41–50 of 195 posts
I live in a planned high density office/shopping/residential development. When the developer switched to paid parking, there were literal protests: folks with signs. It absolutely gutted the shops. Foot traffic was way down. And now with COVID, we have dozens of empty storefronts. Consumers vote with their wallet, and lots of folks are dead set against paying for parking.
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.
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.
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…
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 issues.
Ride sharing and taxi services are available, but they can be more expensive and unreliable.
In smaller neighborhoods I think electric golf carts can work, but the range isn't great and they usually don't have heat or air conditioning.
I saw an older Waymo video where the car was somewhere between a golf cart and a regular car. I think something like that has a lot of promise, but nobody is making them.
If downtown areas get rid of free parking, I wonder if that would just push business out to the 'burbs where there's unlimited parking? That's not great for cities either.
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 believe that when used right*, "lack of visibility" can be a very useful design feature to get drivers to Slow The Fuck Down. In general, North American fetishization of "clear lines of sight", leading to removal of supposed "obstacles" like trees, bushes, etc., leads to streets that are far easier to speed on. Places where planners know how to plan properly (i.e. not North America) use everything at their disposal to make it intensely uncomfortable to speed, with features that send speeders to the auto shop before they gain enough speed to send pedestrians and cyclists to the hospitals.
Parked car lanes on alternating sides of the street can be judicially used to force a previously straight street to meander, for example. It's not as good as other solutions, but it can be useful.
* For example, grade-separated cycle lanes, placed between the parked cars and sidewalk (rather than between parked cars and the street) significantly reduces, and with enough of a buffer completely removes the dooring risk for cyclists.
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…)
I live in a planned high density office/shopping/residential development. When the developer switched to paid parking, there were literal protests: folks with signs. It absolutely gutted the shops. Foot traffic was way down. And now with COVID, we have dozens of empty storefronts. Consumers vote with their wallet, and lots of folks are dead set against paying for parking.
I'm the same way, if there's only paid parking, or a parking shortage, I just don't go there unless forced.
I don’t see the problem; I get what I need and the people in Boston presumably get what they need. If a shopkeeper wants to cater to traffic that comes by car, they presumably set up shop in a suburb (where rents are cheaper anyway).
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 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 So basically you don't want me to go there. Ok, I won't. I'll take my business somewhere else. I personally never shop at small local stores in my area because of lack of parking. I go to the huge stores 10 minutes away that have parking lots.
We’ve a massive problem here in Western Europe (UK and Ireland) with people parking on the footpath (sidewalk). They’ll put all four wheels up blocking the passage all pedestrians rather than use their driveway or a legal space. Unfortunately there is little to no enforcement.
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…
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 car. If a developer wants to build without appropriate parking, they should have to pay Seattle a big chunk of that savings to fund better public transit. Instead it’s just a bunch of money in the developer’s pocket and people driving around for 20 minutes trying to find a spot to park. Adjacent neighborhoods pay the price.