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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

All of those properties you specify are very true, but they are also very clearly luxuries. If you want immediate travel to anywhere at any time in any conditions, you should be expected to pay the cost of it - cities and property owners shouldn't have to bear the cost for you by subsidizing the costs of your travel and vehicle storage.

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.

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Those are luxuries like a cell phone is a luxury. There does come a point where there's no acceptable alternative - a 1 hour bus line I know through the city of Seattle takes 10 minutes by car. Why should the city and property owners have to subsidize cars? They shouldn't, but they need some way for people to get to them and flow people through the city, or they will cease to exist.

I don't even own a car in Seattle. It's clearly not a necessity as I, my fiancé, and several of our friends are all careless and do just fine.

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.

> It's clearly not a necessity as I, my fiancé, and several of our friends are all careless and do just fine.

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.

Yes, clearly it's a problem to not have a car when living a lifestyle designed entirely around a car. We get that, we can skip the 100 identical posts that have appeared and are yet to appear.

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?

I expect city dwellers to recognize that their aesthetic distaste for car infrastructure doesn't come close to the very real impact on someone's life of tripling all their travel times.

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.

> 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?).

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?

A basic car is practically free compared to basic housing. It's not necessary to divorce employees from needing cars, any more than it's necessary to divorce them from needing housing.

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 don't like the kind of people that transportation brings in to my quiet neighborhood"

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.

I think the best solution is for employees to drive the unique parts of their routes (home to suburban transit stations with parking structures), and then ride fast, frequent, reasonably comfortable train service for the "trunk" part of the route.

Use cars where they're the best option. Use public transit where it's the best option. Take 5 minutes to transfer in between.

Even better, ride your bicycle to the train or bus station, and take it with you. At the destination, ride to work.

You need secure bike parking on the suburban side and bike share on the urban side. A typical commuter train car can take maybe 3 bikes per 100 passengers. Carrying your bike only works because so few people do it. Fortunately, the Bay Area already has this.

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.

> E-bikes are getting cheaper.

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.

> Use cars for the unique portion.

Fair enough. I also like the walk//bike suggestion also made here for this consideration.

Wouldn't that just result in giant parking structures at the suburban transit stations? It seems like it's less a solution than a mitigation.

Yes, it would. The problem stated here are traffic jams and the waste of urban land, and this has neither of those problems. What are your objections?

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?

> Yes, it would. ... What are your objections?

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].

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172888

My comment was about making proclamations about what is easy or not for the majority based on the experiences of a minority. I'm not making any claims that cars are a requirement, just that when deciding policy that affects many people in the area, considering all those people and finding solutions for problems you might create for those people should be important. I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make from that.

> 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.

A car-centric society is “good” for 20–60 year-old non-disabled people who can afford to pay for them, very young children who need to be carried around, or anyone who can afford to hire someone to drive for them, in a place with low to medium population density (e.g. rural towns, suburbs). They’re especially convenient for people who need to carry around large amounts of gear, or go to isolated places.

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.

>They’re terrible for ...the elderly

On what grounds?

Obviously there isn’t a sharp age cut-off, but many elderly people start having problems with vision, hand-eye coordination, reaction time, joints, memory, ...

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.

Citation?

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.

That being unacceptable is based on conditions where owning a car is subsidized by free parking. Remove those subsidies and there would now be a market for more flexible childcare. Your argument amounts to a tautology. A car is necessary under current driving conditions is not the same thing as a car being necessary under any driving conditions. There are many places around the world where most people don't own cars. They still manage to figure out how to raise children, often while being substantially poorer than we are in the states. I'm confident that if we create the right environment that discourages car ownership, we'll figure it out here too.

> Your argument amounts to a tautology.

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.

Quite so. My wife and I have raised three children into their teens without ever having owned a car. This was not problematic, precisely because we live in Tokyo, a city mentioned in the article as having enlightened policies on parking and public transport.

So everyone can do this ? What is your average expenses per month, you know, basic stuff. Apartment (rent/mortgage), transport, non-restaurant food, etc.

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.

Citing a dysfunctional housing market like San Francisco is instructive, but only because it provides contrast to the situation the poster you're replying to was talking about. Tokyo may be expensive, but it also manages to house more than 15 times the residents of San Francisco. Not all of the almost 14m people living in Tokyo are rich.

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.

Yes, because clearly having children was impossible until we developed the motor car.

I gather you don't have kids then? With young kids in family you will almost certainly need cars.

