American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage • Hacker News Board

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#261

Post by closeparen » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #37

jaysonelliot wrote: post #9

Until cities have a better alternative to driving than "use our terrible mass transit in our poorly-designed cities," this will remain a problem. American cities are designed for cars, so that bicycles, scooters, or any other human-scale transportation is not just inconvenient, it's dangerous. Forcing skateboards, scooters, gyros, bicycles, etc., into the road with 4,000 pound cars is insanely dangerous. If you're ri…

Yeah, people make exactly this argument every time it's proposed to build denser stuff with less parking in the middle of downtown Palo Alto, which has relatively good walking/train/bus/bike lanes... we can't possibly do it yet because we aren't ready. Even though surveys show that people who live or go to downtown use cars less than the rest of the city. And so parking spaces are built which are never used.

Downtown Palo Alto and Berkeley both have a nice model with affordable public garages just off the main strip. So the pedestrian area isn’t (as) inundated with cars and parking, but you can still get there as a motorist.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#262

Post by idontpost » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:04 PM UTC

nmoaenm342nt wrote: post #203

ryanSrich wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few points: 1.) A lot of employers offer some percentage of parking reimbursement. 2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations. 3.) Often times the bus is extremely dirty and dangerous. Risking injury or confrontation isn't worth saving a few dollars a day on driving.

> 2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations. I live in large dense city in the US (Los Angeles). I live a 15-20 minute car ride from work. The city is going to be doing some construction on my route and have asked the businesses to encourage their employees to take public transit, walk, bike, etc. during the construction. I looked into taking the bus, which for the first time…

> I live in large dense city in the US (Los Angeles)

Los Angeles may be large, but it is NOT dense, even by US standards.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#263

Post by toomuchtodo » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:16 PM UTC

haste410 wrote: post #202

DINKDINK wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. The word, that not enough technical and non-technical people know, that describes this issue is ergodicty: > an ergodic dynamical system is one that, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states…

Seems like a useful term to know. Too bad the wikipedia article is too dense to understand.

Consider editing the Wikipedia page to make the term more approachable.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#264

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #251

ghaff wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Taking taxis everywhere will be cheaper than owning your own vehicle. People say this but it's very unclear it will be the case. Especially outside of places where the environment (salted roads for example) take a toll, most of the cost of owning a car is ultimately distance, not time. A lot of factors could make pay-per-use fleet cars a bit cheaper or more expensive than owner but it's not clear that the economic d…

The distance traveled will be a bigger part of the cost of robotic travel. That's what happens when you are sharing the capital cost with many other users. And that is a big part of why AVs will be cheaper. Paying 1/10 of $500 a month is better than paying $500. The cost will also depend on how big a vehicle you need. For many people going to work, they only need room for one person and a little space for cargo. Payi…

But there is no $500/month. There is some Time Value of Money involved, yes, when I plop down $30K for a vehicle that will last for 150K miles or whatever. ADDED: It would be silly to let it sit for 5 years before using it because that $30K could hopefully have been earning money elsewhere. The "$500/mo" is just the financing vehicle you've chosen to purchase the car.

But mostly there is $0.50 / mile or so which is reasonably constant whether I put 10K miles on my car per year or 50K.

There's some savings in provisioning for average usage rather than peak usage as to type of vehicle and so forth. But I'm skeptical how significant this will be beyond city dwellers who are on the cusp of not owning their own vehicles (or their own second vehicles) anyway.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#265

Post by Felz » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

antoineMoPa wrote: post #156

Felz wrote: post #122

We can build over all of the parking lots once driverless cars become a thing, can't we? Public transportation looks awfully like a dead end in that light. If you don't have to park and drive them, cars are better in nearly every way.

Public transport also reduces the amount of congestion in roads that driverless cars can only worsen.

Probably true, but completely missing my point.

Buses are inflexible solutions, far from ideal transport. You have to find the bus, abide by its schedule, and the bus can only deliver its passengers sort of near its destination. If the bus isn't near full, it's also very wasteful.

A better solution would be on-demand, and could come much closer to the passenger for pickup and dropoff. It would be cheaper to scale as needed.

I think that describes driverless cars, and less perfectly Uber/Lyft. Improving congestion is a matter of improving thoroughput, and our society would be better off focusing on ways to pack more driverless cars into less road, or have more roads, or have more road alternatives (point to point electric scooters), or have better traffic routing, than make a bunch of buses and have people drive them around all day.

