Comment by vantassell

Don't take this the wrong way but to anyone who has read the book "The High Price of Free Parking" this contribution to this thread reads like someone who came late to a meeting and missed half of the discussion and keeps asking questions that would have been answered had they joined earlier.

I can see why you might ask this, but the book very much focused on the idea that a piece of land much preserve space for a parking space. It might sound innocuous but it is the source of many issues within cities, a contributor to housing inaffordability, why so many buildings in the US are surrounded by miles of parking, why some of the lots in your city are derelict, etc.

The book very much addresses why mandated parking minimums even in suburban residential lots are also bad (specially the mandated minimum less so the carpark itself), I highly recommend the book mentioned above.

Here's the preface of the book http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PrefaceHighCostFreeParking.pdf

There's also a good audiobook.

This is crazy car-centric legislation.

Now, instead of letting car owners pay for the public space they use (street parking), you are forcing anyone without a car to waste their own private space, in case somebody wants to park there.

In England, so many people are living at home due to the housing issues that some houses have 3-4 cars and no driveway. Streets are nowhere near as wide as Norther America so two cars cannot pass easily and drivers have to find gaps between cars to pass each other.

I have space in garage for car at times of year when plowing may be needed. But plenty of space outside on driveway at times of year when it's not. Live in a very safe area and it's easier to just pull up in front of the garage door. Not sure what's crazy about that.

Blocking the sidewalk should be fineable?

Garages are the easiest way to get cheap storage space attached to or close to your home. Apart from garden sheds.

The issue is really the perverse incentive: if there is free onstreet parking, its usually more useful to put your car on the street and use the garage for something else. For many people that might even hold true if they have to walk a bit to the next parling spot

That's really hard to escape unless you remove free on-street parking from large areas at once

I think it's a corollary of Parkinson's Law: Crap expands to fill the space available for it. It's one reason I've never gotten a shed rather than just depending on my garage to store stuff in the winter when I need to get any cars off the driveway for plowing. Too much temptation to just fill spaces up.

Or maybe big vehicles which are inefficient from the point of view of physics (bigger = more energy to move around), take more space and damage the road more (more heavy, more bad for road) should be banned or taxed accordingly instead of having the law change the size of garages ?

I don't suppose you have Ford F350s in your area? You could put that Ranger in the glove box.

This is true. Back when I was EV shopping, the number of models that were both proper modern EVs and could fit reasonably in my garage was shockingly small.

UMR?

> The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use.

Removing surface lots doesn't immediately mean removing parking. You're still free to build parking - you just have to integrate it into the building it is serving. Which gives you a pretty big incentive to only build the parking you actually need, and share it with neighboring buildings to reduce costs.

> Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.

Removing surface lots means increasing density, which means the same transit stop can serve more people, which lowers per-passenger costs and allows for higher-frequency running and denser transit networks.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem: you don't want surface lots removed because there is no good alternative, but a good alternative isn't economically viable due to the surface lots enforcing low density.

Something that peeves me where I'm at is that the transportation system here (not Chicago) is not coordinated across the systems. Here there's a bus that could take me to where I work, but it stops once every hour and is often late by 20 minutes. Local businesses also sponser a "free trolley" that follows the same route. It's overfull at peak hours and as a form of transportation the seats and setup make it much less safe for passengers. (Park benches as seats, and when the driver breaks you're holding on for life) The worse part is that this "free option" now competes with an existing valid option that cost a dollar. But that means that based on fares it's likely they will reduce stops and reduce hours (they have) it would have been better had the business incentive had just sponsered the existing bus route instead. Additionally comparing to china's awesome bus system (depending on the city), there, there is always two buses that come every 20 minutes. So you're never really ever suffereing. (Major cities anyways) The trolly is poorly managed and often three of them will come at once as they don't sync them when they run late they just all go so often you have three trolleys following each other and a very late bus. So it just... I never understood with the advent of GPS why buses aren't syncing so that they could just be traffic bound instead of time bound That way a bus could always arrive every x minutes instead of well the bus is scheduleed to arrive at x time and it might not arrive due to traffic woes. This should be syncable. ... Like why is the system so... I can't avoid saying it... capitalistically bound instead of populas bound. I mean it would better for capalism if that was more human centric. /political rant blah blah

Buses are a simpler solution. A city should solve the anywhere to downtown is quick on bus or train thing. You need transit lanes and more buses. Ideal is public transit is faster and cheaper. Even someone who already has a car will not use it.

Then once solved, let people get across from one suburb to the next on transit quickly but that is harder to do economically.

If you remove parking spaces it solves itself because traffic is reduced and transit options become more efficient AND more financially sound.

Yes, I do love the rail system in Japan. Went a few years ago, going back next year most likely. I've also driven in Japan (Osaka). I just meant, in general, a low-hanging fruit we could tackle is making surface parking lots a thing of the past in downtown or urban areas. With actual economically productive constructs there instead, such as business, retail, housing, parks, &c. we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense, and in some cities we could work on intra-city rail too.

I think where I live (Columbus) is very well positioned for this model if only our civic leaders had courage and stopped thinking of transit as a "blue" thing (also our city council needs to stop suburban thinking). We don't need to build any more expressways or highways. We are maxed out. The only sane option is respecting appropriate density, and focusing on categorical changes in how we move people: walk/bike/rail instead of bus/car/roadways.

I'm a Tokyo local and yes, this is real. Even I find it uncomfortable. On the Yamanote Line during rush hour, trains come every 2-3 minutes and it can still look close to this.

That said, most people's daily commute isn't this extreme -- it depends heavily on the line and direction. The tradeoff most Tokyo residents accept is: 30 minutes of crowded train vs. hours stuck in traffic with nowhere to park.

