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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I expect residential parking is pretty price-insensitive. Maybe more households would forgo owning a marginal second car. But if a households needs a car, they need a car. And if that means paying $100+/month that's just something they're going to have to eat.

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With parking requirements, families who don't have/need/want a car still have to pay the extra price for a built-in feature they don't need. When we bought our first home, it was a condo in SoMa without car parking. We loved it because we didn't want or need a car, and we couldn't have comfortably afforded a place with parking included. Especially in metropolitan environments, minimum parking requirements are the near the core among the reasons many things don't work well (public service, street safety, runaway home prices...)

The parent was making a different point though which was that increasing the price of parking would decrease the demand. And while that is true almost by definition, mostly you'll just transfer money from all the people who want/need cars to someone or someones else. Most adults aren't going to forego a car because parking is too expensive. (Of course, they may decide just to live someplace else where parking is cheaper/free.)

There's definitely a core set of drivers who can't give up their cars, for whom any price increase will just be swallowed. However there's a big swath of gray cases at the boundary.

For example, when we moved to San Francisco, we kept our car and parked on the street. After two parking tickets within the first month (because we forgot the weekly sweep schedule), we decided it didn't make sense to keep the car. We sold it, and started using Caltrain/Muni/biking for most of our trips, with a few Zipcar rentals peppered in. Without those parking tickets, we would definitely have kept our car because there would be no downside.

There is a gray area. I know a couple who live in SF who don't have a car. (They actually have a parking space but they sublet it.) They take muni some although my observation when I visit is that they use a lot of Zipcars, regular rentals, deliveries, and Ubers.

One of the things that's probably true as well is that many people adjust their lifestyle to what's convenient. If you need to rent a car to go somewhere on the weekend, you probably tend to favor other activities.

If everyone just swallows it, the price is still too low.

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