Certainly, if you make it less practical to arrive by personal car, less people will travel to places by car, and then you'll have less traffic. Unless this comes with a massive improvement in other means of transport, you'll probably have less visitors as well.
The problem with alternatives to personal cars is that personal cars have many desirable properties:
a) near zero latency to take a trip: if there's not a cab at my curb, I have to request it and wait -- or request it early and hope I'm ready when they are. Buses and trains are usually not waiting for me at the station.
b) proportional penalty for leaving late: if you miss a bus or a train by 10 seconds, you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour. If you leave a couple seconds late in a car, you'll probably arrive a couple seconds late (around rush hour, it gets worse of course). If you don't make it to a requested cab in time, they may leave, and you have to wait for another one to come.
c) availability: a personal car generally provides the same service during the day, at night, and can be used in rain and mild snow (heavy snow, if properly equipped). Busses, trains, and even cabs have less availability at night.
d) flexibility/directness: a personal car can drive to almost everywhere, and can generally take a fairly direct route. Trains only go where there is track, and busses only go where there is a route. Cabs don't always pick up and drop off where you want to go. In case of an urgent change in circumstances, you can change your destination at will in a personal car or cab, but may not be able to easily redirect to where you're going in a bus.
All of those properties you specify are very true, but they are also very clearly luxuries. If you want immediate travel to anywhere at any time in any conditions, you should be expected to pay the cost of it - cities and property owners shouldn't have to bear the cost for you by subsidizing the costs of your travel and vehicle storage.
If people are willing to pay the full costs of parking, the market should sort this problem out for itself as paid parking garages fill in the gap left behind by free parking. But what the article is saying is that in cities where parking is not free or not required by law, the market chooses to provide far fewer parking spaces that the minimum parking laws tend to require.
Those are luxuries like a cell phone is a luxury. There does come a point where there's no acceptable alternative - a 1 hour bus line I know through the city of Seattle takes 10 minutes by car. Why should the city and property owners have to subsidize cars? They shouldn't, but they need some way for people to get to them and flow people through the city, or they will cease to exist.
I think the article's authors would say that you have it backwards. You can't have acceptable alternatives while cities are forcing businesses and developers to subsidize car driving. How can the alternatives compete when the market is subsidizing their competition?
What this article is positing is that the conditions you describe are emergent, not determining. Change the policies and the conditions will adjust after a brief, albeit painful period.
> Change the policies and the conditions will adjust after a brief, albeit painful period.
This is an unproven assertion, which in my view is most likely political dogma rather than analysis.
Take a look at parking and alternative transportation in Philadelphia, for instance. It's nothing but pain for everyone and has been for at least 30 years.
City zoning codes requiring off-street parking on a per-dwelling or per-sq foot basis at least has the aspect of not letting the situation deteriorate into unlivable squalor, with no good alternatives. It may be that this pushes the problem to the transportation network, true, but that's a different problem to solve.
If you want to take away, or let developer profit-driven markets take away a major quality of life issue then you'd better provide a better, cheaper, more individually useful alternative first.
>Why should the city and property owners have to subsidize cars? They shouldn't, but they need some way for people to get to them and flow people through the city, or they will cease to exist.
So cities should remove all parking minimum laws, and let apartments and businesses decide how much parking to build. That's exactly what the article is saying.
At least in Washington/Seattle, there is a gas tax which helps pay for road maintenance. But of course increases the price of gas. I'm lucky in that I can walk to work (~40 minutes), and the bus ride is roughly 5 minutes faster if I make it to the stop as it comes in.
Why would the value of their property go down? Apple's new headquarters has 318k ft^2 of office space and 325k ft^2 of legally required parking spaces. If Apple could flexibly choose what they wanted to do with their land, they could use their land in more useful ways, making it more valuable to them.
If people can't get there, or park there, then its less valuable to them. There's freeway capacity and bus routes to think about, and I'm 100% sure that they planned their campus alongside city planners in cupertino and santa clara county. That area of Wolfe Rd. would be totally overrun if there wasn't enough parking not only for current employees but future ones as well.
It's in Apple's interest to optimize their transportation situation. Because Apple built the absolute minimum amount of parking, it seems to indicate that Apple thinks less parking than that is necessary for optimal performance.
Instead of investing money in parking, they could have spent that money on private buses, public bus passes for employees, bike parking, bike subsidies, Uber subsidies, sponsored carpools, bike paths, or nearby high density corporate housing.
As for freeway capacity, if we reduce free parking, that will cause less people to drive, making the freeways more clear.
> If people can't get there, or park there, then its less valuable to them.
So the natural response to that is to force businesses to have greater value? Is this not exactly what market forces would do naturally? A business with insufficient parking would have less value than one with, and would therefore compete less effectively.
Right now, it would take me 41 minutes by car and 48 minutes by BART to reach my office in SF, according to Google Maps.It would cost me a bridge toll and an exorbitant amount in parking to drive, and wouldn't even be much faster, due to 17 minutes of traffic delays (which is fairly typical).
Needless to say, I take BART, because ~$4 in fares beats spending ~$25-30 in parking and tolls for the privilege of sitting in traffic half the trip.
Gotta say SF Bay is definitely NOT a best case public transportation scenario. Try Hong Kong, Paris or London.
Of course those places you don't just pay for parking, you pay congestion charges, high gas prices and steep registration prices (HK) as well. Oh and toll roads.
It's quite stunning the amount of things that are under costed in the US to enable our car economy.
I used to drive my wife to work, down the 405 corridor. With traffic 30-45 minutes, an hour on a bad day. But when she takes the bus it takes close to two hours, mainly because she had to transfer.
Going to Seattle is better, if I catch one of the few express buses. Taing the express is usually faster than driving. But miss the express, then it takes closer to two hours
Unless he drives through Mercer and then maybe it is 90 minutes in rush hour lol. Takes my wife that long on occasion to get home from downtown Seattle because of the Amazon Mercer traffic
worst case from south bellevue via 90/merce to belltown takes me 55 minutes in rush hour. Well a month ago when that wreck was on i-5 I took 405 south to i5 north to belltown and that took 1:30, eg 90 minutes.
If I go in my preferred slot it's 45 minutes max, usually 33 minutes. If I go 10am, 6:45 pm, it's 22 and 20 minutes. Fastest I've ever made it is 19 minutes and that was doing well over the speed limit the whole time on a motorcycle.
Heading to East side is better, yea. And actually, if you are already on Mercer it's not as bad. Getting across from Westlake ish means the bus routinely goes slower than walking speed. Can walk to Fremont faster...
> It's clearly not a necessity as I, my fiancé, and several of our friends are all careless and do just fine.
Please consider people living in other circumstances and with other responsibilities before making blanket statements for all based on the experience of yourself and your close social group. It's entirely possibly that you and your group do not encompass all the situations that may be found. For example, having a child makes not having a car extremely problematic. Being 30-60 minutes late to pick up you child is often unacceptable, and in many circumstances (such as childcare) may net you quite large fees if it happens often.
That being unacceptable is based on conditions where owning a car is subsidized by free parking. Remove those subsidies and there would now be a market for more flexible childcare. Your argument amounts to a tautology. A car is necessary under current driving conditions is not the same thing as a car being necessary under any driving conditions. There are many places around the world where most people don't own cars. They still manage to figure out how to raise children, often while being substantially poorer than we are in the states. I'm confident that if we create the right environment that discourages car ownership, we'll figure it out here too.
Quite so. My wife and I have raised three children into their teens without ever having owned a car. This was not problematic, precisely because we live in Tokyo, a city mentioned in the article as having enlightened policies on parking and public transport.
So everyone can do this ? What is your average expenses per month, you know, basic stuff. Apartment (rent/mortgage), transport, non-restaurant food, etc.
And how does that compare to average income around you ?
This is the argument everyone in SF makes. "Just move into the city. Use an (electrical) bike. Yes there's the homeless but you learn to steer around them quickly". And then you look at the rent, and the average income. Needless to say, this is not a reasonable suggestion.