That is wild, I wouldn't have nearly enough faith in the structural integrity of the doors for that. Not to mention that packing people in like that seems vaguely unsafe.

Can such policies be implemented individually by cities?

In a city with a properly-designed transit system you wouldn't need a car at all.

I think it is quite telling how car ownership is viewed here: it it something you "have to" "give up". Car use has been normalized to such a point that it is viewed as a necessity, almost a God-given right, rather than just another mode of transport to get you from A to B.

Even in bike-heavy and transit-heavy cities you'll be hard-pressed to find trips which are impossible to do by car. Sure, it might not be the cheapest or most convenient option, but (outside of small pedestrian zones) completely banning cars is practically unheard of. On the other hand, there are plenty of suburbs where public transit basically doesn't exist, and any kind of bike infrastructure is met with hostility. For all intents and purposes, you can't live there without a car. That doesn't exactly sound like freedom to me.

The San Francisco neighborhoods I'm thinking of aren't downtown. they usually require residence permits to park.

Seems like a poor use of space when you can just work at making things easier for people to travel without a car.

> Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increase a suburb's density by something like 5%-10%.

As you say, only for new construction. The lack of new construction is itself the problem.

The lack of sprawl is also a consequence of how mountainous the country is. While not as bad as a lot of western sprawl, the areas of Japan that are a bit wider and less populated do have an element of car dependent sprawl to them. Then of course the villages that aren't covered by the train network and aren't boxed in by mountains have a pretty similar relationship to cars as a small western town.

Where I think the US and Australia both struggle is trying to make the car work in dense cities as populations grow. We do actually have pretty dense cities in Aus, yet cannot give up the car.

> Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain societally because cars cause so much wear-and-tear;

Actually the wear and tear due to cars is minimal compared to that of trucks. The relationship of wear to mass is nonlinear. Which isn't to say that buttering half the earth with asphalt isn't a seemingly absurd use of resources.

But it is. Otherwise we'd just be talking about raising meter prices and not trains.

That's probably an exception. Most cities I know in Europe have crazy expensive parking and usually forbid cars from entering the city center. I would say EU cities are really hostile to cars

I suspect if you live there you can get a parking permit to park relatively cheaply. Where I used to live they introduced paid parking on my street, because people were going out the city center to park in residential areas instead of pay for a parking garage. A permit cost me €75 a year.

I don't park on the street anymore when I go to Paris by car. The private underground garages are cheaper (4-5 euro/hour).

True in England for sure. People in towns and suburbs, which is most of the country, think they have a god-given right to park on the street outside their house.

Even in urban London areas there is usually onstreet parking, it isn't free but it is quite cheap, you buy a permit from the council for ~£400 a year. On a square footage basis that is extremely cheap land rent!

Sometimes it’s privately subsidized, too, such as when you go out to eat and your meal costs more because the restaurant provides free parking. People who don’t drive often pay higher prices subsidizing the people who do, which is something we should talk about more directly.

>The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

This seems backwards to me tbh. Is this a feeling or backed by hard data?

As much as anti-american sentiment is right now, there are still great engineering feats pulled off all the time.

Construction is expensive because we value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted. Other countries not so much.

I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.

Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it. Your trains should be faster than door-to-door flight time, so people would take that as well. Unfortunately that makes a lot of things more complicated in communities with high income disparity.

> The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

The cost of passenger rail is high in America because America has 11% of the population (read: customer) density of Japan.

(For cities, NYC has 25% lower population density than Tokyo.)

>the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.

Our road-building has slowed dramatically since the 1980s. The Interstate Highway network would be much more expensive and slow to build today.

>If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots.

Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. Access to the island/town is through two two-lane roads that get backed up to a standstill every night. There's a running "joke" about how everyone is going to die if there's a major hurricane.

It’s been a while since I read about their system but as I recall, across the entire system something like 100 billion is the total cost. But that’s only for like 75 ish miles. So it’s very expensive. I recently saw a news article saying they’re 30 billion short per their projections and are now cutting lines out of the plan that voters expected when they supported levies, and some surrounding cities where residents have each paid hundreds or more a year for the rail to come to them, now may not get them at all. Even though they’ve been paying into it for a decade or two. Which to me is a form of theft.

You raise some very good points about the expansion of rail in Los Angeles basin. However, this part: "struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed". As I understand, it is incredibly complex to build subways in that part of LA basin due to natural gas deposits that make tunnelling dangerous and expensive.

California is about the size of Japan with the same GDP. They could pass their own funded project for public transportation.

It's a problem with the entire US needs to support it, that is politics 101.

> political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project

This is part of what people mean by “grift.” Anyway, I’m not right wing. I just want cheap rail done competently. That’s not “not the issue.” As a voter, that is very much an issue for me.

If you tried that your politicians would get tossed out of office the next election.

Your argument totally ignores that all this infrastructure was built around using cars. Doing things like banning street parking doesn't magically reorganize the way everything was built out over the last 100 years. Took a 100 years to build this will take 100 or more years to undo it.

I'm also suspicious the people pushing stuff like that would in a different time and place would be wearing hair shirts and flagellating themselves. All nice but that's not most people.

> Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.

> Such a change would have a significant impact.

What would that impact be? Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?

There's plenty of contention for street parking in nonresidential areas. But a nighttime parking certificate doesn't do anything about that. Nighttime parking is done in residential areas.

Neither LA nor NYC are even vaguely similar to the rest of the nation, so invoking their names when talking about national effects is pretty useless. They're insanely, unbelievably dense locations. The extreme majority of Americans do not live in anything near that dense.

You changed the goalpost...

If LA or California wanted to enact these laws, they could. Passing at a federal level is a non starter.