We need to convince people to stop having kids, too. Then we can have our public transportation utopia.

We need to convince people to stop wanting to go anywhere, then we can save on the costs of that, too.

People living with children in London tend to do just fine as long as we are trading anectdotes.

My commute to my office is 90 minutes by bus on a good day. It's 15 minutes driving outside of rush hour.

If you need to go downtown, Seattle buses are great. Anything else (especially east/West corridors to the north) is a huge joke.

> It's 15 minutes driving outside of rush hour.

Is it 90 minutes inside of rush hour?

I think he meant to say "on a good day"

Unless he drives through Mercer and then maybe it is 90 minutes in rush hour lol. Takes my wife that long on occasion to get home from downtown Seattle because of the Amazon Mercer traffic

worst case from south bellevue via 90/merce to belltown takes me 55 minutes in rush hour. Well a month ago when that wreck was on i-5 I took 405 south to i5 north to belltown and that took 1:30, eg 90 minutes.

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.

Heading to East side is better, yea. And actually, if you are already on Mercer it's not as bad. Getting across from Westlake ish means the bus routinely goes slower than walking speed. Can walk to Fremont faster...

Right now, it would take me 41 minutes by car and 48 minutes by BART to reach my office in SF, according to Google Maps.It would cost me a bridge toll and an exorbitant amount in parking to drive, and wouldn't even be much faster, due to 17 minutes of traffic delays (which is fairly typical).

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.

So you live in one of the best case parts of the world, and it still barely works out?

Pretty much, and that's only because my office is 10 minutes walk from BART.

Gotta say SF Bay is definitely NOT a best case public transportation scenario. Try Hong Kong, Paris or London.

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.

I used to drive my wife to work, down the 405 corridor. With traffic 30-45 minutes, an hour on a bad day. But when she takes the bus it takes close to two hours, mainly because she had to transfer. Going to Seattle is better, if I catch one of the few express buses. Taing the express is usually faster than driving. But miss the express, then it takes closer to two hours

>Why should the city and property owners have to subsidize cars? They shouldn't, but they need some way for people to get to them and flow people through the city, or they will cease to exist.

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.

If everyone did that, the value of their property would go down unless the city picked up the tab for alternate transport. Either way the city pays

Why would the value of their property go down? Apple's new headquarters has 318k ft^2 of office space and 325k ft^2 of legally required parking spaces. If Apple could flexibly choose what they wanted to do with their land, they could use their land in more useful ways, making it more valuable to them.

If people can't get there, or park there, then its less valuable to them. There's freeway capacity and bus routes to think about, and I'm 100% sure that they planned their campus alongside city planners in cupertino and santa clara county. That area of Wolfe Rd. would be totally overrun if there wasn't enough parking not only for current employees but future ones as well.

> If people can't get there, or park there, then its less valuable to them.

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.

It's in Apple's interest to optimize their transportation situation. Because Apple built the absolute minimum amount of parking, it seems to indicate that Apple thinks less parking than that is necessary for optimal performance.

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.

At least in Washington/Seattle, there is a gas tax which helps pay for road maintenance. But of course increases the price of gas. I'm lucky in that I can walk to work (~40 minutes), and the bus ride is roughly 5 minutes faster if I make it to the stop as it comes in.

I think the article's authors would say that you have it backwards. You can't have acceptable alternatives while cities are forcing businesses and developers to subsidize car driving. How can the alternatives compete when the market is subsidizing their competition?

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.

> 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.

Cellphones don't have the sort of negative externalities that cars do, and there are no statutes that actively make externalities worse, either.

Agreed. If you live outside of a city with no public transport ... what options do you have? No one is going to cycle 40 miles to work every day.

maybe it really doesn't make sense to travel 80 miles a day to get to work? just saying, at some point it becomes a poor societal and personal tradeoff. where do you think the line is?

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.

For me it comes down to my house - I can't sell it as it is worth less than when I purchased it. This is the case for a lot of people since the housing crash.

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?

i'm not criticizing your personal choices. i'm old and i can't afford to buy so i really screwed up. but as a matter of policy I'm not sure we should be encouraging exurb development by trying to twist transit around that.

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

But we don't provide free cell phones to everyone.

We don't provide free cars to anyone.

I'm pretty sure I pay for the bus as well both with taxes and fares.

But we do provide free parking.

You should try living in a real city like London or Paris, where being a car owner sucks and that's really good.

