking is very beneficial to people’s health.
Where are the urban populations growing? In reality, you have a meager recovery of urban populations that have been in a tailspin since 1960. Capital is cheaper than ever, and the bargains to be had in the urban core are bringing in the cool kids and pushing out the poor folk.
That growth is almost entirely at the expense of people less able and less vocal.
As a weirdo who has lived in the city since before it was cool, I'll always bet against the cool kids colonizing the cities. Once they have kids who have to go to school, they leave.
to some extend the 80 mile commute is being subsidized (roads, artificially lower gas prices, cost of congestion, pollution, sufficient space for parking at dense destinations, etc)
I'm not saying there aren't tradeoffs, but you can't really assert that as a group we just have to accommodate 80 mile daily commutes for everyone and solve backwards from that.
Also, jobs come and go. Sometimes I'm working close to home, sometimes 40 miles East, sometimes 50 miles north. I guess this is the same for most people. Why move when you're just going to get laid off in a years time?
more broadly i think the US (whatever combination of govt and industry) has failed to provide well for the guy with a job that wants to invest in property and possibly to raise a family. even with two incomes.
as you say, the promise of job stability is looking increasingly illusory
the job market putting you in a position where you are killing time in traffic for 2+ hours a day is a pretty clear sign of that failure
Your suggestion essentially turns into a game theory problem of "is it better to construct parking for my business or be located next to a business that was dumb enough to construct parking, as many of my customers who really would have wanted parking will end up just parking there, they will get the ire of anyone who actually gets towed, and that assumes they also have any good mechanism to decide who to tow anyway.
If that sounds a lot like a mall, it is, but I'd advocate for also removing the zoning restrictions that segregate residential condos from business (a really stupid decision that many American cities keep perpetuating).
So instead of requiring a business to have parking, ban the creation of parking and mandate the creation of parking towers or lots financed by business property taxes instead. You get denser, nicer downtowns as a result. You can similarly socialize parking in less dense areas by banning business from having free parking lots and making a few city ones instead.
Once you remove the subsidy people pay to park. What is so unfair about that?
Our whole district (West Oxfordshire, England) has free parking and it's killing us. People pass up shops they could walk or cycle to, like ours, in favour of shops they can drive to (in the nearest large town). There's no up-front cost to driving, and walking takes effort, so why not drive?
The result of the local free parking policy has been that two large town centres in the district are thriving; everywhere else is dead; and the roads are clogged with traffic.
Not sure about "most." Even in smaller cities free street parking is getting pretty rare. My town charges $1/hr for meters and it's clearly too cheap because it's still hard to find a spot most times.
Certainly in urban centers like downtown Chicago there is no such thing as free parking, even at hotels and office buildings.
Merchants decide where to locate in part based on traffic counts (vehicle and pedestrian). Places that are more valuable to merchants are more valuable to the city (property taxes and sales taxes are higher).
It's economically logical for the city to consider whether to offer this investment/subsidy.
Edit: I should put this in context:
The merchants felt the city (which collects sales tax revenue) would benefit by subsidizing parking, which allows for more traffic and theoretically leads to increased sales (more tax dollars). The city saw parking tickets as a greater source of revenue, and felt increasing enforcement was the better plan. The merchants paid meter-feeders selectively, so as to encourage locals who are a more consistent source of revenue.
They may well do so. But the point of this article is that municipal ordinances don't give property owners the choice:
> Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it. Cupertino has a requirement for every building.
http://kellyjclifton.com/Research/EconImpactsofBicycling/OTR...
Here is a roundup of numerous case studies. http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/03/the-complete-busine...
(not that i think going that far would be a good idea. But it's important to realize just how much public money is spent maintaining infrastructure for private vehicles. eliminating free parking would be a very small portion of the subsidy.)
Car = I paid for it out of the money I earned
Roads = I pay for them with my taxes
Parking = I pay for this either by being a customer of your business or, if you're a landlord, by paying you rent every month.
Making free parking into pay parking or making pay parking into more expensive pay parking will serve to decrease traffic, but at what cost?
Once you monetize it or make it more expensive than a reasonable price it practically begs to become corrupt. The end result is only incentives to increase parking costs via tools such as premium/VIP parking. Theoretically, a premium spot could pop up and would normally be a regularly priced spot when the inventory of other spots dwindles. The spot itself isn't actually any closer to the destination for the customer but is just more expensive. Sure, you could argue that this is how supply and demand works but that only really applies to supply of goods for which there are similar alternatives. If you raise prices on parking, why not raise prices on public transportation as well, and if you're raising those prices then who is going to stop the taxis and ride-hailing apps (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, etc.) from raising their prices as well? You haven't actually solved any problems. You've just made more money.
