Hmm. Pretty sure I read about this from the libertarians in Reason at least a decade ago. Amusing to see a few people catching up. :P While we're at it, here's some other fun transportation/planning policy articles from that group that might be relevant to the HN demographic:
Why New Urbanism Doesn't Work: https://reason.com/archives/2013/06/07/why-new-urbanism-does... - "Urban elitists don’t recognize that their policies helped create the “sprawl” that they disdain. It’s not as if middle-income San Jose workers would choose to live over the mountain ranges in places such as Tracy"
The New urbanism article was pretty bad.. The author made some OK points, but the only example he provides is the San Francisco which you can really only compare with a city like New York, London, Hong Kong.
I thought it was funny the idea that New Urbanists are this big powerful entity pushing all these regulations and codes in place, as if building developers and their investors don't have any sort of input.
Also he fails to provide any sort of evidence these new codes and regulations pushed by new urbanists are responsible for sprawl. Especially when most of the suburbs mentioned in the article are much older than new urbanist policies.
Limiting free parking works as part of a long-term solution to make driving a car in high-density areas miserable and expensive, while making walking, cycling or taking public transportation enjoyable and cheap.
Other than making parking expensive, I'm these include: closing roads; creating roads closed to private vehicles, allowing only electric busses/trams; city bike programs; increase in pedestrian and cycling infrastructure; closing side roads on one end to remove their functionality as transit roads; congestion charges; limiting access to the center to odd numbered plates; requiring residential buildings to include ground-level commercial spaces; narrowing roads; increasing the number of buses/trams; park and ride systems; car shares to help people living in high density areas to abandon car ownership; etc.
You can see every single one of these solutions implemented in cities all over Europe. Europe is a obviously a different case than America - almost all of its cities had centers whose roads were defined before cars were invented. After 60+ years of trying to shoehorn car culture into them, they've said "enough". They collectively decided that they literally can't afford to accommodate cars at a rate that drivers want, and decided to take another route. Which is actually an interesting phenomenon once you start noticing it - there is no infrastructure that you can build in a high density area that will not be completely filled with cars within a couple of years. The only place where high car ownership makes sense is in rural areas.
And to put it in global warming perspective: Urbanism is a long trend, and only countries who reduce their exposure to cars and individual transport will be able to make the turn towards reducing CO2 emissions.
Only people who can afford endless impound
fees will "just park in the street".
It depends if all the other parking in the area is restricted - the jargon I've heard is "displaced parking" and I've seen it in action.
When a university near me raised parking prices, any road or grass verge or dropping-off point on campus that wasn't marked 'no parking' got cars on it. When those were marked 'no parking', they started parking in the customer parking of nearby shops. When the shops restricted parking to two hours, people started parking on residential streets further out. So the residential streets needed a residents permit scheme.
Now, if parking is already extremely heavily regulated you might already have the street parking and customer parking and residents parking restrictions (and admin and enforcement for them) in place. But it's my experience that restricting the supply of parking spaces isn't always a simple matter.
Obviously these things take time to carry through. When you half the parking space, you don't suddenly half the amount of cars. Over time people frustrated with the parking, the fines for parking in wrongful areas and the walking distances when parking further from home, will sell their car, and over time fewer people who didn't have a car yet will buy one than they otherwise would in a world of ubiquitous parking. Gradually this reduces the amount of cars and displaced parking.
If you build new housing without parking for new inhabitants, you don't have that inherent excess of cars per parking spot. You might have some excess still but not nearly as much.
The biggest solution though is to offer alternative transport, first, and then removing, reducing or making more expensive the parking infrastructure. Here in Amsterdam the city has been removing parking and hiking up parking fees quite rapidly. But it was after establishing ubiquitous, separated, safe cycle paths everywhere, a decent tram, bus system and metro, 8 train stations (in a city of just 1 million) and another relatively high-speed underground light rail project in the works today, as well as public-transport's rentable bicycles and mini electric cars (which, due to sharing, is getting iirc about ~20 users for the space of one traditional parking spot). In Amsterdam I've never owned a personal car and won't ever need to. But having lived in America, I can't imagine that to work.
> It depends if all the other parking in the area is restricted...
I thought we were talking about major and not-so-major cities; areas where there are mandates to install X units of parking per Y units of new housing. In places like these, unrestricted parking is almost non-existent.
