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Comment by finaliteration | Hacker News Reader

I feel really mixed about things like this. I absolutely appreciate the need for additional housing in urban centers, especially if it makes housing more affordable. However, I’m also someone who lives relatively far from an urban center with no reliable public transportation for the sake of having housing that isn’t ridiculously expensive. This means I’m required to drive into the urban center for work where parking is already expensive and difficult to find. The lot where I usually park has months long waiting lists to get a monthly pass.

Again, I totally understand the rationale behind it. It’s just frustrating for those of us who have no better options in the near future.

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> This means I’m required to drive into the urban center for work where parking is already expensive and difficult to find.

Do you mean you literally drive into a city centre at rush hour, park there, and go into an office?

It blows my mind that people are even able to do that. It actually says something perversely positive about US roads and cities that it's possible!

I would not attempt to drive into the centre of a city in the UK for any reason at any time of day ever. You would not make it to your office before the day ended and when you got there you'd simply find there was no parking anyway and you'd have to go home again!

US doesn't have nearly the public transport infrastructure that the UK does, unfortunately. I think the issue here may be that cities aren't necessarily building infrastructure to compensate for their reductions of car access.

It's the richest country on earth. What's the excuse?

> It's the richest country on earth. What's the excuse?

Car lobby, brainwashed citizens.

The answer nobody wants to hear, but knows is true. There is propaganda from all sides with big lobbying interests. Media is completely in the pockets of those interests which only further pushes the propaganda model.

Just watch TV around an election. It's complete and total doublespeak and propaganda every few minutes.

Ah yes, no one could possibly like driving of their own accord, they must be brainwashed.

If you think you like driving into the city anytime near rush hour, then yes, I think you’re definitely brainwashed. :)

In the hundreds of US cities that aren't NY/SF/etc, traffic flow at rush hour is perfectly reasonable. The average speeds are much faster than BART, anyway.

> Ah yes, no one could possibly like driving of their own accord, they must be brainwashed.

To think that you need:

- A 5000 pound machine to take a 200 pound human to work

- Workplace is 60 miles away

- On a road with many other rush hour drowsy 200 pound humans

- Said humans, then spend 30 mins and $30 for parking, in which the 5000 pound machine is just lying around empty

- All the above effort just to bring back the person from work in the evening and leave that car back on the street, lying around?

That doesn't sound insane to you? There's no reason for this for a rich country.

If you want proof that there are better, efficient and human friendly transportation systems, you need to visit HongKong and Singapore. (NYC doesn't count)

Yeah, no thanks. Images of Asian megacities' subway systems at rush hour are nightmare fuel. No opportunity, relationship, or life could possibly be worth spending time in crowding like that every day. Hell is a crush-loaded train.

> no one could possibly like driving of their own accord

That's what weekend cruising and trackdays are for.

Sitting in commuter traffic is to driving as being a passenger on a low-cost airline is to flying.

Once a city is built around cars, it can be VERY expensive to reconfigure. Things are built too far apart.

Also? We’re not good at infrastructure spending, it’s not sexy enough. And many cities are having trouble just keeping people living/working there.

A very expensive 15-20 year project that may help with that can be a VERY hard sell.

And it’s only to build a few miles of something, so just a tiny piece of what’s needed.

Or you’re NYC and already have an existing subway. But instead of 10s of millions it needs HUNDREDS of millions (or more) to ‘fix’, minimum.

>Or you’re NYC and already have an existing subway. But instead of 10s of millions it needs HUNDREDS of millions (or more) to ‘fix’, minimum.

Remind me how much money is in NYC?

The fact that money exists they are does not mean that it’s accessible. If it was there wouldn’t be new stories about how the subway system is about to fall apart every 12 months.

SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.

>SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.

They should. All that would be required is raising municipal taxes.

It’s where it is because of happenstance. It’s not a city that needs some specific natural resource that’s only produced right there.

There’s nothing stopping Silicon Valley companies from migrating to other areas in California or even other states. I’m sure there are more than enough places that would be willing to throw out ridiculous tax advantages to lure big companies there.

Won't let me reply to you. A tax on housing is different than a tax on business. You've got the priciest real estate in the U.S. If you can afford that, you can afford to pay more in taxes.

If you can afford pricy real estate, that doesn’t mean you can afford more taxes. That means that you are spending more on real estate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton%27s_fork

They built vta and no one uses it.

I have a bunch of issues with the VTA light rail. Mostly it’s slow and doesn’t always come at the “right time”. If the choice is not to go somewhere, or take the light rail, I’ll almost always choose not to travel there, or take a taxi. Sitting in a light rail for an hour vs 20 minutes in a taxi just doesn’t make sense.