Well that's your opinion, at least I find the framing and connotations of that word problematic here, but I agree to let the market sort it out.
It's amazing how many people in America think our car-dominant culture is just the result of market forces.
The truth is that land use for transportation is zero sum enough to make market forces impossible to use in the way we expect for most consumer services. If you want choices, the best option is to support multi-modal transportation, which in most US cities means reallocating resources away from cars (who currently have almost all the resources) and towards walking, biking, and transit.
Free markets need very specific conditions to lead to the optimal solution. I don't think the transportation market fits the requirements.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
[2] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
I think it would be dubious that private roads would require liability insurance. At present, liability insurance is only widespread because of regulation (i.e. a non-market mechanism). I do not see the economic case for the owner of the road to require liability insurance of its users.
Insurance wouldn't cover the full cost either. According to [2], total car insurance losses were $117.5 billion in 2011, compared to the $242.0 billion in economic losses cited in my previous post.
[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/industry/automobile-insurance.html
In particular merchants with free parking nearby will do much better than merchants without free parking nearby, so eliminating free parking in just one area will put all of those merchants out of business (as people drive to other areas to shop).
Freedom of Movement is very much not a luxury. You might argue that lacking these 'luxuries' does not prevent you from going anywhere, but it is very much a restriction of otherwise freer movement Also, it ignores the inherent timeliness our society has developed which make lower variance delays much more desireable.
If you truly believe that freedom of movement is a right that should be applied to everyone, you should be arguing in favour of improved public transit and any other solution that isn't a personal vehicle, because personal vehicles aren't accessible to everybody. In addition to being financially out of reach for many, they cannot be used by the visually impaired and by people with certain motor function impairments, the young, or the old. Something as important as freedom of movement should be serviced by something that is accessible to all.
Traveling in a personal vehicle affords drastically more freedom of movement (you are literally in control of your movement) than any form of public transport and while it's not necessarily a need that should be subsidized by the state it is nonetheless a curtailment on freedom when the state deliberately makes it less convenient than it had been.
The state should make it less convenient. In the past they have been massively subsidizing it with free roads and military interventions abroad to safeguard the oil supply. Furthermore cars and gasoline should be taxed much more heavily to compensate for the negative externalities of cars: noise and air pollution and countless traffic victims (35.000 motor vehicle deaths in 2015 in the US alone [1]).
Your freedom to get somewhere in a car is not absolute (e.g. you have to follow roads), it should be balanced against other freedoms. Ponder this: cars have impinged on my freedom to go certain places (e.g. highways or certain neighborhoods that no longer have sidewalks) on foot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
First, this is not what I was responding to. Parent claimed that restricting the freedom to use cars was not an impingement on personal freedom at all, because not everybody can drive a car. That is a different question than whether it is a tolerable infringement, and it is precisely the denial that people have a legitimate interest in car use that I have characterized as Orwellian.
Second, your comparison is equally silly. Complaining that I cannot walk on the highway is like complaining that I cannot drive my car through a building. It is normal that you cannot move literally everywhere. The question of the freedom of movement being infringed necessarily relies on the change in freedom relative to what was previously possible, and highways take up a small proportion of land which is hardly comparable to reducing by half or more the number of car-miles a person can afford to drive (or taking their car completely).
>Furthermore cars and gasoline should be taxed much more heavily to compensate for the negative externalities of cars: noise and air pollution and countless traffic victims (35.000 motor vehicle deaths in 2015 in the US alone [1]).
They are already taxed to compensate for those externalities, by requiring drivers to buy insurance policies that cover damage they may cause. There cannot always be the argument that because there are externalities, taxes must be raised. At some point the taxes have to be enough. This is yet more absurd gaslighting by rich jerks who like to push people around.
Insurance policies only cover damage that is directly attributable to individual drivers like traffic collisions. They don't cover any of the damage caused by air or noise pollution.
Any reasonably time-efficient transportation system is going to deny pedestrians some space.
