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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Oregon eliminated burdensome parking regulations in most larger cities and: it's fine.

Many home builders still add parking to new projects because there is market demand for it - and they are also competing for tenants or buyers against existing housing which has parking.

But there is now the flexibility to do some projects without parking, which really helps at the affordable end of the spectrum, and is a good fit for more walkable locations.

BTW, Nolan Gray, cited as the author, has a book out himself that's really approachable and good reading if you're interested in cities: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines

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Near my house in Portland a 6-unit complex just went up on a lot that was vacant for at least a decade prior. Three blocks from there they are building at least twice as many units on what was an abandoned church and parking lot. Neither project provides any parking, and the units are cheap. Something like 320k for a brand new 1000 sq-ft build. It’s so amazing.

That's awesome! And, given current prices, a great opportunity for someone to own a home they otherwise might not have been able to.

Here's an article about some of the other things happening: https://www.sightline.org/2023/06/30/parking-mandates-are-va...

Does Portland have good public transport?

Hit and miss. Good for North America, horrible compared to Europe. Where these are located, it's a bit of a train desert, but the bus system is pretty good. There are three lines within short walking distance, and they go to pretty good destinations, and trains.

But on the other end, there's still street parking, and it's plentiful. I'd say Portland is a good 1-car city, if you're a family. Lot's of stuff is one bus away, but you definitely get into situations where some appointment is 1:30 away by bus, 20 minutes by car, so it's nice to have options. If I was a bachelor, I'd be fine with no car, and using a bike or cab when needed.

It's spread out but I found the bus system very usable when I visited.

There's gotta be some middle ground. I think of san francisco, where the streets are clogged with people circling the block and folks are double parked everywhere.

The solution, as Donald Shoup advocated, is to raise (or in some cases, lower, and in general, have it be dynamic) parking rates to market-clearing prices for parking spots such that there are is always one (but not too much more) free spot available on the block.

That's a necessity, but I'd also add legalizing construction of dedicated parking structures in more places. Land is at a premium in any desirable place and street parking is a lot less efficient usage of that than a multi-level parking structure. As a driver I also prefer them. Circling around blocks is a waste of time and annoying and my car is safer in a dedicated building that typically has some cameras

This is not really because parking lots are not legalized (they are, and in fact are often required) but because structured parking is so expensive to build; $25-35k per space in an above ground garage and $35-50k per space underground. https://dcplm.com/blog/cost-of-building-a-parking-garage/

The only place I'm aware of that bans new parking garages in the US is Manhattan, which has a general parking cap; but providing enough spaces for the actual car travel demand to Manhattan would necessitate leveling the whole island and then some, so the policy is there to get people to stop driving to a narrow, congested island.

At least here in California the big driver is Prop 13. The flat parking lots all over Los Angeles have been owned by the same people for decades, usually since the 70s or earlier, so they’re paying a few thousand bucks in property tax while absolute raking in cash - they can usually meet their obligations with a week of revenue and the constant cash flow is a guaranteed lever for credit and loans. Selling or redeveloping the lots would trigger a reassessment, so the owners just keep them as the cash cow they are.

I have a friend who inherited three such lots in downtown ($$$) and he lives very comfortably off just that revenue because their old assessments totaled under a million so they never got reassessed (though the rules have become far less generous with Prop 19).

A good very argument for a taxing the value of the land instead of the improvements/building.

All my homies are georgists

I've also heard that it's popular as a literal cash-heavy business. This allows it to be used for manipulating tax filings, in both directions: laundering other income, or under-reporting profits.

I am pretty sure that most areas here in Portland affected by the shortage of parking aren't zoned to allow building a parking structure. I haven't looked this up though. Edit: It's not downtown here that has this problem, but smaller, hip neighborhoods where you have a shopping street surrounded by an ocean of SFHs

If high cost is the issue, it seems like people are complaining about lack of parking but don't want it enough to pay the real, unsubsidized price. So why should everyone else pay for them?

> it seems like people are complaining about lack of parking but don't want it enough to pay the real, unsubsidized price.

That's exactly what it is. The normalization of "free" street parking does a lot of damage here.

Boston also has a longstanding parking space freeze downtown.[1]

[1] https://www.boston.gov/departments/environment/air-pollution...

