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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Here’s a crazy idea: let the property owner and developer decide the correct amount of parking to provide. And the size of the apartments. And the number of floors to build.

The regulations here should be based around things like structural integrity, egress, and safety. Not views, not density, not what size of apartment is “too big” or “too small.” All of those are things the market can sort out.

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It's crazy because it doesn't work. All of those factors rely upon the use of common, municipal resources, and those municipal resources, especially streets, often can't be expanded.

Although the fact it's illegal to buy that parking and build housing shows which need is more important evidently.

When you're willing to externalize the costs of making mass-SOV transportation possible, to the advancement of personal gain, yes, “the market” will push people toward taking advantage of that discounted resource. Until there is established some sort of per-use fee for ROW use that offsets those externalities, the market pricing is already critically warped and cannot be used as an oracle for what people are willing to pay for being able to get to that parking spot, 10k sq foot residential lot, etc.

EDIT: discounted, not “free.”

Do cyclists pay for their road usage? I paid over $600 for my California car registration and I pay significant gasoline taxes. I also pay significant income taxes. And bridge tolls. The taxes and fees that I directly pay for my car (registration and gas taxes) aren’t being used 100% for my road usage. That money is being used for bike lanes I never use or buses I never ride. So I am paying for someone else’s “externalities” while public transportation riders pay a subsidized fare. I am not opposed to public transport at all — but when we hear about motorists paying more for their “externalities,” I might argue that public transport users ought to be paying their fair share. Electric car drivers don’t even pay a gas tax but they roll on the same roads as everyone else without actually paying their “fair share.” They even get to clog up the HOV lanes despite rolling with a single person. I am stuck behind some single driver in a Tesla, while I have 5 people in the car while also getting the privilege of subsidizing his use of the road. I also get in traffic jams on roads like El Camino in Palo Alto while buses get to stop and block the road to unload a single person.

It’s fashionable to hate cars, but when I need to get from Mountain View to the Hayward Airport at 4:30am, there is no combination of public transport that would get me there in less than 2 hours. Going from Palo Alto to Livermore on public transport is practically impossible. These European-style high density dreams aren’t based in reality for the majority of the United States. Making San Francisco high density would certainly be great, but applying that model to the rest of the Peninsula is just a pipe dream. 50 floor apartments like Korea would be the only way to make that work, but that still doesn’t account for the reality we have. Saratoga to Milpitas— how does that work with public transportation? The United States is built around cars. That horse has left the barn. You can’t realistically redesign the entirety of America to fit a model that is ideal for Copenhagen. Even in Europe, there are vast searches that are car dependent. Putting a tram or high frequency buses in southern France for instance would be ridiculous outside of Marseille perhaps. Even in the cities: how do you deliver a refrigerator easily within a pedestrian-only city? How about moving trucks? I spent a lot of time in Venice and prices for things are astronomical simply because everything has to be delivered via boat. Venice’s geography makes this unavoidable, but intentionally destroying city logistics because of some fantasy is ridiculous. We can do better, but the anti-car movement doesn’t really understand the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Bike lanes would incur 10% of their current cost if they didn't have to be engineered around the ubiquitous SOVs. That's another externality of automobiles, and it doesn't account for how insufficient, broken, and unsafe that bike infra is, all because it has to route around cars being catered to as the “first class” use of ROW.

> Do cyclists pay for their road usage?

A better question is: do automobile users? And the answer is: no. Roads are subsidized: https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...

> when I need to get from Mountain View to the Hayward Airport at 4:30am

Well it sounds like the right tool for that job. But that doesn't mean it's the right tool for every job or even most of them.

> Going from Palo Alto to Livermore on public transport is practically impossible

That's a political choice that those places made. It can be fixed if there's the will to do so.

> Putting a tram or high frequency buses in southern France for instance would be ridiculous outside of Marseille perhaps.

Yeah, there's no trams in southern France. Except for in Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Grenoble, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice, Saint-Étienne, and Toulouse. And there are plans for trams in Nîmes and Avignon.

