Why parking minimums almost destroyed my town and how we repealed them (2017)
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Edit: ah, it's a multistorey office building, so that's presumably 1:1 employee parking, not a branch with customer parking?
I was trying to work out how this would play in the UK, and in the first instance it's most likely the bank would shut: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/caroline-flint-... (Thorne has a population of 16k and no bank branch).
There is always a back-and-forth about parking availability, charges, and business taxes in relation to the UK high street. But the usual model is either a small amount of on-street parking or a charged-for public or private car park.
The building, if some day fully occupied, would have over 400 employees daily in it. In my city, they'd probably push closer to 450+ employees into there.
I always thought a park and ride would do well there so tourists could park out of downtown and take a bus to downtown or the beach.
It's not a big problem, but I couldn't imagine the city having less parking.
For such a capitalist country as the US, the die-hard attachment to free or overcheap parking is really odd.
2) They notice it because they're used to getting it for free. Do people notice pay-renting in the US because everyone needs to sleep somewhere? Or do we just understand that using land comes with a cost?
It shouldn't cost less to give a place to sleep to a car than to a person.
Really? It shouldn't? Beyond the obvious fact that people in the US _need_ cars (it's not an option for most), parking space costs far less to build and maintain than does a home.
Not true. A car can function as a home, but not vice versa, so in extreme cases this is almost unilaterally untrue.
because you can't walk to things.
Why can't you walk to things?
Because they're so far apart.
Why are they so far apart?
Because a) parking minimums mean more land is given to parking than the actual amenity, and b) zoning forces single-use and density maximums
Why do people want parking minimums and zoning restrictions like that?
Because it's annoying to drive through high density.
Why do they need cars?
on and on and on
It's not an option because we built an entire country for 2 ton beings that need 30 feet to move in a circle, rather than humans. Can ants walk across Manhattan?
Seriously, look at your standard US "shopping center" and it's almost entirely parking. The lots dwarf the actual buildings.
I agree that we have done a putiful job in providing public transportation and designing cities around the notion that reducing cars is a good thing, but to argue that a parking spot should cost as much as rent is ludicrous. It is completely impractical and will never happen.
The US is also a country defined by an extreme attention to individual freedom and personal liberty. It's practically a meme that "Americans love Freedom" (using the American definition of 'Freedom'). Limiting parking in any way is, in practice, a very real limitation on a person's freedom to exist and/or move about.
This is why parking is given such high attention. Obviously not every single American drives (and I'm not justifying this response, just attempting to explain it) but when you limit roads/parking, you are effectively telling the vast majority of Americans that they should never be allowed somewhere, and they react accordingly.
You can think of this as like the American version of how France has major protests/riots whenever their leadership does something really bad/unpopular against the citizens.
If your argument is that we should have stronger public housing, to mimic public parking and/or for consistency sake -- I agree 100%.
It's not. People want to create a narrative that there is a tension between them, one or the other. (Urbanists hate cars because they hate cars, so they want to define every argument as requiring a hatred of cars to make any progress on anything else, to suit their religious beliefs. Every blog post on StrongTowns is a good example of this).
But you can always do both well, we just choose not to.
Chicago Loop, while not perfect or ideal, is a great example of how an urban environment could look that serves all well. It is dense, highly walkable, highly transit oriented. But it also still has a strong network of freeways and has an entire underground network of roads and tunnels for cars to pour into/out of (where they can peacefully exist just a few feet above/below walkability and transit, without ever hurting any of it). As those cars electrify, all noise and pollution problems are slowly but steadily disappearing.
In many ways, it is the closest to an American city ideal. Which I would define as a place where it is 100% convenient to use any transportation method you wish, at any time you wish, with as few-to-no restrictions as possible.
There's a great 99% Invisible episode that's relevant here:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern...
That's right - before cars became the de facto way to get around, they were compared to Moloch. Any "hate" modern urbanists might have for the car has nothing on early 20th-century posters featuring death, cape billowing, riding a demonic-looking car as it mows down hapless children.
I'd say, more accurately, that urbanists are investigating out what the balance of harm vs. benefit is here so they can propose ways to bring back some user-friendliness to our rights-of-way. They're revisiting the assumption that cars, rather than people, should be the primary focus in designing cities.
Put another way: IMHO, cars represent a local maximum in transportation outcomes. There's a lot that's great about them: independence, mobility, ease of use supported by robust infrastructure. There's a lot that isn't so great: long commute times, pollution, noise, sedentary lifestyles, urban sprawl, collisions causing death or injury. I fully expect humanity will outlive the car, just like it's outlived any number of other transportation methods, and it's in our collective best interest to start thinking about what that means.
Cars reduce noise compared to subways squealing and rattling, compared to commuter rail horns blasting, and compared to the big engines of diesel buses.
As a US citizen living in Germany, I have to disagree. I live one very quiet residential block from a nationwide major rail artery and do not hear or feel the trains. Noisy, squeaky, rattling, rail horn blasting trains are a choice made by underfunded, weak, and poorly organized governments and transportation organizations. In the US, it is only that way because the US has chosen to prioritize cars over all other means of transportation.
