Why “free” street parking could be costing you hundreds more in rent
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This will be at the "cost" of 150,000 parking spaces… out of three million. Our car-owning minority will fight tooth and nail for their right to cover our sidewalks in sacks of trash, which of course makes sense given that they don't walk anywhere.
But realistically, plenty of folks have cars in NYC. With a metro area of over 20M people, enough people commute into the city, or aren't close enough to LIRR/MNR/NJT, or prefer driving to visit, or just are needed for commercial/industrial/institutional uses to clog the city's roads.
Double parking is infamous in NYC, as are aggressive drivers and terrible roads and parking situations.
That joke doesn't work because the people who drive in NYC are by and large not NYC residents.
> But realistically, plenty of folks have cars in NYC.
Depends on your definition of "plenty". NYC is the only city in the country where the majority of residents do not own a car.
While car ownership rates are higher in the outer boroughs, OP is objectively correct that car ownership in NYC skews towards the wealthy.
This is a common talking point among people who oppose congestion pricing by incorrectly claiming that it is a regressive tax. In reality, car ownership rates are positively correlated with income, public transit usage is negatively correlated with income.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2007/11/02/fact-check-congestion...
https://citylimits.org/2017/09/07/debate-fact-check-is-conge...
Car ownership is relatively rare in NYC, with NYC being the only city in which the majority of residents do not have a car.
However, car ownership in NYC is strongly positively correlated with income[0], which means that local politicians and their key supporters are more likely to own cars, drive cars, and listen to the complaints of car-driving non-residents (e.g. the police, the majority of whom live outside the city, mostly in Long Island).
That means that politicians are reluctant to back any measure that makes driving or car ownership more inconvenient, not because their constituents don't support it, but because it inconveniences them personally. Anytime it comes up, they make a big effort to back the car-owning minority, making it seem like they're standing up for the "working class", when in reality they're very clearly just taking the stance that their wealthiest donors/supporters are pushing for.
[0] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2007/11/02/fact-check-congestion...
(you can view NYT articles by turning off javascript and refreshing, incidentally)
Shame, that's not great in cities, having a hard bin in your yard is cool, having one inside your flat is awful (and in-building storage of hard bins has ended up with rot every time I've seen in). Especially since they often come with tracking these days, which encourages only getting the bins out when they're full, which is not great for clean bins.
Though it does talk about collective containers for appartment buildings, so there's things to be optimistic about.
Reading https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/reports/fut..., a combination of individual waste bins for some houses and large shared containers above ground. A reason for making that choice is that underground containers require “substantial space to build underground and a comprehensive underground map that does not exist in New York City”
That makes me wonder how they build anything there.
Containerized Garbage is something that sounds really good, but there's always unexpected consequences to new policies.
Here's a quick stab at some of them.
1) Less Safe Roads. New Yorkers in many areas have to drive around for half an hour or an hour or more sometimes to find an open parking spot. This already leads to deeply frazzled nerves and unsafe driving as drivers scoot around oblivious to traffic and pedestrians to try and find a spot. I've seen drivers down main streets see a spot open up and immediately try and do a U-Turn into oncoming traffic, or just gun it through an intersection to try and be the first one to grab an open spot. Remove 5% of parking spaces, and this stuff increases. Maybe more people will get hurt in pointless accidents.
2) Fewer Spots lead to more parking tickets. These are of marginal impact on the well-off, but a struggling person who receives an unexpected ticket is completely fucked. The same people who claim to be on the side of the downtrodden and struggling classes truly ignore the actual impacts of their social engineering on those people. And as much as you might not like cars, many people have employment or childcare needs that depends on them.
3) Air Pollution and waste of gas. Garbage on the sidewalk is unsightly and horrible to see, but there's more than one kind of pollution. As mentioned, there are areas in the city where it's routine to drive around 30-60+ minutes to find a parking spot. Now increase all of this by a percentage, and more cars will be spewing exhaust fumes for longer. Is it a real win to tradeoff cleaner sidewalks for dirtier air? Maybe that's the best tradeoff, but I think it's important to recognize that there might be a tradeoff.
Despite all of this, I'm not saying that containerized garbage isn't a good idea. I'm just playing a little devil's advocate here. But just wanting to point out a different perspective that there's always some ignored bad that comes with every good.
Yes removing a few percent of parking spaces will make the mismatch slightly worse (since less supply means the price should rise a bit more) but that’s not the root cause of the problem
I'm not a fan of externalities, so this makes sense to me, especially in an urban area where public transportation is available.
