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Comment by throwaway91111 | Hacker News Reader

No, parking is a terrible use of land and encourages bad practices like commuting in a personal vehicle using 1/5th of available seating.

If you choose to view that as a masochistic world view, that is entirely your choice. However, i would hate to live near you.

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Well, that just argues for a Land Value Tax. If you buy land in downtown SF and want to make that a parking lot, more power to you, but you pay taxes proportional to the unimproved value of the land, and so you pay a lot more with respect to the value you gain than if you were to use it for office space.

Publicly auction public parking spots and allow them to rise unboundedly in price.

These are all economically efficient approaches. Instead of shaming people, we should incentivise non-wasteful behaviour (and I think economic efficiency is a good guideline here).

Land value tax is the ideal end state, but it's difficult for one person to work towards that; doing it on a smaller scale by e.g. getting your own employer to introduce a scheme like this seems a lot more plausible. (Also things like letters to one's representative asking them to remove parking minimums from planning criteria)

(My current company has "free" bicycle parking in the basement with a years-long waiting list; meanwhile many of the spots are unused or have a bike sitting their permanently, and I'm paying for a spot 10 minutes' walk away. Maybe I should start asking them to charge)

Who came up with such a dumb scheme. Bikes consume almost no space. The idea that there is a "spot" for one just seems needless. My buildings bicycle parking is a storage closet with 4 racks. Last time I checked there were a dozen bikes, a few scooters, and skateboards in there.

Yeah this is a skyscraper; there are multiple bike racks with dozens of spaces, but still not enough room for everyone.

If you presuppose that Prop 13 could be eliminated, then you probably wouldn't need a land value tax or any parking because all those single family homes would be sold and developed into higher-density uses.

Driving is a pretty minimally wasteful behavior compared to the low lot coverage and building heights prevalent here.

We have a middle class in this country because it's reasonable to participate in productive economic activity while living in housing whose price doesn't completely swallow your productivity. Parking is what makes that possible. It's a fucking great use of land.

(I say this as a carfree renter in an urban high-rise. This is fun, but in no way sustainable - I have no hope of owning an analogous condo, let alone one big enough for a family, and that's as a well-compensated professional. When it comes time for stability and child-raising, it will be imperative to chose a city with enough parking that I can commute from an outer suburb where prices are accessible to mere upper-income salary workers. Far as I can tell, cities with your view of land use only work for longtime incumbents, international oligarchs, and twentysomethings living together like they're still in college).

Other countries have much less parking, yet they somehow manage to have a middle class.

Have you considered that one of reasons for the high condo prices may be that there's too few of them, in part because land that could be used to build a bunch more is taken up by parking lots?

Especially if we're talking about flat parking (not silos), a single spot is taking the place of multiple condos. So you can imagine how much each actually costs, even if you're not the one paying the price.

>there's too few of them

Absolutely, yes! I'm just not holding my breath for public opinion to turn around on whether condo towers and the developers who build them are good or evil.

>in part because land that could be used to build a bunch more

In minuscule part. Mostly, land is taken up by buildings that are too short.

>a single spot is taking the place of multiple condos

This presumes a building height that I assure you would get laughed out of the Zoning Adjustments Board hearing room.

Each parking space enables timely access to much more square feet of land than any residential construction project would contemplate. (Up to the point where the road network breaks down due to congestion, which is why I think affordability in those cities is probably a lost cause).

> yet they somehow manage to have a middle class.

Probably because their electorates are able to distinguish between mid-rise apartment blocks and Satan, just like they distinguish between single-payer healthcare and the USSR.

There are other countries with similar or higher productivity. The need for a car and car parking is not a requirement for a strong middle class

There are other countries without the need for a private health insurance market. Yet no one thinks shutting down the health insurance market would be good policy unless combined with a replacement like single-payer.

The same is true for parking. A replacement transportation system would be better, but that doesn't excuse moving us towards a world with no transportation system.

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