Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking
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Lol. A bit melodramatic, but sure. Charge for it, yes, but give motorists a civilized experience when possible.
Some of the emotion and impatience and anxiety can be reduced. IME, parking anxiety can come from 1) finding the expensive parking, 2) navigating in/out of it, 3) paying for it, and 4) worrying about it expiring. Technology can lighten some of that chore and people can get on with their business and pleasure. Self-navigating/parking cars might soon be helping with 1 & 2. Background: I cofounded PayByPhone with a goal of providing a civilized solution to 3 & 4.
For example, in the bay area, parking in SF is difficult to say the least and usually in paid garages. But go less than 30 miles to east bay (far east or south east bay, not Oakland or Berkeley), parking is much more plentiful everywhere and the expectation for parking is free.
If you live in the east bay and visit SF once in a while, you are coming from a daily life of the expectation of free parking to suddenly seeing signs for $20 a day, $50 a day, and so on. Without really consciously thinking about the economics and thinking, oh, it makes sense, because millions of people want to park in the city, it can definitely drive some emotional responses. If you live in SF and have thought about the economics and have accepted that parking is expensive, then the emotion and impatience and anxiety can be reduced/removed by the UX.
I think it's useful to consider that SF downtown parking is - in the grand scheme of things - an exception, not a norm.
As it turns out, parking is free in most geographical locations. Even within SF, there's plenty of free street parking around areas like the Sunset or Potrero Hill for example, a mere 20 mins away from downtown core. Go another 15 mins further south and there's free parking at Home Depot, Costco, etc. Go further out to places like San Jose, and strip malls with abundant free parking dominate the landscape.
IMHO it doesn't make sense to think parking space can be easily replaced with residential space. This has been a theme in places like downtown Toronto, where parking lots were literally getting turned into condo buildings. Without a supporting transportation strategy, all that ends up happening is overloaded roads because more residences equal more people, and people need transportation. Going back to Toronto, they're now apparently talking about expropriating businesses to make space for public transit expansion in the worst congested subway station (Ironically, several businesses were already displaced from a lot to build a high rise mix use condo building in this exact intersection some 5 years ago, and there's now another high rise in construction right across the street from it). I honestly wish them good luck with scaling public transit to match demand, as all forms of traffic there - including the subway - already get to pretty bad levels.
Like we've got a membership to the children's museum. But parking is ~$15 a time so we go far less frequently than we otherwise would.
Economic arguments about freeloading are good and something I theoretically agree with. But in practice when the other option is 2 busses & 45 minutes you end up not going to as many places as you otherwise would.
Yes.
>> ensuring the only people using it are the people who want it really badly
Not necessarily. People using it could just have more money.
Funnily enough, when you live in SF, you find parking to be easy and mostly free :-)
However I would argue that charging sufficiently high prices for parking solves #1 too, the remaining difficulty would be finding cheap parking, not expensive parking.
(...which were put on the books decades ago to keep taxi drivers trolling for fares out of high-congestion areas.)
In short, many people agree that the human-driven, gasoline-powered car is the problem. But far too many zero in on the adjectives, implying that solving the "human-driven" part will solve our cities' problems (love the traffic-light-free intersection visualizations, totally want to be a pedestrian trying to live next to those). Then there are people pretending electric cars are more than just marginally better for the environment when the full life cycle of both the energy required to power them and the materials that go into them is considered.
Stop trying to fix the car. The car is the problem. Specifically, at a certain point (you can quantify it as certain population density, or population size) there are too many of them to rely on them for transportation of most people and to have liveable cities. In North America, we sacrificed the liveability of cities to keep the car, in Europe they're sacrificing the car for liveability. There's not too much more to it than that.
Electric self-driving cars change this a bit, but not enough to matter. It's basically the same as above.
Since I'm not interested in paying the taxes necessary to double the amount of roads in town, and since I hate traffic, I'd rather just make what you describe illegal [2], just like how many other nuisances are illegal on public roadways. It should be pretty easy for legislatures to force vendors to disable self-driving summons/parking on public roads.
[1] And no, even if the traffic you create is counterflow, we will still need more road capacity, and I'm not paying for it. Where I live, there is no 'counterflow' - traffic consistently sucks in both directions of travel.