That's addressed in the article. In the long run, these laws result in overproduction of parking spaces, driving down density, driving up car utilization, and accelerating (sub)urban sprawl.
> I'm not a fan of externalities, so this makes sense to me, especially in an urban area where public transportation is available.
A better approach is to provide public transportation and make car owners actually pay for parking spots (currently, street parking is completely free in NYC).
I think you may be thinking "require developers to build parking spots for planned occupants of (apartment/store/building)" but the person you replied to was advocating not for building more parking spots, but rather limiting the number of car registrations to the number of parking spots.
I would only add that in a place like NYC, many of the cars are registered in a completely different state (NJ, for example) and still driven in Manhattan so I think you'd need a special permit/RFID tag/plate registration to drive through the bridges/tunnels to get to Manhattan.
From their reply, I think you're mostly right, in that we both agree that parking should not be free for car owners.
> I think you may be thinking "require developers to build parking spots for planned occupants of (apartment/store/building)" but the person you replied to was advocating not for building more parking spots, but rather limiting the number of car registrations to the number of parking spots.
The issue is that, unless parking spots are themselves capped (or extremely costly), this just encourages developers to build more parking spaces. It's not as bad as using public land for it, but it's still bad.
In denser places, like Tokyo, people don't need cars like in most U.S. cities, they live in walkable neighborhoods full of multiuse buildings with transit connecting them to larger commercial areas and the rest of the country.
Tokyo would be quite different if all streets in those walkable neighborhoods had to be widened for parking.
Someone who wants a car can leave room on their city lot to park it, or rent space within walking or transit distance. Visitors would park in nearby pay-for-parking lots. I assume in less dense places in Japan it is not difficult to have a driveway to park in, just like in U.S. suburbs.
I don't follow your connection as to how eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. To the contrary it seems like taxpayer subsidies in the U.S. for cars, which include free street parking, led to a lot of sprawl.
This is a common fallacy: "X happens in Y, and Y has greater Z. Therefore, X increases (or does not decrease) Z". At its core, it's an issue of confounding variables: even if what you're saying is true (I don't know, because I don't know about Japanese parking policy), you can't use differences in macro results as a way to draw conclusions about the effects of micro policies. There's too much else that gets bundled up in that measurement and which isn't controlled for.
> I don't follow your connection as to how eliminating free parking leads to sprawl.
I didn't say eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. I said that requiring (or encouraging) the creation of parking spots without any external cap or limit on parking would lead to sprawl.
I did not have a car for the first 4 years I lived in NYC. I have one now. Let me try to explain some reasons why someone may want a car in the city:
* public transportation doesn't go where you need to go, or if it does, it takes unreasonably long. Example 1: you live in an outer borough, your job or family or love interest is in a different outer borough. Example 2: you are in a transit desert (e.g. certain parts of Queens). Example 3: you are an outdoor enthusiast and head out to the Gunks, Catskills, Hudson Valley, or the Delaware Water Gap every weekend. Example 4: you got your kid into an out of district elementary school because the nearby school is terrible, and the subway doesn't go there.
* you regularly need to carry heavy or bulky objects. Example 1: you work in the trades. Example 2: you own a place and are renovating it DIY. Example 3: you operate a small brick and mortar business and regularly need to get supplies from Restaurant Depot etc. Example 4: you have a back yard and want to do some gardening.
* you or someone in your household can't easily use public transportation. Example 1: injury, illness, or disability. Example 2: you have a baby in a stroller; buses require you to fold the stroller, many subway stations lack elevators.
If public transit isn't good enough, the answer isn't for people to drive cars, it's for the city to build more and better public transit. Complain to your elected officials, or vote for better ones.
If you have a back yard and buy gardening stuff, you can pay to have it delivered. Any city with excellent public transit has no problem delivering cargo by van on surface streets.
You don't need a car if you're disabled. Subway stations should have elevators, or you can use a taxi (subsidized by the local government) or disabled transit van. Any good city has this stuff. Stollers can be used on subways, and stations all have elevators in good cities. Here in Tokyo, parents use strollers on the subways all the time.
It sounds like you live in some corrupt, backwards nation that can't build decent infrastructure.
They're privileged because roads and parking are paid for by all whether they use a car or not. The gas tax does not cover the infrastructure spend needed to handle the volume of car traffic US roads experience.