Perhaps if the "anti-car" argument is framed more precisely, you'll see that it's entirely consistent with using a car for those 4:30 am trips to the airport. What all these efforts seek to minimize is not all car travel for all people, but rather routine car travel for many/most people. That includes, first and foremost, daily work commutes, because that's what dictates road capacity necessary to make traffic jams manageable, so that's the kind of car travel that's a) most expensive for society b) leads to cityscapes that are uncomfortable or actively hostile for pedestrians and cyclists. The way to do that is by giving them a viable alternative, not merely inconveniencing them by, say, neglecting highways and calling it a day. A city where commutes by public transit are a viable option* for, say, 3/4 of the population is a city where the other 1/4 has fewer traffic jams to contend with, and where that same 3/4 can make an economically rational decision to spend $150 a month on Uber instead of owning a car, which will cover airport trips, grocery trips, etc.

>>> Do cyclists pay for their road usage?

Yes, definitely. Granted, this may vary from state to state, and I don't know the situation in California. Most of the roads that I travel on are city and county roads that are paid for out of my property taxes. Ironically, our property taxes are higher because living in a bike friendly zone with good access to public transit increases our property value.

I'm not allowed to ride my bike on the freeways, and I avoid the major federal / state highways. I suspect that those are what suck up the most money.

I pay income tax.

Most cyclists still own cars. My family pays for registration of two cars that we drive less because of our bikes. We pay gas taxes when we drive, plus license fees, and state-mandated insurance.

Our bikes do negligible damage to the roads, and we reduce the need for both road construction and parking space.

I'd be willing to bet that if we analyzed all of the numbers carefully, we'd find the net effect is that motorists and cyclists both pay -- to subsidize the trucking industry.

How do we know it doesn’t work?

If I was a builder, my incentives are closely aligned with the city - build something that appeals to buyers. If I build a fancy apartment building where everyone owns cars but I provide no parking, well those aren’t going to be very desirable.

Why are your incentives (as a builder) always closely aligned with the city?

Consider Japan, which has building restrictions to avoid eternal shadows. Building height is a function of the setback from the street.

A buyer may well want a taller building, and a builder might well be happy to provide it, when the city is dead set against it.

What is the mechanism by which "the market" balances out the desire by the megarich to live in tall towers in NYC, with the desire by those who use Central Park to not be in shadows more?

The value of the owner’s asset (the building) is based on more than just the building itself, but also on the surrounding area and the quality of life.

It doesn’t help an owner if they build units nobody wants to live in because of shadows, no parking, etc.

It seems that your answer to my question "What is the mechanism by which "the market" balances out the desire by the megarich to live in tall towers in NYC, with the desire by those who use Central Park to not be in shadows more?" is that the megarich should build as many towers as they want until the megarich themselves no longer want to live with Central Park in shade.

That is, if the megarich enjoy the 50 mile views and don't care about Central Park at all, then it can smother in shadow, yes?

And the only mechanism for the people who want to have sunlight in the Park is to make the megarich either socially or physically uncomfortable enough (perhaps by threats of violence?) that they decide it's time to move away ... or buy more security?

If so, your mechanism seems rather prone to encourage social unrest.

  If I was a builder, my incentives are
  closely aligned with the city

Imagine I've got a fixed-size plot of land, and I'm constructing a 12 space parking lot and a 3-floor building with 3 apartments per floor. 1 space per apartment, plus 3 spare for guests/deliveries/two-car families. No underground parking or anything, just a basic paved lot.

I'm planning to sell all the apartments and move on to another project, so I won't have to solve any parking problems residents or locals end up having.

I have the option to add an extra floor on, so there would be 12 apartments - but no guest parking any more.

What do you imagine my incentives are?

It’s more complex then you are making it.

I won’t replace parking with units unless that makes the building more valuable overall. If there is a strong demand for parking spots, the existing units are likely to lose value by having no parking. And I’d also have to shell out cash upfront to compensate them.