[2] Or toll you, preferably to the point where you'll find it more advantageous to just pay for parking.
Now imagine what this will do to rush hour traffic - There would be twice as many vehicle trips for the same number of people. Road tolls (particularly on unoccupied cars) would be needed as part of any solution, which everyone loves even more than parking fees.
Why should the number of occupants affect the amount of the toll?
Clearly it's not that simple and we want certain vehicles to be devoid of human occupants.
A larger toll on all cars would disincentivize it just as much.
My point is: why not set the toll at an optimum level, and then let each car owner decide whether it's worth the car driving at a particular time and place?
If we want to charge people based on the contents of the car, why not charge lower tolls for cars with 5 occupants instead of 4. Or lower tolls for cars carrying older or fatter people (who are less able to take public transport)?
It seems to me that road usage prices should be high enough to limit/eliminate congestion and that, if they were that high, there would be no need to discriminate based on what is being carried.
Because to a person stuck in traffic, seeing a bunch of empty cars beside you wasting space is infuriating regardless of if they paid the government their $3 toll or whatever
> If we want to charge people based on the contents of the car, why not charge lower tolls for cars with 5 occupants instead of 4.
Yep, I'm fully on board with scaling the toll down as the number of occupants increases (and so are most people - HOV lanes exist for exactly that reason)
> Or lower tolls for cars carrying older or fatter people (who are less able to take public transport)?
Yeah, on board with this too, as are most regulatory bodies - thus the handicap only parking spaces, bus+handicap loading zones, etc.
Equal isn't always fair.
So if you're sending your car to pick up your grandparents, you are 'wasting space' for the first leg of the journey if you don't sit in the car during the round trip?
Malcolm Gladwell wrote about his experience in a Waymo and he came to an interesting conclusion. Because self driving cars always defer to pedestrians, pedestrians will get very bold and not be scared about stepping off the curb in front of a self driving car. It could mean traveling through dense urban centers by car is almost impossible.
Of course, car owners vote in enough numbers that, if this were to happen, I could see cities installing barriers between side walks and streets like Las Vegas has in the strip area.
(See parallel thread on "Lufthansa confirmed that 18k flights had been flown empty to keep slots", which feels related.)
Another idea is some kind of open API standard, where you can use the app of your choice in a particular locale, rather than being locked to a particular vendor. Then the apps can compete on which one has the best user experience, privacy, and so forth.
background: I'm friends with Kush.
At least in the US, I do not see a path forwards tho. The houses have been built and the people live where they live.
Ownership of land is really important for ensuring everyone in America is literally bought into the American Dream. Until you’re ready to buy a house, I feel no compunction forcing you into high-density housing in the meantime (paired with greatly increasing low-income mortgage assistance).
Is this because of the pandemic that the demand of dense multi-family housing has stagnated while isolated SFHs have risen?
The thought has crossed my mind the past two years where I've encountered more rude, aggressive, and hostile fellow residents in my building. Our building staff members have commented the same. Pleas from building management to mask up or avoid riding the elevator with other households go unheeded. Likewise pleas to not smoke in outdoor, but common areas (lounges, rooftops, etc.) go unheeded, and now add marijuana smell as a bonus.
It's gotten to the point my wife and I specifically want to move to a SFH so that we don't have to deal with such people.
To me a home would mean no shared walls/floors/ceilings with other tenants.
Yes, sure--I was referring mainly to American single use zoning, which is terrible. There are certainly approaches that have way less in terms of downsides, such as the Japanese style zoning.
I'm generally anti-NIMBY but this kind of sentiment is a dramatic oversimplification. I really don't think we should immediately frame this as a rich people are afraid of poor people problem. For one thing, it doesn't explain why NIMBYism is also present in poor and working class neighborhoods.
Now, it's tech companies the ones that have the money to create a bad for humans landscape. Will the USA repeat the same mistake and let them create an unfit for society digital neighborhood, or has it learned that to take corporation interests above everything else create inefficient societies?
For residential street parking, I guess it should be up to those communities to decide what they want. The town where I live has outlawed overnight street parking which prevents people turning single-family homes into overcrowded communal living situations like you see in many parts of California. It makes the streets very safe and pleasant for walkers and kids on bikes, but also works against housing density which I recognize as problematic. I support density, but not density with cars; we need a lot of investment in transportation alternatives.