When I last worked in Boston (decades ago... pre Big Dig), I shared a spot with a coworker (we alternated days) that was $600 a month for parking (total).

Im in Sydney AU and parking spots are more like 50-100k. In the city center, or desirable suburbs you might see $150-200k. The city has also restricted parking permits to 1/residential address, and eliminated them for businesses.

This has all been more-or-leas fine, with residential prices factoring in parking, and multi-tenant developments pulling in density via car stackers and the like. Oh, and a pretty functional transit system, of course.

> $25-35k per space

Seems unreasonably high.

It's about right from what I've seen. "The high cost of free parking" isn't just an ironic title.

https://cityobservatory.org/the-price-of-parking/ - and this is from before the pandemic.

You might think so at first glance, but if you multiply a regular parking space (9' x 18', 162 sq ft) by the median price per sq ft of a normal house ($244) you get $36288. Obviously these figures are specific to the US, but cars take up more space than you think, either because we're usually inside them or because we're just used to it.

For a whole parking garage you need many large I-beams, tons of concrete, frequently elevators are added, etc. Not surprising builders opt out of including them when they can.

A parking garage also needs a gigantic ramp since cars don’t really use stairs.

Perhaps they can be trained to use them? :-)

Autonomous vehicles will reduce the need to park. Eventually.

I don't think this is actually necessarily true. Most of the AV fantasies involve cars driving about aimlessly when not in use or increasing congestion in the reverse peak towards parking lots in the suburbs during dead times, and to the extent that those scenarios increase vehicle miles traveled that might actually be worse than parking lots everywhere.

Cars are about as healthy as Daleks are for cities.

The other part is to make public transport more appealing.

Yes, the system developed as it did for a reason, some of the more obscure being: + entrenched rent-seekers controlling properties in cities (it's almost axiomatic) + centralized transportation systems being subject to political and labor capture-- the main purpose is not great customer service + red tape in urban areas for everything + market forces created last-resort poor quality housing in cities + the car vs transit battle is winner-take-all at a neighborhood level, and transit does not compete properly on a metro or regional level, nor is the park-and-ride system fully competitive + car-compatible density negates transit density + different ownership model for rolling stock leads to over-investment for cars and under-investment for transit (you buy the car you personally can afford and it sits idle while you ride the subway car your grandparents' generation was willing to pay for collectively )

And cheaper! A roundtrip 10 min bus ride into town costs my family £6. That's more expensive than driving in and parking for 3-4 hours.

Is there at least seats available? As shouldn't public transport too be market clearing. So price should be high enough that there is always empty room in busses and the busses fully pay for themselves.

Usually yeah. London has buses every 10 mins on most routes. It can get very crowded at rush hour or school run time though. Several groups (OAPs, kids, disabled people...) get discounted or free bus passes which I wouldn't want to change.

Don't get me wrong - London public transport is fantastic. Extensive, frequent, convenient, and multi-modal. But the pricing is quite static so that people who use it for short inner-city journeys lose out a bit.

How large is the family?

I think you are right and this is one of my issues with busses in most American cities. Basically, it's just going to be viewed as a worse version of your car. You have to create a categorical change and that's best achieved with rail, biking, and walking which can't be replicated by cars or busses. This doesn't mean we shouldn't have bus routes or anything, that's not great either, but we need to break the habit of hopping on/in motor vehicles if we want to see change.

But also, we need to actually fund public transportation. In most states the amount of funding allocated toward non-car infrastructure amounts to a rounding error.

So what can be done?

Write to your representatives at your city, county, and state level. When your state's department of transportation issues surveys or maps for feedback make sure to give feedback! If there are other opportunities where your local leaders are engaging with the public just mention you'd like to see better transit and walking infrastructure to reduce cost for taxpayers and increase quality of life. Ask for a meeting. Ask for explanations. Ask questions and keep asking questions.

Of course, the backlash to that will be "so parking is only for the rich?"

Same as when we built express highways and priced the tolls to demand - see the complaints about "Lexus lanes".

Capitalism is still the least-bad way of allocating a scarce resource, but of course those who get priced out will be unhappy.

The rich use helicopters...