Citing a dysfunctional housing market like San Francisco is instructive, but only because it provides contrast to the situation the poster you're replying to was talking about. Tokyo may be expensive, but it also manages to house more than 15 times the residents of San Francisco. Not all of the almost 14m people living in Tokyo are rich.
And for those that don't like living in that kind of population density, it's surprisingly easy to live in other cities. The public transportation system there is amazing...far better than even Europe can offer. The Tokyo Metro goes everywhere in the city and the transfers between the Metro and the high-speed rail lines are timed, so you don't waste time waiting. When we took the bullet train, I saw people commuting in excess of 100 mi to/from work. That may sound like a lot to an American, but it was around an hour of commute time with their infrastructure. And since they don't drive during their commutes, they can spend the time on the train doing something entertaining/productive.
It's really eye opening what can happen when you don't prioritize cars in a city. If San Francisco were similarly prioritized and we invested in transportation infrastructure the way the Japanese do, you wouldn't have to live there to work there. You could live in the Stockton area, where the median home price is under $300k, and you'd only have to dodge the homeless people on your way between the metro and your work. And you and your spouse could share a car instead of each needing one since you'd only need it for local trips around your home city rather than commuting.
> A car is necessary under current driving conditions is not the same thing as a car being necessary under any driving conditions.
That wasn't my argument at all. I was simple stating that when making an argument using personal experience as the basis for what is and isn't "necessary" is likely to leave out a lot of people with valid concerns. My example wasn't to push an agenda for or against cards, but to show how some people may come to an entirely different conclusion about what is and isn't necessary, currently.
Yes, clearly it's a problem to not have a car when living a lifestyle designed entirely around a car. We get that, we can skip the 100 identical posts that have appeared and are yet to appear.
The point is: what are you going to do about it? Because clearly city populations are growing and people are exceedingly unhappy with vastly subsidizing a shrinking minority that expects to drive door-to-door, or better yet, lives in a cheap suburb but expects city dwellers to sacrifice money and space for their daily commute.
I think you will find in places that cater much less to cars people are very understanding if you miss a bus. Though likely they won't notice, because there are simply more buses and transit options around, so your delay won't be an hour. It seems getting rid of free parking, as suggested by the OP, is a good start, no?
I expect city dwellers to recognize that their aesthetic distaste for car infrastructure doesn't come close to the very real impact on someone's life of tripling all their travel times.
As long as we're humoring city dwellers being tired of things, we will never have housing construction (they've got ownership or rent control already, and they're tired of tall buildings). As long as we're humoring what they want to pay for, we'll never have decent transit (they can walk or bike, why should they pay taxes for your bus?).
There are reasonable positions to be in which don't require parking downtown. Cheap housing in the center. Cheap housing near train stations and a quick ride in. Abundant parking at train stations and a quick ride in. Decouple cities from employment so that they really are luxuries and not crucial access to opportunity. Keep job growth in balance with walkable housing growth and don't allow development of suburbs.
Any one of those is a great thing to strive for. Eliminating parking by itself just makes the city less livable.
> As long as we're humoring what they want to pay for, we'll never have decent transit (they can walk or bike, why should they pay taxes for your bus?).
Honest question: is there really "paying for transit" hate? The only "transit hate" I've seen ranges around various forms of "it sucks" e.g. "never a bus when I need one" punctuated by "5 of the same bus at the same time" and "always late". I'm happy to pay for transit, just as I am up for sidewalks and bike lanes.
Also: how does one "decouple cities from employment"? And how does a surge of oasis-style job centers divorce an employee from needing a car to get there?
A basic car is practically free compared to basic housing. It's not necessary to divorce employees from needing cars, any more than it's necessary to divorce them from needing housing.
It is necessary to divorce employees from trying to drive (mostly) the same routes at the same times, because there is no solution to car transportation at scale without traffic jams. The "solutions" (congestion pricing, less parking, etc) are to reduce the scale. It is necessary to divorce employees from competing with each other for such tiny slices of the city where the commute is reasonable, because paying an extra $2000/mo just for land value is such a soul-crushing waste of effort and resources. It is necessary to aggressively migrate the fleet of cars to electrics.
Rush hour traffic in small town or city is still going 60mph, and living "downtown" isn't nearly so expensive because there's less competition, and little drastically wealthier competition. (Good look competing with tech workers for nicely located apartments in SF, or bankers for nicely located apartments in Manhattan, if you aren't one).
See: SF opposition to tech shuttles, Muni expansion, Caltrain extension. I guess those aren't really about cost, but there's a common thread of "I don't like the noise" and "I don't like the kind of people that transportation brings in to my quiet neighborhood" and "we shouldn't be making it more attractive for gentrifiers to live here."
> "I don't like the kind of people that transportation brings in to my quiet neighborhood"
I see this on NextDoor whenever VTA LiteRail improvements are discussed. Possibility of a Los Gatos [or Netflix] stop? "Criminal Homeless will invade our city". Maybe, but I won't see you complaining when you go to a 49rs game in person at the stadium and take VTA so you don't get stuck in car traffic.
> It is necessary to divorce employees from trying to drive (mostly) the same routes at the same times
How is this possible without massive and awesome public transit? Rush hour traffic exists because "every employer" wants "every employee" at their desk at 6-9am.
I think the best solution is for employees to drive the unique parts of their routes (home to suburban transit stations with parking structures), and then ride fast, frequent, reasonably comfortable train service for the "trunk" part of the route.
Use cars where they're the best option. Use public transit where it's the best option. Take 5 minutes to transfer in between.
You need secure bike parking on the suburban side and bike share on the urban side. A typical commuter train car can take maybe 3 bikes per 100 passengers. Carrying your bike only works because so few people do it. Fortunately, the Bay Area already has this.
If you find the Spartan lifestyle compelling, sure, bike to the train station. From a planning perspective, it's a no-brainer to put the infrastructure there to facilitate it.
Just don't force it on the rest of us. (My mornings would go from pleasant and relaxing to miserable, getting in an overcrowded train car while sweaty fucking sucks, and I would have to stop running - if I'm capable of cycling the next morning, I didn't run hard enough the night before. If only my area were a little flatter).
Also, you often don't need a whole car. Scooters and low-displacement motorcycles are cheap and fun. E-bikes are getting cheaper. I mostly ride my little Honda motorcycle to the train now, when the weather cooperates. BART's ample motorcycle parking is pleasantly surprising, and a very good idea.
Yes, it would. The problem stated here are traffic jams and the waste of urban land, and this has neither of those problems. What are your objections?
I suppose it would be nice to build tall, dense housing around the station, but people living in the suburbs are expressing their preference for more, cheaper space per person and lower building heights, and would be extremely unlikely to authorize a microcosm of the city inside their suburb.
If we can solve the "people don't want tall buildings" problem, why not put them inside the city where their occupants are in walking/biking distance, rather than relying on expensive trains?
I'm thinking that if we look at the numbers we might actually find it makes the problem worse, but in other areas. We have very heavy traffic areas currently, but spread over at least a few square miles, which allows that traffic to route to the available spaces through all the available roads. Giant parking structures at specific points along rail would move a large chunk of that traffic to those structures, but those structures are also much more condensed points for traffic
Simply put, if you think urban traffic is bad, imagine trying to get to a specific parking structure along with a couple thousand other people all at the same time. Instead of a thousand different businesses over a hundred or more roads, it's a few structures, each with limited ingress and egress routes, and limited entrances and exits. Worse than navigating the parking structure at the mall at Christmas, but every weekday as the new normal.
Much better, in my opinion, would be a fleet of autonomous buses and vans with ad-hoc ride-sharing. Since they use the normal road system, they can reach much closer to peoples homes. I actually ran the numbers on this in a comment a few months back (although not very thoroughly)[1].
My comment was about making proclamations about what is easy or not for the majority based on the experiences of a minority. I'm not making any claims that cars are a requirement, just that when deciding policy that affects many people in the area, considering all those people and finding solutions for problems you might create for those people should be important. I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make from that.
> I think you will find in places that cater much less to cars people are very understanding if you miss a bus.