Yeah but SF makes a metric f ton of revenue off parking fees and fines. So they'd need to dramatically alter their revenue sourcing to get rid of parking spaces.
Do you have the numbers to back up your assertion?
Do make sure to compare the revenue from parking fees/fines against revenue from other sources (both similar in size and -say- the top five or top ten sources), as well as noting what fraction of the city's entire revenue is composed of parking fees and fines. The city is pretty clued-in, technologically speaking, so this information shouldn't be too hard to get.
I'm not required to do all the research you suggest, because I haven't made a comparative assertion. Most people who live in San Francisco own a car, most people who live in Manhattan do not. So it's not even remotely a fair comparison anyway. It's more expensive and dependent on parking than either Chicago or Los Angeles, but no doubt those cities can't just abandon parking without coming up with an alternative revenue stream.
> Most people who live in San Francisco own a car...
I actually don't believe this. I could be cajoled into believing "Many people who live in SF own a car...", but not "Most people...". I bet if you look at the vehicle registration stats, you'll find that there are somewhere between 1/10 and 1/4 as many cars registered in the county as there are people living in it.
> I'm not required to do all the research you suggest, because I haven't made a comparative assertion.
You're never required to do anything. However, you actually did make a comparative assertion. You asserted:
> Yeah but SF makes a metric f ton of revenue off parking fees and fines. So they'd need to dramatically alter their revenue sourcing to get rid of parking spaces. [0]
That implies that parking fees and fines are a substantial portion of San Francisco's revenue. I don't care about the revenue streams of other cities. It would be nonsensical to look at them.
As I understand it, SF is a city with one of the highest per-capita city revenues in the US. I would be... rather surprised if parking fees and fines were largely responsible for its revenues. While fees and fines may bring in what appears to be a large amount of money, I expect that they account for less than 1% of city revenues. The only way to discover that is to compare them against the take from the rest of the city's revenue sources. :)
Yea, I have gotten so many parking tickets over the years. 90 percent have been for overnight parking. You pay $2000 a month for a shitty room in a 50's cracker box house, and can't park your vechicle anywhere without getting a ticket? (Please save the Emergency vechicle egress excuses? My town happily accept $90 a quarter for overnight passes? And wide streets are treated the same as narrow streets?)
Where I reside, you can't park your vechicle more than 30 min. between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m.
Most towns I have lived in allow 72 hrs of parking, and then you need to move 300 yards. My town doesn't want to change the muni code because they make a staggering amount of Revenue.
Theses parking fines/traffic fines are revenue fueled. I honestly wouldn't be upset but these fees account for income level. They don't. You get a $38 dollar parking ticket, or a dubious $500 traffic violation--it's a setback for low income residents. Why couldn't you send in a copy of your 1040's, and have your parking violation adjusted to realistic amounts?
As to living, working, having a life, while living in the suburbs; you need a vechicle. You need to park the vechicle somewhere? Not all of us can just jump on public transportation(our public transportation is so slow, so spotty, I can get to most places in my county faster by riding my bike. (My employer doesn't like sweat soaked employees though, nor do Judges in Jury duty), or have the income to take Uber/Taxis everywhere.
My point is some of still need a automobile. Yes, we need parking rules. Fees/fines should not unreasonable? At least that's what I thought that constitution, the one one really cares about, said?
Honestly, if you're not working an entry-level job, you should be able to negotiate car storage and/or work transportation arrangements with your employer.
There are towns that use fines and citations as a source of revenue. If you live in one of those towns, and don't like the practice, agitate to have that practice changed. (Yes, I know that this is often somewhere between very goddamn hard and all-but-impossible.)
I am disinterested in responding to the rest of your comment. :)
That's why every big Western European cities force new building houses to have an underground car park, and are pushing to remove free street parking.
That's currently happening in Paris : every parking space in the street is charged and limited to two hours; long-term parking is limited to your "neighborhood" (no spot reserved) and costs around 500€/yr; and lastly a reserved parking spot in an underground garage costs ~1000€/yr.
Yeah, simply reducing the number of parking spaces per residence is not a free lunch. The article is forgetting the negative externality of making people park elsewhere.
Every time someone drives around a block to find somewhere to park, their car is unnecessarily burning fuel and spewing exhaust into the air. That means more pollution, more wasted time, lower productivity, and more accidents on residential streets because all those drivers looking for somewhere to park are not paying enough attention to what's in front of them.
