Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

In the UK we have paid street parking in denser areas, residents pay a few hundred a year to park their cars.

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.

> Families and anyone who wants to do anything with loads larger than a suitcase would move out

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.

Theoretically, yes, in practice, if I couldn't get a permit for my street, I'd sell the house and move out to the suburbs to somewhere where I can actually park, or get a house with a drive, rather than spending my time and money renting cars every time I want to do anything like going to a DIY store, visiting family, going camping etc.

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...

Shared cars are a tragedy of the commons. People famously drive rentals terribly. When you spend even less time with the car you have correspondingly less attachment and accountability. As a consequence, the user fee includes a huge risk premium, on top of the usual system maintenance costs.

You could force a tracker on people, but the privacy implications are severe and frankly unethical.

> 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.

Meh. Just build underground parking.

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)

It does blow my mind how many times the easiest solution is a garage.

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."

Right? It's often not that hard to make an environment that works for cars, pedestrians and bikes.

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.

Underground parking is very expensive to build. According to this source, it costs $25000 - $50000 (USD) per space:

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.

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