For example, it's not uncommon in Asia to find multiple generations living in the same household. AFAIK California has a lot of Asians.
While not in California, the town my parents live in has had an influx of Chinese immigrants the past decade or so. This has resulted in situations like the above, where multiple generations (grandparents, parents, grown children, grandkids) are living in the same SFH. Often times all three adult generations are driving, so that's at least 3 cars. Even more if say, each working individual have their own cars.
The result is that the street in front of my parents' home is jam packed with parked cars that would not fit in these homes' driveways/garages.
I don't not-sympathize, being an Asian myself, as I also happen to think the American obsession of kicking out adult children out of the household ASAP regardless of circumstances is stupid (or from the other side, clawing tooth and nail to achieve so-called "independence" from parents regardless of circumstances). At the same time, the street parking situation is not sustainable.
The pattern I saw in the Bay Area was not so much multi-generational families as groups of multiple unrelated working adults moving into a single-family home together as roommates, each adult individual having their own car and quickly exceeding the 2 spaces provided by a typical Bay Area driveway. Maybe they could park more in the driveway but nobody wants to block in other vehicles so they park in the street for every car beyond 2. Pretty soon the neighborhood is fully parked up.
This is unrelated, but there was also a guy in my Palo Alto neighborhood who hoarded junk cars. He had them parked in his garage, his driveway, yard, and when he ran out of space he started parking them all up and down the street near his house in front of neighbors houses. It was a real nuisance and the police never did anything about it that I could see. Behavior like that shows a real lack of respect for the commons.
> groups of multiple unrelated working adults moving into a single-family home together as roommates
From the number of cars perspective, it doesn't make any difference if the multiple adults in the house are family or not, it's still one car per adult.
For lower wage people, like the janitors, cooks, gig economy people, etc needed to serve tech elites, there's really no option except to crowd in with other people. Even if you move to the limits of a practical commute, it's still very very expensive for those not pulling engineering salaries.
I believe that when used right*, "lack of visibility" can be a very useful design feature to get drivers to Slow The Fuck Down. In general, North American fetishization of "clear lines of sight", leading to removal of supposed "obstacles" like trees, bushes, etc., leads to streets that are far easier to speed on. Places where planners know how to plan properly (i.e. not North America) use everything at their disposal to make it intensely uncomfortable to speed, with features that send speeders to the auto shop before they gain enough speed to send pedestrians and cyclists to the hospitals.
Parked car lanes on alternating sides of the street can be judicially used to force a previously straight street to meander, for example. It's not as good as other solutions, but it can be useful.
* For example, grade-separated cycle lanes, placed between the parked cars and sidewalk (rather than between parked cars and the street) significantly reduces, and with enough of a buffer completely removes the dooring risk for cyclists.
That's why I personally do, as I live in such a city with cars parked literally everywhere so that in order to drive safe I need to slow down. As you imply, it's almost a feature, not a bug.
So basically you don't want me to go there. Ok, I won't. I'll take my business somewhere else.
I personally never shop at small local stores in my area because of lack of parking. I go to the huge stores 10 minutes away that have parking lots.
I even passed on a job offer for a downtown office when I was informed they didn't have a parking lot/garage but would instead provide a monthly parking allowance. Wasn't interested at all in hunting for parking on-street or around various garages every morning.
Why can grandparents only visit by car? Why are there no (better) alternatives?
I think a lot of people forget how sparse much of the country really is.
Is it better to construct and maintain 75 miles of roads (and all the other infrastructure) for a couple of hundred folks?
I highly recommend this video on the finances around urban sprawl and their long term consequences:
He really cherry picked the least flattering angle on modern Front Street. Here's a better angle - https://goo.gl/maps/CBnqs6i9YLG1mSEG6
It's a very strange town to pick to make an argument about sprawl with - Brainard is a pretty densely packed small town as far as towns in Minnesota go.
That meant while I could take the train to downtown, it wasn't practical (at least for a night of bar hopping) unless I wanted to spend a hefty sum on a return Uber at the end of the night.
Trains would allow kids, elderly, people without a driver's license or the financial means to afford a car to participate in society as well.
