Comment by thaumasiotes
11 days ago
> Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.
> This is got to be a huge factor.
If the USA implemented that exact rule, it would change almost nothing. People already need nighttime parking for non-legal reasons.
You are dramatically misinformed. 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.
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.
It's not like you have to get waivers to park your cars in front of your house in Japan. Your car MUST have a designated lot, with proofs(more or less a set of simple declaration forms than anything detailed and concrete), to be registered under your name. Otherwise it cannot be registered. A full waiver for parking violations technically exist, but they are reserved for official and/or actually special vehicles only(like actual fire trucks). The vast majority of cars stay in an off-of-road parking lot of some sort, be it a fancy mechanical one or a crude gravel lot next to apartment complex.
I reckon that not many other country do that kind of legal setup. But Japan is among those very few.
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Not the person you're replying to, but I see the same thing happen in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Dense neighborhood with a lot of nightlife, but many of its residents exclusively use free street parking to park overnight. There is a lot of contention for spots after about 7pm.
>Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?
In the Hudson Waterfront of New Jersey, yes.
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.
The idea that LA is an unbelievably dense location is puzzling. My Spanish hometown is significantly denser than Los Angeles. Even large parts of NYC are not in any way dense by global urban standards.
As for people parking in the street in the US, you will find them in many smaller cities. Look at random pictures of south St Louis: Plenty of neighborhoods built before every house had a 2 car garage, and therefore with a lot of on-street parking used every day. And that's with single family homes. Hell, you find this in deep suburbs too, where someone decides they want 4 cars, and have the garage full of crap. I could take pictures of at least ten cars parked on the curb, and at least 40 outdoors in driveways if I went for a one mile loop around my 4th ring suburb.
Now, not that this is the main reason Americans still use cars to go anywhere right now, as the rest of the infrastructure around me also makes car mandatory. Suburbs with houses 3 miles from the nearest business, shops inaccessible on foot, streets that, while supposedly crossable, are extremely unsafe to pedestrians... In a world where, say, we limit each household to one car, my entire suburb becomes abandoned, and most businesses collapse, kind of like a place like Madrid collapses if one didn't run any public transit for 4 months.
Over 1/20 Americans live in LA or NYC. Cities in LA county don't show up in a density ranking until 15th with Maywood. WEHO is 20th and its gets less dense from there. Like 80% of Americans live in metro areas.
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You changed the goalpost...
If LA or California wanted to enact these laws, they could. Passing at a federal level is a non starter.
Perhaps you’ve never lived in a large American city? In many cities you can’t even park on the street overnight in residential neighborhoods because the parking is permitted for people who live in that neighborhood. Without the right sticker (or a guest permit from a resident) your car is getting ticketed or towed, formalizing the usage of overnight street parking for residents.
In Chicago, for example, many neighborhoods are full of former single family homes that at some point (often long ago) were converted into 2 or 3 unit residences, but there is still likely only one garage that maybe fits two vehicles. If you’ve got units filled with 2-3 roommates each, there might be 9 cars for a building with only 2 spots.
Obviously I’m not arguing this is good, but that’s the way things are for now.