You mean one spot available to pay for, right? Not a free one :-)

my solution is to look both ways before flipping the windshield wipers up on a double parked villain

How does this benefit poor people who could barely afford their homes and can barely afford to commute to their job halfway across the city by car?

If applied to an area that already is only middle-class people, then sure.

Or resident parking permits.

The solution to poor people not having enough money is to give them more money (if you really want to help them).

It's not to make random consumer goods like parking free for all. If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor, so it's very inefficient at helping you achieve your goal of helping poor people.

In addition, many poor people won't want the thing you are making free. In the case of parking that could be because they don't own a car, so this plan doesn't help a portion of the population you are trying to help. Even more inefficient!

When people think we should have free parking to help the poor, it's mostly just status quo bias at work. Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free. Parking isn't any different.

I know this probably doesn't add a lot to the conversation but for me it articulated and cleared some inconsistencies I was failing to square up in my mind. So, nice, thanks. Do you have any books or articles that helped you in your analysis, I wonder?

You're welcome!

The topical book to recommend here is obviously The High Cost of Free Parking.

https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...

It's quite a big book. Henry Grabar's book, mentioned elsewhere, is apparently more approachable.

It’s big, but it’s very clearly written and you can likely understand the entire premise after a few chapters.

>If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor,

Why does it seem as though some people believe there is an infinite supply of rich people?

Income disparity is so great that the cost of parking is irrelevant to the mythical army of rich people waiting off to the side for parking prices to come down.

I'm not even in the 99%, I'm in the 97% and I don't give a fuck about parking. I'm driving downtown to buy a $600 Barbour jacket from Orvis. I don't care about $20 for parking and I'm not coming downtown more often if parking is $0.

>Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free.

If you are poor milk and bread should 100% be free.

Support for SNAP (food stamps) routinely and consistently polls at >70%.

People who assert what you just did are in the extreme minority.

Making milk and bread free for everyone != making milk and bread free for poor people by giving them SNAP.

The former is bad, for all the reasons I described. The latter is good!

SNAP doesn't make food free in the sense of free parking, it gives money to poor people to buy food. The equivalent for parking would be market-rate parking with means-tested parking vouchers, which would be a much, much better solution than what we have now.

You're missing the trade-off between time and money (and how it differs based on wealth).

"Free for all" parking spaces allow you to trade your time (hunting a spot) for parking, the same way coupon-clipping trades time for a discount on food.

You can say "eliminate coupons, all food should be at market price", but coupons really are an effective way of helping people. They segment the market by being too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.

You can trade your time for goods, but others might trade money for time. Something to think about maybe.

Free Shakespeare in the Park is a New York City civic tradition dating back to the 1950s. It is, as the name suggests, free to the public, but because Central Park’s Delacorte Theater has a finite number of seats, tickets are given out on a first come, first served basis. Some folks, who either can’t or don’t want to stand in line to get tickets, have taken to employing line-standers to do the waiting for them. According to Sandel, the price for a line-stander in 2010 was “as much as $125 per ticket for the free performances”

This is only true if you completely discount the very significant cost of owning a motor vehicle.

The closest option to truly free continues to exist and has always existed: walking

And, unlike with food so much of the time, in this case the cheaper option is also healthier.

That's not why coupons exist, though, it's just a side effect. If coupons didn't exist and your goal was to help poor people eat, coupons would be a weird way to do it.

Why is it weird? It's a lot like the 10c can and bottle levy. Ostensibly for recycling, but also gives homeless people a job. Sneaks under the radar of regular-sized market forces, and gives them some agency in their lives.

It’s pretty badly targeted. Lots of poor people don’t have much time, and lots of better off people have lots of time and enjoy things like screwing around with coupons to get a discount. It also doesn’t do much for extreme poverty. If you have no money, it doesn’t matter if you can get a coupon for half off a loaf of bread or whatever, you still can’t afford it. So you end up giving more help to people who need it less.

If you want to help poor people buy food, give them money to buy food.

Let's go back to may example of bread and milk.

Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange? I would hope not. It might help the poor, but would be a really crappy way of doing so.

Free parking certainly might help the poor a teensy bit. But it's an incredibly bad way of doing so that comes with all kind of other bad side effects.

If helping the poor is our goal, that is not a good way of doing so. You're better off charging a market rate for parking and then taking that money and giving it to poor people.