Merchants in that city area might very well wish to bear those costs in exchange for having people who can afford the luxury of a private car be inclined to shop at that merchant instead of at another, more accommodating merchant area or online.

It shouldn't just be up to the merchants, though. It's a decision that has externalities. Providing space for parking, for example, limits the density of space available for other uses, which makes the whole area less pedestrian friendly.

Other externalities: more traffic, hence more noise, more pollution, more traffic accidents.

That is exactly what validating parking is for.

Agreed, I live in LA (near downtown) and places that have some amount of easy/free parking will be patronized much more than other places (even if the latter has higher quality goods/services).

Then remove the regulation that requires developers to bear the cost of building parking spaces and simply let merchants choose to pay to build them if they want to. Some merchants may feel that the additional cost of a parking structure is worthwhile, others may not. The market will sort out which ones are correct.

(I am an elected politician on the Board of Directors of a special district, one power of which is related to residential parking permits, and am additionally on a community committee working on improving the parking situation in the business area; my job on this committee is to do the actual outreach to local businesses. Note also that I am someone who believes in decreasing the use of cars.)

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.

In my city it's common for large retailers to provide parking lots at a cost. If you buy something, the cashier gives you a stamp that nulls your parking charge. Anyone can park, but free for customers. There's ways to game it, but it seems a workable solution.

I've only seen parking validation for private garages. Are your parking spaces owned by the city, and retailers can still validate for downtown, on-street parking?

Parking lots can exclude people. It isn't a public good.

And in what is probably the first mental association most people have with parking lots, they're also rivalrous.

Right. That is, in fact, the point, and why the suggestion to remove regulations and to just let the market regulate parking ends in combat and a bunch of people trying to game theory each other's parking... the result is everyone hates each other and is clearly unfair (if potentially efficient).

Imagine the horrors if we let the market regulate cabinet space in your kitchen.

Once you remove the subsidy people pay to park. What is so unfair about that?

Requiring each building in a business area to have its own attached parking is a great way to perpetuate sprawl. Successful walkable business districts either use metered street parking, or intercept cars in parking lots at a stand-off distance away from the shops themselves. This amortizes the parking load among the shops.

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).

This is a different suggestion: removing parking at businesses and centralizing it using government (which does not lead to the problem I mentioned).

Maybe we could place that government parking on the sides of existing roads; we could automate the payment process with small devices mounted on posts that could take coins (or in some places, cards or mobile payments). For people who don't pay, we could have city employees walk around and issue fines for non-compliance...

In my hometown's downtown we have large parking towers that provide parking at fairly cheap rates. In the city owned one, the first hour is free. It's actually a lot more convenient than hunting for parking at area X, hoping there is street side parking or a parking lot. We also get a walkable downtown as a result too.

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.

I agree: the suggestion I was replying to was to remove regulation and try to let the market come up with parking, which this suggestion is clearly not anything similar to ;P.

Then nobody will go through the expense of building any parking for their development, after which everyone suffers. New owners will have to build parking simply to exist in the space, and a great gap forms between affordability for owners who were there before vs new owners coming in - less traffic means all the businesses suffer.

> 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.

They may well do so. But the point of this article is that municipal ordinances don't give property owners the choice:

This is already the case with some places that provide free customer parking but most city centres still provide free or low cost parking for personal vehicles at a cost to the city which is effectively a subsidy for merchants in that city.

Yes, it's a subsidy to the merchants who, in turn, pay to the city property tax and sales tax.

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.

I know that in Boulder (CO), the downtown parking spaces that are on the street are owned by the city, and merchants were paying people to feed people's meters b/c they felt parking tickets were driving people away.

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.

> most city centres still provide free or low cost parking

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.

People who arrive by car spend less, not more. Rather than reflecting the luxurious lifestyle of its owner cars are burdens to most people.

People who arrive by car spend more than people who never arrive to that merchant.

I don't know what is your basis for that claim. Looking at actual figures for different places where I live (Finland, which has many places with very good public transport options) shows that people who come by car spend substantially more money when they come shopping.

If that's true in Finland which I don't doubt I suggest that is a reflection of the very different built environment of that country compared to the USA. In the USA there have been several studies on the question and all have determined that arrival by car is associated with lower spending. Here is one:

http://kellyjclifton.com/Research/EconImpactsofBicycling/OTR...

Here is a roundup of numerous case studies. http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/03/the-complete-busine...

I think he got his first sentence backwards, his second sentence contradicts it.