I think you'll find daycares, which are businesses which employ people that they pay, are less inclined to keep one or two people on staff and extra thirty minutes for you because you're running late than you think they are. Most daycares I know of have it clearly outlined in the terms and conditions you sign, if you are more than 15 minutes or so late, they'll charge you anywhere from $10-$20.
A car-centric society is “good” for 20–60 year-old non-disabled people who can afford to pay for them, very young children who need to be carried around, or anyone who can afford to hire someone to drive for them, in a place with low to medium population density (e.g. rural towns, suburbs). They’re especially convenient for people who need to carry around large amounts of gear, or go to isolated places.
They’re terrible for school-age children, the disabled, the drunk, the elderly, the poor; terrible for commuting solo to-and-from work in rush-hour traffic (causes huge anxiety for commuters vs. other types of commute); and terrible anywhere with high enough density that air pollution and traffic get concentrated.
Additionally they are a hugely inefficient use of a society’s capital and energy/carbon budget vs. other modes of transportation, tend to lead to municipal planning which is hugely inefficient and environmentally destructive, and crowd out other modes of transportation leading to horribly slow and indirect bus routes, etc.
Finally, they are tremendously dangerous, one of the leading causes of death among young healthy people.
Obviously there isn’t a sharp age cut-off, but many elderly people start having problems with vision, hand-eye coordination, reaction time, joints, memory, ...
Often elderly people’s driving skill deteriorates before they realize it or they are unwilling to accept the loss of mobility, putting themselves and other people on the road at risk.
When elderly people do accept that they won’t drive anymore, in a car centric society they are suddenly dramatically hindered in their ability to lead a normal life. They become much more dependent on constant care and attention, and are often forced to move into a dedicated retirement home, further alienating them from their life-long communities of institutions and friends.
Places where it is possible to walk to the store, walk to visit friends, walk to the subway station, walk to coffeeshops and restaurants, walk to concerts and museums, etc. are much better for the elderly than suburban sprawl. People can remain independent much longer, because there is more available community infrastructure nearby.
Additionally, maintaining a routine with a decent amount of daily walking is very beneficial to people’s health.
Where are the urban populations growing? In reality, you have a meager recovery of urban populations that have been in a tailspin since 1960. Capital is cheaper than ever, and the bargains to be had in the urban core are bringing in the cool kids and pushing out the poor folk.
That growth is almost entirely at the expense of people less able and less vocal.
As a weirdo who has lived in the city since before it was cool, I'll always bet against the cool kids colonizing the cities. Once they have kids who have to go to school, they leave.
maybe it really doesn't make sense to travel 80 miles a day to get to work? just saying, at some point it becomes a poor societal and personal tradeoff. where do you think the line is?
to some extend the 80 mile commute is being subsidized (roads, artificially lower gas prices, cost of congestion, pollution, sufficient space for parking at dense destinations, etc)
I'm not saying there aren't tradeoffs, but you can't really assert that as a group we just have to accommodate 80 mile daily commutes for everyone and solve backwards from that.
For me it comes down to my house - I can't sell it as it is worth less than when I purchased it. This is the case for a lot of people since the housing crash.
Also, jobs come and go. Sometimes I'm working close to home, sometimes 40 miles East, sometimes 50 miles north. I guess this is the same for most people. Why move when you're just going to get laid off in a years time?
i'm not criticizing your personal choices. i'm old and i can't afford to buy so i really screwed up. but as a matter of policy I'm not sure we should be encouraging exurb development by trying to twist transit around that.
more broadly i think the US (whatever combination of govt and industry) has failed to provide well for the guy with a job that wants to invest in property and possibly to raise a family. even with two incomes.
as you say, the promise of job stability is looking increasingly illusory
the job market putting you in a position where you are killing time in traffic for 2+ hours a day is a pretty clear sign of that failure
Merchants in that city area might very well wish to bear those costs in exchange for having people who can afford the luxury of a private car be inclined to shop at that merchant instead of at another, more accommodating merchant area or online.
Then remove the regulation that requires developers to bear the cost of building parking spaces and simply let merchants choose to pay to build them if they want to. Some merchants may feel that the additional cost of a parking structure is worthwhile, others may not. The market will sort out which ones are correct.
(I am an elected politician on the Board of Directors of a special district, one power of which is related to residential parking permits, and am additionally on a community committee working on improving the parking situation in the business area; my job on this committee is to do the actual outreach to local businesses. Note also that I am someone who believes in decreasing the use of cars.)
Your suggestion essentially turns into a game theory problem of "is it better to construct parking for my business or be located next to a business that was dumb enough to construct parking, as many of my customers who really would have wanted parking will end up just parking there, they will get the ire of anyone who actually gets towed, and that assumes they also have any good mechanism to decide who to tow anyway.
Requiring each building in a business area to have its own attached parking is a great way to perpetuate sprawl. Successful walkable business districts either use metered street parking, or intercept cars in parking lots at a stand-off distance away from the shops themselves. This amortizes the parking load among the shops.
If that sounds a lot like a mall, it is, but I'd advocate for also removing the zoning restrictions that segregate residential condos from business (a really stupid decision that many American cities keep perpetuating).
Maybe we could place that government parking on the sides of existing roads; we could automate the payment process with small devices mounted on posts that could take coins (or in some places, cards or mobile payments). For people who don't pay, we could have city employees walk around and issue fines for non-compliance...
In my city it's common for large retailers to provide parking lots at a cost. If you buy something, the cashier gives you a stamp that nulls your parking charge. Anyone can park, but free for customers. There's ways to game it, but it seems a workable solution.
I've only seen parking validation for private garages. Are your parking spaces owned by the city, and retailers can still validate for downtown, on-street parking?
In my hometown's downtown we have large parking towers that provide parking at fairly cheap rates. In the city owned one, the first hour is free. It's actually a lot more convenient than hunting for parking at area X, hoping there is street side parking or a parking lot. We also get a walkable downtown as a result too.
So instead of requiring a business to have parking, ban the creation of parking and mandate the creation of parking towers or lots financed by business property taxes instead. You get denser, nicer downtowns as a result. You can similarly socialize parking in less dense areas by banning business from having free parking lots and making a few city ones instead.
I agree: the suggestion I was replying to was to remove regulation and try to let the market come up with parking, which this suggestion is clearly not anything similar to ;P.
Right. That is, in fact, the point, and why the suggestion to remove regulations and to just let the market regulate parking ends in combat and a bunch of people trying to game theory each other's parking... the result is everyone hates each other and is clearly unfair (if potentially efficient).
Then nobody will go through the expense of building any parking for their development, after which everyone suffers. New owners will have to build parking simply to exist in the space, and a great gap forms between affordability for owners who were there before vs new owners coming in - less traffic means all the businesses suffer.
I'm (inter alia) a merchant - chairman of a deli and cafe in a small town.
Our whole district (West Oxfordshire, England) has free parking and it's killing us. People pass up shops they could walk or cycle to, like ours, in favour of shops they can drive to (in the nearest large town). There's no up-front cost to driving, and walking takes effort, so why not drive?
The result of the local free parking policy has been that two large town centres in the district are thriving; everywhere else is dead; and the roads are clogged with traffic.
This is already the case with some places that provide free customer parking but most city centres still provide free or low cost parking for personal vehicles at a cost to the city which is effectively a subsidy for merchants in that city.
> most city centres still provide free or low cost parking
Not sure about "most." Even in smaller cities free street parking is getting pretty rare. My town charges $1/hr for meters and it's clearly too cheap because it's still hard to find a spot most times.
Certainly in urban centers like downtown Chicago there is no such thing as free parking, even at hotels and office buildings.
Yes, it's a subsidy to the merchants who, in turn, pay to the city property tax and sales tax.
Merchants decide where to locate in part based on traffic counts (vehicle and pedestrian). Places that are more valuable to merchants are more valuable to the city (property taxes and sales taxes are higher).
It's economically logical for the city to consider whether to offer this investment/subsidy.
