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Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

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Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#61

Post by forty »

criddell wrote: post #33
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…

> we need a lot of investment in transportation alternatives. Some small changes can have a pretty minimal investment. The city of Austin lets motorcycles use street parking for free.

I live in the Paris, France area, and I think most people here that are not themselves driving such things are hoping that motorized two wheel vehicle gets outlawed.

I'm not sure why, but people driving those seem to completely ignore driving laws (red lights, stop sign, lanes, etc) which makes them very dangerous and annoying.

Not to mention the noise (for those which are not electric)

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#62

Post by BitwiseFool »

test6554 wrote: post #38
chizhik-pyzhik wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The path forward is zoning changes. Make it legal to build small apartments in a neighborhood, make it legal to run a corner shop, etc. We can build walkable environments in suburban hellscapes if we tweak the laws.

NIMBY. Asking people if they want the poor in their wealthy neighborhood and school district is like asking if they want a nuclear power plant in their neighborhood.

>"Asking people if they want the poor in their wealthy neighborhood"

I'm generally anti-NIMBY but this kind of sentiment is a dramatic oversimplification. I really don't think we should immediately frame this as a rich people are afraid of poor people problem. For one thing, it doesn't explain why NIMBYism is also present in poor and working class neighborhoods.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#63

Post by sokoloff »

0_____0 wrote: post #56
sokoloff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mo…

I can believe that; I look at total door to door time as the primary factor in choosing my transit (with cost as a second, but pretty distant second [I’m not commuting daily into the city->I’d have to consider cost higher if doing it 20x/month]).

I live in Cambridge, MA (1.4 miles from the Boston red line subway) and, excluding rides where I’m coming home from the airport, I bet I ride the subway less than once per year on average. It’s just not remotely competitive on door-to-door time with a private car, an Uber, or [most commonly] driving in the other direction to an alternative restaurant or shop with parking. (And Boston is probably in the top 10 of functioning mass transit systems in the US.)

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#64

Post by nostromo »

People supporting "new urbanism" -- a camp I was in until pretty recently -- should come look around downtown Seattle and see how it's working out.

Our downtown is a grim wasteland. Shoppers, workers and residents have voted with their feet -- and they voted to avoid downtown.

And it's not just Covid. The suburbs are booming. Walkable areas (most with free parking) in the 'burbs have new stores opening and have crowds of people eating, shopping, and enjoying life. Houses are in high-demand, while apartments near the core of the city are easy to find.

I say all this to say that maybe we should pause and reconsider new urbanism. The push to remove cars (less parking, more expensive parking, removing lanes, "road diets") isn't making our cities better, it's pushing people away. Strong Towns told us this would make our city better, but all evidence points to our cities getting markedly worse.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#65

Post by brk »

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.

Fortunately we're still quite a long ways away from self driving cars in the sense of truly driverless cars that can be relied upon to navigate safely on their own in random settings, like a city block.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#66

Post by paxys »

jabbany wrote: post #53

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…

Sure parking is a "tax", the same way the car payment, insurance, annual registration, maintenance, repairs, tolls, gas are all taxes. If someone can be expected to pay for all of this, why not parking as well?

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#67

Post by SECProto »

sokoloff wrote: post #43
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passing an enforceable law against that will be a lot easier, since the companies responsible for self-driving car algorithms can be bashed upside the head with it.

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…)

> Send the car on an errand and have it come back, or even send it “home” and summon it later

Now imagine what this will do to rush hour traffic - There would be twice as many vehicle trips for the same number of people. Road tolls (particularly on unoccupied cars) would be needed as part of any solution, which everyone loves even more than parking fees.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#68

Post by rory »

nostromo wrote: post #64

People supporting "new urbanism" -- a camp I was in until pretty recently -- should come look around downtown Seattle and see how it's working out. Our downtown is a grim wasteland. Shoppers, workers and residents have voted with their feet -- and they voted to avoid downtown. And it's not just Covid. The suburbs are booming. Walkable areas (most with free parking) in the 'burbs have new stores opening and have crowd…

The lack of a subway system can't help here. How reasonable is it to live without a car in Seattle?

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#69

Post by jabbany »

newaccount74 wrote: post #32

I think the best way to do it is to make short term parking free (under 30 minutes or so), and to charge for long term parking. This ensures that there are parking spaces available for people running errands or people who transport heavy things, while at the same time making it less attractive for commuters or residents to block parking spaces all day long.

In practice people do this all the time already because there's no perfect enforcement.

Plenty of people will risk parking in "no parking" / "permit only" spaces if they expect to only be away for a short duration (<30 mins).

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#70

Post by SECProto »

nostromo wrote: post #64

People supporting "new urbanism" -- a camp I was in until pretty recently -- should come look around downtown Seattle and see how it's working out. Our downtown is a grim wasteland. Shoppers, workers and residents have voted with their feet -- and they voted to avoid downtown. And it's not just Covid. The suburbs are booming. Walkable areas (most with free parking) in the 'burbs have new stores opening and have crowd…

> People supporting "new urbanism" [...] should come look around downtown Seattle and see how it's working out.

People can go look around the downtown of any given city to see a "grim wasteland", but it has little to do with new urbanism and much to do with covid causing major shift to work from home + avoiding a lot of in-person events.

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