Speaking as someone who moved the family to the city and had a fair number of (free) on and (paid) off street parking options nearby, for about 50% of the people we knew, it was like we moved to the moon. Even though we only moved about 5 miles, but that "parking" thing was a massive disincentive for people to come to visit.
On the other side of the coin, my small town mom loved that she didn't have to drive at all and could take a 90 minute bus ride to come visit.
For the other set of grandparents, who were uncomfortable with driving in and parking, we'd simply drive out to pick them up.
EDIT: I'm also reasonably confident that the 4th floor walkup was just as intimidating as the parking situation
Some small changes can have a pretty minimal investment. The city of Austin lets motorcycles use street parking for free.
I'm not sure why, but people driving those seem to completely ignore driving laws (red lights, stop sign, lanes, etc) which makes them very dangerous and annoying.
Not to mention the noise (for those which are not electric)
The main differentiating factor is probably the consequences - or lack of.
Disobey traffic laws and get caught in a car or motorcycle - you face consequences that can range from harsh to at least significantly annoying enough that you'd rather not.
Do the same in a bike, and most people don't care beyond giving you the finger or a nasty look. Even cops don't care more often than not.
True - you don't have a cage of steel surrounding you like in a car so you also risk being killed or maimed, but I've found most cyclists also have a sense of invincibility until they actually get hurt. I am guilty of this myself.
I live in one of two Chicago suburbs notable for excellent connectivity to Chicago's transit fabric (we're on both the Blue and the Green CTA train lines, a major regional commuter rail route, and a zillion bus routes). But people have jobs all over the metro area; to live here, take a job anywhere but the center of the city, and rely on public transit, you'd have to commute downtown and then back out, adding 45-90 minutes to your commute each way. Even if you don't drive every day, most people still need cars. Taking one of the few existing affordable apartments here essentially requires you to kick in several hundred dollars extra per month for a parking spot somewhere else in the area.
What really happens here is that, of course, most residents, working class or not, own cars. But if you don't live on an SFH lot with a garage, you scavenge for parking where you can find it, often parking on the street and getting cited for it; our overnight parking ban generates about $400k/yr, mostly from renters. Gross.†
We've banned overnight parking here as well, and I've been working for years now to build a case against that ban. Many other Chicago suburbs have repealed their overnight bans and replaced them with sticker systems.
Meanwhile, we enforce off-street parking requirements for new residential construction. The sufficiency of those requirements is probably the single most important lever in trying to get new developments rejected at the plan commission, and to ratchet up the cost of new apartments so that fewer are built and for wealthier people. The pattern is to make a case for requiring more parking spots than can reasonably be provided on a residential lot, and, when that obviously can't happen, demand fewer units and less density.
The Planning Association article linked here seems to have things exactly right. What we should be doing is eliminating all off-street parking requirements --- developers can build them if they think the market needs them --- and then simply charging for convenient on-street parking (perhaps with means-tested subsidies for residents). It doesn't seem complicated.
† I did a FOIA request on this a year or so ago and mapped the tickets out, and, because I didn't know the right FOIA request to find all the apartments, surveyed the area for multi-family buildings, and threw together a dumb static HTML page; I just got the 2021 batch of FOIA data and am throwing together an Elixir app to render it this week. https://oak-park-parking.fly.dev/
Where does all this on-street parking come from? It does not compute that it’s impossible to build sufficient parking on the lot, but there is an abundance on the street. To the extent there is an abundance of street parking, this almost certainly means that previous development created sufficient off street parking for their residents.
Nor does it makes sense to encourage developers to dump the cost of building those spaces onto the city. Allowing developers to build without spaces means the rest of the neighborhood pays the cost for the parking congestion. As do the residents who now don’t have a legal parking space.
I expect my house’s lot could hold a 6 unit building. I have exactly 2 parking spots in front of my house. It would be 3 if I had no driveway. So at best residents could get 50% of their parking needs met with street parking if my house were converted to a multi family dwelling. This holds for many of the apartments and townhomes around me. Lots of my neighbors have 1 or even 0 spots for cars in front of their houses.
Looking at a map of Chicago, I would roughly guesstimate that streets are maybe 15% of the land area in gridded areas. Assume that half of that is “parkable” space. I don’t buy that this is sufficient space for all the cars to park. And if I’m wrong, I fail to see why developers are unable to set aside similar amounts of space off-street for their residents to park.