From what I know, cyclists don't exhibit the level of road rage toward other cyclists that people in cars engage in with each other.
The sacrifices that everyone else makes are in tax dollars, air quality, lack of alternative transportation options and arguably health care spending.
I don't mean to make this out to make it seem like car-owners are the cause of all this, because certainly not all of them are. But by continuing to model our transportation infrastructure almost entirely around them does have negatives for others as well as car-owners themselves.
For 1 and 3, though, People driving around for a long time to find a parking space is a sure sign that parking is too cheap. The ideal parking price, according to Donald Shoup, is one that leads to there being an average of 1 empty space per block. That does mean that pricing has to adjust according to time of day/day of week, and probably be higher during special events.
And that does have the downside that, well, parking is more expensive. But I think the benefits far outweigh the costs, as driving has a ton of bad externalities, especially in cities.
[0] https://www.intelligenttransport.com/transport-news/143883/l...
This is what we have in Switzerland in the city's where there is zero room for garbage.
The cost here is around 50k to 150k depending on size and if there is a compactor also built in. No smell and no mess.
This would be a nonstarter in NYC, because large parts of the city are unmapped underground (because they were built in an era when records weren't kept methodically). Digging is expensive because you don't actually have a centralized record of where gas lines, water mains, cables, etc. all are - you have to uncover it carefully, see what's there, and then work around it.
> The cost here is around 50k to 150k depending on size and if there is a compactor also built in. No smell and no mess.
Everything costs much more in NYC, even before you factor in the aforementioned issues.
So just give up? Maybe there should be an effort to correctly map all lines and improve the general infrastructure.
Not unless you think there's no other option between "do something that's ill-suited for the local problem" and "do nothing".
> Maybe there should be an effort to correctly map all lines and improve the general infrastructure.
Sit down and think about both the logistics of this and the cost, and map out what you think a reasonable timeline for that would be, and you'll hopefully understand why that's a nonstarter for a sanitation problem that requires an imminent solution.
People are going to cling to their cars until they have a viable substitute that offers all of the following:
1. Psychological safety - that they wont be robbed or assaulted, wont have to encounter people they dont want to, wont be uncomfortable temperature wise, wont be late due to unreliable operation (including the apathy of unionized workers), wont have to smell things they dont want to smell
2. Similar experience to cars - Get them within 1/4 mile of their destination (~5 minute walk). Anything more means adapting fashion to the elements.
3. Does not have seasonal variability in usability - The bus in Calgary, AB is amazing in the winter, and sucks in the winter (waiting for a late bus in the cold means you have to dress for 40 minutes in -20c weather, when it might only be 2. And then you're inside a 20C bus with far too much clothes on. And it's hard to end up at work presentable. This is probably far less important now with rise of remote work for many.
4. Is not a tax line item that is absurdly expensive per user mile. Right now a lot of public transit is under utilized meaning it's actual price per user mile is very high. I get that it's a chicken / egg challenge. How do you get people to use a sparse system unless you build out a full suite of routes. How do you build a full suite of routes without having them be underutilized, at least at first?
5. Works 24/7 for their needs.
6. Works well for families. Getting groceries with 2 kids, going to urgent care acceptably fast, pickup and drop off at 2 different schools (elementary / middle for example). All sorts of patterns that work with 1 parent and 2 kids each having a diff destination.
Ultimately I think with autonomous cars the whole landscape will change rapidly if the gov't & unions allow it. Parking isn't an issue if my car goes home to my garage during the day (or can park itself within an inch of the next car because no one is getting in/out and the cars can coordinate to unblock each other in a truly packed parking garage). Even more so if the autonomous car is not mine and it simply goes to pickup another rider. Now we have controlled environment for just me and the car can be a small 2 seater like a smart car.
If the car was in fact messy, the previous user takes a reputation hit and may eventually get charged more, if it happens enough to have high confidence they're really at fault. This gives an extra incentive for users to go ahead and report, if there's a problem.
On the other hand if the car was fine, then a separate reputation score starts to lower the weight on the rejecting user, eventually just keeping their rejects in service instead of sending them for cleaning.
It's up to the ridesharing service to decide what they consider "fine," probably something along the lines of "X% of users wouldn't report this."
I would add to #2, "Get them within a 5 minute walk without it taking twice as long". I am ok if public transit takes me up to 50% longer. But many trips are 1.5 to 2x as long when including transfers, and it's not cheap! Sometimes I have to pay multiple transit agencies to get to where I want to go.