At least they have the option of using a functioning train system!
You can see the locations in which street parking is meter-based and how much it costs [1]. It is very much a demand-based scheme and I think that many people see it as ideal.
The map doesn't show how parking is handled in residential areas though [2]. If demand exceeds supply, a numbered residential parking zone is implemented and only those who prove that the live inside the zone can buy the number sticker that goes in the window of your car and allows you to park on the street in that zone ($25 per year). Those residents are also the only people that can buy 24-hour visitor parking passes for guests ($0.53 per pass).
If the government mandated free ice cream for everyone there would likely be an ice cream shortage. The solution would be to charge more for ice cream, not just try to increase the supply to meet demand (which is basically infinity when the cost is 0)
I needed glasses recently, with my insurance I had a choice of 4 stores. I went to the one with free parking. (Google maps streetview is great for checking that.)
Requiring paid parking in a tourist town encourages people to visit a different town.
All the old style tourist towns with limited parking seem to be doing more than fine. I live in such a neighbourhood, with no parking minimums and paid parking. People still visit.
But that means you could have more visitors.
Now, if you are maxed out, then good, paid parking makes sense - send those tourists elsewhere.
But if more visitors = more money, and that is something the town wants, then adding more parking, and reducing fees is what the town should do.
Which is what I said: "It also encourages people to go elsewhere."
It boils down to this: When choosing paid parking make sure this is what you want, that you want people not to come.
(And I acknowledge that in certain situations it makes sense to want that.)
And I know what you are thinking: You'd rather they take the bus or whatever. But think about this: Why do they chose to drive anyway, forcing you have to encourage them not to?
Clearly there is something lacking with the bus, to the point that you have to deliberately make driving worse just to induce them to use it.
It doesn't work like this.
Imagine a person considering visiting the town. They have a threshold of pain/effort in their mind, say V, above which they'll just go sightseeing elsewhere. Let C be the pain/effort of visiting our town by car, and B the pain/effort of visiting by bus. If C < B < V, they'll visit by car. If you can arrange to have C > B, while still keeping B < V, they'll still visit, but via a bus.
So the goal for a town is to make it so that for most interested people, B < C && B < V.
I live in Montreal, and it's the same when tourists come here. They may drive to the city, but they leave their car parked the whole time. (Side streets out of the center have some free parking. Commercial arteries and downtown core is paid)
Sure, you could have more parking for cars, but you might not have more people. And with too much parking you destroy the city you want to visit. Edmonton and Calgary have plentiful parking, and no ones goes to visit them, except as a stopping point to see the wilderness around the city.
Instead, I think a good measure of parking supply for a given destination point could be the sum of available spots, weighed by their distance to the destination.
No wonder there are traffic problems. Lots more parking is needed.
BTW, self-driving will make this far worse for traffic, although better for the businesses. The car can just drive around while I visit the business.
In this case, maybe SF is trying to send you a signal: you probably shouldn’t be driving in it.
If you can’t change you strategy, then consider changing frameworks: LA historically has had extremely high parking minimums, though that does present its own challenges.
MUNI stop locations above ground are not announced or lighted, and you can't just count because the vehicle only halts if a person asks it to do so. The bus routes are confusing; I went the wrong way and ended up in a terrifying neighborhood. When things got busy, there was no way to board the cable car. Due to holiday crowds (people who might want service!) most of the system (MUNI, buses, cable cars... everything in the northern half of the city) got shut down for the evening. Later I missed a bus because it stopped on the other corner instead of at the bus stop, and that was the last one so I had to walk several miles in a rather scary city.
I suppose SF is sending a signal: you probably shouldn't go there.
And if you think more parking fixes traffic I suggest you visit Los Angeles. Or even just San Jose.
Maybe you think it is normal to pay. I don't. I have paid a few times in over 2 decades of driving a car. I can mostly remember them because I'm still angry:
I paid to park in Boston in 2001, near the courthouse. I sort of paid at a park-and-ride place for an airport, but that included a bus ride. I got parking stickers for a couple colleges. I paid the "parking fee" at the Air and Space Museum Annex in Virginia, which is really a cheating way to charge admission.
I think that's it.
The problem is that some people are willing to patronize places without free parking. If people didn't do that, we'd all have free parking.
But I won't walk in LA; I mean, I'll show up without a car and uber everywhere, or I'll rent a car, but you need a car to get around in LA.
But... that's the thing; In SF, it doesn't matter that the traffic is terrible, because I won't drive. In LA, you always feel how terrible the traffic is because you can't really avoid driving.
That's the thing; you need a car in LA but not in SF; I mean, sure, the transit sucks in SF, the transit might even be better in LA, but the city really isn't that big; you can walk most everywhere. In LA, that's hard. LA is big. A lot of that big is parking; LA has a big office tower, then like a city block of parking right there. It's crazy. (I once visited a friend without a car in the days before uber; We went from his place near LAX to Langers deli (that's the other reason why I need to move to new york, I love pastrami) It took us like four hours to just get there using public transit. (It was worth it. Oh my that Pastrami was good) - really from then until he moved I'd rent a car when I went.