I know that in Boulder (CO), the downtown parking spaces that are on the street are owned by the city, and merchants were paying people to feed people's meters b/c they felt parking tickets were driving people away.
Edit: I should put this in context:
The merchants felt the city (which collects sales tax revenue) would benefit by subsidizing parking, which allows for more traffic and theoretically leads to increased sales (more tax dollars). The city saw parking tickets as a greater source of revenue, and felt increasing enforcement was the better plan. The merchants paid meter-feeders selectively, so as to encourage locals who are a more consistent source of revenue.
It shouldn't just be up to the merchants, though. It's a decision that has externalities. Providing space for parking, for example, limits the density of space available for other uses, which makes the whole area less pedestrian friendly.
Agreed, I live in LA (near downtown) and places that have some amount of easy/free parking will be patronized much more than other places (even if the latter has higher quality goods/services).
> Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it. Cupertino has a requirement for every building.
They may well do so. But the point of this article is that municipal ordinances don't give property owners the choice:
> Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it. Cupertino has a requirement for every building.
I don't know what is your basis for that claim. Looking at actual figures for different places where I live (Finland, which has many places with very good public transport options) shows that people who come by car spend substantially more money when they come shopping.
If that's true in Finland which I don't doubt I suggest that is a reflection of the very different built environment of that country compared to the USA. In the USA there have been several studies on the question and all have determined that arrival by car is associated with lower spending. Here is one:
I have no idea what part of the world you live, but near me cars are neither luxurious nor a burden to people. It seems like car angst could be a symptom of big city overcrowding. Overcrowding isn't a car problem. It's a problem of too many people in an area.
I think that if we were to follow that reasoning to the point of eliminating public transit, it would have to be eliminating all public transport subsidies: if all roads were toll roads and the tolls needed to cover the full cost of building and maintaining the roads, and there was no public parking, i think private mass transit would probably be successful.
(not that i think going that far would be a good idea. But it's important to realize just how much public money is spent maintaining infrastructure for private vehicles. eliminating free parking would be a very small portion of the subsidy.)
Well, if we did that in tandem with eliminating public roads we could see what happens. Public transportation does exist outside of the government-subsidized model; see the jitneys in New York for an example.
Parking = I pay for this either by being a customer of your business or, if you're a landlord, by paying you rent every month.
Making free parking into pay parking or making pay parking into more expensive pay parking will serve to decrease traffic, but at what cost?
Once you monetize it or make it more expensive than a reasonable price it practically begs to become corrupt. The end result is only incentives to increase parking costs via tools such as premium/VIP parking. Theoretically, a premium spot could pop up and would normally be a regularly priced spot when the inventory of other spots dwindles. The spot itself isn't actually any closer to the destination for the customer but is just more expensive. Sure, you could argue that this is how supply and demand works but that only really applies to supply of goods for which there are similar alternatives. If you raise prices on parking, why not raise prices on public transportation as well, and if you're raising those prices then who is going to stop the taxis and ride-hailing apps (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, etc.) from raising their prices as well? You haven't actually solved any problems. You've just made more money.
Except that the market isn't sorting it out. Do you think government regulations mandating free and abundant parking come from the market?
It's amazing how many people in America think our car-dominant culture is just the result of market forces.
The truth is that land use for transportation is zero sum enough to make market forces impossible to use in the way we expect for most consumer services. If you want choices, the best option is to support multi-modal transportation, which in most US cities means reallocating resources away from cars (who currently have almost all the resources) and towards walking, biking, and transit.
What makes you think that markets would be any good at sorting things out? The externalities of car usage (such as air and noise pollution, traffic accident victims) are ignored by the free market. Furthermore, the 'traffic' market has a tendency towards monopolies: more people using cars means less people using public transportation making the latter less profitable, resulting in worse service, leading to even less people using it...
Free markets need very specific conditions to lead to the optimal solution. I don't think the transportation market fits the requirements.
Why do you think traffic accident victims are not reasonable examples of negative externalities of cars? As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread: 35.000 motor vehicle deaths in 2015 in the US alone [1]. According to the US department of transportation [2], the total economic cost of motor vehicle crashes in 2010 is estimated to have been $242.0 billion. I don't see how you can reasonably ignore that in any discussion about transportation and cars.
I don't think they're an example of something that markets would be unlikely to handle. I suspect any system of private roads would at the bare minimum require liability insurance.
Interesting perspective. Now I understand what you're saying.
I think it would be dubious that private roads would require liability insurance. At present, liability insurance is only widespread because of regulation (i.e. a non-market mechanism). I do not see the economic case for the owner of the road to require liability insurance of its users.
Insurance wouldn't cover the full cost either. According to [2], total car insurance losses were $117.5 billion in 2011, compared to the $242.0 billion in economic losses cited in my previous post.
And how exactly should the markets sort out something that involves a natural monopoly? Do you think markets should also sort out use of different spectrum frequencies?
A luxury is a good you consume more of as you get wealthier. For example, environmental regulation is a luxury good, which is why many people don't see the need for limiting pollution if it gets in the way of accumulating wealth (and why richer nations tend to have more pollution laws).
The problem is that if all other cities nearby provide a free luxury, and you don't, then you become a ghetto.
In particular merchants with free parking nearby will do much better than merchants without free parking nearby, so eliminating free parking in just one area will put all of those merchants out of business (as people drive to other areas to shop).
I very much enjoy my vehicle, so I am biased... BUT...
Freedom of Movement is very much not a luxury. You might argue that lacking these 'luxuries' does not prevent you from going anywhere, but it is very much a restriction of otherwise freer movement
Also, it ignores the inherent timeliness our society has developed which make lower variance delays much more desireable.
Freedom of movement is not a luxury, and i never said it was. But travelling in a personal vehicle is absolutely a luxury.
If you truly believe that freedom of movement is a right that should be applied to everyone, you should be arguing in favour of improved public transit and any other solution that isn't a personal vehicle, because personal vehicles aren't accessible to everybody. In addition to being financially out of reach for many, they cannot be used by the visually impaired and by people with certain motor function impairments, the young, or the old. Something as important as freedom of movement should be serviced by something that is accessible to all.
Using disabled people as a bludgeon to deprive the middle class isn't sticking up for the little guy, it's abusive. Disabled people have problems on trains, too: elevators are often broken and it's hard to move in a crowd. There are simply disadvantages to being less able, which is not the same thing as being deprived of your ability to do something by someone who holds power over you. Insisting on the equivalence of such a thing brings to mind the character O'Brien from a certain dystopian fiction.
Traveling in a personal vehicle affords drastically more freedom of movement (you are literally in control of your movement) than any form of public transport and while it's not necessarily a need that should be subsidized by the state it is nonetheless a curtailment on freedom when the state deliberately makes it less convenient than it had been.
> Traveling in a personal vehicle affords drastically more freedom of movement (you are literally in control of your movement) than any form of public transport and while it's not necessarily a need that should be subsidized by the state it is nonetheless a curtailment on freedom when the state deliberately makes it less convenient than it had been.
The state should make it less convenient. In the past they have been massively subsidizing it with free roads and military interventions abroad to safeguard the oil supply. Furthermore cars and gasoline should be taxed much more heavily to compensate for the negative externalities of cars: noise and air pollution and countless traffic victims (35.000 motor vehicle deaths in 2015 in the US alone [1]).
Your freedom to get somewhere in a car is not absolute (e.g. you have to follow roads), it should be balanced against other freedoms. Ponder this: cars have impinged on my freedom to go certain places (e.g. highways or certain neighborhoods that no longer have sidewalks) on foot.
First, this is not what I was responding to. Parent claimed that restricting the freedom to use cars was not an impingement on personal freedom at all, because not everybody can drive a car. That is a different question than whether it is a tolerable infringement, and it is precisely the denial that people have a legitimate interest in car use that I have characterized as Orwellian.
Second, your comparison is equally silly. Complaining that I cannot walk on the highway is like complaining that I cannot drive my car through a building. It is normal that you cannot move literally everywhere. The question of the freedom of movement being infringed necessarily relies on the change in freedom relative to what was previously possible, and highways take up a small proportion of land which is hardly comparable to reducing by half or more the number of car-miles a person can afford to drive (or taking their car completely).