> a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange

You've just described how rationing in Eastern Bloc countries worked.

> Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange?

Sounds almost exactly like the argument made here https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...

> too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.

What makes you think poor people have more free time than wealthy people?

That makes a lot of sense, but (mostly conservative) politicians still criticize many innovations because of their supposed effect on the (more or less) poor. Recent example: the 2023 reform of the Gebäudeenergiegesetz (Building Energy Law) in Germany, which sought to promote energy efficient ways of heating and decrease heating using fossil fuels, was met with furious opposition (including a lot of disinformation) from the conservative press and parties because of the poor poor building owners who can't afford a heat pump (which is more expensive to install, but already has much lower operating costs, which are likely to become comparatively even better in the future).

Part of what it allows is more housing (something that places like San Fran fail miserably at) because it's not constrained by having to provide 1.5 spots per bedroom or whatever arbitrary number.

And more housing is what is needed to contain housing costs.

It benefits the poor by allocating resources as efficiently as possible. If there is someone who is poor enough that they need help from society/the government, it would be much more effective to transfer money directly to the, rather than very very poorly (probably regressively in fact) target that help by having the public subsidize parking on their block.

They would rather have the $100 in efficient redistribution rather than the government spend $100 so that they can benefit by $1.

Most poor people don't own their house and often don't have a car – if you do own both you're middle class.

That's true but I'm not really worried about them. I'm worried about the people who are doing everything right and about to not be poor. Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. It's almost like a pseudo welfare cliff. Public policy should strive to avoid doing stuff like that.

I'm of the opinion that when public goods are cheap enough to face shortages all the time the market economy steps up because better off people will spend more to save time/hassle.

The problem is when things are expensive enough to kick out a lot of people, but not enough people actually alleviate shortage, which is basically how it currently goes with parking.

> Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. It's almost like a pseudo welfare cliff.

No, it's the opposite. A city built around everyone having a car makes car ownership a cliff. Normalising not having a car (and a reliable bus service - like the kind you get by turning street parking spaces into bus lanes - helps with that) makes the ladder gentler. If people are late for work because they couldn't find a parking spot just as often as people are late because the bus was late or didn't show, maybe there will be fewer horror stories of people getting fired because their car broke and they couldn't afford to get it fixed.

The market economy has solved none of these problems, and I suggest looking up just how socioeconomically mobile people in the US really are (it's not great).

Price parking at the market rate. Demand for other forms of transportation increase substantially. Provide it. Poor people can now take cheap buses and trains instead of expensive cars.

If you're worried about the transition, subsidize other forms of transport and build that out first, but forcing poor people to own cars just to make it to work is not a good way to help them.

Price parking at the market rate. Political competitor criticizes you for being an "eco-dictator" and promises a return to free parking. You lose the next election.

Sorry for the cynicism, I'm actually for increasing the price of parking, but recent political events have robbed me of any illusions that environmentally friendly policies have a future. When they have a choice between the environment and paying less money (short-term), most people will choose paying less money.

> most poor people don't have a car

Outside of maybe a couple urban areas like NYC, that's patently untrue in the United States. It would not surprise me if the poor frankly had more and older/rougher cars than their more wealthy counterparts.

One of the ways it benefits them is by reducing traffic congestion so buses can get through. A significant amount of traffic in parking-contested areas is from cars looking for parking.

You can't means-test a parking space. You could, in theory, set parking prices based on the value of the land its by.

You can means-test a parking permit. It's dumb, but some cities do.

Rather than implementing all these complex and weird rules, you can just ensure everyone has enough money to afford the essentials.

Shoup wrote a LOT about how charging too little for parking leads to everyone using it, which makes parking worse for everyone involved. San Francisco charges about $50c a day for residential street parking in areas that have a parking permit zone - which is decided on a block by block basis. Most street parking in SF is completely free.

Raise prices even slightly, and people's behaviors will adjust accordingly. I have a friend who street parked two cars until he moved to a different neighborhood and had to start paying for permits. Now he just keeps his commuter and leaves his overlander in the suburbs.

In the case of San Francisco it is a state law that limits cities to charging only as much as it costs to administer the program. San Francisco cannot have responsive residential parking under state law.

California loves kneecapping itself.