At any rate: I answered your question about "where all this on-street parking comes from". You can do the math on the carrying capacity of an Oak Park street for parking; you've got the maps, after all.
If there’s enough street parking, then why the proposal to charge so much for street parking to moderate demand?
> What we should be doing is eliminating all off-street parking requirements […] and then simply charging for convenient on-street parking
I don’t understand how this solves for any parking issues. It seems like it will create a significant parking issue.
There is insufficient street parking for this to work. Yes, you can hypothetically charge to death until most people stop parking on the street but that just means they’ll vote out the board who instituted the parking fees that make it “convenient”, and the poor will be screwed over either way.
Fine if you don’t want to discuss, though.
This is more of a problem with our lackluster transit network than a problem requiring cars. If we just stopped investing into car infrastructure and instead focused on build new train lines to increase interconnectivity and updated our current train lines to run at least 80-100 MPH in the city, you'd be singing a different tune.
I'm personally of the opinion that Chicago itself should have a massive congestion fee for the entire Central Business District and that the parking taxes should be ramped up massively both inside the district and anywhere in the city with a population density of 20,000 people/sq. mi. or higher even without increasing our transit capacity. That system should include an exemption for people with disability tags or placards; delivery vehicles performing a delivery to the area; and registered and taxed taxi and livery service vehicles. Currently, it's a $6/exit tax on parking structures in the Central Business District. I see no reason why that shouldn't be $20/exit or even $50/exit to truly discourage individual passenger vehicles there.
Now, where you live, you're well below that 20,000 people/sq. mi. metric and not even in the city. So no need to get extreme on modifications. But, if we invested more in high-speed, highly inter-connected transit, you would not need a car.
An extra-wide sidewalk with trees and other decoration or a well-protected bike lane can provide a similar benefit, but parking isn't the worst option.
Some relevant content:
1. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/11/20/the-many-cost...
* https://yimbyaction.org/2021/
It's possible to make progress: here in Bend, Oregon a recent code update removed some parking requirements for "middle housing"!
Contrast that to, say, a dense city like Tokyo or Beijing where parking is both scarce and almost always comes at a cost. There is much less backlash, because you can get to pretty much everywhere just using public transit. In this case, people accept that point-to-point driving is a luxury -- you're choosing convenience so it's natural that that would come at a cost.
Heck, the federal gas tax in the US has not been increased since 1993 because people are so sensitive about stuff like this...
The notion that parking is somehow a necessity is only really because of crappy public transit and sprawling cities. In a dense city with good transit options, point-to-point driving wouldn't even be among the top options for getting places to begin with.
• Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers.
• Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages. Prices will balance the demand and supply for on-street space.
• Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can make demand-based prices for on-street parking politically popular.
Given the mix-use urban buildings I've encountered recently, hotels from floor 1-5, offices from floor 6-10, condos up to the top (or something like that), street level shops, office space, I don't see how removing off-street parking requirements would address anything. If you have office workers you must allocate off-site parking space. You're still building for cars, cost of parking is subsidized by the employer or the business. The Tysons development in Northern Virginia is an example of this hell, it's attached to a giant mall and also near a metro (so there's commuter parking involved). I suppose the people who can afford this enclave will not need cars but most everyone else who visits must have one. Every time I go there I think I'm in a dystopian future where the swells live and work in shiny high towers and take futuristic transport to "the country" to take in the air and their children can pet goats. It's not a space for built for humans, at all, but I bet the architectural model looked great.
Point (2), you have to make charging for parking frictionless. There's another development in Northern Virginia called Reston Town Center, they switched from free parking to paid with an app and that caused in an unexpected furor that hasn't died down yet, I think renters are still suing the developers over that. People may be willing to pay cash but making them pay with an app, and a crappy app at that, took them over the edge. Still don't know why you just can't pay with a swipe. Also, payment systems are vulnerable to theft. People who had a choice of driving there or not, decided to not. It's mixed with condos so the people who live there, shop there, but then you've only made an enclave, have you solved anything?
Under a user pays model, parking will be allocated to those who need it the most. Those whose need for parking is not as strong will make more use of alternatives. But when everybody pays there is no incentive to reduce individual consumption, as you will not personally be better off.
