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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

#321

Post by dionidium »

op00to wrote: post #54
badsock wrote: post #37

The 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.

You're right and you're wrong - trucks generally don't pay the true cost of their road usage, but neither do motorists, at least through gas taxes and tolls. Much of our road funding comes from other sources like sales taxes and such. Which seems really funny when public transportation is constantly expected to pay for itself, but far more inefficient private motor vehicles don't have to pay their fair share.

In the U.S. most of a state's transportation budget comes from the U.S. government, but the largest state-level source in my state is fuel taxes:

Source: http://www.modot.org/about/documents/FinancialSnapshot.pdf

(See the chart on page 3.)

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

#322

Post by JustSomeNobody »

tjic wrote: post #245

Meh. You also pay for the cost of public parks even if you never use them. You pay for the cost of government elementary schools even if you homeschool your kids. etc. Now, I'm an anarchocapitalist and would love to see all of these costs unbundled, so that we each pay only for what we use. ...but the other 99.9% of folks in our society think that it is reasonable to have one-size-fits-all solutions, where a single b…

> You pay for the cost of government elementary schools even if you homeschool your kids.

Being a Floridian, we get a lot of retirees from other states (shocker, right?). A portion of these retirees don't like paying taxes for education. They say their kids are grown and they went to schools in other states, so why should they pay taxes for education?

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

#323

Post by strictnein »

vbezhenar wrote: post #162
JDDunn9 wrote: post #98

This topic is discussed at length in the book, "Green Metropolis". It's part of a bigger issue of always putting cars first. You can't build a large building without first doing a traffic study. If you bring too much traffic, you can't build it. Never mind that traffic is about the only cost in America that you can increase to make public transportation more appealing. Generally U.S. building codes include a maximum…

I live in city, where there're problems with parking, everything is tight, no suburbs, etc. And US looks like a dream for me. Living outside this city, driving fast lanes? I would love to live there, I hate public transportations and I hate concentrated people.

You wouldn't know it from reading the comments here, but plenty of people in the US really enjoy the suburbs, myself included.

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

#324

Post by snrplfth »

sfifs wrote: post #308
adrianN wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking lanes to park cars is illegal. It's just a problem of enforcing the rules.

Yes it's tempting to say that but it doesn't solve the underlying problem which is the development didn't create sufficient parking space. It didn't create because the government didn't mandate. A parking lot is not a high value salable area for a property developer and so unless he is building it for the 1% who value and pay a premium for such, there is no incentive fir him to do so. So as people become wealthier an…

But you said it yourself - the way to solve the externality is to forbid them from parking on the street. How is that so difficult? Rather than the government trying to plan the optimal amount of parking for every possible time and use and density, they can just say, "don't park on the street. Figure out your own parking requirements."

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

#325

Post by JustSomeNobody »

JDDunn9 wrote: post #98

This topic is discussed at length in the book, "Green Metropolis". It's part of a bigger issue of always putting cars first. You can't build a large building without first doing a traffic study. If you bring too much traffic, you can't build it. Never mind that traffic is about the only cost in America that you can increase to make public transportation more appealing. Generally U.S. building codes include a maximum…

> We need to push back against suburban sprawl and the car-first design.

Yes, we should. Not going to happen though because Rich Folk(tm) don't walk or ride buses.

Edit: I mean this in the sense that the whatever colored glasses they are looking through when they design the buildings/cities/etc don't allow them to see anything other than what they know.

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

#326

Post by skrap »

joelwilliamson wrote: post #279
skrap wrote: post #46

My city just passed a bond measure which includes $36MM for a 300 space parking garage for the high school and city hall, literally meters from where a new light rail stop will be built. 25% of the city's families don't own a car. I have trouble not seeing this as a forced, direct subsidy for the lifestyle of the employees of the city. And this is supposedly one of the most transit-friendly cities around (in the US).…

$120K per parking spot is ridiculous. Some construction firm must have very good ties with your city government.

It's a bit complicated by the location where they must be built - essentially into the side of a 1-to-1 slope rocky hillside. At least that's what the government claims is the reason for the expense. It still seems a pretty tough number to swallow given that its capacity can only serve less than half a percent of the city's population, and probably will be restricted to only city employees.

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

#327

Post by snrplfth »

tzs wrote: post #60
tonmoy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They specifically talk about the fact that cities require a minimum number of parking to be built for businesses and residences. Now, if this requirement wasn't present then economical forces would take over, places without parking would be ideal for less wealthy people because the prices would be lower.