Personally, this is one of the things I like more about SF than LA. I like walking a lot more than I like driving, and really, I think driving is a low-density transport medium; what are cars good for? cars are good for getting people to different places. When you are in low density areas, each person is going to a very different destination. In high density areas? a lot of people are going to essentially the same place, so shared vehicles, trains or the like, are a much better answer.
It's a choice. If you build your cities to be comfortable for cars, they won't be comfortable for pedestrians, and vis a vis.
I've been thinking about this lately. I mean, I live in silicon valley; essentially in dense suburbs. I want it to be much denser; I want it to be dense enough to be walkable. But my neighbors don't; Maybe that means I should move to new york? I mean, why is my opinion any more right than theirs? It's cheaper there, too. Though, I hear they get up earlier than I'd like.
A local would take the time to research the cheapest store taking into account list price, quality, parking costs and so on. But a tourist probably won't. That's why tourist traps exist.
This would bring additional foot traffic to downtown adjacent neighborhoods, and encourage people to stay longer.
It's interesting how cities react to cars differently
If you look at the map, it won't help in transport practically any Geneva inhabitant, since there are only 4 stops altogether (1 is in so called ugliest town in France just across the border, Annemasse), and moving between those 3 within Geneva will be faster by existing bus system (ie Eaux-Vives -> train station, takes 12 mins). That's not how you build a city subway. What a fail...
Add to that the fact that french commuters would have to drive to centre of border french town (which has its own traffic jams every day and no infrastructure to handle extra commuters) and somehow park (expensively) there - it will take them +-same time to just go to centre of Geneva.
The problem would be solvable very easily without any digging and spending billions and pissing off everybody - just change legislation to make parking to non-swiss (or non-Geneva) cars more restrictive (blue zones) or more expensive (white zones, inner city parkings). And make the border huge parkings really cheap, the prices now are ridiculously high for what they are supposed to do (and waiting times for a slot are 6-12 months). It would also bring more revenue to city without having to build more parking spaces for which there is simply no space.
I suspect huge bribery from companies involved (mainly construction) to push this through, because this really doesn't make any sense. Yet another example of Geneva not really being Swiss in anything but location - more like 50% French with their mess, inefficiency and corruption, and 50% somehow Swiss (but its really smaller half, they just have tons of money from all the companies due to low corporate taxes).
> "more like 50% French with their mess, inefficiency and corruption"
It's sad to bring an emotional "argument" to a rational one
Can't we please just consider public transport, cycle path networks and dense pedestrian areas as alternatives for getting people around to separating every building from every other building with half a mile of road and carpark? For, like, five minutes? Pump maybe half the resources into this stuff that would go into strip car park sprawl and save the rest. Maybe plant some trees for extra pleasantness. The rest of the world manages somehow.
I don't see why the only solution was to go horizontal, for a bank of all companies!
Surface parking $3,000 per space
Multistory $20,000 per space
Underground $30,000 per spaceIt's the cities job to put regulations in place to require underground parking when building certain structures. It is also their job to calculate in the additional toll on traffic as well as public transport in order to plan future expansion.
A town with a regulation like that won't spend much time planning future expansion.
You see the same thing in the original story — some popular restaurant decided not to expand because of the cost of parking. Mandating expensive extras sucks, one way or another.
Anyway we were talking about parking norms for newly commissioned buildings, and "you can't find parking place on the street" isn't really an argument against it.
I'm saying that it's weird to require parking spaces in cities where there is a problem with housing prices when a lot of people don't have a car and thus prove that it's possible. It even completely goes agains the goal of reducing cars in cities.
There is little reason not to enforce parking norms, and "I personally would never own a car" is a poor justification. Maybe the guy you'd sublet it to would, or you decide to start a family and the only kindergarten spot you get is 12km away, or you sell your apartment and move elsewhere but the new owner needs a car.
If you genuinely need no parking spot, there's typically no shortage of nice apartments in the older buildings of nearly every European city out there. Costs less, too.
The reason why the current parking norms are bad is that they require many more off-street parking spots than residents need. Building those costs €25-45k each at current Munich construction costs, and roughly half of that's wasted money (details vary widely).
The streets are packed with parked cars, but we're not talking about public parking here.
This includes families. There are plenty of child-sized bicycles (all sizes of child) in the courtyard.
To get back to useless anecdotes: as far as I can tell, this is not a result of poverty. Indeed car ownership is far more prevalent among the poorer immigrant community than the younger hipster community. I know people owning apartments but not cars. It’s simply a shift in the value system.
The families I know generally use attachable bike carriages for their children, and car sharing for exceptional needs.
Maybe where you live car ownership is for poor, but not here. A rustbucket in Norway would buy you a great car in Germany.
I know very few people who buy only pre-made foods, on daily basis instead a weekly "big" shopping and very few that only use public transportation for anything. Essentially if I count they are well... only one in few hundreds...