As you said paying for parking is just a disadvantage of hauling around several tons of metal, which is not the same as being deprived of your ability to do something by someone who holds power over you.
costs in cities are artificially high and I doubt property and usage taxes would support many "affordable" high rise parking decks.
the double whammy here is the less available parking in town means less chance of EV charging too. then again that has shown that where free you get the same issue if not worse (got to love people who disconnect your car for you)
a) near zero latency to take a trip I can take the subway and go home at any station. If I go by car I have to go back to the place the car is to be able to return home.
b) proportional penalty for leaving late: if you miss a bus or a train by 10 seconds, you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour. This is true if you favor private cars over public transportation. The more people uses the bus, the more buses there are, and they come more often (in rush hours you can take a subway each 5 minutes). The problem solves itself.
c) availability: a personal car generally provides the same service during the day, at night, and can be used in rain and mild snow (heavy snow, if properly equipped). Yes, at night there is less public transportation. But at night there are no "traffic jams" either. When your needs are completely different that the rest of the population then a private car makes a lot of sense. This should be the main use.
d) flexibility/directness: a personal car can drive to almost everywhere, and can generally take a fairly direct route. But usually, people don't want to drive everywhere. Most people wants the same route that everybody else. That's why you have "traffic jams" in the first place. It is the same case that c), if your needs are so different that the rest of the population a private car makes a lot of sense.
In all cities I have lived (Barcelona, London, Stockholm) by far the best option was to use public transportation.
This benefits no one except people that own houses near job centers (since it increases real estate pricing discrepancies).
Due to the local political structure, small town governments are able to sabotage the entire region's transportation network, perpetuating the problem.
The NIMBY's that support this use studies liked the linked one to justify this behavior (which is rent-seeking at best and racial/economic discrimination at worst).
I believe things are better where you live; I'm just trying to explain why your comments are controversial with the HN crowd.
Personally, I'd like more roads, parking, public transit, and bike lanes. It would alleviate some of the housing pressure in Silicon Valley, lowering real estate costs, which would improve the quality of service industries, increase the efficiency with which VC money is spent, and generally enable more startups.
Since I've not heard the news, what cuts in transit have been made?
With you personal vehicle, you might be stuck in traffic, have to circle before finding a spot or find a spot much farther than you expected and have a longer walk to do.
Unfortunately I only have direct control over my own actions, and very limited ability to influence the actions of other travelers or politicians. This isn't really an argument against the original commenter's point. If I get rid of my car and switch to public transportation, maybe on average the wait between buses drops from 1 hour to a millisecond less than an hour.
My most direct bus route to work has actually migrated to lower capacity vehicles in the face of exponentially growing ridership, with no schedule changes.
I could forgive this if AC Transit were out of money, but they're launching a ton of new service on obscure routes. They just don't seem interested in boosting capacity or frequency on the popular ones.
Can you tell Melbourne this, because our population is growing rapidly (~2000/week) and our public transport was once decent, but is now resembling a sardine tin factory. It's been a constant story in the papers for a decade.
Same with proportional penalty for leaving late: arrive somewhere after the free parking fills up, and you're screwed.
Same with availability: forget parking on the street at any vaguely popular time. It's not very direct if you end up in a street space 2 miles away from your destination. And maybe I would like to spend more than 2 hours somewhere.
You can see this with BART, which wildly undercharges for its parking (around $3/day). The only way to park in a BART-owned space is to travel very early in the morning, or spend years on the monthly-permit waiting list, which guarantees a space until 10am.
I'd prefer to drive 1.5 miles to my local station (uphill, or I would bike). Instead I drive 6 miles to a station with a private parking lot, because it's priced high enough ($11) that there's always an available space for me at 9:30am. I've decided those $11 are worth the hour of free time not spent on walking to my local station.
In a big and dense city you would most likely be jammed in traffic while you could just walk to the nearest underground station or tram/bus stop and take the next transit towards the right direction. And the latter is what people do in places where taking the car is not a requirement and where the densities support public transit. In most American cities the densities are laughably sparse, and taking a personal car makes sense.
In LA or Valley it would be a joke not to drive. In NY or London it would be a joke to try to drive.
Traffic and transportation are hard problems, but this area seems to always choose terrible solutions for either of them.
Caltrain is pretty horrible schedule wise.
My experience with the Muni system in the city is that it is less than dependable. Frequent backups, delays or even skipped trains seem to be normal. When I have to use the Muni I basically leave work 10-15 minutes earlier than when I first started this job just because I can rely on the unreliability of the Muni system.