I guess the solution would be to make these spots 2/4 hr parking, instead of permanent overnight parking for all. Or remove parking all together and make it easy to build private parking lots.

SF's lack of grade separated transport outside the narrow BART corridor also makes it hard to convince people out of driving. Buses and trams aren't acceptable alternatives for a city as rich and dynamic as SF.

I think they can be more creative. Hire an administrator of residential parking and pay them $100 million. Also have a special 100% marginal income tax for city employees earning over a million.

No, according to this article by Chris Elmendorf and Darien Shanske https://www.spur.org/news/2020-12-18/how-solve-transit-budge..., Proposition 218, 26, and the California Vehicle Code probably do not prohibit market pricing of residential parking permits as endorsed by Donald Shoup, since street parking is not just a fee-based service, but city-owned land that the city has the right to rent at market rate. San Francisco just hasn’t tried.

Speaking of having not tried, that legal theory could be right but it's novel. On the one hand you have Elmendorf's hypothesis, and on the other you have every city attorney in the state.

What does administer the program mean in this case? Does it include the maintenance? It could also include the property tax the city pays itself for the valuable land that is being kept available.

There are no good solutions for existing neighborhoods with street parking. In new or completely redeveloped neighborhoods, you can make the streets narrower, the lots larger, and the property owners responsible for parking. But street parking in existing neighborhoods doesn't scale. If the neighborhood is getting more dense with gradual redevelopment, every solution to street parking is going to feel unfair to one group or another.

You could issue street parking permits to the residents of the old properties but not of the new ones. Or you could adjust the prices of the permits to achieve the desired occupancy rate. Or you could keep parking free, fine improperly parked cars, and let the residents decide for themselves if the car is worth the inconvenience of finding parking.

> You could issue street parking permits to the residents of the old properties but not of the new ones.

London does this and it works well. New buildings have to be zero parking, there's some grumbling but residents of a new apartment block don't feel so bad when they lose something they never had - they know from the day they move in that they won't have parking, so if that's going to screw them over then they don't move there in the first place. And then you gradually reclaim the parking spaces as the area is developed.

Or you could provide meaningful alternatives to driving, which is my preferred solution but has a whole different set of problems (mostly zoning-related).

It's not enough. Driving is always the better option for an individual, even in cities with great public transport, so you need a bit of stick as well as the carrot.

I hear takes like this all the time but it's just not true. Even without high parking costs the time and frustration expenditure of driving rules out that option for a huge fraction of trips.

The only solution to traffic is viable alternatives to driving. Not more parking, not more lanes, not more parking lots, nor more highways, not wider roads. It's viable alternatives to driving.

Aye. Can't have your cake (car) and eat (drive) it, too. You just get 40 years of pussyfooting around the problem and making it worse.

Donald’s book The High Cost of Free Parking is about this! Really great read, highly recommended.

Rest in peace.

You should actually read Donald's book this is very well covered.

I wonder if Waymo will get big enough in San Francisco to affect this.

> Waymo will get big enough in San Francisco to affect this

SF public transportation is "good enough" that owning a car in SF is already a decision outside of pure transportation needs.

I lived in SoMA for 2+ years without a car using ZipCar occasionally to drive to SouthBay, which was cheaper than the car payment, insurance and the parking fee put together. Plus my commute was to Palo Alto which was neat because every Caltrain out of SF stopped in PA in the mornings, I used the bullets both ways every day.

Bicycles got me and my partner everywhere, faster and more conveniently (including in a bus or BART). We even went by to Napa on the ferry with bikes on it (once the Vine Trail cycle path connects all the way to Vallejo, I want to do it again - for now you can put your bike on a bus from Vallejo, no problem).

The Lyft would be used for the Costco runs or to lug things out of Tech Shop back home, when working on something bulkier.

Then I had a kid + moved to Mission bay which was still great for my Caltrain commute, but the kid changed the way I could just grab an Uber. There was no travelling light anymore.

I struggled to use a cab because we had to drag stroller car-seat everywhere we went with the kid and often even when didn't have the kid, because you'd pick them up on the way back.

The car was bought, even though it was a bad deal financially simply because it offered a fixed set of storage items we always had.