I mean this is my issue with public transport throughout the Bay Area really, except BART at commute hours. I'm visiting NYC right now and taking the subway, and the difference is night and day.

If only NYC got to keep all that money. NYC is part of NY State so the money largely lines the state coffers where it is used for pork-barrel projects in far flung places most NYC residents will never even visit.

The state is very enthusiastic about taking the money out of the city but not so interested in investing much back into any transportation infrastructure to support its' cash cow.

Norman Mailer once ran for Mayor of NYC and part of his platform was for NYC to secede from NY State:

'New York City would be split off from the rest of New York State, and achieve independent statehood as the 51st State of the U.S. The campaign sought to free the city from the control of "upstate legislators who don't care about the city but control our schools, police, housing, and money."'[1]

And perhaps more topical is that part of that platform was also to ban all cars from Manhattan except Taxis and buses. And this was in 1969 :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City:_the_51st_State

It actually isn't very expensive when the same country spends more than the next couple of countries on defense contractor salaries^W^W national defense. The hardest thing is a change of mind and priorities, nothing actual or tangible in terms of cost.

Considering that a local government can't just spend the money allocated to "national defense" even if they wanted to, I'd consider that a pretty tenuous argument to make.

It's not that tenuous. Taxpayer dollars go from the fed to military contracts. Instead, the fed could fund local government projects through per project funding schemes or increased budget allocations.

How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?

> How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?

part of the justification for building it was national defense.

Our country is a lot bigger with barely anything in the middle. Cities without adequate public transit can be blamed directly on the voters.

Or maybe the fact our country is huge, and infrastructure cost is ghastly compared to say, all of europe. But sure, blame the voters.

This is an excuse for no transit options between metros, but not an excuse for no public transit inside the metros.

> "barely anything in the middle"

It's amazing how many people think this. There are metro areas in "the middle" with populations greater than European countries. And Texas, right in the middle, has a population that would put it at #10 in Europe.

   #3 Chicago 9.5 million
   #4 Dallas 7.4 million
   #5 Houston 6.9 million
   #14 Detroit 4.3 million
   #16 Minneapolis 3.6 million
   #19 Denver 2.9 million
   #21 St Louis 2.8 million

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...

The Chicago metro would be the 20th largest country in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

How widely spaced are those cities though? US population density is 33 people/km^2 compared with 112 for the EU.

Far, but almost everyone does not commute outside their local city so I don't get your point.

Let be kind to the GP and assume he meant "space between metro areas" rather than the simplistic "coastal and flyover" meme.

Look at Texas. 200 miles of between Houston and Dallas and Austin. This largely empty triangle itself is half the Texas population. But its barely 10% of the Texas area.

So yes. The US metros are isolated compared to Europe.

That isolation means that people travel to airports to go to other metro areas, rather than train stations like in Europe.

It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.

Metro population density is far more important.

US metro population density is low in most places that are not constrained by oceans or mountains.

Same with Canada, and yet Metro is better in most big Canadian cities than any I've been to in the U.S.

Aren't Canada's biggest cities along borders with rivers?

> It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.

That is because whites moved out and systematically starved the cities of a tax base and state funding for infrastructure projects that would benefit minorities.

Many of these cities were more densely connected by train stations prior to Europe's rail network, yet America's co-dependent dreams of the automobile and of flight derailed that and sold the rail network to the lowest bidder for terrible, slow cargo usage only.

Which absolutely does start to explain the lack of transit inside many of these metros: at the same time the rails were converted to mostly cargo only a lot of the suburban commuter lines were themselves "lost" to time or destroyed. It's utterly depressing to see the old passenger train maps in America and compare to what some of those passenger lines could be serving today if like Europe they'd been kept up/maintained.

A lot more of the suburbs in every American city than people realize were served by trolley and passenger train in their infancy that they grew around, and just because many of the lines have been "lost" over the years doesn't mean that their skeletons don't still show in the overall growth pattern. (Until you get into the entirely car-dependent exurbs and "suburbs of the suburbs", of course.)

America outsourced public transit to the lowest bidders, they got bored serving people directly and went with focusing solely on cargo, and people were too busy driving everywhere to notice what they lost.

> Our country is a lot bigger with barely anything in the middle

That's a positive for public transport, you can cover more people cheaper because almost everyone live in big cities.

Maybe it’s rich because it has lower public expenditures relative to economic output?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending

Americans prefer the convenience of owning cars and driving, at least they have for the past several generations though this may be changing.

