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Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

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Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#151

Post by jabbany »

bluGill wrote: post #133
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…

Paid parking is generally very expensive. There is a reason WalMart has free parking: over the life of the parking lot it doesn't cost them much, so they can afford to take it out of their profits.

Actually, the reason WalMart has free parking is because it is always placed far from where people live so everyone has to drive there, and because everybody has to drive they all have to park eventually. Then, to accommodate all this parking cheaply, the stores will have to be placed on cheap land which is far away from residential areas and you get a vicious cycle...

The notion that parking is somehow a necessity is only really because of crappy public transit and sprawling cities. In a dense city with good transit options, point-to-point driving wouldn't even be among the top options for getting places to begin with.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#152

Post by tzs »

dml2135 wrote: post #116
dpark wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don’t understand why this is the developer’s responsibility. People choosing this apartment building will be aware of their parking options and can plan accordingly.

An argument for making it the developer's responsibility is that buildings should last a long time, so should be designed with flexibility to deal with future neighborhood and city developments.

Take the building in his example, with 42 units and only 5 parking spots. That means 37 units are only useful to people who either don't have cars or who can find their own parking such as on street or at nearby paid lots.

Now imagine that other building are built nearby with similar ratios of units to lots, which might lead to a neighborhood where there is not enough street parking or nearby lots, and most units are only useful to people who have no car.

If the neighborhood has good public transit that might work. If transit is not great through you could end up with a lot of units that are only useful to people who can spend most of their time within walking distance of their home.

How well that works depends on what else is in the neighborhood.

By building buildings with only parking for a fraction of the units, you are making a building that only works in some plausible evolutions of that neighborhood.

If on the other hand you make it a requirement that the developer provide parking for all or most units, so they then include a parking level under the units you end up with a building that works in a much larger range of possible futures for development in the neighborhood and for changes in public transit.

If at the time you build the building a mix of 37 units without parking and 5 with parking would be fine for that neighborhood, build in the parking level but partition it into 5 parking spaces and and 42 storage. The storage units will make the units more attractive, and if future needs change so that what you need there is a building with more parking you can change the partitioning of the parking level. You can even configure it back and forth as the neighborhood and city evolve over the lifetime of the building.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#153

Post by SECProto »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #115
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To disincentivize cars driving around empty.

A toll on all cars (not just empty cars) would already disincentivize driving around empty.

A larger toll on empty cars would disincentivize it more.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#154

Post by ghaff »

donjoe wrote: post #147
ghaff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes longer (with reverse commute traffic and less going home). I'd have to leave early to make it in time for dinner. And I'd have to hope I hit one of the infrequent trains that run after rush hour. It's completely impractical. I just wouldn't do it.

Why don't more people ask for better train connections? Trains would allow kids, elderly, people without a driver's license or the financial means to afford a car to participate in society as well.

You pretty much need a car/ride to take commuter rail anyway. Relatively few people live walking distance from a suburban/exurban station. And there's just very little demand for the train outside of commuting hours--and would be even if they ran significantly more trains.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#155

Post by celtain »

donatj wrote: post #150
celtain wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parking isn't "naturally free". You're using a scarce resource, land, which typically isn't given away for free in a capitalist system. Parking spots are often small enough, used for short enough periods of time, or in places with low enough land prices that it's not worth charging for them, but people often continue to insist that parking should be free even when those descriptions no longer apply.

What I mean by "naturally free" is that if I was alone on earth, I could park anywhere, for free, without having to work for it. Gold? I'd have to dig it up, I'd have to smelt it; a lot of work there, not naturally free. Parking? It's a free resource. The "scarcity" is largely manufactured. Go to Google earth, take the street view dude, plunk it randomly anywhere in the central United States - and there will almost c…

That's certainly an interesting perspective. To help me understand your viewpoint, do you think unimproved land should be free in general?

If a parking spot is paved, does it become more reasonable to charge for it?

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#156

Post by newaccount74 »

jabbany wrote: post #69
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).

That's true. But I was also thinking that long term parking should be expensive -- when long term parking is cheap, you won't find a space.

The worst places in the city to park are streets where residents are allowed to park free / cheap. There's almost never a free spot!

I lived in a street like that, and it was really annoying. Visitors / people running errands wouldn't find a spot, and residents wouldn't find a spot either. Once I found a good spot I tried to avoid using my car because I wouldn't find such a good parking spot when I returned -- oh the absurdity.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#157

Post by jjav »

alkonaut wrote: post #130
criddell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Better yet, with some planning it could go quite far to a place with ample parking (or even back home) to wait. Then come pick me up.

But that trades a lot of unnecessarily wasted energy to move those 4000+ pounds to a faraway place and back, empty, just to work around the parking rules.

(See parallel thread on "Lufthansa confirmed that 18k flights had been flown empty to keep slots", which feels related.)

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#158

Post by nonameiguess »

treis wrote: post #105
godot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that's not all of it; there is a certain expectation for parking to be free from many people and I feel like it's because the demand for parking can be drastically different in geographically nearby locations. For example, in the bay area, parking in SF is difficult to say the least and usually in paid garages. But go less than 30 miles to east bay (far east or south east bay, not Oakland or Berkeley), pa…

Paying for parking changes the calculus of life. It makes everything significantly more expensive and really puts a damper on membership type things. Like we've got a membership to the children's museum. But parking is ~$15 a time so we go far less frequently than we otherwise would. Economic arguments about freeloading are good and something I theoretically agree with. But in practice when the other option is 2 buss…

To some extent, this is the very point of having these charges. They relieve congestion on scarce resources by ensuring the only people using it are the people who want it really badly and are willing to pay, in either time, money, or inconvenience.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#159

Post by donatj »

donjoe wrote: post #124
donatj wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when you live 75 miles from the nearest major city, in a township of a couple hundred, a bus line or really any sort of infrastructure for that matter isn't practical? I think a lot of people forget how sparse much of the country really is.

Well, this is exactly the opposite to an urban environment - this is urban sprawl. Is it better to construct and maintain 75 miles of roads (and all the other infrastructure) for a couple of hundred folks? I highly recommend this video on the finances around urban sprawl and their long term consequences: https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY

Huh, so at 2:23 the speaker brings up Brainerd Minnesota. A town I am very familiar with, having visited family there many times growing up. Cute little town, big chunk of the economy is people coming up to go fishing.

He really cherry picked the least flattering angle on modern Front Street. Here's a better angle - https://goo.gl/maps/CBnqs6i9YLG1mSEG6

It's a very strange town to pick to make an argument about sprawl with - Brainard is a pretty densely packed small town as far as towns in Minnesota go.

Re: Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking

#160

Post by tptacek »

dpark wrote: post #148
tptacek wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-street parking comes from the streets, obviously.

That’s a glib non-answer. How many housing units can squeeze onto a city block is zoned for multi family units? Now how many cars can park on the street in front of those apartments? I expect my house’s lot could hold a 6 unit building. I have exactly 2 parking spots in front of my house. It would be 3 if I had no driveway. So at best residents could get 50% of their parking needs met with street parking if my house…

I don't think you can reasonably say I'm being glib about this, given that I've posted actual data about the specific parking usage in the area I'm talking about, and you're just spitballing based on "a map of Chicago".
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