If you can't see this article by the Bezos-owned Washington Post as a propaganda piece to push aside obstacles he faces in his redevelopment of Seattle, then you need to brush up on your critical thinking skills. Bezos gives fuck-all about the poor unless they're buying his products.
Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
31–40 of 455 posts
Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it, really? Or is cars as the default transportation the problem? Come to Tokyo, you'll see how well things work with effectively no parking in general.
Its an American problem, but it isn't one you just solve banning cars or something. Post-war US built up all its major metro areas on the hype for the automobile. Where European and Asian cities are walkable, American ones are not, and to try to retrofit car cities into public transit / bike / foot traffic is insanely expensive. Add to that America has a systemic car culture (there is a reason cars are all bigger in…
"... pretty much the only market for pickup trucks"
I thought, huh? 'cuz where I live it's pickup trucks as far as the eye can see. Turns out that my country has the highest per capita ownership of pickup trucks [1]
[1] http://wardsauto.com/industry/pickup-trucks-reign-thailand
Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it, really? Or is cars as the default transportation the problem? Come to Tokyo, you'll see how well things work with effectively no parking in general.
Its an American problem, but it isn't one you just solve banning cars or something. Post-war US built up all its major metro areas on the hype for the automobile. Where European and Asian cities are walkable, American ones are not, and to try to retrofit car cities into public transit / bike / foot traffic is insanely expensive. Add to that America has a systemic car culture (there is a reason cars are all bigger in…
> Its an American problem, but it isn't one you just solve banning cars or something.
We're discussing a law that forces people to provide excess parking whether they want to or not, and your counter example is banning cars?
There's a universe of options in between those two extremes.
Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
#34Minimum parking requirements are also a mechanism to prevent businesses from declining to build parking and free-riding on their neighbors.
They also effectively ensure maximum density, which in some areas is an explicit government policy objective.
Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
#35I'm getting really sick of these media companies pushing their anti-rich agenda. Blaming rich people for parking that causes costs to rise for poor people is just insulting.
I didn't believe in much liberal bias in the media until this election. This is simply another extent of it, it's really eye opening.
Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
#36> pay more for their groceries to ensure that richer people can park free when they drive to the store.
That seems to assume that the richer people just park there "for free" and then don't buy anything.
How much volume would that store move without those customers, and what would that do to the prices? Hard to say. On the one hand, there would be lower demand. On the other, worse economy of scale.
Heaven fucking forbid that the poor pay even a tiny share for for something that doesn't directly benefit them.
Paying for this and that which doesn't benefit oneself: isn't that squarely the job of the working class? Don't foist that onto the poor, or the rich.
Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
#37The trucks that deliver the goods that poor people buy (and carry away the waste) are hard as hell on roads - you could say that the car drivers are subsidizing (through gasoline taxes) the massive infrastructure costs of maintaining a road network. I don't know how the numbers would balance out, but I'd bet that the benefits of that subsidy are greater than the costs incurred from free parking.
Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
#38I don't disagree with the analysis on how free parking makes things more expensive, but if you carry that argument forward, it gets kind silly. Credit cards make everything more expensive when the poor often can't use them due to bad credit. Putting grocery stores in really upscale areas makes the groceries cost more (across all stores), even though the poor don't shop at the fancy stores. I'm sure what this article…
Bezos owns WP. He doesn't like the fact that the city forces him to build built-in parking for his imported drones so they're not clogging the locals' ability to live in their own city.
Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
#39Parking shouldn't be free. If it's to entice customers at a store/shopping mall, they can be provided an hour of parking for every x dollars spent. Under-utilised parking spots should be leased or sold. (They sell for 80-300k where I live)
Then poverty activists will vilify you for making it too expensive for poor people to shop at your store.
There are so many factions that will attack you for doing something, you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car
#401. Stores that offer free parking have more customers 2. Stores that have more customers can offer better prices to all their customers (including poor people) due to greater sales volumes
I never shop anywhere I can't park at