Exactly why I prefer public transport over cars. Driving is just lost time to me.
This is a difference between perception and objective reality. Public officials began this campaign of "educating" people about the "dangers" of public transit years ago, coincidentally right when crime was at its all-time historical low. The perception that the subway is unsafe was not actually grounded in any objective facts, but rather a response to the feedback loop generated between the media and public officials.
This would have been very difficult before Uber-like services, as taxis were too slow & unreliable in my experience (London minicabs were pretty atrocious at giving you reasonable time estimates).
This absolutely doesn't work in very suburban/exurban areas; but it really opens it up past very dense city environments where you don't need a car imo.
Just an anecdote, and ultimately felt it was much better to live on the peninsula during lockdowns than to be "car free" and without options in the city.
Also while I don't like crazed drug-addled hobos on the bus with me, I don't feel particularly afraid of them because I'm a male. If I also had to make sure they didn't accost my wife or children would be far less tolerable.
For meal pick-up it is mostly a wash because it is 1:1 too much. But for scheduled delivery, that math is changed. We need to think of some of these systems more like mail delivery and less like instant delivery on demand.
It's a pain to order few items (and delivery cost amortizes across more items, or is not free).
At least my grocery, maybe most, charge more per item as a hidden fee
You dont get to pick the produce/items and store employees do not give a shit.
You have to remain home for a delivery window instead of start/stopping at exactly your choice of time
.
The hard thing is that every substitute has many tradeoffs and many people are already living their optimized choice of tradeoffs that they can determine for themselves without forcing others to make a suboptimal personal choice in sacrifice for distribute good
A lot of social good choices look like "You sacrifice $1 so that 200 people can have a penny more" It's a tough sell because usually the people paying receive far less than they receive back from social good. Yes its "on average" beneficial, but not to the one who's account is being raided.
I'm with you on picking your battles. You have to decide where your pain points are and where your conveniences are.
Right now it's 10pm in the UK and I have some free time. I can jump on the bus and go and buy my groceries for tomorrow, or in the car and for the next week, or the next month.
I could schedule a delivery for... when? Guess when I'm in the house ahead of time and stay in the house? That's literally the opposite of the metropolitan lifestyle I signed up for by living here.
The same applies to basically all of the "solutions" to cars. Trains - oh, it's cheap, just book it in advance! Etc etc. It adds a ton of friction to every day life.
Every place I needed to go to was over 5m walk away.
And point 1 - psychological safety? As far from it as possible.
And frankly, 1.3 deaths per 100M miles driven is not that dangerous. 40k per year in a country of 300M is not a lot of folks. Obesity likely kills significantly more.
the vast majority of people that live in NYC seem to do perfectly well without a car
> the vast majority of people that live in NYC seem to do perfectly well without a car
Yes, you can work around a lot of public transport issues (and NY has many of those) by extending your walk. Which is unpleasant in many situations but absolutely possible. And yes, I wouldn't want to drive in NY either.
I also knew a few folks who live in the NY suburbs who have a car as well, for when they need to do something other than commute to work in NY.
All I could easily find out about (including via Google Maps) was the subway and bus. And a 20m walk in the heat. At least all the skyscrapers provided decent shade.
When? The 7 has run directly to the Javits center for nearly ten years now.
> a couple of miles through just-shy-of-sketchy neighborhoods
This is a common issue for people who visit NYC. It's funadmentally an issue of perception, which makes it hard to address because it's inherently subjective, not rooted in objective facts. To get to the Javits center from the subway, you would have had to walk through the Theater District, Hell's Kitchen, and/or Chelsea. These are some of the wealthiest, most developed, and safest areas in the country. While you may personally perceive it as "just-shy-of-sketchy", that's fundamentally a perception issue: your expectations aren't calibrated in a way that aligns with the actual safety profile of the areas that you're visiting.