If you have office workers why must you allocate parking? Why can't some of those office workers choose to take the bus or a train, or cycle or walk? When the cost of driving is subsidised by everyone, there is no incentive to consider or develop these alternatives.
That's insane, and even more that when I searched for it it's being marketed as "liveable".
Google Maps shows business names, but flip to Open Street Map [1] and two things stand out: motorways and car parks.
> also near a metro ... most everyone else who visits must have [a car]
Um... the metro?
But you're clearly right. To get from Tysons Corner metro into the mall you must climb stairs, cross an 8+-lane highway in a tube, then another road, then cross a plaza. They didn't think of connecting that tube straight into the mall building, or connecting it to the opposite end of the platforms.
Outside North America, the parking garages for a mall like this would be below (sometimes above) the shops and the mall would be oriented to have a very short, covered walkway connection to the metro, and if possible the station would be in the middle of the mall.
There would not be 21 road lanes to the east, 10 to the north, 9 to the west and 4 to the south.
> dystopian future
Looking on Wikipedia, I'm amazed at how recently much of this was constructed.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/38.9224/-77.2233 (shows railways better).
It would allow the developer to choose the appropriate amount of parking spaces for their building, instead of being forced to follow the requirements resulting from central planning by the city administrators.
They cannot simply rely on on-street parking instead, since (per the second bullet point) the prices would for those parking spaces would increase dramatically, providing the developer with a competitive disadvantage.
I could see this working out perfectly fine for businesses who compete for customers, as those will likely be very sensitive to the cost of a parking space. However, for buildings where people do not have a choice of whether to travel there, this seems more problematic. Imagine e.g. a courthouse – missing parking spaces would just impose a negative externality on the unfortunate “customers”. I guess the question is in which category office buildings and residential areas fall into, arguments could be made either way.
It doesn’t. It allows developers to dump the problem on public streets. Seattle does this stuff now. 42 unit buildings with 5 parking spots. This is great for developers. They get to build more units and let Seattle deal with the additional parking pressure.
It’s car hostile, which fine, but then you need to provide alternatives to the car. If a developer wants to build without appropriate parking, they should have to pay Seattle a big chunk of that savings to fund better public transit. Instead it’s just a bunch of money in the developer’s pocket and people driving around for 20 minutes trying to find a spot to park. Adjacent neighborhoods pay the price.
It’s the developer’s responsibility for the same reason anything else is: because the law says so (or should). If developers could get away with it, they wouldn’t put in fire alarms or sprinklers and they’d skip out on insulation, and they would probably cut all sorts of corners on plumbing and electric. We establish codes so they can’t do that. Nor can they build unreasonably small bathrooms or excessively low ceilings in finished spaces.
I think it’s reasonable that builders be required to include parking spaces, just as builders are required to have sufficient water supply and sewer capacity for their residents. It’s unfair to the residents and it’s unfair to the rest of the city that developers should be able to externalize their costs onto the public.
Take the building in his example, with 42 units and only 5 parking spots. That means 37 units are only useful to people who either don't have cars or who can find their own parking such as on street or at nearby paid lots.
Now imagine that other building are built nearby with similar ratios of units to lots, which might lead to a neighborhood where there is not enough street parking or nearby lots, and most units are only useful to people who have no car.
If the neighborhood has good public transit that might work. If transit is not great through you could end up with a lot of units that are only useful to people who can spend most of their time within walking distance of their home.
How well that works depends on what else is in the neighborhood.
By building buildings with only parking for a fraction of the units, you are making a building that only works in some plausible evolutions of that neighborhood.
If on the other hand you make it a requirement that the developer provide parking for all or most units, so they then include a parking level under the units you end up with a building that works in a much larger range of possible futures for development in the neighborhood and for changes in public transit.
If at the time you build the building a mix of 37 units without parking and 5 with parking would be fine for that neighborhood, build in the parking level but partition it into 5 parking spaces and and 42 storage. The storage units will make the units more attractive, and if future needs change so that what you need there is a building with more parking you can change the partitioning of the parking level. You can even configure it back and forth as the neighborhood and city evolve over the lifetime of the building.
Because otherwise they're just raking in the profits (from many additional units) and externalizing all the negatives.
> People choosing this apartment building will be aware of their parking options and can plan accordingly.