>Furthermore cars and gasoline should be taxed much more heavily to compensate for the negative externalities of cars: noise and air pollution and countless traffic victims (35.000 motor vehicle deaths in 2015 in the US alone [1]).
They are already taxed to compensate for those externalities, by requiring drivers to buy insurance policies that cover damage they may cause. There cannot always be the argument that because there are externalities, taxes must be raised. At some point the taxes have to be enough. This is yet more absurd gaslighting by rich jerks who like to push people around.
Taxes on cars don't even cover the full cost of roads. They don't even begin to cover the negative externalities caused by cars.
Insurance policies only cover damage that is directly attributable to individual drivers like traffic collisions. They don't cover any of the damage caused by air or noise pollution.
It is only as convenient as it has been because the state forces businesses and apartments to provide the parking required to enable this for free out of their own pockets. Removing regulations requiring this can't be said to be curtailing your freedom.
As you said paying for parking is just a disadvantage of hauling around several tons of metal, which is not the same as being deprived of your ability to do something by someone who holds power over you.
they are luxuries many can afford and based on watching emerging economies or those who gained economic freedom to own they are something many aspire too.
costs in cities are artificially high and I doubt property and usage taxes would support many "affordable" high rise parking decks.
the double whammy here is the less available parking in town means less chance of EV charging too. then again that has shown that where free you get the same issue if not worse (got to love people who disconnect your car for you)
I love public transportation, so let me disagree. :)
a) near zero latency to take a trip
I can take the subway and go home at any station. If I go by car I have to go back to the place the car is to be able to return home.
b) proportional penalty for leaving late: if you miss a bus or a train by 10 seconds, you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour.
This is true if you favor private cars over public transportation. The more people uses the bus, the more buses there are, and they come more often (in rush hours you can take a subway each 5 minutes). The problem solves itself.
c) availability: a personal car generally provides the same service during the day, at night, and can be used in rain and mild snow (heavy snow, if properly equipped).
Yes, at night there is less public transportation. But at night there are no "traffic jams" either. When your needs are completely different that the rest of the population then a private car makes a lot of sense. This should be the main use.
d) flexibility/directness: a personal car can drive to almost everywhere, and can generally take a fairly direct route.
But usually, people don't want to drive everywhere. Most people wants the same route that everybody else. That's why you have "traffic jams" in the first place. It is the same case that c), if your needs are so different that the rest of the population a private car makes a lot of sense.
In all cities I have lived (Barcelona, London, Stockholm) by far the best option was to use public transportation.
In the SF Bay Area (which is mentioned in the article), they have repeatedly cut back or held capacities constant for both the freeway system and public transit.
This benefits no one except people that own houses near job centers (since it increases real estate pricing discrepancies).
Due to the local political structure, small town governments are able to sabotage the entire region's transportation network, perpetuating the problem.
The NIMBY's that support this use studies liked the linked one to justify this behavior (which is rent-seeking at best and racial/economic discrimination at worst).
I believe things are better where you live; I'm just trying to explain why your comments are controversial with the HN crowd.
Personally, I'd like more roads, parking, public transit, and bike lanes. It would alleviate some of the housing pressure in Silicon Valley, lowering real estate costs, which would improve the quality of service industries, increase the efficiency with which VC money is spent, and generally enable more startups.
In addition, public transportation (train and metro in particular, it's less true for bus) will give you a predictable time of arrival. You know that by taking this train, you'll arrive at your destination by that time.
With you personal vehicle, you might be stuck in traffic, have to circle before finding a spot or find a spot much farther than you expected and have a longer walk to do.
> The more people uses the bus, the more buses there are, and they come more often (in rush hours you can take a subway each 5 minutes). The problem solves itself.
Unfortunately I only have direct control over my own actions, and very limited ability to influence the actions of other travelers or politicians. This isn't really an argument against the original commenter's point. If I get rid of my car and switch to public transportation, maybe on average the wait between buses drops from 1 hour to a millisecond less than an hour.
The more people use the bus, the more crowded it gets, the more likely you are to be denied boarding due to crowding.
My most direct bus route to work has actually migrated to lower capacity vehicles in the face of exponentially growing ridership, with no schedule changes.
I could forgive this if AC Transit were out of money, but they're launching a ton of new service on obscure routes. They just don't seem interested in boosting capacity or frequency on the popular ones.
> The more people uses the bus, the more buses there are, and they come more often
Can you tell Melbourne this, because our population is growing rapidly (~2000/week) and our public transport was once decent, but is now resembling a sardine tin factory. It's been a constant story in the papers for a decade.
Where I live the more people uses the buses the more packed the buses go, no chances to get more or better buses. I don't disagree with you but the cities you have lived in are developed cities, which are not the norm.
Paid parking actually helps with zero latency: if parking is priced such that some is always available, you can park instantly as long as you're willing to pay. It doesn't help much that the parking is free if it's full by 6AM.
Same with proportional penalty for leaving late: arrive somewhere after the free parking fills up, and you're screwed.
Same with availability: forget parking on the street at any vaguely popular time. It's not very direct if you end up in a street space 2 miles away from your destination. And maybe I would like to spend more than 2 hours somewhere.
You can see this with BART, which wildly undercharges for its parking (around $3/day). The only way to park in a BART-owned space is to travel very early in the morning, or spend years on the monthly-permit waiting list, which guarantees a space until 10am.
I'd prefer to drive 1.5 miles to my local station (uphill, or I would bike). Instead I drive 6 miles to a station with a private parking lot, because it's priced high enough ($11) that there's always an available space for me at 9:30am. I've decided those $11 are worth the hour of free time not spent on walking to my local station.
These points are all relevant in an environment where cars dominate.
In a big and dense city you would most likely be jammed in traffic while you could just walk to the nearest underground station or tram/bus stop and take the next transit towards the right direction. And the latter is what people do in places where taking the car is not a requirement and where the densities support public transit.
In most American cities the densities are laughably sparse, and taking a personal car makes sense.
In LA or Valley it would be a joke not to drive. In NY or London it would be a joke to try to drive.
In the Bay Area it's a joke either to drive or rely on public transportation. Choose the former and suffer in a slow-moving traffic jam in all directions. Choose the latter and be at the mercy of tepid schedules and relatively frequent delays. I live 25 miles by road from my office. Whether I drive to work or take Caltrain/BART my commute (including biking or driving to the train station) is a minimum of 70 minutes one-way.
Traffic and transportation are hard problems, but this area seems to always choose terrible solutions for either of them.
Nope, my office is in the city. I live in San Mateo and take either the San Mateo or Burlingame station depending on my mood and how far I want to bike on a given day.
My experience with the Muni system in the city is that it is less than dependable. Frequent backups, delays or even skipped trains seem to be normal. When I have to use the Muni I basically leave work 10-15 minutes earlier than when I first started this job just because I can rely on the unreliability of the Muni system.
How does pre-planning and forethought not get mitigate "tepid schedules"? Yes, I could want to go to an event all the way up in San Francisco whilst Caltrain shuts down at midnight, but that means only that I have a few decisions to make.
I drive my personal car in Los Angeles rarely enough that I should probably sell it. Bicycling, subway, light rail, the occasional bus, and Lyft satisfy 90% of my "long distance" or "carrying lots of stuff" needs, and the remaining trips could be taken care of by Zipcar or rentals.
At least as a person without children, the need for and experience of using a car is simply a matter of where I live and work (and for the weekends, where my friends live). When I lived in Pasadena, commuted to Irvine 3x a week, and didn't have a personal car, yes, life was miserable. When I lived in Venice Beach and drove downtown for work, the tedious, heavily trafficked freeway commute exhausted me by mid-week.
Also, for what it's worth, greater Los Angeles has the highest average density of US urban areas by a pretty healthy margin. Yes, it's denser than the New York or San Francisco urbanized areas. And LA's decentralized commercial districts make it a prime candidate for an efficient, extensive public transit network [1]; there's just heaps of toxic cultural momentum to overcome in order to restore that former feature to our metropolis.