Even getting from location to location, the car was the slower option, it didn't make any sense except to serve as a home base for all things you needed to have with you.

yep. People railing against cars are usually the younger ones without kids, pets, etc. So they don't understand the value of the car from their own experience, nor able to put themselves into the shoes of others due to that egoism of the youth (i've naturally been there myself :).

I'm a nearly 50 year old dude and cars are awful because I have kids and want to leave them a better city and planet.

They are massive sources of CO2 right now.

Even electric cars produce a lot of particulate matter from tires.

They crowd out housing and businesses when we require their needs be addressed first and foremost.

It's not so much a matter of a binary choice either for most people. You can use a car less and still have one for that occasional hiking trip or something.

And electric cars still produce a lot of CO2 in manufacturing, to the point that though an electric car is a reduction in CO2, its on the same order of magnitude of an gas car for regular usage.

That's not true at all. There's a bit more CO2 during manufacture, at the moment, but a single year of driving and the EV has caught up to a gas car on emissions. Given that lifetime of cars is multiple decades now, the savings are huge for EVs.

https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric-emissions

I think I overstated my case, its not as bad as I thought.

Do you have a car? If you don’t - respect for putting money where you mouth is. If you do - what is the point of your glorious virtue signaling statement when your actions confirm what I said?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I feel like you are really running against the spirit of HN with this comment.

Jesus https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Scr...

>Jesus

Not surprisingly that you mentioned it, preaching and enforcing virtues - let’s get rid of the cars - upon others while enjoying the opposite vice yourself - driving a car - is at the core of the Christianity.

Much the contrary. Like another post has said, I don't want to leave as inheritance to my kids a polluted planet and cities stuffed with dangerous cars.

But it's not only that. Quality of life is precisely the kids being able to just cycle to school and sports with their friends, rather than being stuck on the back of an SUV in traffic for hours every day, being driven around by their parents.

I have lived in places where the former lifestyle is available and where the latter is mandated. There is NO QUESTION which one is better. That's why I'm working to campaign very hard for this to be a reality where I live in ~10 years time :)

You describe my childhood in USSR. I don't see it repeating at any meaningful scale. I do dream though, while slowly working on human carrying electric VTOL, that we'll get to the world with residential neighborhoods kind of like golf-courses - a lot of green space with minimum paved paths for short hops (and last mile various cargo) on electric "golf-carts"/etc. while electrically-VTOL-ing to any destination farther than 5-10 miles.

Parents driving kids to school and hobbies seem to be an almost uniquely American obsession. I live in an affluent not-USA country and my kids go to school and hobbies by walking/bike/bus. If I had to chauffeur them around all the time my quality of life would go way down.

Car dependency is definitely not a US specific thing, sadly.

Of course not, didn't mean to imply that. But the US seems to take it to 11.

Don't take this the wrong way but I definitely think it's "peak hn" to consider that building 1m wide cycle paths is somehow just an impossible thing to have, so much so that you see some weird scifi vision of flying cars as being easier than that.

If anything, cars (and the necessary infrastructure for cars) severely limit the independence of children and senior citizens. Children often can't get to school without their parents driving them. And seniors become homebound and isolated sooner when they're no longer able to drive themselves to the grocery store and their friends.

>seniors become homebound and isolated sooner when they're no longer able to drive themselves to the grocery store

large supermarkets (naturally can't be just in every small neighborhood) -> efficiency and lower costs. What is the point of local (thus small and high priced) store that a senior can walk to, yet can't afford to shop at?

This is simply your gut feeling, smaller (and cheap) supermarkets are common basically everywhere outside North America. Chile which is in no way rich or some urbanist paradise is a specific counterexample, prices only go up with specialist stores (e.g Whole Foods equivalents) or small business of the size of a parking spot in someones home, think like NYC bodegas.

Cars are expensive, the total domination of personal cars is only possible if you are a rich country. Much like gout.

Small stores can be perfectly affordable. National Co+op Grocers lets local coops buy from UNFI at a national bulk rate, just like the giant chains can. I shop at a member store and usually pay less than I would at one of the big chains.

You are partly correct to note that local markets are often not economical, but the reasons for that are precisely low density, car dependence and restrictive zoning.

For a local market to be economical it needs a catchment area containing enough customers.

