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Comment by brenns10 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Which means drivers are getting a great discount thanks to the people who don't use a car, and the non-drivers are getting a markup on all the prices they pay. And the non-drivers were already paying a huge amount to maintain car infrastructure (at least in the US) because the gas tax doesn't nearly cover it.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand the value of a public good. Grocery stores receive food via trucks on roads, so even non-drivers get the benefit of the road. The parking subsidy, however, is insidious because it's so much less visible. It's not a government investing in a public good: the city instead requires businesses to maintain off-street parking, and they pass that cost on to everyone. It lets everybody believe that parking, and driving altogether, is much cheaper than it really is, because the (actually enormous) parking costs are hidden away and subsidized by those who don't use it.

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>the city instead requires businesses to maintain off-street parking, and they pass that cost on to everyone

I'm not sure how generally true that is where I live relatively nearby (Boston/Cambridge). There are some businesses that have generally fairly crowded/small parking lots. (And places like hospitals certainly do though you generally have to pay for them.) But in general you have to pay for metered parking or find a garage.

Much of this depends on the particular city's rules and when development happened. Off-street parking requirements have become far more common since the 1950s. Places that developed prior to this (and didn't dramatically re-develop) may not have this as much, since the rules would only apply to new development. I think a fair bit of the US northeast may fall under that category.

And, for instance, San Francisco has no required off-street parking, and has limits to off-street parking instead: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

However, plenty of other places in the US are different. The rest of the Bay Area is quite sprawled, as are the areas of the Midwest I've spent time in.

In San Fransisco, it's too "costly" to park on the street because your car will be broken into, with full support of the people of SF and law enforcement.

Not sure how many cities' economies can get get by just with their population buying locally, but if your parking is too expensive, I'm not visiting, and I'm not patronizing businesses. I don't actually know how sustainable a policy of "we don't accommodate visitors" is for a large city.

The entire point of a city is it to be a nexus of industry! Any place worthy of the name can get by just fine — the restaurants patronized by the locals, staffed by the locals, who have jobs in other locations. It’s not as if NYC needs your income (tourism accounts for about 7% of the economy). Not having a bunch of people clogging up the streets is a good policy.

Tourists in NYC generally don't drive their own cars around manhattan.

Now, they don't. When cars are self-driving?

Non drivers benefit because workers at the businesses they patronize don't have to pay for parking, delivery people don't have to pay for parking, visitors don't have to pay for parking, etc.

That's an argument that's pretty hard to justify. Most zoning rules with parking minimums attempt to meet peak demand for free parking. Subsidized free parking means that all the extra spaces are paid for by the business regardless of whether they're used. So the business (and thus the customer) is always overpaying for parking, compared to some hypothetical business with no free parking, but reimburses all market-rate parking for visitors and employees. Of course, that hypothetical business could only exist in a dense or very pedestrianized area, and not all businesses are suited to zero-parking.

The point I'd make is that mandating minimums of free parking is absurd: businesses and developers could instead decide how much parking they anticipate their business would need. They could come up with many creative solutions somewhere between the extremes of zero parking and plentiful free parking depending on the area. In most towns and cities across America, except for a few dense urban cores, we mandate one extreme and the result is higher prices for everyone (including the non-drivers, who get to help pay for all that unused parking as well).

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