If LA could have a better bus lane situation, the buses would be more than adequate. That there aren't, and won't be, dedicated bus lanes put in the situation of not only waiting in the same traffic as you would in a car but also waiting for a bus (typically late, because of said traffic) and even switching and waiting. I'm 4 miles from work and the bus would include one switch and about 45-50 minutes. It's a 10-15 min car ride.
Wrong. If parking is already the limiting factor and is already used to capacity, even assuming no other transportation mediums, tolling parking until it's just below capacity obviously won't reduce the number of visitors who actually make it into the attraction at a given time -- it will just reduce the number of visitors who are at any given time waiting for parking in traffic jams.
(You can stop reading now, the rest of this post repeats the above point in more ways for those who did not understand it.)
If this isn't obvious, think of any attraction with a line. Once there's a line at all, the attraction (cashiers, for example) is being used to capacity at maximum thoroughput. Increasing the size of the line does not change thuroughput, but does increase latency in exchange for no benefit for anyone.
If your parking fee is so high that even at peak time half your spaces are unused, it's too high and by lowering it you can get more visitors. But once it's at just the right level where there's, say, only 5-10% vacancy, lowering prices any further will merely increase traffic without increasing the visitor thoroughput at all (conversely, increasing is also lose/lose because you lose visitors while wasting parking)
In other words, there's a natural equilibrium price, and it sure as fuck ain't zero.
By the way, how the heck do you figure it's inconvenient to pay for the resources you use to park? You already do anyway, indirectly. Making it more direct changes nothing except helping reduce congestion, which makes driving more convenient. Nobody likes sitting in unpredictably long jams.
America is funny, we have lots of libertarians who suddenly become communists in the sole case of parking.
> We have lots of libertarians who suddenly become communists in the sole case of parking.
Car advocates strike me as less like communists and more like an occupying force. They have a very strong sense of ownership of things they have no just reason to own.
They don't think of the communal resources they use, such as parking, as being public resources. They think of them as theirs, and anyone else who would use them is an enemy.
"You can't build more housing here! Then people might drive and park on my street!"
True only in areas with abundant parking right next to the destination. This is not true in many urban places, where parking might be located some distance away, requiring you or a valet to retrieve the vehicle. Also, as the article points out, there can be considerable latency on arrival, as time may be required to find a place to store the vehicle. With public transport, no time is required on arrival to find parking.
This can even be a problem at places with plenty of parking, like airports, where shuttles are necessary merely to get you from the terminal to the big parking lot.
> Also, as the article points out, there can be considerable latency on arrival, as time may be required to find a place to store the vehicle. With public transport, no time is required on arrival to find parking.
And indeed, cities are starting to acknowledge that, with major public events offering off-site parking, and then public transit for the last several miles. The hybrid solution works great in larger states, although I'm not sure if the same strategy would work in, say, manhattan.
Large protests in the DC area have a mix of private and public transit. Lots of folks come in on buses that park at RFK stadium and then take the Metro. People who drive personal cars will frequently use park-n-ride lots at outlying Metro stations.
e) Privacy - a personal car lets you be alone, listen to anything you want at any volume you prefer, eat food or drink, etc. It also reduces the likelihood of certain types of frustrating interpersonal interactions.
f) Storage - a personal car acts as storage for things you want to have with you, things you acquire at multiple stops, etc.
g) Kids - Getting multiple kids (especially young kids) around is much easier with a personal car than most forms of public transportation.
h) Fun - believe it or not, some people enjoy cars and like to drive.
That said, I strongly prefer to live in a location with excellent public transit and also own a car for occasional trips.
If only kids (g) were exposed to something they thought was fun (h), perhaps they'd better learn to respect other's privacy (e) in public, and they might even learn reasonable consumption habits (f).
e) There are scientific papers published hypothesizing that suburbs and private transportation are increasing isolation and therefore depression and isolation.
f) Theft from cars is a real thing (and a big thing during Christmas at the mall near me). Similarly, given in the U.S. we have high grocery waste; suggestions include making more trips with smaller loads.
g) driving is much more dangerous, especially with young kids serving as distractions.
h) as with e, while some people have fun, a lot of people experience a lot of stress while driving; In the U.S. your risk of heart attack increases significantly with traffic. Cognitive load is also increased. Road Rage is also a thing where the worst cases result in shootings and intentional collisions.
Most of the benefits you list are eaten up by the simple fact that encouraging car transport has the net effect of an encouragement and subsidy for living farther away from density.
When you live farther away from density, you need those things. So in effect, driving more people to car ownership just exacerbates many the problems that they ostensibly solve.
While true, it's hardly a practical barrier. Anyone who isn't disabled can easily pass a driving test and get a license. It's not like you have to justify a need to drive, and it will only be taken away if you demonstrate severe incompetence or recklessness.
It's not clear how you're any more free driving (engaging in a heavily regulated activity) versus taking a bus (availing yourself of a public accommodation).
This argument ignores other vehicles that aren't cars that operate on non-fixed routes. Bikes and e-skateboards jump to mind. Maybe even scooters (as in many southern European cities).
A fundamental property?! Karl Benz built the first car and believe me, it was utterly useless in its time. It is only through the many trillions in tax dollars invested into building dedicated streets that it has become possible to drive any sort of distance.
I think you will find that if you take the infrastructure away, your land-locked "freedom car" is now totally impractical junk.
Nice straw-man. If you take the infrastructure away, you would not go anywhere. Period. Because you can not pass that swamp, river, canyon, and so on. By bicycle or horse or by foot.
Not a straw-man at all. The point is: there was a choice. You can build infrastructure for cars, for bicycles, for trains, for rail, for lightrail, for pedestrians, for horses. Some of these are more or less useful without, cars are definitely in the less useful category.
It is not a fundamental property. It is not god-given. You were born into a world where car roads are ubiquitous and now your thinking stops slightly after linear extrapolation. That's not the case for everyone.
a) When in a car you are delaying the latency until arrival, when you need to search for parking. Public transport doesn't require this of you.
b) Sure, but there are two things here: 1) if you have more people taking public transport, the delay will be more like 10 minutes rather than 1 hour; frequently travelled routes even every 5 minutes. 2) Having hard deadlines in your life can mean you actually plan better and stick to a schedule. You know when people will actually arrive for events, for instance.
c) I'm not gonna lie, public transport shutting down at night is annoying. That said, with the new generation of cab companies this is much less of an issue than it used to be.
d) When it comes to flexibility, I like to make the decision to be able to drink with friends whenever I want, without having to worry about how I get home. I chose where I live to allow a quick commute by public transport, so for me the tradeoff is fine. Moreover, because the local city didn't need to allocate parking space to every single person who lives there, there are a lot more people who can enjoy the benefits I do. This in turn drives local restaurants, sports shops, pubs, grocery stores and more. People don't go to the mega-store and buy 3 months of milk because they'd have to quite literally carry it home. This makes the place have a friendly atmosphere, and in turn attracts more people who have grown to dread the soulless suburbs.
The problem with arguments like yours is that you argue like bikes don't exist. Yet in the real world they do. And people even use them to get to places!
One alternative to a personal car is a shared car (one way car sharing), which eliminates B, C, D and partially A (depending on car share density in your area).
The things you cite about cars are great - and cars are a great way to get around for many things. However, the article is merely suggesting that people should factor in the costs of car usage that they are currently not paying directly.
e) safety: there may be a risk to get mugged on your way to the car, but you can also get mugged on the way to the public transportation. However, once in your car, you hardly have to worry about someone coming to you for "something"
f) comfort: I always have a seat in my car, and I'm not compressed between 5 people and pushed around against my will
g) consistency: the car will leave when I get to it and start it, pretty much every time. The bus may be there on time today, or not, or could be full (and I have to get the next one), etc
I would say that the same points other than c also apply to bicycles or vehicles of a similar type (though it's true that you can ride in night, rain, or snow with the proper equipment).
