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Suppose that parking a car takes about 10 square meters. Then you can easily compute what parking should cost in a certain area. There probably are places where 10 m2 costs around £3,000 per year, but they are relatively rare.

Traditionally having all car owners share all parking space makes sure that when you drive your car somewhere, for example to visit a friend, you can actually park there. If all parking space is privately owned that model tends to break down.

The problem is that to have a functioning city (as opposed to a suburb) you need to have a high enough population density. And you cannot have a high population density if you have to reserve a huge amount of space for cars.

The tricky thing is to design a city (or set policies to move in a certain direction) such that it is not one-size-fits-all. Slowly banning cars slowly from the parts of a city with the highest densities allows people who like to live without cars to move in and people who need a car to move to areas with a lower population density.

Eh, 10m² parking instead of more room for a building with three stories is already 30m² of wasted space. 3000 pounds per year is then about 8 pounds/m²/month. That's really cheap for urban space.

In fairness, it's cheaper to build a parking spot than a three-story building...

Looking at data from the city of Amsterdam, which has specific reasons for keeping track of the value of land, then a reasonable price for a piece of land in a good location is about EUR 3000 per m2. So for 10 m2 you would expect to pay EUR 30,000 to buy it. That would make the main annual costs the interest of a mortgage for this amount. Currently in the Netherlands that would be around EUR 900 per year.

(Amsterdam keeps track of the price of land because basically the city rents out land and doesn't sell it. Price real estate owners pay is based on the estimated price of the land)

Car parks can be multi-storey too, no?

> There probably are places where 10 m2 costs around £3,000 per year, but they are relatively rare.

Costs in what sense? The whole argument here is that cities subsidize car space, so the cost to the end consumer doesn't prove anything.

> Traditionally having all car owners share all parking space makes sure that when you drive your car somewhere, for example to visit a friend, you can actually park there. If all parking space is privately owned that model tends to break down.

Depends. If it's privately owned by parking suppliers, then presumably you can buy parking. Or if it's privately owned by residents, then you can use your friend's parking.

Besides, you can always have alternate options for visiting friends.

No, I'm talking about the cost to own a piece of land. In most areas it is possible to compute what a piece of empty land costs. Even if that piece is right in the middle of a city.

If you want to have a car (or otherwise rely on cars) it is an extremely bad idea to rely on a privately owned parking supplier who can set prices at any amount. Additionally, if everybody reserves space on his/her own private property for visiting guests, you are wasting an enormous amount of space. Wasting space is bad because you want to have as high population density as possible within constraints set by your life style.

So the obvious solution is to pool all that space and then let the local government set the price for using it. And then of course, it is best to just pay that as property tax.

Of course, if you don't need a car, then it is better to live in an area where cars can not park. And that space is use for something else.

Ah, well in that case 3000 GBP/year doesn't sound that unusual to me. I bet lots of cities have prices that high in their CBD/downtown area.

> If you want to have a car (or otherwise rely on cars) it is an extremely bad idea to rely on a privately owned parking supplier who can set prices at any amount.

"If you need to eat, it is an extremely bad idea to rely on a privately owned food supplier who can set prices at any amount."

> So the obvious solution is to pool all that space and then let the local government set the price for using it.

Okay, maybe that can work if

> And then of course, it is best to just pay that as property tax.

Wait what? Why? That space is valuable, if the cost to the end user at the point of the transaction is zero then you're making people who walk/bike/bus subsidize people who drive, which means the poor subsidizing the affluent, not to mention it'll get overused. Why would you want to do that?

Cars should be optional things, and if the government subsidizes them people will tend to drive everywhere and push for vast swathes of parking everywhere (see: almost every city in the US) which hurts every other form of transportation.

> And then of course, it is best to just pay that as property tax.

This is where you lose me. It is better for the government to charge per use so that people have the incentive to use parking space efficiently. Making the parking free at the point of use just encourages overuse.

Once you have built a residential neighbourhood, parking on the streets is a sunk cost. Cities need money for the police, to collect garbage, etc. So there is no point in coming up with convoluted schemes to charge people for services that the city provides. Keep tax simple and it costs less to collect it.

Of course, you always run into people with mistaken believes in economic incentives, such as charging per kilo of garbage. By and large those cause more problems then they solve. The best option to make people miserable is to let a private company collect parking fees on behalf of the local government. Then you can be sure that a lot of that money will be wasted on expensive officies, salaries for management, etc.