What's the point of a government-ran infrastructure otherwise? I could've built my own parking space by myself without any laws if I needed it, the point of having a government monopoly in this business is that we have roads and parking spaces that everyone can use.
If I'm forced to pay for something then I should be able to use it. I shouldn't be told to suck it just because I came too late.
Yeah, I know, there is not infinite space on Earth. That doesn't mean the government has any right to shift their responsibilities to the citizens and keep demanding money for the service they've ceased to provide.
That doesn't mean that a) they're going to build it in the smartest, most optimal way, or b) they're going to build it in whatever way you would most prefer.
None of this is hypocritical or contradictory, it's merely annoying in case a, and something that sensible, non-narcissistic human beings who want a functional society accept and expect in case b.
By artificially enforcing lower density than some people desire we force some less density and less density forces people to drive thus bogging down the city in traffic - the very thing you wanted to prevent by enforcing parking minimums causes the problem.
Note that above I'm only talking about people who don't want a car. Most people are on the fence - a car is a useful tool to get around but if they could get by without it they would consider it. There are a few people who love cars who will want extra space. There are some jobs that require cars (or more likely vans/trucks), but most people are on the fence where they have a car only because it is the best solution to their current transport needs but they could live without in a different situation (they probably can't see the other situation as possible)
This whole branch came about after mention of pushing the trend towards underground garages. They are neither take land nor occupy liveable space.
So just stop giving them the public street for free! Nobody's saying you shouldn't be able to buy half an acre of land and park all your cars on it if that's what you want to do.
What's disturbing to many here is making us buy parking we don't need so that _you_ can continue to get parking welfare for free from the state (aka taxpayers).
Yes, did I argue otherwise?
> What's disturbing to many here is making us buy parking we don't need so that _you_ can continue to get parking welfare for free from the state (aka taxpayers).
What are you on about? What "parking welfare" is requiring garages/spots on private property?
Are you trying to dispute that people do own cars in real life? For every X apartments there are Y vehicles, and build codes attempt to balance real life needs by requiring developers ensure certain amount of parking available. Not building the parking garage under the building won't make people car free, they'll just park it on public property.
Person A lives in a nice old house in a quaint neighborhood built before cars. They park their car on the street.
Time goes by. More people buy cars, and more people move in. The street parking becomes full.
Person A is outraged that their ability to park on the street is gone. They demand all new homes have off-street parking.
Newcomer to the neighborhood, say some weird hippie cyclist who doesn't own a car (like me), has to pay more for their home because the land that could have held 8 homes now holds 5.
Their property taxes help pay for person A's parking.
Of course, it doesn't work that well. Off-street parking _still_ takes up street space for access.
If people want parking they will demand it and pay more for it. Some people want helipads but we don't force everyone to have a private helipad in case they run out of space on the street for your helicopter.
Why do people demand parking minimums? Because the street parking is full.
I'd just like to add that the "personal car" era might be coming to its end and we should work with that as well - underground garages are hard to convert to anything useful.
> has to pay more for their home because the land that could have held 8 homes now holds 5.
Yes, and the parking space itself costs a non-trivial amount of money (40-50k USD - if it has to be underground), especially for people in Eastern European metropolises.
Considering they cause less external cost by parking their car on private property, either they are currently getting a raw deal, or you are not actually paying for all of what you are consuming.
Also: you’re just making stuff up when you claim the government has ever promised you universal free parking.
If I pay all these taxes (thus contribute to the state budget as I should) I shouldn't pay for a parking space because the government is supposed to build that from my taxes.
And no, I'm not making anything up. There is zero reason why the government should build roads if not for sharing the whole infrastructure and providing everyone with the opportunity to use their car to go where they need (and, of course, park there - it'd be useless otherwise). There is huge precedent with public parking spaces literally everywhere, because European cities simply don't allow people to have their own parking places. Of course that backfires now because this made sense in the 80's but not today.
I'm not saying I'm against car regulation etc, that's another discussion. My point is that the government definitely should not take my money for what they don't do.
The rail network is also supported by taxes, yet train tickets still cost money. Cultural events are also often supported by taxes, yet they charge admission.
According to our constitution every person is equal, so why am I forced to pay 1 million CZK (45k USD, cost of building a parking spot - needs to be underground because of space constraints) more for an apartment just because I live in Prague? The government has simply decided that they don't want to do their job in this city while they happily do it literally all around the rest of the country, that is fair?
Why other cities or happier people in the rest of Prague can get public parking spaces with no further payments (in very few places there is a yearly fee, but that is okay, I would pay), and why calling it unfair is wrong?
I'm perfectly happy with people being forced to build their spaces on their property and I'm even completely fine with people not being able to have a car - but I'm definitely not going to pay for parking and then be happy with not getting any.
Where I live there's no free parking. People who own cars use the private car park around the corner. It works fine.
* buy the land.
* turn it in to homes.
It also means that as the area grows and more people come here and wish to park and live here, they can price according to the market, meaning we can determine if more people want to live on that land or park on it.
