Where to park your car, according to math • Hacker News Board

Re: Where to park your car, according to math

#51

Post by lostmsu » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #38

Hmm - do non-mathematicians "optimise" their parking? I really doubt it. I feel like the people trying to park right near the door/entrance to the shops are not "optimising" the time they're there - I feel like they're probably just being lazy and "optimising" for the smallest amount of energy exertion possible (consciously or not). After all, why walk when you have a car? They don't seem to mind spending time follow…

There is not much difference between conscious and "non-conscious" optimizing.

Re: Where to park your car, according to math

#52

Post by technothrasher » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 11:48 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #32

technothrasher wrote: post #20

I've never been called 'meek' before! But then I think I'm looking at the problem differently. I don't consider the walking time wasted, I don't mind the walk. I want to get the car parked as quickly as possible, not spend the least amount of time between entering the lot and getting to my destination. In fact, I will often park further away even when I can directly see that close up spots are free.

Walking can be nice, but in an indoor parking garage not so much, with all those exhaust fumes and cars driving by without a clear sidewalk.

Ah, yes, well for most indoor parking garages my usual strategy is to immediately head for the top (or bottom) floor. Almost nobody parks there unless they have to, so there's often lots of open spaces and much less traffic. If there aren't and good spots on the last level, then there likely aren't any good spaces anywhere in the garage anyway.

Re: Where to park your car, according to math

#53

Post by OliverJones » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:10 AM UTC

esotericn wrote: post #37

OliverJones wrote: post #29

OK, I admit it. I use the meek strategy. Why? because I believe the parking spots that minimize walking from car to destination should be left empty for people who need them more than I do. On the rare occasion where I need to minimize walking (because I have something heavy to carry, for example) I park to minimize walking even if I have to waste some time and fuel doing it. In that case it helps me when other peopl…

Right. I actively want the exercise. I take the stairs at work rather than the elevator when practical for the same reason. I don't think it's fair to categorise being a decent person as "meek". If more people did that, we'd have a far lower need for things like disabled and family spaces because people would fill inwards.

Agreed, entirely.

But the social-science and system-science issues get confused by using ethically charged words like "decent." Modeling "decent" gets confusing without ways of measuring it. (I'll spare us a long digression on how slippery it can be to understand ethical / moral reasoning.)

Do I leave parking spots for other people because I'm a "decent" person? I like to think so -- I like to think I put others' needs ahead of my own when I can -- but that's my business. From a systems point of view I do it to help control parking lot congestion.

If I were a business owner and didn't leave convenient parking spots for others, I'd be deliberately adding to congestion near my business. That's a cost. What's the benefit?

Example: Van Jacobson's slow-start / exponential-backoff algorithm to help prevent TCP endpoints from saturating routers. It's certainly possible to explain this to a roomful of undergrads as a "be nice" requirement on web servers and other sources of large TCP streams. But it's more productive to model it as part of a large-scale system to control congestion.