If there is an actual shortage of parking space, and replacing parking space with bike lanes, etc, may cause such a shortage, then charging for parking makes sense.

If most people living in a residential area are convinced they need a car, then charging for parking is just going to make people unhappy and is likely reducing the value of property in that area.

You've got it exactly backwards. There IS a shortage of parking in big cities. You can't make more streets. Collecting a pile of money in property taxes doesn't improve the situation.

The point here is to use money as a means to allocate a scarce resource, and to make car drivers pay the fair cost of operating their car. This will re-balance the incentive structure to push people to walk, use public transit, bike, use delivery services, etc. Covering the cost in property tax doesn't allocate the cost to people who drive.

"charging per kilo of garbage"

But this works really well!!! I live in an area where instead of paying x per month for garbage collection, I pay about €3.50 per bag for a particular kind of bag that I can leave at the curb and have picked up. This way I am incentivized to produce less waste (also, recycling is a little bit cheaper) . https://keywaste.ie/domestic/domestic-waste-services/

Similarly, there is no free street parking. We have some street parking, but it's still too cheap because it's almost always full (about €3 per hour but only during enforcement hours). However! There is a private garage around the corner where I can park for €22 per day if I care to. If I don't care to, I am wealthier as a result. In the end, so are my neighbours, because none of us is paying for parking we don't need.

> Oslo tried to ban cars, but there has been a huge backlash, without the right sort of support some of the most vulnerable (i.e. people with physical disabilities) just cannot live successfully in cities.

That's the main problem with the approach taken by local governments to ban cars: they always fall short of actually solving the mobility problem which cars have been solving for decades. Governments are shortsighted and focus on reaching their goals (get rid of cars), but in the process they fail to provide alternatives such as improving and extending the reach of mass transit services.

Many people with disabilities can easier ride a handcycle or just an electronically powered wheelchair than they can use a car.

Of course they can't in cities today because nobody wants to play sitting duck in 50mph traffic.

I'm the rain? Across town?

Cars aren't just means of transportation. They also provide shelter and comfort.

This is also a very narrow view of "disability", there are many reasons why someone may not be willing or able to ride a bike, not all of them are met by suggesting that those people should use a hand cycle or electric wheelchair.

And you are suggesting their needs are better met by buying a transporter that they then have to entirely rejig for a cost in excess of $30k and telling everyone who wants to get around by handcycle or electric wheelchair to fuck off?

It's hard to see this as any more than a thinly veiled "but I need my car!" by people who have likely never in their life met a disabled person.

I am suggesting that there is no "one size fits all" solution. This isn't a problem that is amenable to simplistic solutions.

Be careful with your presumptions, we're all strangers here.

> Many people with disabilities can easier ride a handcycle or just an electronically powered wheelchair than they can use a car.

If that was true then they would be riding handycles instead of a car.

Moreover, I fail to see the relevance of your point. Local and central governments are invested in eliminating the best options available to a significant portion of society, and are failing to even consider introducing any alternative services. Claiming that people with disabilities could use another means of transportation fails to address the issue.

> Oslo tried to ban cars, but there has been a huge backlash, without the right sort of support some of the most vulnerable (i.e. people with physical disabilities) just cannot live successfully in cities.

The backlash is pretty dishonest, though. The car-free area (a small part of downtown) will have more handicap parking spots than it does now, sidewalks are being improved so they're larger and universally accessible, and the disabled benefit from cycling infra too—I see people riding mobility scooters in bike lanes in Oslo, much as in this video, but not so many specialty bikes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSGx3HSjKDo

It's generally the Joe Schmoes who cry "but what about the disabled" and "but what about people who NEED to use cars for their work?", blithely ignoring the points above, and the fact that trade and service unions welcome the change because they'll be allowed too, just like in pedestrian streets, and they'll have an easier time of getting around when they're not trapped in car traffic by people who drive through downtown just because they can and they don't want to use the tunnels.

> not the primary means of moving around a city

Are private cars the primary means of getting around any city today?

I would have thought it was already totally impossible to 'get around' a city like San Francisco, London or New York by car. Where on earth would you park securely at each stop? I can't imagine ever even attempting to drive into a major city. Maybe if I had a very specific plan of getting to a particular hotel that I knew had a car park with spaces that had enough headroom for my car, etc. But driving into a city to just 'get around' without a plan? Surely that's suicide?