Also, for me at least the most expensive part of car ownership would be paying for parking. If I had a space with my flat, I'd probably own a car because it's a sunk cost (I would be bitter about it though). As it stands now I have the choice of not paying for a parking space, and I prefer not to.
When you can't walk most places (in the US zoning codes won't allow it) you start to need a car. There is a level where public transit and work for some people but cars start to make sense at this level (thought perhaps one car per family instead of one per adult)
Here's an analysis showing how absurdly expensive it is to make build built little houses for cars that are empty most of the time any time we want to do anything.
Compare this to an outside parking space: none of that applies.
I'd love to hide all the cars away from the street but I didn't realize all these differences until I got myself an underground spot.
More details:
http://www.alamedatheatres.com/historic-theatre/
https://www.overaa.com/projects/alameda-historic-theatre-res...
I’d certainly shop in Alameda vastly more frequently if it had a BART station. Heck, my wife would probably insist we move there, the reason we don’t live there is I insist that we live near a BART station.
You don't need parking minimums in the middle of nowhere, with businesses too far apart for swiping each other's parking spaces.
Customers really do go elsewhere if there are no spaces, but a business can't affordably provide the spaces if they will mostly be swiped by customers of other businesses.
Also, parking minimums can omly make sense in the middle of nowhere. In a dense location, each business cannot be reasonably expected to build parking.. because the location is dense. Unless you spread out the buildings, to make it sparse enough to support each building owning x spaced... but I don’t think anyone wants to take a city and pretend its the middle of nowhere.
Parking minimums are neither a good solution, nor the only solution. I don’t know what the best solution is, but as above, alternative solutions obviously exist. My opinion: city-owned street parking + private lots offer a good setup; businesses shouldn’t be directly involved in parking lots, except as a worst case scenario (ikea/walmart 40 minutes out of the city proper)
ADDED: Some cities (e.g. New York, London, various other European cores don't really lend themselves to driving in--though many people still do in the evenings--but that presupposes public transit that can comfortably substitute for driving in terms of convenience and cost).
In a dense location, each business can be reasonably expected to build parking... because the city requires it. Businesses don't get the option to ignore the city regulations.
In general, businesses don't survive without parking minimums. Businesses die all the time, falling into bankruptcy. There are a few that can survive on tourist foot traffic in the more-famous cities, selling junk like postcards and T-shirts. Businesses with enormous per-visit revenue can of course provide valet parking, so a 4-star Michelin restaurant might work. You're going to have a bad time running a Home Depot in a city without parking minimums.
Well, no, thats my point. A dense location... is dense. There’s not much room for n parking per business, at least directly where the shop is located. You meet the requirement by doing as the article does: destroying dense locations and forcing them to be sparse. Pretending that they live in the middle of nowhere, when in fact they’re in the heart of the city.
Parking garages/lots (lots of parking, shared by all stores) is a clearly more ideal solution: its much more compact. And there’s no real reason parking has to be located directly next to the businesses themselves; just nearby enough to make walking (like, well, any shopping mall)
So then you have the question of who pays for it — in a shopping mall, its built in by the mall. In a city designated shoping center, its built in by the city. But those are totally pre-planned situation. In a more organic environment, where parking minimums are meant to operate, it would either be a collective decision... or its independent of the businesses, and expanded as necessary, as any private garage works. And I’ve personally seen examples of this situation in LA, chicago, mumbai.... and probably any city that manages to exist without minimums.
The only way you can believe that parking has to have a minimum is if you believe parking must be free. But thats nowhere near true. In most cities, but not in a mall, its not free.
The freeloading problem in a dense location is trivially resolved by looking beyond the individual businesses, and realizing that parking itself is a market.
And the belief that its absolutely required is trivially disolved by... realizing parking minimums are already not the default, and so pretty much any successful city/area will constitute an example of it not being a necessity
Home depot/ikea are self-incentivized to build parking for themselves, because regardless of minimums, they tend to carve out a huge plot of land for themselves and exist independently of other businesss. They don’t sit in dense locations by their nature, and I don’t think you really want them to, and they barely share parking by their nature.
In an artificially dense location (eg parking mall/center), parking is free and its owned and maintained by the owners of the overall location, paid for by the business's rent.
In an organically dense location (eg chicago downtown, chinatowns, etc), a parking-market will inevitably exist, and garages/lots will be privately owned & maintained, paid for by, well, the price of parking.
Parking minimums seem to me to be an artificial solution to an artificial problem: the only time it might be effective is in the last case, and that's only if you believe parking should always be free. If you accept the parking-market, as most cities do, the market solves parking without issue. Zoning would just be a bandage solution, vulnerable to many edge cases, and likely lead to similar and perhaps even brand new mistaken outcomes.
Source: lived 4 years in Los Angeles, a city with pervasive minimum parking laws. Can't hide 101sq miles of parking spaces (https://la.curbed.com/2018/11/30/18119646/los-angeles-parkin...).
Parking minimums exist to fix this.
Other approaches include parking maximums, in particular, not allowing parking (e.g. inside dense city centres) at all, see e.g. [1] for such requirements in London. A hybrid solution would be shared parking only, so no business is allowed to have on-site parking. Various other alternatives exist.