I think this is part of why the parent poster used the term "psychological safety". The thing about driving is that you are individually in control, you can choose how you drive and that greatly affects the safety of driving. While public transport may be statistically safer, for some people the lack of control increases the feeling of lack of safety. I am one of those people actually. I've been driving for more than 20 years, I've had several accidents, all of which occurred while my vehicle was fully stopped and I was rear-ended by someone not paying attention, some while my car was parked and I wasn't even in it. I've had zero injuries from driving, and I have an impeccably maintained fleet of vehicles and have extensive driving training (I hold a competition racing license, have driven many different types of vehicles, and have done executive protection/pursuit driving training). I feel significantly safer in a vehicle I own, maintain, and control (including my reactions to others) than I do being exposed trapped in a box with random other people, many of whom are dangerous, without any significant recourse. The only way I'd ever take public transport every day is if self-defense were strongly legally protected and I could be armed at all times, because there are too many crazy people out there that will kill you for looking at them accidentally, or for not dropping a dollar in their hat when they're busking, or whatever other reason they contrive in their delusional minds for why they should harm a random person they don't even know.
Statistically I might be safer taking public transport, but in a car I never have to expose myself to random crazies without an escape strategy, and I can choose how I react to other drivers to prevent accidents (I have avoided MANY MANY MANY accidents in my life due to my awareness and superior driving skills).
I feel for the psychological safety aspect, I really do. There are some cities in the US where the public transit system gets underutilized and hosts more bad behavior. From personal experience, MARTA seems rough after COVID, and psychological safety rightfully becomes a huge factor in avoiding the public transit system. But your second to last sentence is pure hysteria. If you feel that unsafe in Boston or NYC, I'd advise you to drive armed too, because you could experience trouble from a "random crazy" with road rage.
Agreed, and I do drive armed. I conceal carry every time I leave my house. So far I've only ever experienced one road rage incident in more than 20 years of driving, and it was able to be resolved without needing to use a weapon in self-defense. Unfortunately there's crazy people with self-control issues everywhere.
Generally speaking we have a problem in America that there are a lot of potentially violent mentally-unsound people roaming around, we have no cohesive plan to get these people treatment/help/medication, and in most major cities you will be penalized for defending yourself so you have little recourse if someone decides to attack you. Solving this problem will likely solve many other social problems, but there seems to be little political will to try to solve this problem.
As a former Canadian I often tell people that Canada's gun safety starts with a well funded social safety net.
It's not just that people "cant" (legally) get guns as easily. It's that they dont want to do terrible things with them.
Woof, I think this right here is the thing that we'll never get beyond. I get that when we talk about psychological safety for this, it's hard to point at numbers because people don't make measured judgments about numbers... But when you make a claim like that, I think it deserves some numbers to be more than just fear mongering.
While yes, we will need to account for this while driving. I do wonder if this takes us way to far from the root. People drive drunk so we need busses to be safe? Sometimes attribution is key and in this case I think we need to allow drunk driving's cause of death be "alcohol industry" and not "driving".
This leads into my argument that if we need gun more control in this country it's only logical we also need more direly Food control and Alcohol control (both obesity and drunkenness harm far far more people than guns)
Autonomous cars that work as you describe are not anywhere close to being ready. And I don't think the math works if they're a replacement for mass transit.
Self Driving can do a lot of things that increase the efficiency of roadways.
Eg: If everyone's vehicle went to a fixed 10mph idle speed as soon as the light turned green we'd get far more vehicles through a light rather than cascading 1-2 second reaction times to the next vehicle's brake lights (and much more if the person is on their phone, which is increasingly common) .
Eg2: Self driving cars could drive much closer to eachother, and actually pre-communicate intent to brake giving the effect of negative reaction time. (relative to humans)
The downtown areas that are likely to be workable with no parking in the mid-sized cities I've lived in are already essentially "child-free zones". I think that childless people tend to self-select into the trendy downtown lifestyle, and are more inclined to imagine the world as a playground for young adults.
Go to any other civilized country and you’ll see children biking or walking to their daily activities, or riding public transport alone (ever heard of a school bus?) if they really need to.
Part of why Americans travel 20 miles per day is because highways make things "close" in terms of minutes, and because they take up so much space, large roadways can make proximal (distance) things further. Eg if you have to walk 1 mile down a highway to a pedestrian bridge to get to the part that is just across 8 lanes, a 1 minute walk becomes a 40 minute walk.
Additionally these roadways rarely are kid safe for things like bicycles.
Additionally social stratification and division has made it (seemingly?) less for those kids to travel alone.
Additionally 100 other points.
I really do think when people choose to drive they're expressing their best known solution to a wide variety of non transportation issues and because they choose it it feeds back on itself democratically and design wise (Design for cars because people choose cars, people choose cars because of the solutions to design for cars)
1. Get people to change their lifestyles to the downtown lifestyle in which you don't own a home, you don't do significant DIY / outdoor hobbies etc, you don't often leave a 10ish mile radius of your home except for holidays.
