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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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