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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Well that NIMBY response was the same here.

In London generally on-street parking is already at- or over-capacity, so adding an extra couple of hundred to a thousand people wanting to park their car in the surrounding 3 or 4 streets is not just NIMBY-style petty complaints of "I don't want someone parking outside my house" and so on, but more "there physically isn't enough space for even more people to try and park in the already over-capacity on-street parking - get a reality check, this isn't going to work".

I think there is a difference between those two responses

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"get a reality check, this isn't going to work".

If I gave out free hot tubs then there would pretty quickly be a hot tub shortage. The problem is that parking is the leasing of public land for insanely low amounts for private property storage. You are forcing everyone around you to pay for your private property storage because you don't feel like paying for it yourself.

After all, can I pay the council the £100 a year (or whatever tiny amount it is) for an on-street parking spot so I can store my hot tub? Have a little garden? No? Then perhaps we shouldn't let you store your metal box there either unless you're willing to pay market rate for the land.

Keep in mind that any time you say developers must be forced to add room for parking, they were trying to add room for humans and NIMBYs told them places for cars to sleep were more important.

I'm not defending parking on street parking, and I am not saying we should force developers to add parking (I just find the fingers-in-ears ignoring of the issue frustrating), but with respect I think your views on the parking are a bit maladjusted.

That's because you could use your same argument about any public service. We pay for it in spades through income and council taxes.

Deliberately semi-quoting your argument:

You get public services for an insanely low price (healthcare, firemen, police, libraries, schools) for your own private benefit. You are forcing everyone around you to pay for you to not die/not have your house burn down/not get robbed/learn/get your kids educated etc because you don't feel like paying for it yourself.

Can't afford your own healthcare/fireman/police/library/school? Then perhaps we shouldn't let you use them unless you are willing to pay market rate for the service.

There are reasons why most services aren't public ones and should not be - this argument actually works.

For each service that is public there's usually a good counterargument. Is there one for public subsidizing of private car parking?

In and around a commercial district, there is. If your customers are living in a standard suburban area around your commercial core, the city will often provide parking so that those customers can reach the businesses in that area. See the publicly owned parking lots in Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, etc. Without those lots, there would be a lot less business (and thus less tax revenue) because the customers couldn't get to the businesses.

Or you can design your city to not be so car-centric. Why aren't commercial districts designed so that walking or using public transportation to reach them is viable?

If you put cars right at the center of urban planning, you'll always build cities that require people to own cars.

This is true, but the challenge is that you can't just change how wide the streets are or how big the buildings are in an urban area overnight. It takes decades to change the transportation orientation of a neighborhood, and in the meantime, people have to live/work there.

When I lived in Santa Monica it was pretty frustrating they used my taxes to subsidize homes for cars and not people.

Every service you named has huge positive externalities for the community. Parking is the opposite.

Does London not have buses and trains? Why do people need to park or drive anywhere?

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