At least as a person without children, the need for and experience of using a car is simply a matter of where I live and work (and for the weekends, where my friends live). When I lived in Pasadena, commuted to Irvine 3x a week, and didn't have a personal car, yes, life was miserable. When I lived in Venice Beach and drove downtown for work, the tedious, heavily trafficked freeway commute exhausted me by mid-week.
Also, for what it's worth, greater Los Angeles has the highest average density of US urban areas by a pretty healthy margin. Yes, it's denser than the New York or San Francisco urbanized areas. And LA's decentralized commercial districts make it a prime candidate for an efficient, extensive public transit network [1]; there's just heaps of toxic cultural momentum to overcome in order to restore that former feature to our metropolis.
[1]: http://humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-metr...
(You can stop reading now, the rest of this post repeats the above point in more ways for those who did not understand it.)
If this isn't obvious, think of any attraction with a line. Once there's a line at all, the attraction (cashiers, for example) is being used to capacity at maximum thoroughput. Increasing the size of the line does not change thuroughput, but does increase latency in exchange for no benefit for anyone.
If your parking fee is so high that even at peak time half your spaces are unused, it's too high and by lowering it you can get more visitors. But once it's at just the right level where there's, say, only 5-10% vacancy, lowering prices any further will merely increase traffic without increasing the visitor thoroughput at all (conversely, increasing is also lose/lose because you lose visitors while wasting parking)
In other words, there's a natural equilibrium price, and it sure as fuck ain't zero.
By the way, how the heck do you figure it's inconvenient to pay for the resources you use to park? You already do anyway, indirectly. Making it more direct changes nothing except helping reduce congestion, which makes driving more convenient. Nobody likes sitting in unpredictably long jams.
America is funny, we have lots of libertarians who suddenly become communists in the sole case of parking.
Car advocates strike me as less like communists and more like an occupying force. They have a very strong sense of ownership of things they have no just reason to own.
They don't think of the communal resources they use, such as parking, as being public resources. They think of them as theirs, and anyone else who would use them is an enemy.
"You can't build more housing here! Then people might drive and park on my street!"
True only in areas with abundant parking right next to the destination. This is not true in many urban places, where parking might be located some distance away, requiring you or a valet to retrieve the vehicle. Also, as the article points out, there can be considerable latency on arrival, as time may be required to find a place to store the vehicle. With public transport, no time is required on arrival to find parking.
This can even be a problem at places with plenty of parking, like airports, where shuttles are necessary merely to get you from the terminal to the big parking lot.
And indeed, cities are starting to acknowledge that, with major public events offering off-site parking, and then public transit for the last several miles. The hybrid solution works great in larger states, although I'm not sure if the same strategy would work in, say, manhattan.
e) Privacy - a personal car lets you be alone, listen to anything you want at any volume you prefer, eat food or drink, etc. It also reduces the likelihood of certain types of frustrating interpersonal interactions.
f) Storage - a personal car acts as storage for things you want to have with you, things you acquire at multiple stops, etc.
g) Kids - Getting multiple kids (especially young kids) around is much easier with a personal car than most forms of public transportation.
h) Fun - believe it or not, some people enjoy cars and like to drive.
That said, I strongly prefer to live in a location with excellent public transit and also own a car for occasional trips.
e) There are scientific papers published hypothesizing that suburbs and private transportation are increasing isolation and therefore depression and isolation.
f) Theft from cars is a real thing (and a big thing during Christmas at the mall near me). Similarly, given in the U.S. we have high grocery waste; suggestions include making more trips with smaller loads.
g) driving is much more dangerous, especially with young kids serving as distractions.
h) as with e, while some people have fun, a lot of people experience a lot of stress while driving; In the U.S. your risk of heart attack increases significantly with traffic. Cognitive load is also increased. Road Rage is also a thing where the worst cases result in shootings and intentional collisions.
When you live farther away from density, you need those things. So in effect, driving more people to car ownership just exacerbates many the problems that they ostensibly solve.
e) freedom: you are not told by anybody other if you are allowed to travel or not.
I think this is a fundamental property of personal cars.
I think you will find that if you take the infrastructure away, your land-locked "freedom car" is now totally impractical junk.
It is not a fundamental property. It is not god-given. You were born into a world where car roads are ubiquitous and now your thinking stops slightly after linear extrapolation. That's not the case for everyone.