And I don't even need to mention the crushing inflexibility of subways and trains.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#266

Post by UncleEntity » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

stefan_ wrote: post #193

UncleEntity wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" s…

You're enraged because other people park on the same public land you and your neighbors do? Do you own it? I'm sure if you want to pay market rate for that land you can get your very own parking spot.

Enraged? no... Observant? perhaps...

I believe this is what people like to call "the tragedy of the commons."

There's only like two other neighborhoods in all of Phoenix where there's a residents only parking restriction codified into law so apparently the bureaucrats also think maybe there's an overgrazing problem.

> I'm sure if you want to pay market rate for that land you can get your very own parking spot.

Or I could just pay my landlord and get my very own parking spot?

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#267

Post by xapata » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:23 PM UTC

DINKDINK wrote: post #126

jjeaff wrote: post #123

This article tries to make the (weak) point that there is plenty of parking simply because averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends. Cut any of…

>...averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. The word, that not enough technical and non-technical people know, that describes this issue is ergodicty: > an ergodic dynamical system is one that, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states…

I'm not sure ergodic is what you're looking for here.

Ergodic is like a gas particle in a box. Over time, it'll have been at every position in the box.

Non-ergodic is like a house of cards. Eventually, it'll collapse and stay down.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#268

Post by xapata » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #215

justincormack wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The level that allows all cars to park at peak times is not the economically efficient level; that hugely increases the overall cost, as you cant use parking for any other use. Peak cases should have surge pricing to ration the space there are for efficiency, and the overall level should be less.

If it wasn’t economically efficient, they wouldn’t exist. My uncle runs a small parking lot in a central business district. He clears a very healthy living working 5:30-9 five days a week, plus events. When he is ready to retire, he can sell it for a couple of million dollars or pass it on to his kid. Most older central city parking is like that... modest income to cover taxes and expenses to park the property for fu…

Reminds me of that old joke: Two economists are leaving a lecture. One says, "Hey, there's a $100 bill on the floor!" The other replies without looking down, "Can't be. If there were, someone would have picked it up."

The market can be inefficient. It's a construct of society and society can set some nonsensical rules. Heck, the market can be inefficient even under simple rules. It's easy to construct dynamical systems with different phases, some with equilibria and some without. Most economic analysis -- that whole supply/demand thing -- assumes an equilibrium to make the math easier.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#269

Post by fencepost » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:43 PM UTC

cozzyd wrote: post #177

fencepost wrote: post #96

If anyone in city government is smart Chicago is going to have no real choice but to go against this trend because of its utterly atrocious parking meter deal 10+ years ago - or they're going to have to take that glut of spaces and make them free parking to try to get out of the deal. Basically the city committed to keeping a fixed number of street parking spaces for 75 years in exchange for a pittance. If spaces are…

This is a tricky issue. The correct thing to do would have been to increase parking rates to something sane, which the private company did, but would have been politically difficult for the city. At the rates the city was charging before, and assuming there was no political way to raise them, it's possible it may have been a rational choice. Ideally it would have been a shorter timescale though...

If it was a rational choice it wouldn't have been rammed through the way it was. The way it was handled gives an almost undeniable air of utterly filthy bought and paid for fix is in. The Chicago Reader has a nice timeline of a bunch of the privatization that was going on at the time: https://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/features-cover-april-9-2...

Bids are opened 12/1. Aldermen get invited on 12/2 to a briefing that day, where they get limited information and no details. 12/3 a finance committee meeting is held to get an ordinance to accept the bid into process - what they'll be voting on is provided only during this meeting. The finance committee passes it with no significant scrutiny. The full council vote is scheduled for 12/4, and requests to see the city's numbers and financial analysis of the deal are rejected.

When you look back at the deal, to me and an awful lot of other people it looks like one of two things: either most of the people involved on the city side were utterly incompetent, or someone(s) were nicely taken care of in some way.

Edit; autocorrect

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#270

Post by 8bitsrule » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 10:47 PM UTC

angarg12 wrote: post #2

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spac…

Here in the US, some city developers are building apartment buildings - with dozens of units - which provide NO parking for the tenants ... let alone any potential guests. To me this is equally puzzling.

Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.