If you go to cities like Chicago or New York City, many people do use public transport. I did when I lived in Chicago, generally hated it, but it was cheaper and faster than driving downtown for work in that situation. To get anywhere else in the city or suburbs it would be faster and more convenient to drive.

I have a commuter stop within 500ft of my apartment to ride in and out of NYC. I rarely use it because I can beat the train by driving, it's unreliable, I don't have to plan around the schedule, and it's cheaper to drive. On street parking is not a problem for the time and place that I go into the city.

It's the richest country on earth - that's the reason

Politics.

Adding a bike lane or adjusting road speed to reduce car-pedestrian fatalities is enough to get city council members unelected the next cycle.

I know lots of people who commute by car into the centre of Birmingham every day. My train commute is only 30 minutes door to door, but I'd be quicker driving. Do you live in London?

That's basically everyone in all but the top ~5 cities. In a mid-sized metro area, there might be a bus system with hourly or worse frequency as a handout for the destitute. The working poor drive beaters.

Even in New York's non-Manhattan boroughs, 35-75% drive.

Hilariously enough, the working poor in Europe wish they could afford to drive beater cars.

Mhh no they don't. Working poors in Europe have vars because they live in suburbs with bad connections and have to work far outside city centers. People without cars are mostly richer households living close to city center and working inside the city or not far around.

There's a bit of hyperbole in your answer. Plenty of people commute into UK cities by car, even in London. That's why there's a rush hour.

Commuting by car into central London would be foolish (I have a colleague that tried it once - it took him an hour and a half from the M25 to Kings Cross). However, there's a lot of cities in which it is feasible (if slow) and a lot of businesses close to the centre of cities which do have parking available (or you could just pay for private parking).

I sometimes drive through Central London in the evenings - it is slow, but it's not that slow. At certain times of day it's no slower than public transport (it really depends where you're going to and from).

I used to work shifts in London, drove in. When I lived west it took 2 hours in the morning (10am arrival), took 30 minutes at night (10pm departure)

South east was worse, at night is drive through the mall and grafalger square on the way home, took an hour or so. Again 2 hours in morning.

Not everyone is based in the centre of London. Not everyone works 9-5.

> I would not attempt to drive into the centre of a city in the UK for any reason at any time of day ever.

So are there any cars in the city and where do they park? Or is it mostly taxi cabs and city buses?

Taxis, busses, delivery vehicles, chauffeured cars, police. Very few private drivers.

Thanks, makes sense. That's how it should be. Also a testament to functioning public transportation system.

I mean there's still millions of them clogging the roads and polluting, they're just not private vehicles.

A parking minimum is good for you, because it creates excess spaces, making prices go below market rates.

Since I live downtown, I'd prefer severely limiting parking. Call it a "parking maximum", reducing congestion at commute times, as parking costs would shoot way above a market price.

The fair solution is to have neither parking minimums nor maximums. Then parking is developed in proportion to expected demand, competing for space against offices and homes, neither subsidized nor penalized. Yes it would cost more than you prefer, and less than I prefer, but probably a fairer situation.

I guess my ideal solution would be housing that’s more affordable downtown so that I and other commuters could live there. If I could eliminate my commute or make it much shorter then it would be one of the best changes in my life. Unfortunately even with my decent salary that’s not possible because housing is 3-4x more expensive than where I’m at now.

One thing that makes new housing downtown more expensive is parking minimums. Food for thought.

The naive free market analysis doesn't work here, because it's not typically possible for a real estate developer to purchase a random building and convert it to a parking structure if more parking is demanded. Even when it is possible, that kind of project ends up taking years and years to complete.

Why isn't it possible?

More likely it's just not profitable, because most people are only willing to spend so much money paying for parking, and often "downtown" land is quite expensive.

It would have to get past zoning/etc. when many cities are fighting to get more people to move into downtown removing buildings and putting up parking may be seen as a problem/eyesore.

I think basic profitability is probably the #1 and #2 answers.

Sometimes it's completely forbidden for zoning reasons.

Sometimes it's a regulatory risk. If the local residents decide they don't want a parking structure, they won't offer you a fair market price to stop it; they'll just try and get city officials to deny or obstruct all the permits you need. (And a large construction project needs a lot of permits in most jurisdictions.)

Sometimes it's just prohibitively expensive to convert. In order to tear down a typical commercial building, you'd have to either buy out everyone's leases or wait for up to a decade for them to expire. This imposes a huge deadweight cost that wouldn't be there if enough parking had been built in the first place.