Everything in the "fuck cars" movement seems to stem from that.
I live in London and the public transport network works fantastically for the "metropolitan lifestyle". But that's not what I want to limit my life to.
If push came to shove and I had to decide whether I wanted a house with a garden, kids, hobbies that require transporting relatively large items, etc, I'd sooner move out of the city than give that up.
I love clubs, pubs, makerspaces and the high street as much as the next guy but it's pretty easy to just live out of town and get the train in for that.
You should not have a house, you should live in a city, everything should be shared and paid for with taxes.
I was born in NYC and own my own apartment and I am considered a "Gentrifier" because I bought it and do not rent.
I like living in a metropolitan area, but I can see why other's don't.
You can't work on your own place, you have to employ someone to do that. Where do they live with their work van? I guess they have to be a business(tm) and rent a warehouse. Oh and their van has to be less than 5 years old, otherwise it's too pollutey. They can just buy a new one, that's fine.
Etc etc.
It'd be funny if it wasn't actually happening. I have had a pretty charmed life and I still find it really hard to understand the weirdly bookish attitude.
Part of this is the taxation and GDP-ification of everything.
(not saying go back) for example when we traded housewives for house cleaners + hello fresh + fiverr assistants we got a double whammy of GDP growth (+ for the wife going to work, plus for the employees now doing her previously unaccounted work at a profit). And same story with IRS receivables. (again, not saying send women back home, just pointing out the accounting)
Yes, my hobbyist motorcycle track riding, self maintenance etc are massively hampered by apartment living (where they have dozens of rules against the things I expressly want to do like change my own oil).
And if I have to take the motorcycle to a mechanic to pay $140 to do a $20 parts and labor job. Suddenly that car free life (garage free life) is costing me $120 more this month.
I'm a fairly intellectual guy, but all of this stuff seems to come from the really bookish people that just spend basically all of their time in academic pursuit.
Someone else fixes their plumbing, someone else built their house, someone else drives the bus (imagine them being a bus driver? ridiculous). Anything that involves physical work, not even getting your hands dirty but any kind of practical thing, is someone else's problem.
If you don't do any of that then of course you don't need a car, you don't even need to move from your desk.
I feel pretty lonely sometimes as someone who tries to straddle both.
In the US at the moment, public transit suffers from the fact that in most areas, for most people it's largely optional: you can drive, or you can use public transit. Quite a few people choose to drive, leading to a disproportionate fraction of the people on public transit being people who have no other option, and furthermore the fraction of outright deranged individuals (leaving all their clothes on the platform save for a baseball cap and a syringe tucked behind their ear, for an example I witnessed a few days ago) being over-represented in the public transit riding populace.
Overcoming this stigma is important for getting people to use public transit as their primary means of transportation, and working towards making truly car-optional cities.
> The High Cost of Free Parking
> Publication date: March 1, 2005; 2011 (Revised Edition)
> Media type Print (Hardcover)
> Pages: 733
> ISBN: 1884829988
Imagine if you had a product that you really wanted to sell, but were having trouble because every sale required 110 square feet of earth to be set aside.
And then, miraculously, the government, with an insanely heavy hand about it, terraforms the fucking planet to achieve compatibility for hundreds of millions of your devices.
I'm not sure any class of corporate operation has ever gotten a more exacting and widespread easement for its business model.
In 2020, there was a newly houseless guy (unemployed in the early pandemic panic) on my block who a few of us knew. He set up a tent in a street parking spot. And when the cops came and forced him to move on (with, I will point out, what seemed like empathetic body language), I remember pantomiming their position as, "You can't live here - this is where the person who lives <there> (points to nearby house) puts their car when they aren't using it."
Roads and highways have been a multi-trillion-dollar subsidy for Ford, GM, and Chrysler since the 1920s. It's bizarre how blind everyone is to that.
I'm always amazed when someone thinks they've trumped anarchist political science by asking, "by who will pave the roads?!"
Scaling back road pavement is one of the things to which I most look forward in the retracting state apparatus.
The reason we have 8 lane highways etc is because of private automobile use, and the enormous space inefficiency of automobiles, of private vehicles being driven back and forth with single travellers in them.
We've gone too deep into fundamentally inefficient private automobile use and are having to spend a fortune on the infrastructure to keep that paradigm functional.
