Comment by cosmic_cheese
11 days ago
Street parking makes suburbs worse, too. Almost everybody in my neighborhood has their garages piled to the ceiling with junk and parks in the street, which makes it a pain to weave through even for someone driving a compact crossover… I can’t imagine what kind of hell it is for trash and delivery drivers having to squeeze huge trucks and vans through without swiping peoples’ cars.
This is where legislation can come in - when I bought my house, one provision was that I can't change the front to a garden, it has to remain usable as a parking space for a car. Even if I don't have a car. There's limited extra / visitor parking available. Of course, a lot of people have two cars so it's kinda moot but still.
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.
I can't imagine that you have to let someone park on your private property anywhere.
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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.
In my area street parking is banned on collection day until 5pm. This is also when they do street cleaning. Somehow everyone finds room for all their cars on this day. Otherwise its similar to how you describe.
Guilty of garage as a storage shed, but its also crazy to me people don't store their second most expensive asset inside their garage.
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.
And that's without mentioning what's like for the lowest of the low (in the USA): pedestrians.
my absolute biggest pet peeve about living in "modern" suburbs and a large contributing factor behind why i wanted to (and eventually did) leave them.
imagine having the only well-maintained sidewalk for a good ways out be blocked by cars whose owners have 2+ car garages!
Blocking the sidewalk should be fineable?
Such rules are often not enforced.
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In an ideal world where scrolling and driving would _actually_ be a punishable offense, sure!
In reality: moving away solved the problem.
Note: I grew up in an older (1940s) suburb with a town square that was actually walkable. This problem didn’t exist there. Mostly because the garage was detached and further back from houses, so you had your own proper driveway to park your car onto.
There is an absolute mind-boggling number of garages full of crap in Japan too.
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.
It doesn't help that under-main-roof garages seem to be designed to only just fit small to medium sized cars despite the significant, rampant inflation of car sizes over the past few years.
My family tend to opt for smaller cars, because we're practical and don't have the faulty 'keeping up with the Joneses' gene, which means we can fit two cars in a two car garage.
We may still be in the majority, but it feels like it won't be for long.
UMR garage sizes should be inflating with the average car size. The Ford Ranger, essentially a fucking truck, and completely impractical, is the highest selling car in Australia because of backwards-thinking tax incentives from a few years ago, and then the ensuing Joneses effect.
Sigh... humans.
/rant
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'd be happy with all of the above.
I don't suppose you have Ford F350s in your area? You could put that Ranger in the glove box.
Don't see them very often, thankfully. We're not the US yet - there is still hope!
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?
Under main roof
Apologies, I meant to add the acronym where first said under main roof.
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Also makes roads unsafe for cycling