Uber is incentivizing property developers to get rid of parking | Hacker News Reader

Uber is incentivizing property developers to get rid of parking

ftalphaville.ft.com

AWESOME! Parking lots are one of the greatest waste of resources and property in modern time. It's bad for the environment, it's bad for walkability, it's ugly and it's bad for health.

Check out the Strong Towns black friday parking series to get an idea of how wasteful currently zoning and building laws are: https://www.strongtowns.org/blackfridayparking/

Couldn't read the article due to paywall, but an underground/overground parking structure is more expensive per square foot (due to reinforcement and earthquake safety requirements) compared to residential square feet, so developers are always trying to wiggle their way out of parking requirements, which just externalizes the problem to nearby streets.

Turns out people who buy cheaper units still need/want to drive, or occasionally have friends or family who arrive by car.

The end result is a bunch of nasty comments on local Facebook groups and NextDoor, comments on a-holes who hog the spots with their commercial trucks or RVs and people parking out for days just to save themselves (or their friends) a spot.

Eventually residents get enough and lobby the city council to zone their streets as "resident parking only".

You have a right to disagree, but modern city planning experts tend to agree that parking minimums are bad policy that artificially subsidize personal autos.

Developers should put in exactly as much parking as their customers are willing to buy at market rate. Street parking should be paid, either by meter or though market-rate annual permit costs.

Forcing urban drivers to pay full price to have a private car is the only way we will push enough money into other modes of transportation to make them economically feasible.

https://medium.com/@ezheidtmann/minimum-parking-requirements...

> Street parking should be paid, either by meter or though market-rate annual permit costs.

Totally agree with this. The problems arise when things don't start that way, and developers quickly monetize the opportunity to offload those costs to someone else.

Buyers usually shop on $/sq.ft., not on $/sq.ft + parking availability, so raising awareness among buyers would help balance the market out.

Wow. Journalists will literally bend over backwards and manufacture all sorts of contortions that paint everything Uber does in the worst light possible. They went out of their way to strongly associate and intentionally racist and malicious act by Robert Moses with recent actions by the company, despite the fact that the author presents zero evidence to support any malicious intent whatsoever. Yes, the author puts that disclaimer eventually, but many readers will never read that far and such disclaimers won't ever fully erase the association implanted in someone's mind by what came just before in the article.

If there is a clearly unethical business out there they want to really want to examine, maybe it's time journalists took a long hard look in the mirror.

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." -Nietzsche

Whether it is Uber or any other company in the space, on-demand transportation services are here to stay and they are getting faster, cheaper and better with each passing day. It is only a matter of time before such services are accessible to all. Chauffeured services were once only available to the rich, but now are regularly used by the middle class that are increasingly deciding to abandon car ownership. It's practically inevitable that it eventually becomes accessible to the poor. Economically, once self-driving cars become increasingly commonplace, it won't even take long before on-demand car services are cheaper than owning a car in most urban areas. Suggesting that this structural change is anything but inevitable and that the poor might still need parking is pure unadulterated poppycock.

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