[1] https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/london-plan-new-dev...
And there's no recourse. He paid up, because it'd cost more and be a massive headache to try to fight it. I'm not sure there's anything stopping me from calling it in on any neighbor I dislike. (AAA has a weird setup as well; they've never once properly verified I owned the car I was having towed.. but they're not antagonistic, and the caller is verifiable by their AAA account, so I'm not worried about them as much)
The only thing that keeps towing companies in line is that if they caused too much trouble with their bullshit, they'd see repercussion from populace/city. But as long as they're justified 70% of the time they take your car, they'll keep on truckin'
I mean shit, how do you even consistently verify that the car was parked at the wrong business... you watch someone park and go into the neighboring business? 5 minutes later he goes to the correct one, and whoops, there goes his car.
There's not much difference between a well-behaving towing company and misbehaving one.
Unfortunately for city planners, doubling the size of a lot when it becomes 80% full is not a cheap operation.
I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike street parking, its just such a foreign concept to me that someone would avoid an entire otherwise-nice area because there is plentiful parking that doesn't suit their tastes. Kind of weird to see it written out like that.
With all that, I find it more convenient to mostly just go to the grocery store which has a parking lot, and order in.
As a side note, I also hate street parking as just a driver passing through because it so often makes the street suffocatingly narrow and I have to watch out for people coming and going.
This is an article from the town in my example above - comments from business owners make it seem like, yes, the primary issue really was that people don't want to pay anything at all to park.
(A couple of years after the controversial paid street parking experiment started, a new mixed-use development with a public parking garage on the ground level opened up. The garage is still free to park in to this day. Somebody paid a lot of money for those garage spaces, and is seemingly very afraid of charging anything to use them)
The voices that most loudly condemn socialism and regulation suddenly become advocates for government-run parking and against deregulation of private-sector parking. (For example: https://twitter.com/KCGOP/status/1067502185099841536)
Where is the part where they want government run parking and regulations on private sector parking?
That specific example doesn't touch on parking minimums, and maybe deregulating those are less of a political hot button, but the fact that they remain pretty much ubiquitous in the US suggests that there is still some opposition.
But there also seems to be a lack of faith that the private sector will step in a replace the public sector spots that have been converted to other uses, as well as opposition to charging a market-clearing price for the remaining government-run spots.
Coincidentally, the author's bio says he now lives in Seattle, which has truly awful traffic. They could have banned traffic in e.g. South Lake Union when it was being developed and didn't.
I wish, though! I hate how dependent I am on my car for transportation.
For very small towns, you can walk. For mid-size villages, you take the bike. For cities, there is a public transportation network. In exceptional circumstances you can take a cab or an uber. If you want a week-end in a remote site, you can easily rent a car. I see zero need of owning a car for the general population, and I have never had or needed one.
But I grew up in a small, isolated village (in Europe, as the other comment notes). When your bus ride to school (on public transport, not a school bus) takes 40mins+, walking or cycling just isn't practical. So please, rural communities have it hard enough already without presumption or condescension. A bit of empathy goes a long way, although I guess it's easier to just assume everyone lives a certain way.
[0] not where I grew up, privacy, but comparable: https://www.cumbria.gov.uk/elibrary/Content/Internet/544/931...
Four Yorkshiremen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ZDB9h7BLY
But lets see my last few commutes.
* Now; walk 15 minutes (mid/small-size european city; population 350k)
* 4-8 years ago: 20-50 minutes on tube (living close to work was prohibitively expensive) (this was London, so, large city)
* 8 years ago: 40 minutes (Helsinki, pop: 1.4m)
* 10 years ago: 1hr 20m (mid-size UK city; pop 1m)
So although recently, yes I have had better commute times, it's not uncommon or insane to have commutes that stretch 40 minutes.
Of those commutes, the only one that would be improved by having a car would be the 10yr one (I was going to college and couldn't have a car then, it would be impossible to pay for it barring everything else)
The others could really not improve, London traffic is insane, the Helsinki train system moves significantly faster than traffic, I walk today, and if I were to cycle it would take me even less time.
For very small towns the nearest X is probably at least a 4 hour walk away, in the next town over, for many values of X. For large cities the nearest X is probably a 4 minute walk away for most values of X. The smaller the town the less chance that what you want is within walking distance and the more important it is to have a car.
Smaller towns have more need of cars than large ones, to get out of the town.
While I'd like for cars to be eliminated, it's not happening in sparse areas.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but rural towns aren’t cities.
"For very small towns, you can walk. For mid-size villages... I see zero need of owning a car for the general population"; so not just cities.
But, if we consider Blairgowrie (a fairly typical farming town), you could get by without a car if you lived and worked in town. The Tesco isn't in the best location for walking (because it's surrounded by a giant underutilized parking lot). But, the large Co-op in town is walkable. And the small Co-op is walkable for the houses along Coupar Angus Rd.
My parents owned a house on the outskirts of town and I could walk to the Wellmeadow in 10 minutes or so.