Like I told, this is fundamental to the cars and can be to an extent only compared to the horses.
It is no surprise that this freedom comes with the price. I did not argue that it is not the case.
Nothing we have is god-given. All we have has been fought with somebodies blood.
b) Sure, but there are two things here: 1) if you have more people taking public transport, the delay will be more like 10 minutes rather than 1 hour; frequently travelled routes even every 5 minutes. 2) Having hard deadlines in your life can mean you actually plan better and stick to a schedule. You know when people will actually arrive for events, for instance.
c) I'm not gonna lie, public transport shutting down at night is annoying. That said, with the new generation of cab companies this is much less of an issue than it used to be.
d) When it comes to flexibility, I like to make the decision to be able to drink with friends whenever I want, without having to worry about how I get home. I chose where I live to allow a quick commute by public transport, so for me the tradeoff is fine. Moreover, because the local city didn't need to allocate parking space to every single person who lives there, there are a lot more people who can enjoy the benefits I do. This in turn drives local restaurants, sports shops, pubs, grocery stores and more. People don't go to the mega-store and buy 3 months of milk because they'd have to quite literally carry it home. This makes the place have a friendly atmosphere, and in turn attracts more people who have grown to dread the soulless suburbs.
Sure, there are other advantages to cars that he didn't list, but every one that he did applies to bikes.
Article I wrote for Vice on that topic: http://svedic.org/philosophy/car-sharing-and-the-death-of-pa...
e) safety: there may be a risk to get mugged on your way to the car, but you can also get mugged on the way to the public transportation. However, once in your car, you hardly have to worry about someone coming to you for "something"
f) comfort: I always have a seat in my car, and I'm not compressed between 5 people and pushed around against my will
g) consistency: the car will leave when I get to it and start it, pretty much every time. The bus may be there on time today, or not, or could be full (and I have to get the next one), etc
The one disadvantage a bicycle has compared to a car is the capacity to transport cargo. If I'm shopping for groceries for a family, I'm much more likely to drive there as opposed to cycling there due to the limited carrying capacity I have on the bike compared to my car.
a) people have kids
b) people need to drive somebody who is not able to table public transportation (sick, old, disabled, etc.)
In other words, yes: if you allow only rich people to drive to come certain location (by not providing free parking, etc.) then there will be no traffic jams. Middle class will move to suburbs...
Children and the elderly are, unsurprisingly, more than capable of riding on a bus or train. And taxing a taxi (or Uber, Lyft, etc.) when the occasion requires.
All of the "positives" of individual personal transportation quickly turn into negatives when everyone else is simultaneously trying to avail themselves of them in a dense, congested city. Then you realize that trying to have a car in the middle of a big city is more hassle than it's worth, and that walking, biking, public transit, and ubiquitous cabs actually work quite well, way better than individual cars could ever work in such conditions.
So yes, we've got suburban Americans who can't even conceptualize what life is like in our biggest city, despite it being a constant subject in pop culture.
I've lived in Chicago, and came to the same conclusion. I like having a car so that's one of the reasons I don't live there anymore.
But most of the US is not big cities. Yet even in modest sized towns you see people advocating for public transit and bike lanes, etc. where they will never be used enough to justify the taxpayer expense.
EDIT: Also, we spend far, far more money on our road infrastructure than on all public transit combined. You are looking at the cost of public transit but assuming that roads were/are free. They are not. Taking steps towards equalizing funding levels between the two would go a great ways towards making public transit better while remaining revenue neutral.
In fact, the percentage of households that own cars in the US is not that different from either other wealthy Western democracies, Japan, or South Korea. (China and Russia are both much lower.)
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/16/car-bike-or-...
- free parking siphons away would-be bus and train customers, which deprive the transit authority of revenue (leading to less frequent service, older vehicles, etc.) and also reduce the political impetus to deliver high quality transit.
- subsidized parking leads to lots of drivers circulating looking for an open spot, causing congestion and pollution -- the article mentioned that 53% of SF residential parking permit holders spent more than five minutes looking for parking at the end of their most recent trip. This congestion makes surface buses and trams run slower and with greater schedule uncertainty, making transit even more unattractive.
Obviously I would like great public transit in America yesterday, but I don't think the current state of transit is good reason to preserve subsidized parking. Preserving subsidized parking is going to keep transit in America as unattractive as it is now.
