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Comment by jkimmel | Hacker News Reader

If SF housing politics has taught me anything, it's that the nastiest of human behavior is revealed by parking disagreements :(

I never understood the residential parking permit argument anyway.

Public dollars built the road, which now contains public parking spots.

Implementing residential parking permits is a transfer of value from the public domain to private land owners.

In Palo Alto (and the rest of the Bay Area, where land owners are inherently millionaires), this constitutes a transfer of wealth from the public to the wealthiest few.

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A street's sewer infrastructure, for example, is treated as a public good for the residents of that particular block. They, and only they, will be assessed extra property taxes when it needs work.

Where it snows, homeowners are on the hook to shovel the portion of the public sidewalk along their property.

It's not exactly unprecedented for municipal governments to treat the properties nearest infrastructure as more responsible for it than the rest of the city. It's not unreasonable that they then have preferential access to it.

An RPP program is a formalization of, "look, it'd be a waste for us all to build off-street parking when there's perfectly good street frontage here, let's agree to be reasonable and share the street frontage equally."

I think you're right. I my observation (though not in SF) the top 2 sources of dispute are 1.) parking, and 2.) dogs. Not infrequently, there's a correlation between offensive parking and promoting bad dog behavior.

Of course it makes sense that would be the case. Inconsiderate people are likely not to care about encroaching on others' driveways when they or their guests leave their vehicles. They're also not likely to heed city leash laws, leaving their dogs deposit excrement randomly which neighbors tend to object to.

In some neighborhoods in town parking is a nightmare because there are not enough spaces on the street for visitors and residents. Institution of metered parking and permits was a price of success of urban redevelopment. Around here the residential permits aren't cheap, but most residents cough up the fee anyway. Even then there's no guarantee they will be able to find parking close to home, though the odds are improved and local dwellers say that's better than nothing.

Under the conditions operating here, I don't think there's a substantial "transfer of value" from public to private hands. It may be a different story in Palo Alto.

Sounds like the permits are still cheaper than they should be, though. Presumably if people value the parking such that it's the best use of land an enterprising person could set up a parking garage and make a profit?

That would require the enterprising person to be able to get past the NIMBYism to construct the parking garage

That's not quite the issue. Public parking garages have been proposed but getting them sited has been difficult. One reason is competition from developers of apartments, who want to use the space for residences. Rather a dilemma to resolve as both are needed. Not exactly a NIMBY matter in that case.

But NIMBY's LOVE parking. They're more upset about homeless cars than homeless people. Surely they wouldn't object!

Yeah, garages is one idea, but that's a land use matter of importance re: need for residential development. Garages have been proposed, but difficult to squeeze in among the competing needs. Sometimes the conflicts are just hard to resolve with the various constituencies fighting it out.

Well, yeah, I'll admit some bias here - I think cars are a cancer to cities that destroy them. I've never met anyone complaining about a lack of parking unless they were complaining about a lack of free parking. Of course, I think we could use that land as places for humans to sleep instead of cars, but I digress.

When presented with the true cost of driving, most people choose other modes. Driving and car ownership are ridiculously expensive once you realize how much you're paying for "free" parking (higher rent), "free" roads (higher taxes), and of course tens of thousands of dead people per year in the US alone. What we do now is largely force people to pay whether they drive or not, which of course encourages car ownership.

I mean, a helicopter would be a fun way to get to work but that doesn't mean we expect free helipads everywhere.

People tend to forget things are public when they're using them, but accutely remember that fact when others are doing so.

> I never understood the residential parking permit argument anyway.

Easy. It becomes an endless source of parking ticket revenue for the city.

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