There is regular bus service to Perth and Dundee, so you can get into the cities for doctors appointments and suchlike.
But, for a farmer who lives outside town, I agree, a car is going to be a necessity. And for people living in town, a car is nice to have, just not absolutely required.
Basically people are worried about a lead balloon like NY-SAFE but for cars.
I'd be perfectly fine if the major city in my state made it more expensive to use a car in the city so long as there was an proportional increase in the quantity of park and ride lots at the ends of the rail network and reliability of that rail service. What would happen in reality is that they'd just raise the cost, the parking garages would all be full at 6am instead of 7am and the rail network would be even worse because it would be handling more volume and the money made would be used on pork and graft. Nobody's quality of life would be improved save politicians who suddenly have more money to spend on salaried government jobs they can appoint the friends/relatives of people they want on their side to and the people appointed to those jobs.
I grew up in eastern Poland - it's a region with few big cities about 50 km apart on average, but there's well developed public transport between them, because countryside is relatively densely populated (even if it's just a chain of villages - it adds up).
Half the population of these villages commute to the big city 20-30 km away every day. People still own cars because it's convenient for shopping and family trips, but they don't need to use them every day for commute.
On the other hand you can have medium or big cities with mostly empty countryside between them (like in western Poland), and a car is required if you happen to live between these cities.
For reference - Poland has about 120 people per square km and is near the average for EU. USA has about 35 people per square km.
Moreover, the nearest city (45k pop) is 45 minutes south and the nearest major airport is 1.5 hours away. You will need a car, unless you are comfortable just bumming it in town all the time.
Northern Idaho is closer to small towns in Iceland.
IMO the problem reside in city concept itself: in the past we need cities because we need to be together around water, together to have services, to being able to defend ourselves etc now those needs are substantially disappear or marginal but space need it start to be a super-serious problem. Basically we can't evolve a city simply because we are so dense that we can't reach agreements to destroy something old to build something new or even if we can reach such agreements costs are so high that no one face them looking for other options.
IMO the sole thing we can and should and must do is start to limit population like "only one child per capita" incentives to child-less peoples etc and start to create distributed place to live make easier work from remote as much as possible, make ease to travel around the country but without "concentrated place" except for factories, official buildings etc that need a small scale concentration.
I have lived in a dense and modern big European city, now I'm living on mountains: cost, quality of life, energy efficiency etc are far superior here than in a city. No matter how developed is public transportation that's it's regularly inefficient because to handle peak time it work at a very bad efficiency for the rest of the year and you can't reduce it without hurting people freedom.
The amount of energy required to build and maintain 500,000 people spread across suburbs is far more than 500,000 in a dense city. The amount of material needed for construction, especially cement goes up massively. Services are able to serve less people, so require more quantity of doctors, grocers, power stations, etc per capita, requiring more land and space and waste. The fact that individuals need to use cars in less dense environments vs many exclusively using shared services such as public transit in dense cities, which are ridiculously more ecological.
Same for undergrounds: many compute how much electricity they consume, but omit to compute how much energy you need to create, maintain and evolve them.
Same for buildings: many confront how much energy is needed to heat or cool a building instead of individual houses, but they omit a thing: individual houses can evolve, being demolish for instance by children when parent's dead, tall buildings are normally not demolished and rebuilt as a result their energy efficiency is far behind individual houses (I have proven myself switching from an apartment in a big city far less cold than my actual individual home), also type of material you need to build a tall (and safe) building is far less recyclable than many individual houses.
Same goes for many "green buildings" innovation that keeps popping around and generally result in failure from "communist buildings" to "integrated social buildings".
Also simply look for and feel on your skin the quality of life in cities than in countyside/the riviera. And in dense countries vs far less dense one.
Well yes, living on the countryside with a big house and car and all amenities may be nicer than living in an apartment in the city. But you should keep in mind that that's a luxury. And a rather wasteful one at that. It might end up not being that much more expensive for you, but that's because people living in the cities are subsidizing your lifestyle through their taxes.
I do not consider it a luxury but a different development model that may led to a "luxury" life without the need of other's sacrifice.
Consider a thing: we do not produce foods in towns, we (normally) do not have factories in towns so towns live of the shoulder of productive people outside, they can't live without them. In the countryside you suffer without a "countrywide development" but you still survive. In towns you generally have only tertiary sector's workers, no more.
Arguing about the quality of life is something else with different trade offs. I'd say ban cars from city centers and then we start talking about quality of life.
- big buildings demand more resources to being built, in terms of concrete, steel etc and require deeper foundation that destroy ground humus far more than correspondent single houses;
- big buildings are in medium older than single family houses simply because demolish and rebuild them cost big money and it's practically impossible for many reasons (reach agreements between all involved landlords, not enough space around for work, new norms hard to respect in the available space/site etc) so they consume in medium more energy than single houses;
- cities was a need for various reasons in the past but they are not anymore and modernize them as much as we can with improved public transportation etc cost far more than private transportation in a distributed area.