I think that most of the time public transportation must be subsidized anyway. In fact some cities in Europe make public transport completely free, because subsidizing 100% of the cost it not much worse than subsidizing (on average) 75%, especially considering that you can greatly reduce traffic jams this way.
From what I can see, it just leads to crush loads. When there's money for expansion, it goes to routes that make political (not practical) sense, subsidized tickets for certain demographics, etc. Frequency and capacity on popular routes stays the same, so with increased ridership they just get worse.
A public transit agency isn't incentivized to fulfill customer needs. It's incentivized to get its director elected up the ladder in city politics, which means serving swing districts, not demand.
Also, we need to resist the temptation to assume that low utilization of a half assed public transit solution means that nobody wants it. In my small town, we had a bus line that had almost no utilization despite going between two desirable locations; an area with tons of apartments oriented towards students and the university itself. The city was talking about killing the line but someone convinced them to try making the bus run more frequently, and continue running later into the day as a trial. The line went from having the lowest ridership to the highest. Not every improvement will be that dramatic of course, but I think often times public transit is underutilized because it's not meeting the needs of the population.
Parking space requirements (along with other zoning regulations) prevent cities from being built densely enough to reach the critical mass needed for great public transit. It's not an accident that our densest cities (e.g. New York) also happen to be our oldest cities, from before the advent of most of the zoning regulations. Significant swaths of New York City could not be built again the way they are now thanks to zoning laws that have since come into play! Contrast with Los Angeles, a city which was largely developed post-zoning-laws, and you can see the huge resultant different in density, and thus apocalyptic levels of traffic with few good alternatives.
One additional floor of height limit is 5-6 whole apartments.
We can get a lot more bang for our buck with fewer negative side effects by building upwards (in places where parking is not necessary).
It doesn't really address the issue, though it does make service for the rush hour suburb / city commuters better. (which is really all the current public transit infrastructure in the Seattle and surrounding areas is optimized for).
Nor does it address the issue of it being expensive to extend the service in a way that meaningfully empowers, E.G. those working a late shift somewhere, to get home at 2AM.
To me it seems like a no brainer that the demand is there whether driving is terrible or not, good public transit can be better than private even if a city doesn't go out of its way to discourage driving (and don't get me wrong, if a city has good public transit options then I think it should commit and strongly discourage driving).
Cities should be much more like the Caves of Steel (Asimov).
Instead of cars on the roadways pedestrians should have bizarre (market streets), park way, and retail streets. People moving belts could also increase flow.
An entirely different layer would be used for the vehicles. Electric motored transport for goods, services, and people; within a city these would likely be orchestrated via central driving servers.
At the edge of the city, and likely also by ports and major civic centers, there'd be interfaces for legacy vehicles. Massive parking and warehouse structures that are well connected to the local civic infrastructure for moving goods and people.
If they do not also change their parking policies, such efforts amount to little more than window-dressing. There is a one-word answer to why the streets of Los Angeles look so different from those of London, and why neither city resembles Tokyo: parking.
I wanted to be an urban planner and I have done a fair amount of related reading. Los Angeles sprawled before it became known for being so car oriented, back when people took the tram and walked everywhere.
It sprawled because it was built in the desert. The fact that water has to be imported to the area means that you had to develop large tracts of land in order for the financing to make any sense. It has to do with how much it cost to develop the necessary underlying infrastructure.
It's layout is somewhat unique due to the environment and circumstances in which it was built, the way that Venice is unique for being built in a swamp. If you don't study the history of the place, you can't understand how it came to be the way it is.
I would love to see the U.S. become less car centered. I would love it if we stopped whoring our cities out to the cult of the car and built more walkable communities and provided better public transit. But arguing for some particular approach and basing that argument on completely made up facts without understanding the history behind the places used as examples does not in any way impress me.
Obviously life needs to balance many things, and increasing the cost of parking in an attempt to shift commuters to alternative forms is also going to decrease the number of people who want to commute to the destination at all.
I live in the Los Angeles area and significantly prefer living in and visiting cities that have free parking (e.g., the southern beach cities). I actively avoid cities such as Santa Monica that have costly and insufficient parking--and importantly, that means I don't spend any money at Santa Monica retail businesses. Alternative transit options are not appealing. Light rail, while expanding in this metropolitan area, is far too inefficient. Uber and Lyft are an additional cost friction that gets factored into any decision (e.g., where to go for a dinner out?). Plus I don't want to have to deal with an app to go somewhere.