Once customers start driving they prefer to drive a bit longer to go to a mega market or mall with good parking options, i.e. not a local market.

Local markets thus have a catchment area that is defined mostly by walking and biking.

(Not having a lot of parking can also help to make local markets more economical)

Some important conditions for local markets are then:

1. Zoning needs to allow the shop to be very close to residential areas, and with only few parking spaces.

2. Residential density needs to be high enough to have a large number of customers within walking or biking distance.

3. Walking and biking should be sufficiently safe and pleasant.

It is easy to see the why there are few local markets in suburban North America, but they are very common in urban places all over the world, as well as in thoughtfully designed and slightly denser suburbs in many countries.

Having kids radicalized me against cars more not less. Cars kill kids. Suburban isolates kids from their friends and in person activities.

Often "flexibility" simply becomes providing less parking to make room for more units on a given lot, effectively outsourcing to the surrounding community.

I lived in an area that allowed "senior" developments for 55+ people. As old people are all retired and so do not commute/drive, there were far fewer necessary parking spots and the development was deemed not to increase local traffic. Without the need to commute to work, upgrades to mass transit were deemed unnecessary. Total BS. All the care providers and visiting families ended up parking at the nearby mall. And retired people still drive. They don't commute to work but they don't sit still at home all day either. The whole pack of lies was simply a way to bypass parking regs and squeeze more condos onto the lot to the detriment of the surrounding community.

So you make the street parking paid.

It’s insane that so much land is dedicated to giving people free space to store their personal vehicles.

“But that’s unfair!” People can take the bus.

“But the bus service isn’t good!” That’s because no one uses the bus, if there’s demand, supply will be added. The biggest determinant of transit use is the availability of parking.

> That’s because no one uses the bus, if there’s demand, supply will be added.

You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after. Otherwise people will never accept your proposal (and nor should they tbh, as there's no guarantee that the promised supply will arrive). Right now people are, by and large, content with the status quo. In a democratic system of government, that means you need to convince them to change, and that won't happen unless you address their objections in advance.

People parking cars on the street are simply freeloading off the taxes of people who don't do that. They should pay for what they are using, so they can make better choices.

And people living without parking, but who still expect the services of plumbers, carpenters, pizza delivery, amazon vans, taxis, home care workers, not to mention emergency services, are also freeloaders. When such vehicles have to park on the street they block roads and pedestrian traffic.

Some communities are starting to enforce against amazon trucks that park inappropriately on the street. They often force traffic into dangerous situations as everyone must skirt around them.

People often say this when parking spots are being taken away, but when they try to placate it with having short time parking spots or paid parking (which would increase the likelihood of a pizza driver or handyman finding a free spot) they somehow aren't happy. As it turns out, it was never about those services, only about having free storage for their own car.

To add, somehow in Europe you can have pedestrian zones with no street parking, and still people live there and everyone has functioning plumbing.

None of us are freeloaders. We all pay taxes and consume our own unique constellation of public resources. It's good that we're all different, concentration rarely ends well.

> You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after.

Isn't pricing street parking the solution the parent comment proposed? It increases parking availability in the short term, while increasing demand for public transport.

Well, there’s a lot of people in this thread not content with the status quo.

The whole urbanism movement of the past decade is evidence of that I think.

Moreover, even if a community is happy with free parking and expensive housing within that community, it doesn’t mean that people outside that community are happy with it.

I think it’s a bit more complicated than people are happy with the status quo.

This same logic applies for every single other proposal (charge money for on-street parking, etc.). Many people would not be able to afford to live where they already do if that change was done overnight.

Im not talking about taking away parking per se, im talking about taking away free parking.

> You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after.

If you can't change anything then you can't change anything. Replacing parking spaces with bus lanes can be a huge improvement, but obviously you have to take the parking space away before you can put the bus lane in.

> Right now people are, by and large, content with the status quo.

Boomers might be. Young people who have no hope of ever owning a home anywhere where the jobs are aren't.

> “But the bus service isn’t good!” That’s because no one uses the bus, if there’s demand, supply will be added. The biggest determinant of transit use is the availability of parking.

Public transport is not some enterprise, but rather public service. It's literally in the name. You flip the chicken and egg problem around with corporate bs: make public transport usable and use will skyrocket.