I have no idea what part of the world you live, but near me cars are neither luxurious nor a burden to people. It seems like car angst could be a symptom of big city overcrowding. Overcrowding isn't a car problem. It's a problem of too many people in an area.

I'm (inter alia) a merchant - chairman of a deli and cafe in a small town.

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.

There is clearly more to the story than just free parking. My guess is those town centers have a larger variety of stores and possibly better prices.

By that reasoning we should eliminate public mass transport and someone will fill the gap. However, I think it would be an error too.

Well, if we did that in tandem with eliminating public roads we could see what happens. Public transportation does exist outside of the government-subsidized model; see the jitneys in New York for an example.

I think that if we were to follow that reasoning to the point of eliminating public transit, it would have to be eliminating all public transport subsidies: if all roads were toll roads and the tolls needed to cover the full cost of building and maintaining the roads, and there was no public parking, i think private mass transit would probably be successful.

(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.)

There is a lot of regulation preventing people from making their own public transport. Things like taxi medallions and a ban on dollar van lines.

I have paid for all those luxuries.

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.

> luxuries

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.

Except that the market isn't sorting it out. Do you think government regulations mandating free and abundant parking come from the market?

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.

I was claiming that markets should sort it out, not that they are sorting them out

What makes you think that markets would be any good at sorting things out? The externalities of car usage (such as air and noise pollution, traffic accident victims) are ignored by the free market. Furthermore, the 'traffic' market has a tendency towards monopolies: more people using cars means less people using public transportation making the latter less profitable, resulting in worse service, leading to even less people using it...

Free markets need very specific conditions to lead to the optimal solution. I don't think the transportation market fits the requirements.

Air and noise pollution are probably reasonable examples, but I don't think traffic accident victims are.

Why do you think traffic accident victims are not reasonable examples of negative externalities of cars? As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread: 35.000 motor vehicle deaths in 2015 in the US alone [1]. According to the US department of transportation [2], the total economic cost of motor vehicle crashes in 2010 is estimated to have been $242.0 billion. I don't see how you can reasonably ignore that in any discussion about transportation and cars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

[2] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

I don't think they're an example of something that markets would be unlikely to handle. I suspect any system of private roads would at the bare minimum require liability insurance.

Interesting perspective. Now I understand what you're saying.

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

[2] http://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/auto-insurance

And how exactly should the markets sort out something that involves a natural monopoly? Do you think markets should also sort out use of different spectrum frequencies?

Didn't the public (who make up the market) vote for those in govt. office, who then make these decisions?

A luxury is a good you consume more of as you get wealthier. For example, environmental regulation is a luxury good, which is why many people don't see the need for limiting pollution if it gets in the way of accumulating wealth (and why richer nations tend to have more pollution laws).

The first sentence is well formed but the example makes no sense at all to me

The problem is that if all other cities nearby provide a free luxury, and you don't, then you become a ghetto.

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).

I very much enjoy my vehicle, so I am biased... BUT...

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.

Freedom of movement is not a luxury, and i never said it was. But travelling in a personal vehicle is absolutely a luxury.

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.

You are grasping at straws.

How?

Using disabled people as a bludgeon to deprive the middle class isn't sticking up for the little guy, it's abusive. Disabled people have problems on trains, too: elevators are often broken and it's hard to move in a crowd. There are simply disadvantages to being less able, which is not the same thing as being deprived of your ability to do something by someone who holds power over you. Insisting on the equivalence of such a thing brings to mind the character O'Brien from a certain dystopian fiction.

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.

It is only as convenient as it has been because the state forces businesses and apartments to provide the parking required to enable this for free out of their own pockets. Removing regulations requiring this can't be said to be curtailing your freedom.

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.

> 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...

And mass transit infringes your freedom to wander on to train tracks.

Any reasonably time-efficient transportation system is going to deny pedestrians some space.

Show me a neighborhood or city that's only accessible via train track and I'll agree the comparison makes sense.

Absolutely. My point was that none of those freedoms are absolute, and they should not be treated as if they were.

>The state should make it less convenient

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.

Taxes on cars don't even cover the full cost of roads. They don't even begin to cover the negative externalities caused by cars.

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.

And yet freedom of movement is severely curtailed throughout the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

they are luxuries many can afford and based on watching emerging economies or those who gained economic freedom to own they are something many aspire too.

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 fast reliable Internet connection is also very clearly a luxury. What's your point?

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