Make Parking Impossible

"Until the advent of automated ticket machines, many garages were controlled by the mafia. Grabar takes us on a tour of parking’s underbelly, including the Philadelphia airport where attendants collected between $3 million and $7 million in cash a year in the 1990s by underreporting long-stay parking. Owning parking was a good way to launder money and cheaply get a piece of downtown real estate to develop later. Parking was a tough business, and it has been routinely made macho in popular culture. Garages are unloved parts of the urban landscape, and they produce an unsettling feeling when inside. Deep Throat set up his meeting with Bob Woodward in one, and Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered in the subterranean garage of the Dallas Police Headquarters. Yet, despite the suspicion that garages are where bad things happen, most cities want to build more of them rather than phase them out."

Is this a joke? Parking garages are bad because the mafia owned some, Bob Woodward interviewed a source in one and Lee Harvey Oswald was shot in another?

Like, the mafia built a lot of children's playgrounds and playgrounds have been the site of many horrifying crimes. So what?

It might be true that we should reduce parking space but this argument structure is insulting and contemptible.

Parking is impossible in San Francisco. It hasn’t helped.

Only an insane person would try to take the bus. The Bart takes literally one line through the city. Doesn’t connect to Caltrain in any sensible way. You can’t buy a monthly transit pass because some moron added a clause to the Bart authorization law requiring every segment to pay for itself which means it’ll never be possible to get a combined muni / Bart / Caltrain pass.

You could bike I suppose if you have a death wish. No route through SF is safe for bikes. Try it.

What’s left? Leave I suppose.

Oh, but if you want to actually fix it. Recognize that people need to move from A to B for several important things in their lives (work, groceries, healthcare, friends to name a few) and make viable alternatives to driving. You actually have to do the work to craft an alternative.

> No one wants to be cruising a highway in a Fiat 500, feeling vulnerable as everyone else lords above them in Tahoes, Expeditions, and Escalades.

Actually, it's more that I don't want to be cruising the highway in a Fiat 500, full stop. Once you've experienced long trips in a large comfortable car, going back is _very_ hard.

I really hate these people. They make life worse for everyone as a way to be ideologically pure because their life is so white and middle class. “I take the bus and it’s fine” says janet who only takes it twice a week between her house and the tennis club.

I don’t want to take a bus. The screaming children, the knives, the people calling the black people racial slurs and threatening to attack them, the black people mugging the screaming children… It’s just awful. I never want to have to go back to that. Cars are so peaceful and safe. Nobody can bother me there and I can transport as many items as I want without being mugged.

These people will win and they’ll ruin everything and it just pisses me off. My family were peasants for all of history and I finally get the right to travel freely and now the other peasants are taking it off me to trap me in the village. The lords will never have to take the bus.