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Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

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Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#51

Post by sokoloff »

0_____0 wrote: post #23
newaccount2021 wrote: post #6

remove or charge for parking and people park on the street...no one is giving up their cars, all of the social engineering just ends up creating more problems in many Bay Area communities you will see cars as tightly aligned on both sides of residential streets as is physically possible...homeowners don't even have room to put out trash bins without blocking their own drives. and why? because apartment complexes and…

The last line of your reply there really says it all. Every facet of how our cities are built caters to the automobile owner. Universal street parking, parking minimums, highways through urban cores, not prioritizing public transit infrastructure... these things all reinforce automobile dominance, and they've been public policy for the last 70 years. In order to fix the issue of congested and dangerous streets, we ne…

> we need to get drivers to shift to other transit modes, and part of the answer is to stop coddling them with free parking.

Another approach might be to make other transit modes suck less. A lot less.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#52

Post by 0_____0 »

criddell wrote: post #44
0_____0 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last line of your reply there really says it all. Every facet of how our cities are built caters to the automobile owner. Universal street parking, parking minimums, highways through urban cores, not prioritizing public transit infrastructure... these things all reinforce automobile dominance, and they've been public policy for the last 70 years. In order to fix the issue of congested and dangerous streets, we ne…

I've been thinking about other transit modes for medium and long distances and I'm having a hard time thinking of great ideas for where I live (central Texas). Public transportation is one, but the last thing many of us want to do right now is get on a crowded train. Bicycles are great until it gets too hot or too cold which is a pretty large chunk of the year. They also aren't an option for many of us with health is…

If you try to conceive of The One Weird Trick that will solve urban mobility, it's an impossible problem.

The best general purpose plan I can conceive of is to build mixed housing and commercial in places where there is already decent transit. No parking minimums.

Build in earnest for a city where people can literally walk to any errand they may need. European planners actually do this -- they require neighborhood plans that offer a mix of residential, commercial (restaurants and nightlife), schools, other amenities. If the local grocery store is 2 blocks away, you don't need to get on a crowded train at all!

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#53

Post by jabbany »

The problem with paid parking at least in North America is that many/most cities are designed so that you need a car to get around -- driving is a necessity not a luxury. This makes paid parking feel like a tax rather than a service.

Contrast that to, say, a dense city like Tokyo or Beijing where parking is both scarce and almost always comes at a cost. There is much less backlash, because you can get to pretty much everywhere just using public transit. In this case, people accept that point-to-point driving is a luxury -- you're choosing convenience so it's natural that that would come at a cost.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#54

Post by jstarfish »

criddell wrote: post #27
emptybits wrote: post #9

> Rational people quickly become emotional about parking ... Thinking about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain responsible for snap judgments about urgent fight-or-flight issues, such as how to avoid being eaten. Lol. A bit melodramatic, but sure. Charge for it, yes, but give motorists a civilized experience when possible. Some of the emotion and impatience and a…

If parking gets too expensive, I can imagine self-driving cars circling the block until the owner is ready to go.

This will run you afoul of existing no-cruising laws.

(...which were put on the books decades ago to keep taxi drivers trolling for fares out of high-congestion areas.)

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#55

Post by BitwiseFool »

dpark wrote: post #50
devchix wrote: post #18

The core of this post is the linked article The Pseudoscience of Parking Requirements . The core of that article is three bullet points: • Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers. • Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, s…

> I don't see how removing off-street parking requirements would address anything. It doesn’t. It allows developers to dump the problem on public streets. Seattle does this stuff now. 42 unit buildings with 5 parking spots. This is great for developers. They get to build more units and let Seattle deal with the additional parking pressure. It’s car hostile, which fine, but then you need to provide alternatives to the…

Agreed, it's not enough to just be car-hostile. Pain and inconvenience do not automatically lead to increased public transit utilization.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#56

Post by 0_____0 »

sokoloff wrote: post #51
0_____0 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last line of your reply there really says it all. Every facet of how our cities are built caters to the automobile owner. Universal street parking, parking minimums, highways through urban cores, not prioritizing public transit infrastructure... these things all reinforce automobile dominance, and they've been public policy for the last 70 years. In order to fix the issue of congested and dangerous streets, we ne…

> we need to get drivers to shift to other transit modes, and part of the answer is to stop coddling them with free parking. Another approach might be to make other transit modes suck less. A lot less.

If you approach the issue holistically, you both improve transit and wind down subsidies and aids for drivers.

Tangent: there's an interesting equilibrium effect with commuter traffic - if a commute is served by an automobile route and a train line, the commute times will be similar. If for some reason, automobile traffic is delayed by loss of road capacity, over the long term some of that auto traffic will switch modes to the rail option, until the systems are in equilibrium once again.

Obviously in the real world this is much more complex but it's still observable... let me see if I can find a link...

