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.
If applied to an area that already is only middle-class people, then sure.
Or resident parking permits.
And more housing is what is needed to contain housing costs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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.
The closest option to truly free continues to exist and has always existed: walking
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”
If you want to help poor people buy food, give them money to buy food.
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.
Sounds almost exactly like the argument made here https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...
You've just described how rationing in Eastern Bloc countries worked.
What makes you think poor people have more free time than wealthy people?
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.
The former is bad, for all the reasons I described. The latter is good!
They would rather have the $100 in efficient redistribution rather than the government spend $100 so that they can benefit by $1.
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.
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?
That's exactly what it is. The normalization of "free" street parking does a lot of damage here.
Seems unreasonably high.
https://cityobservatory.org/the-price-of-parking/ - and this is from before the pandemic.
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.
Autonomous vehicles will reduce the need to park. Eventually.
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).
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.
[1] https://www.boston.gov/departments/environment/air-pollution...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rest in peace.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like you are really running against the spirit of HN with this comment.
I think I overstated my case, its not as bad as I thought.
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 :)
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?
Cars are expensive, the total domination of personal cars is only possible if you are a rich country. Much like gout.
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.