I don't think any of the vehicles in a city are private cars - aren't they almost all taxis and commercial vehicles making deliveries?

> Are private cars the primary means of getting around any city today?

Guess it depends how you define city. I like in a town that is on the top-100 list of "most densely populated cities in the US" and I'm right next to #1, #2, and #3 most densely populated. (Manhattan and others aren't on this list, but "NYC" is).

My city, yeah people definitely use private cars to get around. There are cars literally parked on both sides of EVERY street!

> Are private cars the primary means of getting around any city today?

There are a lot more cities (and a lot more total people in them) like Dallas, Houston, Baltimore, Detroit, Phoenix, St Louis, Pittsburgh, Miami, Los Angeles, San Diego, Columbus, etc where cars are the primary means of getting around.

It is San Francisco, London, and New York that are the outliers.

>It is San Francisco, London, and New York that are the outliers.

You should have limited that list to the US, in Europe many other capitals and big cities have extensive public transportation networks that are used as primary means of transport in the city by a wide range of the population, in a wide range of journeys.

Of 112 cities and towns in the UK, only 15 of them have less people commuting to work by car than the sum of walking, cycling, and public transport. That's only 14% of towns and cities.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U9f-g8ETvljw-YAZbFpW...

In the UK 6M people drive to work each day, 1M of them live within 20 minute walking distance of work, and 3.5M live within 20 minute bike ride of work.

However to blame them for making a transport choice over another transport choice is to not recognise that Local Authorities and National Governments have direct responsibility for ensuring there is real perceived safe choices.

There is no point berating people for choosing to drive to work, when the bus service takes you to the central bus hub and you have to buy two tickets to get to work. Unless your local authority provides end to end protected cycle networks why would you get on a bike?

Are those people really driving to work /in/ a city? Or are they driving to work around the suburbs of a city?

I mean 26% of people drive to work in London? Their definition of London can't be what I think it is then. I would have thought almost literally nobody is driving themselves to work in central London. Offices in London don't have car parks do they?

London most likely means Greater London. Lots of people drive if they live and work in the suburbs. Trains only really go in the direction of central London, so it can make sense if you're just commuting from one suburb to another.

I guess my definition of city might be tighter than everyone else's then. When people said about driving to get around a city I was thinking 'nobody who has to go to Harrods and then the British Museum will be driving themselves between those two places'.

Agreed, but London, as far as I could work out was pretty much anything within the M25. Not ideal.

> Are private cars the primary means of getting around any city today?

Lol come visit Detroit sometime. Make sure you drive or rent a car, though; you'll need it to navigate our eight-lane roads and ridiculous highways.

Public transportation costs to build and operate, which means more taxes which are politically difficult.

On the other hand people have shown again and again that they are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars every year for what the car gives them.

Private car transportation is also massively subsidized. Near my neighbourhood, they are rebuilding a highway exchange for more than 3.6 B$CAD (2.7 USD). A few blocks from there, they have to rebuild a bridge, another 4.2 B$CAD. It's not even old infra. It was built in the 60s, but it didn't last (harsh winters, bad concrete, too much traffic).

And that's why they have gas taxes. Canada has a federal one, and maybe your province has an additional tax.

In Vancouver, public transportation gets half it's funding from property tax and fuel tax. And more than 70% of commuters drive. So not only are car drivers funding roads, they're also funding public transportation.

http://buzzer.translink.ca/2013/03/translink-101-where-does-...

Then what happens if people stop driving and take public transportation? Their costs go up and revenue goes down. Double whammy.

For Quebec, according to some numbers I found, in 2013-2014 (when gaz prices were high), the provincial government made 2.2 B$ from gaz taxes that year. If that's the case, it's not that much compared to all the infra that needs overhaul.

Private transportation doesn't fund the roads, only about half of it on average.

'Use' taxes only cover about 1/3 to 2/3rds of road expenditures (in the US). https://taxfoundation.org/how-your-state-s-road-spending-fun...

If everyone used public transportation, all the property taxes and so forth used on roads could go to public trans instead.

Public transportation uses roads.

If you mean some sort of mass transit that doesn't use roads how do you transport freight and how do emergency vehicles get around?

Sorry, doesn't work.

Collective transportation and freight degrade pavement much faster than cars.

Overweight freight, sure. Collective transportation.. certainly not per-capita (assuming you're talking about buses, not subway/rail). Any references?

Where I live, the main causes usually quoted are: overweight freight, roads over capacity, salt and winter.