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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

To a cheesy jingle tune: public services paid by taxes aren't handouts.

I don't know why this has caught on so strongly online that like water and gas hookups, electric, roads, and trash/yard waste pickups to single-family homes aren't supporting a specific lifestyle but public parking? Those evil suburbanites ruining everything. My hometown Columbus and the policy of mandatory parking is still working out great. New developments are building more parking than required of them and they're the hip trendy areas. The only places in the city where it's an issue is in and around "The Short North" where you can't fit any more parking and they moved to an app based pay system everyone hates. Whenever I'm home and want to go out with friends it's much easier to hit up Bridge Park or Franklinton because they have massive garages.

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Free public parking is a handout. I use it myself, I love it, I circle the block multiple times for a free space than pay for parking. But it is a handout.

Forcing private businesses to have parking, even if they make a business decision to not have it, is a tax on those businesses. And on all the businesses that would have been viable without that tax.

I have no issue with paid public parking. It needs to exist.

Or if we love free public services so much, we can talk about why public transport isn't free.

Does attaching a cost really make a meaningful difference? I'm paying for my trash pickup even though I'm not directly billed for it. The point if charging for public parking is more a rationing mechanism than a moral imperative. I think it's annoying to shoulder the cost on businesses which is why it's in practice being shouldered on the developers who get money from the state so large-scale I think it evens out.

I think public transport should be free, keeping on the Columbus track I have no idea why COTA even bothers to charge. They instituted a monthly price-cap that's at most $62/mo and (or at most $31 plus 50% reduction on the per-fare cost if you're broke). And while not an insignificant amount of money to the riders it's bottom-of-the-bag chip dust to COTA itself. Oh no, more people might use the nearly empty busses, the horror.

Yes, because people respond to incentives. A few dollars a month for parking is enough for people to junk their broken cars instead of leaving them on the street. A few dollars a day is enough to make people reconsider getting a second car. A few dollars an hour is enough to make people carpool and limit their stay.

The point of charging for parking is not just to collect funds, it's to make sure parking is available.

You need water and heat to survive; you can have a functional city without everyone having three SUVs. Thanks for coming to my talk.

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