For all the above I consider a bad idea living in a city, I consider in more and more unsustainable. And recently many people around the world start to know that hard on their skin...
If you do not want to understand I can't help, my mind works well and I was capable and lucky enough to switch from a big city to a wonderful mountain area without loosing anything I really consider valuable.
You forgot to mention how much ground all those residential roads will destroy. Those don't help your argument.
About roads: try to think how much material you need and regularly consume in a town vs countryside roads, also imaging not today but in an imaginary tomorrow world how much roads we will need in a really low dense country vs in "megacities".
Without counting what happen in case of floods or other problems in a town vs elsewhere and the relevant cost to repair. Only imaging september 11th in a country without dense urban agglomeration: how much victims, costs, effects it may have had in such scenario?
What help my arguments are tons of small things grouped together, the sole things it doesn't help is hospital/emergency service proximity in case of need, but that's compensated by a properly organized sanitary system and a strong public investments in that sector (a thing we desperately need also for many other reasons). Another is the problem of few residual but important labor-intensive activities that require many, many people in a concentrated place, but again this is less and less important thanks to automation.
A simple, yet stupid arguments, that my clearly demonstrate advantage of single can be: what if there was a strike, a big one, and you do not found anymore essence for your car? In a town substantially anything can't work anymore, electric public transportation may work but see Gilet Jaunes in France today and Paris status these days. In the countryside nearly anyone have a big tank (500/1000 liter) of reserve. There is place for that. There is place for keep large quantity of food (perhaps with dual-energy freezer electricity/butane gas with enough cylinders, around 20Kg/month to give a quantity) etc. Imaging only elevators out of services due to a short electricity outage.
And the horror scenarios? Please, people in the country will be hit just the same when they can't get gas anymore. Or when the food supply stops.
What you're saying is: "Wouldn't it be nice if we all lived in the countryside?" That idea has crashed decades ago. It's unrealistic. Please stop.
BTW try to determine cost per capita of countryside living and city living, also notice that foods normally came from country and sea, not from cities, oil&gas tend to be the same (how many oil/gas extraction are done inside NY?)...
This idea crashed only in few countries, mostly from the third world, in the developed world only USA, Russia and eastern Europe.
Only to have you telling me I'm doing it wrong based on personal anecdotes? No thanks. I have no trust it would lead to a useful discussion.
> also notice that foods normally came from country and sea, not from cities,
Food and gas don't come out of suburbia either. What's your point?
> This idea crashed only in few countries, mostly from the third world, in the developed world only USA, Russia and eastern Europe.
What third-world countries? It's not 1960 anymore. People all over the world are moving into large cities. They are not waiting for the cities to build the roads and pipes your idea requires.
I can understand if you prefer the countryside: maybe you don't enjoy how people continuously try to correct you when you're wrong. Or these bike-riding eco-hippies just smell funny.
But then you should be glad that others enjoy cities (and logic): if we try to evenly disperse them among the liveable space of the earth, I guarantee you there will be some neighbours moving in far to close for your comfort.
What you do not understand is that we do not live since today for today, we do not build new cities and houses from ground to the ceiling today. We need to evolve and we can evolve far more in the countryside as a result while in theory tall buildings are more efficient than single houses, in practice we have more "newer" individual houses and less newer tall building so in the end the practice is the opposite.
Perhaps you do not even understand why speed trains does not gain traction in the USA but works well enough in French because of the urbanization level of certain area those density are so high that the cost of "pierce" the urbanized area is so high nobody try to sustain.
Essentially you study too much the details that you loss the sight of the big picture, a common mistake these days.
How can it be full if nobody is using it!?
In Sweden for instance most of the buildings are "ancient" enough to be far less efficient than newer one, most of individual houses (that are build generally with a very poor quality and little price) are newer and as a result far better isolated. Also they are easy to be recycled since have far less concrete and far more wood than tall buildings.
In France situation is less different since houses tend to be kept for longer time and they are not build until few years with much energy efficiency attention, however they are still a bit more efficient than buildings since they tend to be a bit "newer" in medium.
Old apartment was heated by a central methane based burner, new house by a VMC with a heat pump and a two solar thermal vacuum panel + 800l heat cumulus (~28ft³/ 211 US gal / 176 UK gal), whole cost dropped around 80%, whole energy consumption drop from around 300-350w×m²/years to around 25w×m²/years...
But in medium in the whole country individual homes are newer than tall buildings mostly because they tend to be poor quality to a point that's cheap demolish and rebuild than maintain and also tall buildings are normally property of many different subjects so reach agreements on any upgrade / maintenance is far complex than individual houses and physical space and usable ground for construction around the home is normally far more present than around a tall building...
Keep attention that I always talk about mean values, not single buildings.
Another thing, I do not know in the USA but in Italy and France construction norms are less tight for airtightness in collective buildings than individual houses, airtightness often play a more prominent role than insulation thickness in term of energy cost. I do not know in big buildings how for instance a VMC (mechanically controlled ventilation with heat exchanger) can possibly work...
Evolvability matter and too many fail to take that into account. We do not live today, since and for today.