I work in public transportation, at the end of the day there is a finite supply of resources and you have to decide where and how to deploy them.

The biggest determinants of quality of service are geographic coverage and frequency. Good luck getting political will to increase frequency or extend geographic coverage on routes that no one is riding.

Try working in care. Try doing home care for maybe five or six different elderly clients every day, each at a random location. If we want to support elderly people we need to provide for the poorly-paid care providers who must bounce around doing that support. Telling them to take the bus is about as effective as telling Amazon to abandon delivery vans in favor of bicycles.

This is a great example of a specific problem with a specific solution that people use as an excuse to try and impose blanket, one-size-fits-all city-wide rules for automobile storage.

This must be why Europe just kills everyone over age 75, since it is impossible to support the elderly without 12-lane highways and subsidized gasoline.

Giving viable alternatives to driving (be that cycleways or public transport) reduces traffic, and reducing traffic makes it easier for people that actually DO need to drive motor vehicles.

>Telling them to take the bus is about as effective as telling Amazon to abandon delivery vans in favor of bicycles.

Ironic that you bring this up as an absurd example, when this is exactly what happens in dense cities with good cycling infrastructure (Holland, Denmark, etc).

This edge case that you came up with warrants a car, but is that really the reality of most cars parking in any given community?

And honestly, it’s questionable whether it warrants a car too. In Tokyo it would be perfectly fine to do those trips by public transport. My biweekly cleaner gets around by train to all the places she works at. And local delivery companies all use bicycles for last mile delivery.

Maybe that’s not viable right now, but I think that’s the point of Donald’s advocacy. By not pricing parking correctly we provide perverse incentives as a society that lead us down a vicious cycle. Free parking means more cars means less transit ridership means we need more free parking, and repeat.

This shapes our cities into places that prioritize cars over humans. High housing costs, air pollution, less mobility, less freedom.

If you price parking appropriately, you get a virtuous cycle instead. Expensive parking means less driving means more transit ridership means more free parking slots means more room for other development, etc.

It is not an "edge case" in a development for 55+s. And, with the shifting economic, we will soon see a great many more seniors growing old in condos rather than detached houses.

To be fair I don’t know how often elderly care workers are going to 6 different locations in a single day, but it’s hard to imagine it’s a very common thing. If there’s a large condo with lots of residents wouldn’t it be more efficient to hire a permanent employee?

Malls usually have huge, empty parking lots, so it sounds like it's a win:

More people got a home to live in that costs less, and some formerly squandered land was better utilized.

And if you start doing other things like legalizing corner stores and neighborhood businesses, rather than designing everything for the automobile Uber alles, maybe some of those people will find they don't need a car.

Also, policy changes almost never happen in one nice tidy package where you do all the things at once, like eliminating expensive and arbitrary parking rules, adding a bunch of transit, re-legalizing neighborhood commercial, right-sizing roads, etc... so there are going to be fits and starts and bumps along the way. Still worth doing though.

To be fair, those mall parking lots were busy at one point in history.

Strong Towns had people take pictures on 'Black Friday' of mall parking lots, just to see. Many of them still had a ton of excess capacity.

I meant history like 1993, not history like several months ago.

Funny how you consider less parking to be outsourcing, but you wouldn't consider free parking to be subsidizing. Curious.

Might be worth taking a drive through formerly "suburb" neighborhoods that are now a battle royal for street parking thanks to high density units with zero parking.

I mean, it is portland, and they will do it wrong no matter what, but still; if you expect the people we've been mass producing to handle this well going forward, I've got bad news for you.

People are the "big rocks" in cities. Housing and businesses for people is more important than storing automobiles.

If there's not enough free street parking, charge more. That's part of what Shoup talked about.

Portland's problem is that they aren't charging enough (or at all) for curb parking.

If a city offers land for free, what incentive is there to pay for building parking on your property?

Free is always going to outcompete non-free. The answer is to get rid of free on street parking.

If only there were other ways to get around in high-density areas that didn't necessitate a private vehicle. Could we all brainstorm some ideas?

HN on USian real estate / urban development: this experiment has been running for two weeks and it's fine.

Also HN on USian real estate / urban development: everyone prefers this district developed two hundred years ago, because it was not fine.

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