Your reflexive concern that parking wont get built is well-founded. Parking is just plain shitty. Let's have less of it.

Only a tiny portion of most metro area populations can live in the zoned housing capacity of central business districts. Only a handful of cities have remotely passable public transit systems. Everyone else needs parking.

You are so right. Let's attack both of the challenges you identified, and solve them

> Only a handful of cities have remotely passable public transit systems.

> Only a tiny portion of most metro area populations can live in the zoned housing capacity of central business districts

And they and their companies can pay for it. There should be more parking garages and less parking lots and on-street parking. It's important to get make all the costs transparent so people can make good decisions. Maybe the office will move from downtown to somewhere closer to their workers -- reducing congestion and commute time.

>And they and their companies can pay for it. There should be more parking garages and less parking lots and on-street parking.

These statements are contradictory! Making business pay for their own results in on-street parking parking lots and minimum parking requirements. When you centrally plan parking you get parking garages.

>Only a handful of cities have remotely passable public transit systems. Everyone else needs parking.

They don't need parking. They need a solution to enable access to the downtown core. The solution you want is parking, because that's the status quo. Improving public transit is also a solution - It's not actually impossible to build.

Building out acceptable public transit over America's vast <1,000 people/square mile suburbia is probably not economical. First you would need drastically higher densities to become socially acceptable and legal. Then you would need decades of building until most of a metro area's population actually lived at high enough densities. Then public transit that's actually competitive with the status quo for mobility could start to pencil out.

Even when the density is there, the social mission of public transit agencies is to be a lifeline for the very poor. Improving service for professional commuters is at the bottom of their priority list. I can't even argue with that: the middle class can drive as an alternative, without bus service the destitute are just stuck.

The solution I want is unlimited construction of skyscrapers and travel mostly by foot and elevator. But if there's one thing our democracy is great at, it's preventing high rises. For the densities we have, our choices are cars or simply having commutes eat further into our already scarce free time. (No, public transit is not free time, as any vaguely useful train is crush-loaded standing room only).

You could have parking spots at train stations that take you downtown. It's not necessary to have a bus stop at every corner in the suburbs.

Indeed, those can work well, but the urbanist community is working hard to remove them (i.e. AB 2923 in California).

I'm aware of a deal where a consortium bought a plot in a downtown area to build a tower, and demand went down so they went into a holding pattern while making money on the parking.

I didn't see a naive free market analysis in progress, but anyway, I have noticed that people build new parking structures around my urban area on a regular basis. It does take a while, but it happens.

You can strictly limit parking. That's got some congestion benefits. It also makes driving into the city, especially for work during the day (evening parking is usually not a scarce resource), less attractive. Which in turn makes many employees prefer employers located in industrial parks outside of cities.

Not everyone of course. The (often young) people would often prefer urban living. But your urban office building is going to be unattractive for anyone who needs to drive in.

Strictly limiting parking is unnecessary. Market-oriented policies for parking and traffic (congestion charges) combined with solid support of alternatives (protected bike lanes, protected intersections, bus lanes, light rail/subways) are sufficient to encourage a balanced transportation distribution.

Neither of those things are what American conservatives refer to as "market-oriented".

Congestion charges are taxes, and therefore abominable; alternative transport is socialist, ditto.

Since conservatives control the majority of state governments, neither policy can make progress in the current environment.

Subsidizing the use of roads by letting people use them for free after spending a great deal of money on building and maintaining them is not "market-oriented". Charging people to use them is the closest you can get to market-oriented if you are already stuck with the roads. The most market-oriented solution would be not to build public roads in the first place, but it's too late for that.

I suppose we could just demolish all the public roads and start over.

Urban roads are a natural monopoly, you're not gonna build multiple parallel sets of roads going along each block.

> Which in turn makes many employees prefer employers located in industrial parks outside of cities.

So basically silicon valley which is one of the highest cost of living places these days and has terrible traffic?

I don't live there, but the hub (city) and spoke (suburb) model seems to scale much better than the point to point where jobs and homes are distributed everywhere like silicon valley and thus everyone has to drive.

Park-and-ride is the usual solution. Can you drive in from your home to a large lot where the reliable public transit begins, and then ride from there? That can work pretty well.

We have some of those available, but they would increase my commute time by 30 minutes both ways, and the busses can be unreliable, which means sometimes it can take an hour. It may work for some people, but unfortunately I’m not willing to give up an extra two hours of my day when I can drive in.

I used to take a train, but it took 50-60 minutes, and any delay meant I missed a connection or transfer which then added even more time. As much as I want to do it and support it’s just not feasible.

