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Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

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Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#221

Post by TulliusCicero »

mjevans wrote: post #172
yason wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also roads are built for the peak consumption. Outside the peak, there's generally excess capacity quietly eating away space from pedestrians and human beings.

This is VERY MUCH a falsehood. Have you ever commuted during the very ironically named 'rush hour'. (Everyone would much rather go fast, and it usually takes much longer than an hour)

Just because it was originally built for peak demand doesn't mean peak demand won't eventually exceed that as the population grows.

Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#222

Post by Decade »

gohrt wrote: post #74
mikepurvis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when parking sucks, isn't that an incentive to take transit? My sister was married in Toronto this past summer, and explicitly requested on the programme that people leave their cars at the church and take the subway across to the reception location (at Bloor/Dovercourt, where parking is horrible). Obviously having a decent transit option available is a prerequisite, but at least in that one case, it worked wonde…

I can buy myself a car. I can't buy myself a train. That's the problem.

Why? So you can customize the paint? It’s not like you have access to the interesting control systems of a modern car, anyway.

Donald Trump does bring up a legitimate point: The train can be operated by a corrupt entity. With a car, you have options. With a train, you are stuck.

However, I prefer to arrange my life so I can use bicycle.

Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#223

Post by usrusr »

desas wrote: post #178
cameldrv wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're underestimating all of the ways self-driving cars will increase efficiency relative to parking, which are multiplicative. 1. Much higher occupancy per car. Based on my personal observations, at rush hour the average occupancy of a car is something like 1.3. I don't see any reason that can't increase to 2.6 or more without significantly slowing anyone down -- 2x 2. Yes, a lot of people need to get to work at 8,…

Do you think people will prefer to use a self driving car that gets them to the office ten minutes faster or one that meanders around picking up other people and dropping them off?

For many people, that meander will save them more money than they will earn in any other 10 minute slot of the day. And sitting in a robocab is smartphone media consumption time (or time for a printed newspaper, if you're a Vicky), it's not terribly hard to tolerate minutes that way. A well designed (and sufficiently dense in usage) shared autonomous car system could also support usage patterns a lot more dynamic than rigid door-to-door pickup: instead of sitting around idle, waiting for a car to divert into the cul de sac maze of their suburb, users might prefer a little walk towards the next through road, with the app auto-negotiating a rendezvous point. Not only because taking a little walk through your neighborhood is less annoying than sitting idle on call for pickup, but also because it would actually be faster. With that usage pattern, pickup overhead for the occupants would be much lower

I say "could" instead of "will" because all this is more a question of cultural development than a technological/economic one. If individual car usage does not go out of fashion, robotic driving will only continue the trend towards ever bigger commuter castles.

Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#224

Post by TulliusCicero »

sfifs wrote: post #176
6t6t6t6 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid that you are comparing pears and oranges. If you want to be fair, compare American cities with European cities. In Barcelona or the center of Copenhagen, there are not free parking spaces. And I can assure you that there are not the traffic issues that you are mentioning in your comment... It's quite on the contrary, actually.

Well if you want to compare that way to the cities mentioned in the list, the only appropriate comparisons in Europe are London and Paris which definitely have parking, traffic and pollution issues (or had till they started banning vehicles in the center of the cities). Paris even considered banning diesel altogether contrary to the rest of Europe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_agglomerations_by_po... Barce…

> Barcelona and Copenhagen arr about an order of magnitude smaller and likely don't even make it into the top 100 cities.

Barcelona makes it into spot #92, actually. It's really not that small, the metro area is a bit over 5 million people.

> Barcelona and Copenhagen arr about an order of magnitude smaller and likely don't even make it into the top 100 cities.

Barcelona is not an order of magnitude smaller than any US city, unless you can think of a city in the states with a metro pop of 50 million.

Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#225

Post by TulliusCicero »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #10

I don't disagree with the numbers but you could make this same argument for literally any feature of a business that has the affect of making that business more attractive to customers with Y quality (where Y is not something all customers have). Let's imagine that the parking lots of Walmart, $localSupermarketChain and other stores is cut to 1/4 it's present size. What happens then? I suspect the inability to draw w…

Yes, and if businesses want to do that, I don't think anyone here is going to object. As you say, it could be like any other perk (albeit a very expensive one to provide).

But the status quo is that businesses are required to provide parking by the government. That's the real problem; even if the business would rather have lower prices or spend more money on different amenities, they have to provide that parking.

Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#226

Post by TulliusCicero »

s0rce wrote: post #101
op00to wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only step foot in the mall when I must. I much prefer to walk to the corner grocery store or take the train to a downtown shopping district. I suppose we cancel each other out.

You probably live in a walkable city with good public transit, the parent poster probably lives in the other 95% of the USA.

And the reason transit sucks and cars are way more convenient in 95% of the USA is exactly what we're discussing: mandates from the government that prioritize cars over other modes.

Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#227

Post by TulliusCicero »

refurb wrote: post #3

I 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…

> Credit cards make everything more expensive when the poor often can't use them due to bad credit.

Does the government force businesses to accept credit cards?

> 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.

Does the government require this?

> I'm sure what this article is arguing for.

Leaving parking mostly up to the market, because there's no compelling public interest in forcing businesses or individuals to subsidize driving.

Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#228

Post by gambiting »

nopinsight wrote: post #179
sfifs wrote: post #119

Most of the commenters on this thread don't appear to have lived in a country with the opposite problem. Consider what happens when development and car ownership expands in a country without adequate government parking mandates. You routinely find at least two road lanes blocked by parked traffic because buildings don't have adequate parking. This leads to very slow bumper to bumper traffic (try Bangalore, Mumbai, Ca…

A factor rarely mentioned is heat. People in tropical climate do not enjoy walking even relatively short distance because of its hot and humid weather during most of the year. Middle-class people in dense tropical cities with traffic problems still buy a car as soon as they can afford it. Coupled with barebone funding for and low quality of public transportation, the traffic problem gets worse and worse as people bec…

It works the other way around too. In countries where the temperatures drop down to -20C, you really don't want to be standing outside waiting for a bus or a tram, even if it's "only" 30 minutes. Any shitty old car is better than waiting outside.

Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#229

Post by TulliusCicero »

wvenable wrote: post #9
grapehut wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not arguing against free parking, just against regulations that require certain amounts of parking to be built

Unfortunately insufficient parking is also a big issues; one in which these regulations are an attempt to solve. One could prevent less parking to be built but that would put more pressure on public roads. If you've ever been to an area with insufficient parking, it's pretty horrible. More so for people with cars but it affects those without cars as well.

> One could prevent less parking to be built but that would put more pressure on public roads.

Yes, and if demand on public parking exceeds supply, you just do the obvious: charge for it until you hit equilibrium.

> If you've ever been to an area with insufficient parking, it's pretty horrible.

It's actually not, you're just thinking with a very American mindset, assuming that everyone will drive everywhere, all the time. I recently moved to Munich, a place that, by American standards, has relatively little parking. It's fantastic, because you can actually walk and bike and take transit places, and it's comfortable and convenient.

Now I know what you're thinking: what does that have to do with offering parking? But the thing is, land use is mostly zero sum. Forcing everywhere to have huge streets and parking lots means that everything is spaced further out; not a big deal when you're in a car, but a very big deal for walking, biking, and transit. Requiring parking helps cars at the expense of other modes.

Re: Poor people pay for parking even when they can’t afford a car

#230

Post by nannal »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #184
flukus wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have to sit down on them like normal buses? One of the benefits of trams is the standing part so you can fit more people in. Last time I tried this on a bus the results weren't as good.

The interior of a bus doesn't need to be any different than the interior of a tram. Unless your city is repurposing coaches for public transport, the interiors of buses should have ample standing space.

In my experience trams trend to be wider than buses by a noticeable margin.
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