The one disadvantage a bicycle has compared to a car is the capacity to transport cargo. If I'm shopping for groceries for a family, I'm much more likely to drive there as opposed to cycling there due to the limited carrying capacity I have on the bike compared to my car.
e) security: arguably speaking, you're much more secure in your possessions and personal safety when you're in your car than when you're on a bus. Your possessions stand to bear some degree of risk while your car is parked but at least there's little to no risk of someone sucker punching you and swiping your phone or wallet.
b) people need to drive somebody who is not able to table public transportation (sick, old, disabled, etc.)
In other words, yes: if you allow only rich people to drive to come certain location (by not providing free parking, etc.) then there will be no traffic jams. Middle class will move to suburbs...
And yet somehow this doesn't seem to be that big a problem in the rest of the developed world that has functioning public transit.
Children and the elderly are, unsurprisingly, more than capable of riding on a bus or train. And taxing a taxi (or Uber, Lyft, etc.) when the occasion requires.
It really is amazing how many Americans seem completely unaware how the rest of the world lives. You see it really acutely in pro-suburbia arguments on HN, and weird objections to universal healthcare around the internet, as if this was all totally hypothetical and we didn't have concrete examples of how it works.
You can tell that they haven't even spent any real time in Manhattan, right here in the US! No rest of the world is even necessary.
All of the "positives" of individual personal transportation quickly turn into negatives when everyone else is simultaneously trying to avail themselves of them in a dense, congested city. Then you realize that trying to have a car in the middle of a big city is more hassle than it's worth, and that walking, biking, public transit, and ubiquitous cabs actually work quite well, way better than individual cars could ever work in such conditions.
So yes, we've got suburban Americans who can't even conceptualize what life is like in our biggest city, despite it being a constant subject in pop culture.
> trying to have a car in the middle of a big city is more hassle than it's worth
I've lived in Chicago, and came to the same conclusion. I like having a car so that's one of the reasons I don't live there anymore.
But most of the US is not big cities. Yet even in modest sized towns you see people advocating for public transit and bike lanes, etc. where they will never be used enough to justify the taxpayer expense.
I disagree with you on justifying the public expense. Bike lanes increase safety, both for cyclists and pedestrians. One preventable death is worth many millions of dollars. Bike lanes are incredibly cheap when all externalities are factored in.
EDIT: Also, we spend far, far more money on our road infrastructure than on all public transit combined. You are looking at the cost of public transit but assuming that roads were/are free. They are not. Taking steps towards equalizing funding levels between the two would go a great ways towards making public transit better while remaining revenue neutral.
I'm not sure why you both conclude that people are unaware that public transportation works well in some cities and countries. I'm aware of that, but it's not relevant to my own ability to travel if I don't live in one of those areas. Could I move? Sure, but if everyone who complains about traffic or public transportation moved to Manhattan I suspect Manhattan's infrastructure would no longer perform so well.
That may be true, but there are also a lot of sweeping generalizations about how the US is totally different from every other developed country when it comes to car ownership.
In fact, the percentage of households that own cars in the US is not that different from either other wealthy Western democracies, Japan, or South Korea. (China and Russia are both much lower.)
A more relevant metric would be how often the car is used: there's a difference between having a family car you use for weekend trips and occasional trip to Costco, and having to drive your kids to school every morning.
And limiting our measurements to cities. Otherwise it becomes a measurement of "who has more rural and suburban areas" instead of "who uses more public transit in urban areas".
Ironically, social mobility is measured by the opposite; the costs of having a car are the top inhibitor to social mobility in areas with less public transportation.
> And in my car I'm quite protected.
You feel protected, but you're much more more exposed to 1) Accident liability 2) an accident 3) stress related health issue including depression and heart attacks. This ignores road rage, car jacking, and car theft (which are of greater incidence than Taxi drivers robbing or raping people).
This article didn't touch on the interaction between free parking and public transit, and I've seen a few comments here talk about the dearth of good public transit options as justification for free parking. I believe it's worth pointing out that free parking causes bad public transit:
- free parking siphons away would-be bus and train customers, which deprive the transit authority of revenue (leading to less frequent service, older vehicles, etc.) and also reduce the political impetus to deliver high quality transit.
- subsidized parking leads to lots of drivers circulating looking for an open spot, causing congestion and pollution -- the article mentioned that 53% of SF residential parking permit holders spent more than five minutes looking for parking at the end of their most recent trip. This congestion makes surface buses and trams run slower and with greater schedule uncertainty, making transit even more unattractive.
Obviously I would like great public transit in America yesterday, but I don't think the current state of transit is good reason to preserve subsidized parking. Preserving subsidized parking is going to keep transit in America as unattractive as it is now.
I think that most of the time public transportation must be subsidized anyway. In fact some cities in Europe make public transport completely free, because subsidizing 100% of the cost it not much worse than subsidizing (on average) 75%, especially considering that you can greatly reduce traffic jams this way.
Where is the evidence that increased public transit demand leads to better public transit service?
From what I can see, it just leads to crush loads. When there's money for expansion, it goes to routes that make political (not practical) sense, subsidized tickets for certain demographics, etc. Frequency and capacity on popular routes stays the same, so with increased ridership they just get worse.
A public transit agency isn't incentivized to fulfill customer needs. It's incentivized to get its director elected up the ladder in city politics, which means serving swing districts, not demand.
Traffic compounds the problems of public transit, but public transit is really bad even on its own. It's slow on its own, total cost is high, it's inflexible for many purposes, it doesn't respond to changes in the city, it's run monolithically, it's not aligned with its customers (customers are a liability), it's designed to encourage points of failure. It has such a multitude of problems, making cars less attractive won't go far to making public transit more attractive.
Why does everyone think that the solution to traffic problems is to first make driving even more terrible and then oh yeah maybe get around to improving or even providing public transit? Why can't we swap the order, especially when it takes years to implement public transit improvements?
Also, we need to resist the temptation to assume that low utilization of a half assed public transit solution means that nobody wants it. In my small town, we had a bus line that had almost no utilization despite going between two desirable locations; an area with tons of apartments oriented towards students and the university itself. The city was talking about killing the line but someone convinced them to try making the bus run more frequently, and continue running later into the day as a trial. The line went from having the lowest ridership to the highest. Not every improvement will be that dramatic of course, but I think often times public transit is underutilized because it's not meeting the needs of the population.
> Why does everyone think that the solution to traffic problems is to first make driving even more terrible
Parking space requirements (along with other zoning regulations) prevent cities from being built densely enough to reach the critical mass needed for great public transit. It's not an accident that our densest cities (e.g. New York) also happen to be our oldest cities, from before the advent of most of the zoning regulations. Significant swaths of New York City could not be built again the way they are now thanks to zoning laws that have since come into play! Contrast with Los Angeles, a city which was largely developed post-zoning-laws, and you can see the huge resultant different in density, and thus apocalyptic levels of traffic with few good alternatives.
We have tried swapping the order. There's no will for good public transit solutions when people can expect to drive everywhere because the current state of things has disproportionately favored cars.
True, that. So how about instead of mandating parking spaces, mandate an area set-asside for public transit right-of-way. Then allow the right-of-way area to be used for parking until the transit authority exercises it's right-of-way. At first, there will be islands of disconnected right-of-way that make no sense for build-out, and they get used for parking. Eventually, re-development fill-in will connect adjacent regions, and then the transit authority can build a reasonable sized segment.
Your city doesn't have bus lanes or a dedicated transit street? Seattle has both.
It doesn't really address the issue, though it does make service for the rush hour suburb / city commuters better. (which is really all the current public transit infrastructure in the Seattle and surrounding areas is optimized for).
Nor does it address the issue of it being expensive to extend the service in a way that meaningfully empowers, E.G. those working a late shift somewhere, to get home at 2AM.
Do you have any links to case studies where this was tried and failed? Every example I've seen ends up being like my story, we did a half-assed version as a trial and it flopped so we gave up. I'm not denying the existence of times when it was given a fair shot, I'm just not aware of them and would like to be.