In a perfect world with perfectly rational people, you're right. But the leasing office will claim "you can always find a spot nearby" and people tend to be optimistic about having it work out even if rationally it won't.
When the developer switched to paid parking, there were literal protests: folks with signs.
It absolutely gutted the shops. Foot traffic was way down. And now with COVID, we have dozens of empty storefronts.
Consumers vote with their wallet, and lots of folks are dead set against paying for parking.
I don’t see the problem; I get what I need and the people in Boston presumably get what they need. If a shopkeeper wants to cater to traffic that comes by car, they presumably set up shop in a suburb (where rents are cheaper anyway).
So, to solve the problem for myself, I built BTON:
you signal that you're leaving... someone comes and hands you a bton - you can use it to find your next spot; BTONs also have floating value to incentivize the spot leaver. Its free and in the App Stores; Again - I built it for a problem I directly and repeatedly experienced (trying to find parking in NYC). Would love to hear your feedback.
This ensures that there are parking spaces available for people running errands or people who transport heavy things, while at the same time making it less attractive for commuters or residents to block parking spaces all day long.
Plenty of people will risk parking in "no parking" / "permit only" spaces if they expect to only be away for a short duration (<30 mins).
The worst places in the city to park are streets where residents are allowed to park free / cheap. There's almost never a free spot!
I lived in a street like that, and it was really annoying. Visitors / people running errands wouldn't find a spot, and residents wouldn't find a spot either. Once I found a good spot I tried to avoid using my car because I wouldn't find such a good parking spot when I returned -- oh the absurdity.
It's also pretty common for apartment complexes to have a "loading only" spot in front of a building for deliveries and moving etc.
Also most cities tend to have restrictions for free street parking like "no more than 72hrs in a spot". Although I suspect this is to discourage RVs...
We’re in the age of COVID, discovering the benefits of not going places, and creating new options not to. Charging for parking makes me reconsider going there at all, raising the cost and hassle - more likely to go elsewhere, stay home and do remotely, or forego the activity. Low-cost or low-planning activities don’t happen if parking sets minimum cost to >$0; random purchases will be passed up. If I do pay for parking, I expect convenience, security, and ease for the act. I’m less likely to visit a local city precisely because parking will at least double my cost getting there (gas); I’d rather spend that $ going somewhere farther, more interesting and free parking.
Want more business? Figure out how to make it cheaper for me to be there: reduce friction, make parking free and easy.
I wonder if you could replace this with: "some people strongly support X - except in circumstances where it negatively affects them personally".
But if a lot of people get there by walk, bike, or transit - it makes no sense for parking to be free, especially if street parking can be replaced by outdoor (truly outdoor, with air flowing freely) dining.
Our downtown is a grim wasteland. Shoppers, workers and residents have voted with their feet -- and they voted to avoid downtown.
And it's not just Covid. The suburbs are booming. Walkable areas (most with free parking) in the 'burbs have new stores opening and have crowds of people eating, shopping, and enjoying life. Houses are in high-demand, while apartments near the core of the city are easy to find.
I say all this to say that maybe we should pause and reconsider new urbanism. The push to remove cars (less parking, more expensive parking, removing lanes, "road diets") isn't making our cities better, it's pushing people away. Strong Towns told us this would make our city better, but all evidence points to our cities getting markedly worse.
People can go look around the downtown of any given city to see a "grim wasteland", but it has little to do with new urbanism and much to do with covid causing major shift to work from home + avoiding a lot of in-person events.
But 1) the start of the shift pre-dates Covid and 2) suburbs are booming with in-person activity, so it's not just Covid.
It's not easy for a lot of other people though. Rent in those neighborhoods is too expensive for most, and while you can take kids around by transit or by bike (and I certainly encourage people to do that when it's convenient), you'd have to be a pretty dedicated urbanist to do that for all your trips.
I don't follow the reasoning. Conservatives are against taxes, right? How is not wanting a tax on parking, something that is naturally free, "communist"?
Parking spots are often small enough, used for short enough periods of time, or in places with low enough land prices that it's not worth charging for them, but people often continue to insist that parking should be free even when those descriptions no longer apply.
The "scarcity" is largely manufactured. Go to Google earth, take the street view dude, plunk it randomly anywhere in the central United States - and there will almost certainly be untapped free parking space as far as the eye can see.