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#57

Post by decafninja »

jurassic wrote: post #24

I think non-residential street parking, paid or not, should probably be illegal. Or at least eye-wateringly expensive and limited to a few minutes at a time (e.g. food pickups). I say this as someone who drives regularly. The lack of visibility street parking creates in densely developed areas is a major safety hazard for all. Cyclists can get doored, drivers have diminished environmental awareness of things such as…

I'm wondering if there are cultural practices in play regarding your mention of SFH being used as "overcrowded communal living situations".

For example, it's not uncommon in Asia to find multiple generations living in the same household. AFAIK California has a lot of Asians.

While not in California, the town my parents live in has had an influx of Chinese immigrants the past decade or so. This has resulted in situations like the above, where multiple generations (grandparents, parents, grown children, grandkids) are living in the same SFH. Often times all three adult generations are driving, so that's at least 3 cars. Even more if say, each working individual have their own cars.

The result is that the street in front of my parents' home is jam packed with parked cars that would not fit in these homes' driveways/garages.

I don't not-sympathize, being an Asian myself, as I also happen to think the American obsession of kicking out adult children out of the household ASAP regardless of circumstances is stupid (or from the other side, clawing tooth and nail to achieve so-called "independence" from parents regardless of circumstances). At the same time, the street parking situation is not sustainable.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#58

Post by criddell »

jdminhbg wrote: post #46
sokoloff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Send the car on an errand and have it come back, or even send it “home” and summon it later. (I’m deeply skeptical that we’ll have level 5 self-driving cars in my lifetime, but if we do, we won’t need to pay $50 in today’s money to park anywhere…)

Even outside of "cheating" like this, self-driving would have a pretty significant impact on parking economics. You don't need to have parking spread throughout the city in convenient places, because you can send your car to the central parking depot while you're shopping and recall it when you're done.

I don't think sending a car on an errand is cheating in any way. In fact I think it's one of the great promises of self driving cars. People already do curbside pickup of groceries, dry cleaning, restaurant food, etc... There's no reason a person needs to be in that car.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#59

Post by aeternum »

jurassic wrote: post #24

I think non-residential street parking, paid or not, should probably be illegal. Or at least eye-wateringly expensive and limited to a few minutes at a time (e.g. food pickups). I say this as someone who drives regularly. The lack of visibility street parking creates in densely developed areas is a major safety hazard for all. Cyclists can get doored, drivers have diminished environmental awareness of things such as…

While I understand the sentiment, this makes cities even more unfriendly to families with kids. How can grandparents or relatives visit for a weekend?

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#60

Post by tptacek »

jurassic wrote: post #24

I think non-residential street parking, paid or not, should probably be illegal. Or at least eye-wateringly expensive and limited to a few minutes at a time (e.g. food pickups). I say this as someone who drives regularly. The lack of visibility street parking creates in densely developed areas is a major safety hazard for all. Cyclists can get doored, drivers have diminished environmental awareness of things such as…

Residential bans on overnight on-street parking are essentially a tool for preventing new affordable housing from being built. It doesn't so much work against housing density as foreclose on it.

I live in one of two Chicago suburbs notable for excellent connectivity to Chicago's transit fabric (we're on both the Blue and the Green CTA train lines, a major regional commuter rail route, and a zillion bus routes). But people have jobs all over the metro area; to live here, take a job anywhere but the center of the city, and rely on public transit, you'd have to commute downtown and then back out, adding 45-90 minutes to your commute each way. Even if you don't drive every day, most people still need cars. Taking one of the few existing affordable apartments here essentially requires you to kick in several hundred dollars extra per month for a parking spot somewhere else in the area.

What really happens here is that, of course, most residents, working class or not, own cars. But if you don't live on an SFH lot with a garage, you scavenge for parking where you can find it, often parking on the street and getting cited for it; our overnight parking ban generates about $400k/yr, mostly from renters. Gross.†

We've banned overnight parking here as well, and I've been working for years now to build a case against that ban. Many other Chicago suburbs have repealed their overnight bans and replaced them with sticker systems.

Meanwhile, we enforce off-street parking requirements for new residential construction. The sufficiency of those requirements is probably the single most important lever in trying to get new developments rejected at the plan commission, and to ratchet up the cost of new apartments so that fewer are built and for wealthier people. The pattern is to make a case for requiring more parking spots than can reasonably be provided on a residential lot, and, when that obviously can't happen, demand fewer units and less density.

The Planning Association article linked here seems to have things exactly right. What we should be doing is eliminating all off-street parking requirements --- developers can build them if they think the market needs them --- and then simply charging for convenient on-street parking (perhaps with means-tested subsidies for residents). It doesn't seem complicated.

† I did a FOIA request on this a year or so ago and mapped the tickets out, and, because I didn't know the right FOIA request to find all the apartments, surveyed the area for multi-family buildings, and threw together a dumb static HTML page; I just got the 2021 batch of FOIA data and am throwing together an Elixir app to render it this week. https://oak-park-parking.fly.dev/

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