This looks like just another of those naive proposals that assume that people will suddenly change their lifestyles given the right regulations. That's not realistic, especially when we're talking about car ownership in the United States of Automobiles.
What we need is actual data on car ownership trends, and a model to translate that data into the number of parking spaces that will be needed in a given city over the next couple of decades. Battery-powered and self-driving cars should also feature somewhere in that calculation. Only then can we ask how many parking spaces we should have.
> This looks like just another of those naive proposals that assume that people will suddenly change their lifestyles given the right regulations.
Days before I moved to SF, I sold my car. I thought once about it, looked at the cost to park it, then sold it. Had parking in the city been substantially cheaper, I would have thought a couple of dozen times about selling the thing, and may very well have ended up keeping it, despite the fact that I would have almost never used it.
There are several 2D (ie. just-a-layer-of-blacktop, rather than a multi-story garage) parking lots in my area of the city. It's obvious that they would make more money as non-rent-controlled housing. It's somewhat clear that regulations in the city are keeping those lots open, and very clear that city regulations caused me to sell my car and use public transportation. :)
Those 2d lots are probably owned by someone trying to acquire air rights. This happens in New York City all the time. Once the conditions are right you'll see a building pop into existence.
If you don't think people will change their lifestyles given the right conditions, then how did we end up with car-dependent lifestyles in the first place? It's exactly because governments subsidized the right conditions for that to happen by building highways and mandating free parking and tearing down streetcar lines.
I'm pretty sure we'll be able to get away with fewer parking spaces in the long term, just like we built them guadually over the decades. But if we suddenly start eliminating them, traffic will be hell for the next 10-20 years.
10-20 years is a bit of an overstatement. People aren't that stupid. The important thing is to have realistic alternatives, i.e. grade-separated transit.
Yeah, simply reducing the number of horse stalls per resident is not a free lunch. The article is forgetting the negative externality of making people tether their horses in the park.s
So we make a law that subsidizes car ownership in order to continue subsidizing car ownership with street parking?
Street parking in a city like SF is insane. It should simply not exist. If you want to have your truck stand around all day in prime location, you better start paying market rate for that space.
Or, if the street needs a line of two ton shields to separate car traffic from pedestrians, and you're willing to volunteer yours, we can come to an accommodation.
> I think the problem with building houses with nowhere to park is that people will just park on the street.
This is exactly what happened in my city. They created a "transit oriented development zone", but never actually provided any new transit.
The developers got to save lots of cash by not building any parking, and the streets are full of cars that everyone is still required to own and park to get anywhere.
1) You can't just 'change parking'. There are already too many variables involved. Articles such as the above are all well and good, but they're pie in the sky, up there with personal space vehicles.
Implementing something like this at the national level is...going to be more than complicated (think, just as bad or worse than healthcare), controversial, and probably not worth it (inefficient and we we trying to get away from centralization anyways).
2) There are some technological solutions...but they are just as difficult, if not more so, than the legal solutions.
So my conclusion is that, for some sort of reform to work, there must be a general 'framework' that is invented, with general solutions, general planned costs, and then this framework must be publicized. That way a larger number of local governments can use these guidelines as a blueprint for reforming/updating their parking regulations.
I'm not saying this would be easy either, but it sounds more attainable than any of the alternatives. I think it would also tackle the problem more efficiently - no painful major overhauls, no expensive long planning/implementation processes, just what people actually want. And can do, given already limited time/money budgets.
What? Matthew Yglesias is not “libertarianish” by any stretch of the imagination, and does not claim anything of the sort. He states outright that the goal is to reduce the extremely expensive (in land, money, etc.) parking subsidy that we currently provide to cars, which obviously makes cars more difficult to own.
I wonder what their response will be when low income people are the hardest hit by the lack of well-developed public transport? "Sucks to be you?" is what it's sounding like, but I hope that's wrong.
This is soon to be a non-issue thanks to automated cars. I hate parking companies like Impark, and I can't wait until 10 years passes to see them die a quick death when their services are no longer needed. It will free up a lot of space that I guess will be turned into more commercial buildings.
They can go a long way to park (industrial districts). They can also park more efficiently (by lining up).
The taxis in Beijing have their little hang outs where they park at 4am in the morning. Parking is notoriously hard in our city, but at 4am, the roads are deserted and they spill into a few second lanes without the police caring (and they are all gone by 6 as peak time is starting). Not a problem compared to the wild parking habits of private personal cars.
