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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Roads are useful, but what I really think we should get rid of is parking lots. When cars can drive themselves we should build over all the lots and knock down the garages. The cars can spend the day on the road and the night parked outside the city. There should be zero parked inside the city.

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Abolish free parking, and raise prices on the parking meter until the parking spots are only ~80% occupied (if they're less than 80% occupied, lower the price).

If there's not enough parking, let the market fix that problem - if private parking lots are profitable use of land, then people will build them. But people will never be satisfied with private parking lots if they could have used free public parking instead (if they'd just looked harder for a parking spot).

In other words, giving out free shit discourages people from buying that shit. Which really shouldn't surprise anyone.

Any other innovative ways to disproportionately tax the wage class?

Charging money for services is “innovative”? I know the hacker set likes to reinvent other industries and call it new, but this is rather extreme.

Just say you're a landlord

Give me free stuff. If you say no you’re a landlord.

Free? Tax-dodging sovereign citizen panhandler too, I see.

Sure - create urban and suburban environments where a car is a necessity for daily function. Financing, insurance, maintenance, repairs, fuel...

Cars aren't cheap. Reducing the overall space devoted to them and utilizing that space for useful purposes would be a net benefit. Providing public transport services with that increased revenue would leave the vast majority better off financially, not to mention the quality of life improvements.

I don't disagree with the objective you describe, but I disagree with the Jonathan Swift-esque idea of abolishing free parking and increasing meters. That would increase the burden on the already-burdened and only nominally affect cost of convenience to the wealthy. I suppose everyone can tip their wait staff by letting them use their residential parking spot-- because without that pre-existing transportation infrastructure, employer provided transport/parking, affordable cost of living, and a living wage for all, I'm not sure how people are getting to work in dense urban areas. Although I love the idea of abandoned luxury vehicles lining the streets with boots on their wheels-- like a broken window theory for late stage capitalism.

If the cars can't park, then they're clogging up the roads and preventing them from being used as intended for transportation.

I am fine with parking lots as long as they're not publicly funded and are taxed just as every other parcel in the city. And on-street parking should be prohibited.

In fact I'd say that self driving cars will mean that it's important that parking is not more expensive than simply driving in circles. You can bet that companies will drive self driving cars in circles to store them while not in use if it's cheaper than parking, and that takes up both more space, and higher value space.

Perhaps there should be some sort of vacancy tax where the operators of driverless cars are charged for every mile they drive without a human passenger.

Youve just invented a new job which is dummy human who is cheaper than parking lot who drives all day around city in otherwise empty cars.

Just another unintended consequence of road use being free for its users, despite road space being a limited resource that's expensive to build and maintain.

Congestion pricing is already a (crude, but still rather effective) way of solving that problem. A more perfect (though impractical to enforce) solution would be charging by the meter-second of lane space consumed, with rates varying over time and location depending on congestion.

Under that pricing scheme, if driving in circles were still somehow cheaper than parking then cars could drive in circles to their heart's content without causing any issues.

This might seem like a good idea at first, but it would essentially result in complete gridlock as the roads fill up with circulating self-driving cars.

No, there's definitely a better solution for this - using self-driving trains to move people.

I'm not sure if people will want to deal with long wait times for their car to drive to them. Imagine watching the end credits roll at a movie theater only to be gripped by the sense of dread that you forgot to call your car during the climactic fight scene and now you'll be waiting half an hour for it to drive from the suburbs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of reducing car dependency, I'm just not optimistic that self driving cars will help.

roads are dirty tho, n really expensive

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