If a parking spot is paved, does it become more reasonable to charge for it?
in many Bay Area communities you will see cars as tightly aligned on both sides of residential streets as is physically possible...homeowners don't even have room to put out trash bins without blocking their own drives. and why? because apartment complexes and offices don't provide spaces for their users. so, people just clutter up the streets. win?
any time there are measures to make parking inconvenient, you end up with annoying ordinances banning street parking...or "members only" local passes...or meter maids who exist to torment us all
how can the government get us out of our cars when they otherwise encourage car use as broadly as possible?
In order to fix the issue of congested and dangerous streets, we need to get drivers to shift to other transit modes, and part of the answer is to stop coddling them with free parking.
Public transportation is one, but the last thing many of us want to do right now is get on a crowded train.
Bicycles are great until it gets too hot or too cold which is a pretty large chunk of the year. They also aren't an option for many of us with health issues.
Ride sharing and taxi services are available, but they can be more expensive and unreliable.
In smaller neighborhoods I think electric golf carts can work, but the range isn't great and they usually don't have heat or air conditioning.
I saw an older Waymo video where the car was somewhere between a golf cart and a regular car. I think something like that has a lot of promise, but nobody is making them.
If downtown areas get rid of free parking, I wonder if that would just push business out to the 'burbs where there's unlimited parking? That's not great for cities either.
The best general purpose plan I can conceive of is to build mixed housing and commercial in places where there is already decent transit. No parking minimums.
Build in earnest for a city where people can literally walk to any errand they may need. European planners actually do this -- they require neighborhood plans that offer a mix of residential, commercial (restaurants and nightlife), schools, other amenities. If the local grocery store is 2 blocks away, you don't need to get on a crowded train at all!
Cities ultimately have to be built for the people who live there. In Austin, I'm pretty sure voters are going to continue to demand better car-based infrastructure first and then bus, train, and bicycle infrastructure second.
Definitely agree with mixing commercial and residential though. I live in the suburbs but that's because my office is also out here.
No thank you. I've tried them all, and driving is better than all of them.
> and part of the answer is to stop coddling them with free parking.
Yup, can't make the other options better, so instead the only alternative is to make driving worse. Great plan.
Another approach might be to make other transit modes suck less. A lot less.
Tangent: there's an interesting equilibrium effect with commuter traffic - if a commute is served by an automobile route and a train line, the commute times will be similar. If for some reason, automobile traffic is delayed by loss of road capacity, over the long term some of that auto traffic will switch modes to the rail option, until the systems are in equilibrium once again.
Obviously in the real world this is much more complex but it's still observable... let me see if I can find a link...
I live in Cambridge, MA (1.4 miles from the Boston red line subway) and, excluding rides where I’m coming home from the airport, I bet I ride the subway less than once per year on average. It’s just not remotely competitive on door-to-door time with a private car, an Uber, or [most commonly] driving in the other direction to an alternative restaurant or shop with parking. (And Boston is probably in the top 10 of functioning mass transit systems in the US.)
Like you, I commute to somewhere where it's annoying to take transit. I've settled on a combination of cycling, WFH and driving on occasion. I can pick up a rail trail for about half my commute, which means that it's actually faster to bike than to dive.
I'm actually looking for employment that's a little bit closer. If I worked within about a 2 mile radius, I'd actually have a feasibly walk-only lifestyle.
When you live in the downtown of a city, and parking at your apartment is $300/month, that's a strong incentive to give up your car
I would never use my car for any of those examples (living in a small EU city). The car is just there for leisure activities, to access skiing in winter and mountain biking/hiking/camping spots in the summer. Yeah it's more expensive than not owning a car but for some hobbies it's hard to give it up.
"annoying ordinances banning street parking", as if street parking isn't itself extremely annoying to pedestrians and cyclists.
"free" parking is not free. just like any other scarce good that the government mandates to be "free", someone, somewhere is paying for it.
Do you mean forcing, by law, business and homebuilders to provision parking?
these laws aren't new...when Yahoo's "new" campus was built in 1999, only 8 parking spots per 10 employees were allowed to "encourage mass transit use" (lol)...so people just wasted hours driving around aimlessly
Parking in the street is still parking. The first parking to charge for (and the one to charge most for) is street parking.