Comment by skybrian
11 days ago
It would make a difference in dense cities like San Francisco where many people park on the street. A lot of people would have to give up their cars.
Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night.
So it seems like it would be difficult to get enough people in favor to do it state-wide in California? Wherever it would actually force people to do something, it would be unpopular.
Your city/rural distinction is insightful. I think it can be taken into account relatively easily. Name explicitly the cities/locations were the requirement would apply. Possibly based on some objective criteria like population density.
Can such policies be implemented individually by cities?
Not sure about the legal frameworks in the US but that’s exactly how it works in most places in the UK. Cities have restrictions for on-street parking (metered, permitted, illegal) whereas the towns and villages don’t (unless they also bring in bylaws to help with congestion).
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there is middleground: tax / fines, whatever you name them. It will be free if you filled the paperwork, and it start out cheap, while gradually increase yearly. Can be different depending on the density or how heavy traffic an area is. However you should improve the public transport at the same time too.
> A lot of people would have to give up their cars.
You don't have to give up the car, you just park it farther away from the dense and crowded downtown and use some other personal transportation (scooter, bike) for the last mile trip.
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.
> In a city with a properly-designed transit system you wouldn't need a car at all.
That's the wrong argument. People stay in traffic for hours, being frustrated about the waste of time. Yet, when asked why they wouldn't take public transport, you hear a bunch of dumb arguments why public transport is shit.
I experience this all of the time in my city. Public transport is awesome and you get around just as fast as with a car (given there is no traffic, which rarely happens). Yet, people complain about how bad public transport is and how unreliable. But if you point out that car traffic is just as unreliable and slower, then they take their freedom-card. That's some cognitive dissonance, if nothing else.
I wouldn't give a shit about these people. It's just so damn funny to see that - unless public transport is immediate teleportation - it never is good enough for them -- even if it's objectively faster a lot of times. Public transport will never good enough for these negative Nellie's.
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The San Francisco neighborhoods I'm thinking of aren't downtown. they usually require residence permits to park.
In dense cities parking garages (both underground, free standing and on top of commercial properties) works great to give high-density parking space
The difficulty would be in transitioning. Building spots only open up so often
Seems like a poor use of space when you can just work at making things easier for people to travel without a car.
> Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night.
... which is exactly why it can have a huge impact! The default American suburban street is insanely wide due to the assumption that people will need on-street parking. Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increase a suburb's density by something like 5%-10%.
Just think how much the municipality would save in road maintenance by basically halving the amount of road surface! And it's also a 10% reduction in water/sewer line length, a 10% reduction in area which needs to be covered by emergency services, a 10% reduction in commute distance, and so on.
As an added bonus: the smaller streets will disincentivize speeding, so it'll directly make the neighborhood safer as well.
Of course this won't immediately fix existing neighborhoods, but it'd at least open up the possibility of building right-sized ones in the future.
> 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.
A problem is that most municipalities require excessively wide streets with on street parking for any new developments.
Japan-width streets, despite their increased safety & land-use efficiency, are prohibited most places.