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Comment by strbean | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, parking structures always look and feel pretty distopian.

I like the approach of making downtowns walkable and having a bit of parking at the periphery of downtown, along with good public transit. Encourages people to use public transit to get to town in the first place. Downtown residents can use transit or a zipcar or equivalent when the need to get out of town, instead of devoting a ton of space downtown for storing their cars.

Not sure if that approach is really practical, but if it can be made to work it is much nicer.

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Well, in Menlo Park they're just flat surface parking lots, not even multi-story structures. The planned development is multi-story housing with parking underneath.

To be fair, I am boycotting the (similar) underground garage over at Springline because they're clearly made only for people in Range Rovers or whatever. They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access from a normal car.

Is the Bay Area really dealing with ticket machines? The global capital of technology? Just bill by plate or something.

Or develop 12 competing apps that each only work in different lots.

A fellow Swede I presume?

It's extra silly cause I once parked in central Oslo and got the ticket mailed to my sthlm address. No fuss, no problem, super easy!

We got a lot to learn from our neighbours....

Super easy unless you have moved recently, then you don't get the bill and end up years later in collections for the original amount plus a million late fees added on.

Nah it arrives electronically to kivra, which is like email except you log in with your social security number and it's only for "official business" like invoices and whatnot.

That sounds great! In the US the phrase you used "mailed to my sthlm address" would never mean anything other than physically sending a paper bill to your house.

Yeah I phrased that wrong. I wanted to emphasize that I don't live in Norway. I found it extra impressive that it worked so seamlessly even with a foreign car. Oh well.

Unfortunately here in the US we are pathologically incompetent.

One day we will attempt to roll out such a system. We'll pay McKinsey billions to develop and operate it, set no targets, and they will take the money and disappear for 10 years, and then deliver some unusable website developed by one offshore developer.

No not a Swede at all this is funny! That was my experience parking in the Washington, DC area last year.

The global capital of technology has absolute horrid infrastructure and is not on the forefront of any municipal technologies.

There's a big disconnect from people building new projects and local governance, and it's growing. When tech companies started even providing buses for their employees, because local government is too fractured and incapable of running needed bus routes, and can not coordinate across county and city borders, local activists were extremely upset that tech workers were not driving their personal cars and instead using environments-saving and traffic-reducing transit.

I got billed by plate at gravel parking lots in places in Iceland where there were probably more sheep nearby than human residents. Embarrassing.

I would bill by ticket machine too if it was my job to collect money on the parking. I’m guessing that the amount of people who never pay is much higher than zero so it really only makes sense when you have such high throughput that the slowdown is detrimental (such as the Bay bridge).

The reasons why the Bay Area is the global capital of technology are absolutely totally unrelated to the quality of infrastructure or the policies of local government there.

It’s mainly due to the state of US technological advancement decades ago when the whole thing got started, the general US-level business-friendly environment, and the presence of an extremely prestigious (especially in science and tech fields) university nearby.

The specific reason is that William Shockley's mother lived in Palo Alto. Stanford gets the credit but in reality it had nothing to do with the decision.

> They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access from a normal car.

Are you sure it's the ticket machines? Around here, the ticket machines have stayed the same, but it's now impossible to use them without stopping the car and getting out, because car manufacturers have decided I need eight inches of empty space between myself and the side of the car.

That eight inches is called "side impact protection" and, while it sucks to not be able to comfortably rest your arm on the window sill, it is pretty important to have in the event of an impact to the side.

I liked it when my car could fit inside a parking space, personally.

Safety people: <Ruins cars>

Also safety people: "These goddamn consumers have started buying SUVs"

I'm not saying this is you personally but the trend is pretty goddamn clear.

I drive a 90s Miata. Trust me, I hate the SUV trend as much as anyone else, and I also recognize that car design from the 90s is not exactly the pinnacle of crash safety.

I don't know if that's a boycott, or just going some place you like better.

I park on the street for free. (The lot is also free in monetary cost, for the short windows I'd park there, but the hassle is larger than the hassle of finding street parking).

> To be fair, parking structures always look and feel pretty distopian.

What a lot of the new buildings in Austin are doing is putting an attached garage directly behind a 4 + 1 mixed use development - the street-facing facade is the apartments and shops, and the garage is directly behind (and usually attached) to the apartments. You basically never see them.

They put it in the middle usually. It’s literally called the “Texas Doughnut” — a 5 over 1 surround a parking garage.

Ha, today I learned.

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