There is a great deal of human civilization that works well despite looking nothing like the postwar suburban United States. This idea that anything outside status-quo zoning codes will lead to the collapse of civilization seems easily disproven by most middle-class people's travel experiences.

I have to completely disagree with you here in terms of parking. Cities absolutely need to do significant transportation planning or you get the mess that exists throughout huge portions of the developing world. Even Los Angeles with it's traffic problems doesn't even come close to Mumbai. While governments aren't always good about solving these issues, the market would be worse as it's too decentralized to care about tragedy of the commons type problems.

Additionally, I also indirectly disagree with the last two points because it is absolutely crucial that cities have some control over population changes as it relates to density. Utility overload is a real issue, and needs to be accounted for. Schools need to get built, sidewalks widened, and so on.

What's ultimately needed is a form of adaptive city planning, that reacts to market forces (such as population changes, desire from developers to build new buildings, ect) with planned solutions such that there are no tragedy of the commons issues that come about. What's unacceptable is the 20+ year horizon planning that most cities do now.

I am guessing that you are aligned political to the ideological view of the smallest possible government and regulations.

Unfortunately, developers and property owners will care nothing for the wider community. Firstly, at what point would you end regulations? Perhaps zoning and planning permission frameworks are too much? Let the market decide. Electrical, again that really is too much regulation, and we should let the free mark reign as people will have to adhere keep up their personal reputation.

The unfortunate fact is that personal reputation does not count for shit. Just look at Trump and Johnson. They outright lie and nobody is holding them to account, so what makes you believe that shonky developers and property sales people will hold to their word.

Secondly, our road systems and other community infrastructure can only accommodate and scale with so much growth. If growth is not managed reasonably, then our communities will become truly awful places to live.

I would agree that where population density is lower, then there needs to be less regulation, and where it is higher there needs to be more.

Finally, I would add that that charging 5p for disposable plastic shopping bags has had a hugely positive effect on curtailing the use of single use plastic bags.

Sometimes there is too much regulation, and sometimes there is too little, but fundamentally we need regulation, and participatory democrat systems to manage it.

Your quality of your life and ownership should not be obliterated overnight because somebody bought the neighbouring property and decided to build an industrial composting facility.

Houston doesn’t have zoning and it seems to work just fine.

Houston doesn't have official zoning. Instead it has land use regulations, like off-street parking mandates, which act like de facto zoning.

https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-regulates-...

> Finally, I would add that that charging 5p for disposable plastic shopping bags has had a hugely positive effect on curtailing the use of single use plastic bags.

Although it's increased purchases of garbage bags, which use more plastic in the end because they're thicker.

I’m under the impression plastic bag bans and use taxes are intended to reduce plastics waste in the environment, not resource consumption.

You could do that if you enabled per-minute and per-meter billing for usage of municipal resources like driving on shared roads.

When bus fares are increased to account for the actual cost of the bus system, then let’s talk about metered usage for cars. Bus and train fares are heavily subsidized so those users aren’t paying their fair share either.

Sure, but first let's internalize all the externalized costs of cars, for example pollution.

Isn’t that basically just the libertarian mindset? Ie let individuals optimize for their own interests, even when the t as the detriment of the community? Markets are definitely efficient in sorting out short term individual goals, but not much beyond that.

I agree that markets can't solve everything, especially within the tight networks of externalities that exist in high-density cities. But with parking, I think the problem is the opposite: car owners create a negative externality (use of limited city-provided parking) that ends up costing non-car-owners because cities then require buildings to build parking.

I agree that cities can screw this up, but the idea of leaving parking policy completely up to the free market is also unappealing. Parking mins are dumb, but parking maxes can make a lot of sense.

This would eliminate too many middlemen and bureaucrats. We need the government to mandate what's optimal based on what lobbyists from parking construction firms advocate for. We also need to ensure the requirements are sufficiently high enough so that only a select few companies can effectively bid, ensuring minimal competition and maximum profitability, and maximum political donations.

This is a critical cycle that must be preserved!

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