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Comment by village-idiot | Hacker News Reader

You're in the minority where it affects you negatively.

The main purpose of street front parking meters, aside from revenue, is to encourage people to get in and get out. Parking is a limited resource designed to support local businesses, whose revenue scales with the number of visits, not their duration.

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This assumes that the purpose of a visit is retail shopping, which is in decline. Downtown use is shifting towards experiences (restaurants, coffee shops, etc) where lingering a while is an essential feature.

Even this idea of optimizing for visits over duration is flawed for retail shopping: not everyone has a specific item in mind and only that specific item in mind for a direct in/out purchase decision. So much of marketing is about impulse buys, and so much of consumer decision models are about wrestling with a wall of near but distinct variations of a product for that "perfect" one for a particular shopping. That's before you even get into the social models of retail where people shop together. Retail shopping benefits financially from time/lingering/"experiences" just as well as everything else and optimizing for "visits" maybe optimizing for the wrong things for even retail.

Arguably this is exactly part of why retail disappeared from many urban environments because suburban and exurban Malls were better at optimizing for lingering, social experiences in the 70s/80s.

The statement you are responding to does not assume the purpose of a visit is retail shopping. It doesn't matter what kind of business it is, it needs to make sufficient revenue, and unless the businesses start charging for lingering, they need to ensure enough customers are able to patronize the business to keep it going.

The point is a quantity over quality thing. People that linger/feel free to take their time are more likely to spend more in a lot of business classes. Optimizing for quantity of people spending money may be suboptimal for total revenue if each individual person spends less because they feel time pressured / aren't allowed to "window shop" / etc.

Quality over quantity is a nice theory, but a bad idea when allocating public spending.

I'm not sure I even understand what your point is now.

Public spending tries to account for quality all the time. Quality "metrics" of various sorts exist in lots of places and can always be evaluated (or found, then evaluated, as may often need to be the case) when making trade-offs.

In the case of public parking, there are ways to improve "quality" by reducing overall parking pressure at specific locations by "moving" it to other areas, such as park-and-ride combinations with public transportation, improving access to site-to-site ground transportation (bicycles, scooters, wheelchairs, segways, what have you), and just improved public transportation in general.

Quantity is often an easier metric to optimize for because it's always a number, but that's all the more reason for public spending to find ways to do the hard thing and optimize for quality. That's why we elect people to work on hard problems and care so much about public spending.

Define quality. It's all great to say that quality matters, but you're using an abstract definition of quality while letting everyone fill in their own mental definition of quality. That feels good, but is is a terrible way to actually make the concrete decisions about how the public purse will be used.

There was nothing abstract in my definition of quality. I defined quality directly in terms of things that matter to net revenue of local businesses several times in the above posts and gave several examples (such as perceived time pressure versus ability to window shop or impulse buy).

I don't see how that is a terrible way to make concrete decisions about public spending, and I'm very not sure why you are arguing that it is. Quality can certainly be defined and optimized for, and that's precisely what I've said, and provided specific examples for. I even admitted that optimizing for quality is hard, but just because something is hard doesn't make it impossible to make concrete decisions about.

So you’re not optimizing for quality, you’re optimizing for revenue, and you just disagree with my recommendations for optimization. Got it.

The point of going to a restaurant or coffee shop is the atmosphere / venue for socialization; you would not do it if too tight a timeline were imposed.

... which is why they usually pay for their own lots and don't use publicly funded metered parking.

Not at a lot of places I go to. I guess a place like Starbucks or McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts almost always (not always!) has a lot, but random restaurants and coffee shops that I go to generally don't.

> The main purpose of street front parking meters, aside from revenue, is to encourage people to get in and get out

That's not a purpose aside from revenue, that's a mechanism for increasing sales, property, and/or income tax revenue, depending on the particular tax regime in the locality.

If you want a walkable downtown, you need to keep the stores alive, which means they need revenue. Especially true in a place like Palo Alto with its crazy rent prices.

IF you want a walkable downtown you need people to have a reason to walk. Once someone is in their car it isn't a big deal to get back in my car to drive to the next place - you see this all the time in strip malls where people drive to the next store. Keeping people from getting into the car in the first place is key. That means you need to focus downtown first on the people who live there. Outsiders who don't live downtown are welcome to come too, but if you make their needs the focus you kill downtown.

Car shoppers are the least valuable shoppers by far. They spend less and they demand more public spending in their support.

You can downvote all you want, but it's been researched.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/12/cyclists-and-...

https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/study-shows-people-w...

https://www.bishopstonsociety.org.uk/bishopston/amenities/11...

"Car shoppers are the least valuable shoppers by far. They spend less"

Hmm...sounds like a good justification for owning a car - I can't give it up, otherwise I would spend too much on other stuff!

I won't disagree with your ideas in general because I just don't know.

But in the case of Palo Alto, this isn't true. Parking is just hard enough to find that people generally do walk once parked. And there aren't enough people in downtown to keep it alive without the outsiders.

I've never been to Palo Alto, but I'm going to guess that it is another town that goes to bed early. Busy during business hours and sporting events (and other large venus that bring in people), dead otherwise. People already downtown for work stay downtown for lunch, but they do all their non-lunch activities elsewhere if possible. (using the court house is only possible downtown...)

There's a lot of places like you describe :-)

Palo Alto is oddly not one of them. I don't know why PA is so unusual, but it is. Might be the safety. Might be the disposable income. Might be the lack of mainstream-style shopping and dining areas.

Palo Alto is a town where Millionaires complain about being treated like undesirables, because they don't make as much money as the vast numbers of people who have hundreds of millions of dollars, or billions.

And so the "just millionaires" become the new downtrodden and homeless. At least, in their own minds.

You wanna talk about "Reality Distortion Effect"?

The idea that parking exists primarily to increase the revenue of business owners seems pretty bleak.

What other function would it serve in a retail area? I suppose you could argue that its direct purpose is to allow people who do not live within walking distance to visit and spend time. But unless local businesses profit from that visiting, they're not going to be in business for long and there won't be any reason for people to go there.

30 years ago we could say the purpose is simply to "exist in the public space of my community", but the demand for constantly increasing revenue from any and all space has effectively destroyed that.

You’re joking right? We’ve never had parking just because. It’s always been there to serve the needs of whatever it’s next to. In the case of retail, it’s to support the shops, period.

We’ve had mechanically metered parking since the 1940s, and manually paid for parking before that. Something has to pay for all that concrete.

It’s not like parking is this beautiful stuff you’d like to have around, eh? Of course parking serves the purpose of whatever it’s next to.

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