> Now, if this requirement wasn't present then economical forces would take over, places without parking would be ideal for less wealthy people because the prices would be lower. On the other hand, wouldn't those places tend to have fewer customers because people who are not willing or able to get their without driving will go someplace with more parking, and so would have to charge more per customer to cover fixed c…

Maybe, maybe not. But isn't that for the businesses to decide, depending on their needs? As it stands, large numbers of businesses (and residences, etc.) are required to have more parking than they ever need at any point. How does that make sense? Why can't the owners of a property determine how much it's worth to them?

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

#328

Post by VLM »

greedo wrote: post #304
dagw wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children are straight up evil, so you're still going to need a supervising adult on each minibus to keep them from murdering each other.

And destroying the bus. Idle hands and all that...

One answer is unshared cars, or shared only within a possibly extended family.

Not all Americans are atomized urbanites. Many are in families.

My MiL, wife, myself, and my two kids could easily share one self driving car although the number of miles traveled would likely be staggering.

If my kids destroy "dads car" they are in big trouble, and "dads car" has "car alexa" and she will yell at them for awhile if they misbehave and god help them if "car alexa" has to resort to facetime dad at work to mediate a child argument. "Wait until your father gets home" worked on gen-xers when they were kids, but now we have facetime and dozens of equivalent systems.

The mileage used and CO2 footprint will likely be much higher than individually owned cars because every trip everyone takes will be twice as long upfront, plus my kids will be car mobile which means much less sitting at home (Hey, you want your allowance, have the car drive you 10 miles to grandma's house and rake her leaves while mom and dad at work and behave yourself because Car Alexa has her eye on you and I will ask her). Also my senior citizen MiL would never road trip at her age and driving ability but a self driving car would result in a lot of visiting rural relatives and doing stuff in the hypercongested and terrifying to drive in downtown. Heck if I had the car at my beck and call why would I ever eat lunch at my desk when I could hang out at a nice park instead and never care about parking or driving. Hey why drive the whole family to the library when you can just send all four separately at their convenience, each of which takes twice as many miles because its pick up and drop off service unless no one else needs it, for 8 times the number of miles driven. I need a head of lettuce for dinner tomorrow, normally I'd get it on the way home from work for "free" ecologically speaking, but my son is just doing homework on his ipad so I'll send him out shopping on a special trip because he can do his math homework for 90% of the time while the car is driving him.

I would realistically estimate we're doing about 25000 miles per year across three cars and if we replaced it with one extended family self driver, I think it quite reasonable we'd knock out 60000 miles per year. Given that the self driver is likely to be staggeringly more expensive than any of our three cars, it probably cheaper and better for the environment to have separate cars, at least until self driving is so cheap its "free".

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

#329

Post by verbify »

VLM wrote: post #310
verbify wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can already make these tradeoffs for yourself by moving to SF or Manhattan, which is generally ill-advised unless you make so much that the astronomical housing costs don't hurt too badly. The shoe is on the other foot. The reason why rent is so high in these places is because there's a lot of demand to live there - people do find it desirable. If more cities were built like SF or Manhattan (i.e. there was more…

"people do find it desirable" Americans are culturally completely blind to narrowcasting, in this case narrowcasted beliefs about lifestyle. For example, millions of people are rabid extreme fans of the TV show "Survivor". Its economically important. Its culturally and socially relevant (well, to its super fans who insist on seeing life thru a "Survivor" lens). Enormous sums of money change hands over this one TV sho…

I did not advocate for everyone living in cities. I advocated for more city housing, as currently it is unaffordable to many who do want to live in them due to demand outstripping supply. If you want to see my view as Pol Pot style authoritanrianism, well, I'm not even sure where to start.

We need more city housing because there's plenty of demand. I understand plenty of people want to live in rural areas, and I wish them well.

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

#330

Post by CydeWeys »

ryuker16 wrote: post #149
CydeWeys wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still assuming that everyone owns their own self-driving car, though. Given that the average person only uses a car for one hour per day it's silly that you'd keep idle a car that can drive itself for those other 23 hours. It makes sense to share the entire fleet. So after you get dropped off at the mall, the car is off to pick up its next passenger, and you get whatever self-driving car happens to be closest…

Except the issue with traffic is commuting which occurs at roughly the same time. You don't have much problem with Saturday shopping traffic .

The idea that everyone needs to commute in a separate vehicle is an outdated notion whose time has past. It especially makes no sense with shared self-driving cars, which are more like small buses than privately owned passenger cars in function. The total number of vehicles on the road would end up drastically reduced.
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