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Comment by dotcoma | Hacker News Reader

Please ban free parking, too!

This has already happened in my area. If you want to park on the street you now have to pay £120 / year extra to the council.

Edit: That’s not an allocated space, that’s just to park somewhere on the street, maybe, if there is a space available.

That is very cheap, if you want to rent a similar sized piece of land in the same place it costs orders of magnitude more. Just think about how much a restaurant with some tables on the sidewalk is paying.

Most of them are paying nothing. They got that space for free during covid and cities haven't taken it back yet.

That's just not providing free parking. Banning it would be disallowing malls, stores, gas stations (heh) etc from providing parking without charging for it.

This is currently a hot potato in Norway. The local government wants to force malls to charge for their parking at rates to be decided by the government, but aren't allowed due to national regulation.

So there is a political battle to determine whether the law will be changed to allow it. The malls aren't at all happy about it, of course.

Can't the government just levy a tax per parking spot?

My council was incredibly fast to raise this for inflation. Literally back in March, they raised it from £100 to £107.

Greedy.

That is a really cheap price for public land

I want my city to do this, because it will mean that people won't just store their unused cars on the streets, which means that it will be much easier for people who actually live here to park.

You can defeat this law by detailing everything you're giving away for free including parking, ketchup packets, napkins, EV charging, etc..

Then it will become just some extra government-mandated printing that nobody reads, like the stuff they print on the receipt asking you to go online and fill out a survey.

I usually look at the survey offer. If it's good enough value to me, I'll do their survey

I think that with enough spaces disbursed evenly enough, this would actually be good. And I love to drive and park.

Technically if you park in the supermarket free parking, you can't leave your car there while you pop in to the bar around the corner. Instead you're supposed to move the car to the bar's parking. If the parking was independent of either business, you could park once and visit as many businesses as you cared to walk to from your car.

I can understand not requiring it but if someone wants to provide free parking they should be allowed to.

Free street parking vs free lot parking are two different things, but I can certainly see the arguments around both.

Establishments need to itemize how much free parking is adding to the cost of each meal or other product/service purchase so that non-drivers, carpoolers, etc, can fully appreciate how much they are losing to pinkos like the AAA.

Sure, if you want to build and maintain your own parking lot on your taxed land that is cool. Street parking should endeavor to be at least cost-neutral though, and free just means that taxpayers are subsidizing it.

I think all road use should require some type of fee and maybe tracking. Why should people using cars be subsidising the pedestrians and bikers by huge amounts of money. They should pay for their own roads.

You want the government to track you everywhere you go? What could possibly go wrong with that?

Isn't that small price to pay for everyone paying their fair share and not free loading on others?

Frankly, no.

Well, it's a price. Definitely not a small one.

I'll pay more and subsidize freeloaders rather than increase government tabs on me.

If that’s the case, car users should be paying _more_.

Pedestrian and bike infrastructure is peanuts in comparison to the investment and ongoing maintenance costs that car infrastructure requires.

I genuinely can't tell if you're being serious or just taking the piss.

If you're taking the piss: lol, pretty funny.

If you're serious: lol, pretty funny.

Wear from bikes and pedestrians is too small to be worth metering. You'd spend more on tracking and enforcement than it costs.

It's true that automobile use-in-terms-of-road-wear taxes would look very different from what they are now. A compact ICE car's total tax burden would drop to almost nothing. Ditto motorcycles. Truck and large SUV taxes would increase significantly. 18-wheelers would see enormous tax increases (road shipping is effectively heavily subsidized, now).

No, no it is not. No thank you.

The way it works in some places is that road tax is funded from taxes from general population plus road tax for cars, trucks and motorcycles plus, for highways, extra taxes for cars and trucks. The car use of pedestrians and bicycles has minimal to no impact on maintenance (I know sidewalks built more than 50 years ago that never needed any maintenance), while the part of the road where cars drive is impacted by the cars and a lot more by trucks, so the system above seems quite fair. Also highway taxes funded only by cars and trucks is very fair, pedestrians or cyclists are not allowed there.

Those must be in horrible condition. You are telling me that no one ever cleans sidewalks there? Or repair the broken parts?

What I am saying is that they are not broken. Pedestrians walking on asphalt sidewalks cannot break it. And no, in most cases rain is the only cleaning.

Cars don't subsidize pedestrians or bikers, at all. The maintenance on roads from pedestrian traffic is essentially 0. bikes to almost no damage to roads compared to cars, much less tractor trailers. Doubles the weight of a vehicle increases maintenance costs by a factor of 4 per axle... bicycles and pedestrians are nothing. And without cars, we could go with much cheaper gravel, dirt, cobblestone, etc with no issues.

Actually surface roads in my state in the US mostly have another 4 ft of the outside lane (typically 12ft) for bikes. So 16ft frequently, with approx 25% of that for bikes. I have no problem with that. Just trying to be accurate.

The actual reason for that space is a shoulder for breakdowns. They paint a line on it and call it a bike lane for PR. A usable bike lane needs physical protection (and not be usable by cars at all).

I want to believe this is some kind of dry sarcasm but cars don't subsidize pedestrians. If anything, urban walkable, bikable neighborhoods subsidize cars and suburban areas.

Roads are generally paid for from property taxes, which are paid by both pedestrians and drivers. The pedestrians are subsidizing the drivers.

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