I think I remember reading that when the Matrix sequel came out, they spent something like $10 million building a 1-mile length of highway. I assume that this was neither much cheaper nor much more expensive than building the real would have been.
Which fallacy is it when you make a false equivalence between some gigantic construction product in the modern world, and someone having cleared some brush in the pre-modern world, all because we happen to use the same word to label both things?
Car sold new @ $40,000 (Pennsylvania taxes at 6%) = $2400 in tax; same car sold used @$12,000 = $720 in tax; car sold again @$3000 = $180 in tax. Total taxes on 1x $40K car = $3300.
Cars kept to 200K miles, 25mpg = 8000 gallons of fuel used;according to EIA https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10 average state and federal taxes on fuel are about 50 cents per gallon, thus, $4000.
So just there you have (for a typical PA car) over $7300 per vehicle in taxes over the car's lifetime.
The point is the same, an 18 wheeler does >99.9 percent of all the damage on the roads. Trucks absolutely do not come anywhere even remotely close to paying for the damage they create. The entire transportation system in the US is a trillion dollar subsidy to the trucking industry.
That being said, I'm fine with that. I also don't want tomatoes to cost $11.
Isn't that only like 1% of the average house's lot size? You make it sound like most houses wouldn't require any space if not for parking.
I can't imagine not having a car.
And yes, I've lived in big cities with good public transportation. Public transportation is a great bonus if and when it's appropriate for use, but it absolutely can't replace a car.
Yes, there are ways to defray these annoyances but those ways generally carry fractally nested annoyances of their own.
To me, living without a car is the true freedom, one that I miss, that I yearn for every day presently. To have the most expensive thing I own be a bicycle would be splendid. I can always rent a car, carry an umbrella, hail a taxi for the edge cases.
Living is expensive. Housing is an order of magnitude more expensive on a monthly basis than cars are. Food is around the same as a car payment.
EDIT: And in a pinch, a car can be used as housing. Sucks that this is a real thing, but there are definitely folks who prioritize their car payments over house payments. Gives them shelter and transportation so they can find work again.
> complicated,
No more complicated than working around public transport, IME.
> require constant maintenance and consumable wear items
About once a year, yeah, drop it off at a mechanic for a few hours.
> and a lot of space to store,
The space is built into most origins and destinations, the cost built into the location regardless of whether you drove or not. To be cheeky, why not use what I'm already paying for?
> they pose a substantial personal liability risk,
Not really? Your liability is generally managed by insurance, which leads to:
> incur significant taxation and insurance fees, you have to pay for fuel
These exist for most other methods of transportation, just usually hidden from you. You'll pay for it in fares and taxes.
> manage the logistics of frequent refueling/recharging,
Once weekly (give or take) I stop and refuel. If I had to do it daily, I might be a bit more annoyed by it.
> they rapidly depreciate in value, they can be damaged, catch on fire, strand you in the middle of nowhere, you have to pay attention constantly while using them, etc.
Can be said about every method of transportation, sans walking, in existence. :) Though... a broken leg could definitely strand you places too.
> To have the most expensive thing I own be a bicycle would be splendid.
My personal computer is probably worth more than 99% of bikes on the market. FWIW, living an ascetic life is not something most people on the planet aspire to.
This is the reason why your opinion differs from the car drivers, I guess.
Owning my own home and significant items that I need for my lifestyle is a hard requirement for me. It's not a nice to have, I will compete with others until I have them, because otherwise I'll be competing for my entire life for rent, until someone inevitably outcompetes the older, less vivacious me.
Who do you think maintains the roads you're driving on?
All those roads are practically open 24/7.
Meanwhile, for public transit there's just one real agency around me and it doesn't even go everywhere I might want to go. The lines operate at whatever schedule that agency wants to operate them at. Those lines stop at like 2AM so I better be home before that or it's potentially a long walk home.
The number and type of people who complain when roads are bad means the government pays more attention to that than buses.
And if you can't drive, how do trains or buses make you any more independent than taxis and rideshares do?
It would be more difficult to see your friends if they couldn't afford to live in that area t all.
difficult to visit your friends ... for free. There's probably paid parking somewhere nearby willing to take your money in exchange for storing your car
It's common enough that plenty of homeowners put up their own no parking signs, which are obviously un-enforceable. There is at least one sign that I'm aware that I think was put up by the city as pacification measure. There is no possible mechanism the city could use to enforce it, but it does appear to have been installed by the city.
https://www.distilled.earth/p/how-paris-is-taking-back-its-s...