Certainly. That lowers the cost. It doesn't drive the cost to zero. Someone owns the land. Someone maintains the road surface. If there are 1 million self-driving cars on the road, then that's what, >6 million square meters of space?
If the cars are parked in a few secondary lanes, then the city is subsidizing the parking.
Otherwise there will be some sort of commercial parking facility.
Next to zero then. You definitely don't need parking companies. Most likely the owners of those vehicles, the commercial companies, would have their own lots for parking in places where it was the cheapest. But third party parking companies with parking lots charging exuberant fees would definitely be a thing of the past. What does a 5x10 piece of land cost of rent for a month at the edge of the city. Next to nothing.
For this to work, I think you are predicting there will only be a handful of large commercial companies in this autonomous future. Otherwise I don't think the economics works out.
In any case, if I go on the Great American Road Trip, I am going to have a single vehicle the whole time, yes? (Assume I rented it for a month, and that it's fully autonomous in a city.)
I don't want to load and unload all of the luggage, including the tent and stove, when I visit a city. So where do I park it?
If I rented it in Florida, and park it in L.A., does the car owning company in Florida own parking spots in L.A.? Or does it have a parking agreement with the parking facility in L.A.? Or do I contract directly with a third party parking company?
My guess is there will still be third party parking services. With the option of renting a space that's cheap but 15 miles away (adding $5 in fuel and a 25 minute latency) or a local place that's more expensive, but where I can easily fetch the suitcase I forgot in the car.
Take the taxi model, eliminate the driver, and there it is. There are plenty of cities in the world where taxis are more ubiquitous and owning personal cars are very expensive (parking being a big expense, but also winning the license plate lottery). American centrism doesn't really explain it.
So you normally don't take a taxi out of the city, and it is such a niche activity that I'd assume that it would be a different kind of speciality business with much higher costs that allow it to solve these problems. E.g. Private parking lots like those today.
<i>Most likely the owners of those vehicles, the commercial companies, would have their own lots for parking in places where it was the cheapest.</i>
Most companies, including large national ones, don't own the buildings that their stores / offices are in. They don't want to get into the real estate business and would rather someone else handle it.
The amount of surface area needed for cars in motion is strictly greater than the amount of space needed for cars at rest which means traffic lanes can dynamically shift from transit to storage based on variance in demand.
Let's assume we do automated cars right, so that the cars have a wireless connection to some central traffic planning system that coordinates traffic for an entire city.
As traffic dies down in the evening and overnight, fewer lanes are needed. Some lanes could be deallocated from traffic use and allocated to parking use to hold cars overnight, and then put back to traffic use in the morning.
"some central traffic planning system that coordinates traffic for an entire city"
That would be impressive uptime for both power and wireless connections. I was under the impression that autonomous vehicles would be more autonomous than that. Else what happens should something like http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/01/chicago... occur?
In any case, we're starting from the position that there are commercial parking services.
For your proposal to work, as a way to get rid of "companies like Impark" we have to assume that either that 1) street parking as you suggest will be free, ie, subsidized by the tax base as a whole, or 2) the city does not contract/sell operation of the central traffic planning system to companies like Impark.
Chicago (to mention it again), leased out its meters to a foreign corporation for 75 years.
Which is my option (1), free parking subsidized by the city.
If we wanted that now, we could nationalize all of the commercial parking systems. We instead often see the desire to find more revenue sources.
BTW, it won't be as simple as having a sign. Some areas already are free parking between given times, except during a declared snow emergency, or during hurricane evacuation. I'm not saying it can't be solved, only that it's not simple.
You don't need a real time central planning system for that. Just a few signs and some tow trucks. SF has a few streets that are traffic lanes during rush hour, and parking spots on off peak hours.
Why New Urbanism Doesn't Work: https://reason.com/archives/2013/06/07/why-new-urbanism-does... - "Urban elitists don’t recognize that their policies helped create the “sprawl” that they disdain. It’s not as if middle-income San Jose workers would choose to live over the mountain ranges in places such as Tracy"
Self-driving cars could destroy fine-based city government! https://reason.com/blog/2015/07/15/self-driving-cars-could-d... - "What's the downside? Increasing automation limits the ability of authorities to profit off human error."