All that said, self-driving cars may be a big game changer for my lifestyle. I would be more likely to visit Santa Monica if my car could find a suitable parking structure and park itself. To my mind the cost of parking would be less of a nuisance if I didn't even have to think about the parking process.
Many local municipalities require absurd amounts of parking per new housing unit, and many Baby Boomers show up to meetings to complain about how there's no parking and thus a new project should be denied.
I hope it works but I wouldn't be optimistic that it would
Nobody's saying that you can't patronize a business that provides free parking, but if parking isn't mandated by zoning you'll on average pay more for the benefit compared to someone patronizing a business without ample parking.
Removing the requirement from the zoning code allows people like you to vote with your dollars, and people who don't care about free parking to pay lower prices. It's a win-win.
Anyone referencing European public transportation should realize that over half the countries in Europe are smaller than the state of Iowa, and none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas. You're comparing apples to oranges.
Second, not one of the comments below mentioned the Auto lobby. If your beef is with the number of personal vehicles on the road vs. public transportation, you should probably look there first. Tell your billionaire friends to start outspending the $61 million spent in 2016 by Automotive[1] industry lobbyists (compared to the $1.4 million for Misc Transport[2]) and maybe you'll start seeing a difference.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=M02&yea...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00004700...
Completely irrelevant. Nobody is talking about providing public transit for rural Texas. The important factor is density on a local scale, not overall size.
I don't know where you got this bizarre notion. The populations of Russia (~144m), Germany (~83m), Turkey (~80m), France (~67m), The United Kingdom (~65m), Italy (~61m), Spain (~46m), Ukraine (~43m), and Poland (~38m) are all quite a lot larger than Texas (~27m).
There are a lot of people in the US who would not be willing to live in a place with a population density high enough to support public transport.
Predicting the intended consequences is hard enough.
Second, I'm no fan of cars or Apple, but if Cupertino doesn't want their largest employer there who is paying more taxes than everyone else combined, they should just kick them out. If they do want them there, and there's traffic problems, they should use the tax money to build gigantic boulevards so the Apple employees can drive wherever they want. They are taxpayers and their taxes pay for roads like everyone else. The city takes charge of building roads so they should do their job and build roads, or public transport, to serve the people paying taxes, especially those paying the most.
The first, efficient merging, which means, no, you don't stop in your lane to move to the right, you speed up a little and leverage the accordion effect of the slower traffic on the right to find a spot big enough for your car to fit in and then merge. More efficient utilization of the space on the roadway, while keeping the lane you're leaving and the one you're entering moving at their respective speeds.
Second, speed up when you get out in front of the jam. This is well studied and found to mitigate the traffic jam behind, when enough drivers do this.
It surprised the hell out of me when I bought a condo apartment. No parking spot included.
This title is horrible because it uses a double negation. Here's one without it:
>How to create traffic jams: Let people park for free
Doesn't that read much less confusing?
In my honest opinion, any design that doesn't attack the root cause is an improper one. Please make public transit a clean, safe, affordable and sufficiently widespread in coverage instead of increasing barriers to car ownership and ridership.
Basically the argument here is to stop traffic jams from happening just make it so annoying that people won't drive. Well here in Texas you literally can't get anywhere without driving. Buses don't really run, there isn't public transportation to utilize, and you're going to tell me on a 100F day to ride a bike 15 miles?
Houston and Dallas have much more amenable geography for becoming denser, larger cities with better mass transit. Yet they haven't, because they chose not to.
And there's plenty of unused space in New York state, anyway. It's big and only moderately populated north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. Compare New York with Texas: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/New_York... https://i.redditmedia.com/cn1OstwGd24Katakx1DFdC8cVzAjUVyOFh...
Would the inverse of these punitive solutions, ie., encouraging carpool / ridesharing, not also work? It always amazes me how relatively unutilized the HOV lanes are.
1. Make the location less desirable.
2. Make the transportation more efficient.
Obviously nobody wants to do the 1st option, but the 2nd option is more difficult so they stick to the 1st. It seems a little backwards to me, like the goal is simply having less cars regardless of secondary or tertiary negative impact.
They could have just stated "Free parking increases traffic, sprawl & pollution".
But then we wouldn't have clicked on it.
Or something along those lines.
Then again, I haven't had a car since living here (10+ years) and don't plan on getting one.
Could someone parse out 'The Grand Tour' chart for me? I have no idea what it is trying to present.