There's a 'critical mass' aspect to this where if enough incentives to a car-free (or car-light) lifestyle are provided within a certain area, public support in that area will eventually shift against unlimited free public storage of cars.
This has a really easy fix: mandate a new reserved, dedicated parking space for every new residence. For single-family homes, this is basically a no-op because driveways exist.
I've seen something similar, but it was placard-based for the whole neighborhood. You needed a parking pass to be able to park, but there were no reserved spots (which I imagine would raise enforcement costs a lot).
A significant minority want to end this (basically to create car-free cities).
By rights the land is council owned, there's no reason it should be used for parking, and yeah, £300 a year is far under the market value of the land if you put even a camper van on it.
But personally I think it'd just end up ghettoising the inner city all over again. Families and anyone who wants to do anything with loads larger than a suitcase would move out to the suburbs or out of town entirely.
Some people probably consider that acceptable collateral damage. I think that places like London suffer from being too focused on single professional life as it is.
A lot of the discussion on cars seems to revolve around what "can" happen in some theoretical abstract, without considering whether people actually want that to happen. It seems very, central planning, for lack of a better term.
That's where carshare (like Zipcar) comes into play. Carshare allows residents to be able to access a full vehicle when they need to "do anything with loads larger than a suitcase", without using public property for their own personal, subsidized, private car storage.
I have a Zipcar account and it's just a big faff. Limited miles, super expensive, car is always damaged and a bit smelly, you have to hope that it's available for the times you need (almost never is if that's more than a day) it's just a mess.
It just about works for picking up large items from FB marketplace or house moves, but even for that I'm considering just buying a van to avoid the fuss.
As I mentioned - it's not like it's theoretically impossible, it just changes the make up of the city and who lives there. I'd gladly buy the parking spot outside my house if the council were willing to sell it...
You could force a tracker on people, but the privacy implications are severe and frankly unethical.
On a Zipcar? They're already GPS tracked everywhere. They're not your car. I don't think a device that monitors hard accel/breaking activity would be outrageous in this scenario.
Pretty much every new development in my city comes with underground parking now.
I think it's a combination of land getting so expensive that underground parking is worth it, and also that developers realised that people will pay a lot more if there are gardens and parks between houses (instead of parking lots)
In San Francisco, there's was a proposal about ten years ago to convert a street that was full of shops near the water and already had a bike path to a proper pedestrian promenade. A bunch of shopkeepers flipped their shit at the idea of not having parking spaces in front of their stores. The mayor's optometrist was on that street, so he had the whole project binned.
They could have easily eminent domained some disused building nearby, built a parking garage, and made everyone happy. Instead they went "cars good, people bad, cancelled."
I live in an apartment complex with a gigantic underground parking garage. There are no cars on ground level, just paths for walking and bikes. About 2000 people live here. Almost everyone has a car, but their cars are mostly just parked in the garage.
90% of people who live here either walk, take public transit, or ride their bikes to work. But when you need a car to visit grandma with your 4 kids, it's right there, underground.
https://www.fixr.com/costs/build-parking-garage
That adds up to a lot of extra cost in a development, and the requirement to build parking underground can easily sink a project.
Maybe it's an imagined problem that should just be ignored, but if we wanted to tackle the hypothetical issue head on we could pivot toward a more comprehensive tracking of cars to parking spots, and only license cars if they have a known, associated parking spot, whether that be a garage on private property, or a license from the city to park on the street long term.
I'm under the impression that Japan does something similar to this?
This already happens where I live, but the buildings provide plenty of parking and most of it goes unused. The reason is because a spot in the garage is not free, I think it's like $50 or $100 a month. So people just park on the street and the garages are mostly vacant.
My city is now looking into paid street parking via permits, I'm sure if that gets adopted, people will start using the garages more and streets parking will become much more available. The way it works is that if you live in one of the neighborhoods that requires a permit for street parking, you can park anywhere as long as your permit is paid.
It is no surprise that a city named after a Christian saint permits this, of course, but it is yet another example in which American separation of Church and State is mostly textual and not defacto.
Of course, the problem is that religion is a sensitive subject so when used to illustrate, this is inevitable. I couldn't think of another example where a grant to the people violates the Constitution but if there is, and you suggest it within the edit period, I'll swap it in. After all, the point is that parking's biggest advantage is that it is a subsidy and those are hard to remove.