> I’m not willing to give up an extra two hours of my day when I can drive in.

Right. But in the future you won't be able to drive in. So move closer to work, I guess.

The self driving car will go park outside of the city.

Hopefully that dream will be the self driving car bringing you to kiss-and-ride and then going home, not bringing you all the way downtown. Otherwise everyone's congestion problems just got 2x as bad (and that's before you account for the current mass transit users who may suddenly decide that personal automobile use is more attractive now that you can pay for your empty car to drive off to cheap/free parking instead of paying for a downtown spot).

What you describe would be a temporary problem - tolls for entering the city would appear out of necessity (see London for a present day example). Life would go on as before except for a bunch of now outraged self driving car owners, mass transit would still be terrible (this is the US after all), and the bickering over parking minimums, zoning, gentrification, etc would continue unaffected with no end in sight (the same as at present).

Or perhaps we'd finally get our act together and build out functional mass transit, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Or, as many do today, companies will keep much of their office space in the suburbs both because of rent prices and because it’s where most of their employees including execs want to live.

I commutes into the relatively nearby city both by rail and car at one point. Wouldn’t have done it long term and probably wouldn’t again without buying a small property in the city for during the week.

Added: Companies will do whatever makes business sense. But potential employees who would find commuting into a city location a nightmare is a factor. As of course is new grads who insist on a location they can get to without a car.

Closer to work where? To a close-in suburb that doesn't want apartment buildings ruining their detached home values and neighborhood character? Or to an urban neighborhood that doesn't want to be gentrified and displaced?

Without solving zoning, "move closer to work" is zero sum advice. All you can do is switch places with someone poorer than you.

But in the future you won't be able to drive in.

What are you basing this on?

The article.

>It may work for some people, but unfortunately I’m not willing to give up an extra two hours of my day when I can drive in.

Right, and that's a convenience and you pay extra for that. People renting downtown pay more for a smaller unit compared to units not in downtown.

There is an easy solution to this that has been around for a long time. What most people do is park on the outskirts of town, where there tend to be lots of park and ride lots, then take public transit downtown.

So, in your case, you drive your car until you get to the outskirts of whatever large metropolitan area you are visiting, then take public transit.

When we lived in the UK, we frequently drove to a car park near the Hammersmith Station and then took the tube from there to central London.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a dearth of reserved parking at the BART Park n Rides. You can show up to the Park n Ride super early and pay the daily rate for a spot, and you can get on a long waiting list (sometimes more than a year long) to purchase monthly parking (still expensive, but not as bad as daily parking). There is also likelihood of getting stuck in traffic on the way to parking lots. There's no great option, just a choice between different last-mile options with pros and cons, including driving a car, driving a motorcycle, bicycles (electric and otherwise), electric scooters and skateboards, Uber/Lyft, and shuttles (I used Emery Go Round a fair bit). All have to deal with traffic to get to the park-n-rides. The cars and busses have to go single-file in their lanes, but others can go past them. Unlike most other states, California allows motorcycles to split lanes. http://lanesplittingislegal.com/

My favorites were taking the Emery-Go-Round while I was living in Emeryville, and walking two miles each way every single day while I was living in Redwood City while listening to podcasts/audiobooks.

It's not hard to find parking in BART stations at the ends of the line. The problem is, people want to use as little public transportation as possible, so parking lots fill up in a spoke like fashion from the downtown SF area.

If you live in the suburbs but don't live at the end of the line, it's going to be unpalatable to drive all the way to the end of the line. The gap between stations near the end of the line can be big, too. It's about 10 miles from Orinda to Concord. Orinda seemed like it would be hard to find parking. Walnut Creek wasn't bad though. Point taken though. The tone of the article seemed to be about the lifestyle of some place like Liverpool or Vallejo, which might have a decent park and ride situation (I think it would be a supercommute and traffic would be bad, so that wouldn't be a pleasant commute overall).

By the way some of the hardest commuting problems to solve are couples or people who otherwise really want to live together who have jobs at different parts of the Bay Area. They could be making a combined $400K but no amount of money will make their commute reasonable. I'm surprised telepresence robots like AnyBots haven't gained more traction.

Yup, it sucks but is ultimately necessary. Having parking minimums is a big part of why there are no good alternatives much of the time, after all: why even build alternatives where abundant parking everywhere is legally mandated?

Just sounds to me like the price of parking is artificial low for some reason. That garage should never have a waiting list. Is it run by morons? Is ever other garage, or is there something else going on?

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