To me it seems like a no brainer that the demand is there whether driving is terrible or not, good public transit can be better than private even if a city doesn't go out of its way to discourage driving (and don't get me wrong, if a city has good public transit options then I think it should commit and strongly discourage driving).
I see 'parking' as just a symptom of a larger issue. The lack of civic planning and encouragement of desirable and healthy balance within communities.
Cities should be much more like the Caves of Steel (Asimov).
Instead of cars on the roadways pedestrians should have bizarre (market streets), park way, and retail streets. People moving belts could also increase flow.
An entirely different layer would be used for the vehicles. Electric motored transport for goods, services, and people; within a city these would likely be orchestrated via central driving servers.
At the edge of the city, and likely also by ports and major civic centers, there'd be interfaces for legacy vehicles. Massive parking and warehouse structures that are well connected to the local civic infrastructure for moving goods and people.
Road networks are at an over capacity which makes it worse for everyone and disproportionally worse for people on high occupancy transit. Look at when schools are out and parents aren't shuttling their kids around. Road networks are clear, congestion is gone and things move smoothly. Lets get to that stage by whatever means necessary.
I would really, desperately like to agree with this article, but I hit this point and may not read further because this is a completely clueless statement:
If they do not also change their parking policies, such efforts amount to little more than window-dressing. There is a one-word answer to why the streets of Los Angeles look so different from those of London, and why neither city resembles Tokyo: parking.
I wanted to be an urban planner and I have done a fair amount of related reading. Los Angeles sprawled before it became known for being so car oriented, back when people took the tram and walked everywhere.
It sprawled because it was built in the desert. The fact that water has to be imported to the area means that you had to develop large tracts of land in order for the financing to make any sense. It has to do with how much it cost to develop the necessary underlying infrastructure.
It's layout is somewhat unique due to the environment and circumstances in which it was built, the way that Venice is unique for being built in a swamp. If you don't study the history of the place, you can't understand how it came to be the way it is.
I would love to see the U.S. become less car centered. I would love it if we stopped whoring our cities out to the cult of the car and built more walkable communities and provided better public transit. But arguing for some particular approach and basing that argument on completely made up facts without understanding the history behind the places used as examples does not in any way impress me.
Putting aside the awkward title, the article is confirming what we instinctively would expect: increasing the burden of commuting by car will reduce the number of people who commute by car. The cost of parking is an example burden.
Obviously life needs to balance many things, and increasing the cost of parking in an attempt to shift commuters to alternative forms is also going to decrease the number of people who want to commute to the destination at all.
I live in the Los Angeles area and significantly prefer living in and visiting cities that have free parking (e.g., the southern beach cities). I actively avoid cities such as Santa Monica that have costly and insufficient parking--and importantly, that means I don't spend any money at Santa Monica retail businesses. Alternative transit options are not appealing. Light rail, while expanding in this metropolitan area, is far too inefficient. Uber and Lyft are an additional cost friction that gets factored into any decision (e.g., where to go for a dinner out?). Plus I don't want to have to deal with an app to go somewhere.
All that said, self-driving cars may be a big game changer for my lifestyle. I would be more likely to visit Santa Monica if my car could find a suitable parking structure and park itself. To my mind the cost of parking would be less of a nuisance if I didn't even have to think about the parking process.
I know this wasn't your point (and I completely agree with what you're saying), but I actually find Santa Monica to be one of the easiest places to visit in LA, because they have a bunch of reasonably cheap city-run parking garages. I've never had a major problem parking in Santa Monica, and if I did, I'd got there a lot less often.
A concrete thing you can do about this is email your local City Council or Supervisor and ask them to reduce parking requirements for new buildings. Send them this article.
Many local municipalities require absurd amounts of parking per new housing unit, and many Baby Boomers show up to meetings to complain about how there's no parking and thus a new project should be denied.
This analysis seems to ignore the benefits of free parking, both for drivers and for the businesses they're driving to. Personally, in cities where I have a car, if ample parking (day or night) is not available near a business, I patronize someone else. I do prefer public transportation, but there are only a few cities in the US where that actually works.
Right, because transportation land use is largely zero sum. If you have ample parking everywhere and wide roads for cars, every other mode of transportation is automatically worse.
This article is about parking requirements as they pertain to zoning, i.e. mandatory parking.
Nobody's saying that you can't patronize a business that provides free parking, but if parking isn't mandated by zoning you'll on average pay more for the benefit compared to someone patronizing a business without ample parking.
Removing the requirement from the zoning code allows people like you to vote with your dollars, and people who don't care about free parking to pay lower prices. It's a win-win.
Anyone referencing European public transportation should realize that over half the countries in Europe are smaller than the state of Iowa, and none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas. You're comparing apples to oranges.
Second, not one of the comments below mentioned the Auto lobby. If your beef is with the number of personal vehicles on the road vs. public transportation, you should probably look there first. Tell your billionaire friends to start outspending the $61 million spent in 2016 by Automotive[1] industry lobbyists (compared to the $1.4 million for Misc Transport[2]) and maybe you'll start seeing a difference.
> Anyone referencing European public transportation should realize that over half the countries in Europe are smaller than the state of Iowa, and none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas. You're comparing apples to oranges.
Completely irrelevant. Nobody is talking about providing public transit for rural Texas. The important factor is density on a local scale, not overall size.
> none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas
I don't know where you got this bizarre notion. The populations of Russia (~144m), Germany (~83m), Turkey (~80m), France (~67m), The United Kingdom (~65m), Italy (~61m), Spain (~46m), Ukraine (~43m), and Poland (~38m) are all quite a lot larger than Texas (~27m).
Chances are this would have the desired effect for me: I would simply not shop during those times. I enjoy purchasing items in a store and going to the theatres, but I hate paying for parking or dealing with public transit. So I would just stop patronizing stores and movie theatres and instead use Amazon and Netflix more than I do now.
This article paints an overly rosy picture of self driving cars. A significant cause of traffic on our roads is single occupancy vehicles. Opening up the gates to zero occupancy vehicles could cause the number of cars on the road to skyrocket, because you are no longer bounded by the number of people.
First, the double negative is simply terrible. Title should have been "How to create traffic jams: Let people park for free" so their point would be more clear.
Second, I'm no fan of cars or Apple, but if Cupertino doesn't want their largest employer there who is paying more taxes than everyone else combined, they should just kick them out. If they do want them there, and there's traffic problems, they should use the tax money to build gigantic boulevards so the Apple employees can drive wherever they want. They are taxpayers and their taxes pay for roads like everyone else. The city takes charge of building roads so they should do their job and build roads, or public transport, to serve the people paying taxes, especially those paying the most.
I read the damned title three or four times, trying to parse out its meaning, and still wasn't entirely sure I had a hold of it. That's some serious title gore.
I think if two key driving skills were taught, traffic would be greatly improved.
The first, efficient merging, which means, no, you don't stop in your lane to move to the right, you speed up a little and leverage the accordion effect of the slower traffic on the right to find a spot big enough for your car to fit in and then merge. More efficient utilization of the space on the roadway, while keeping the lane you're leaving and the one you're entering moving at their respective speeds.
Second, speed up when you get out in front of the jam. This is well studied and found to mitigate the traffic jam behind, when enough drivers do this.
There already exist considerable barriers to car ownership -
1. Cost of car, which in itself is a perpetually depreciating asset.
2. Insurance
3. Recurring service fees
4. Non open market for parts and replacements
5. Price gouging of insurance if found liable in an accident
In my honest opinion, any design that doesn't attack the root cause is an improper one. Please make public transit a clean, safe, affordable and sufficiently widespread in coverage instead of increasing barriers to car ownership and ridership.
I avoid places that don't have free parking almost as assidiously as I avoid places that don't have public restrooms. It's a sign that a place is not for people like me.
"Ohh. Ok. I didn't realize we were doing trick questions. What's the safest way to go skiing? Don't ski!"
Basically the argument here is to stop traffic jams from happening just make it so annoying that people won't drive. Well here in Texas you literally can't get anywhere without driving. Buses don't really run, there isn't public transportation to utilize, and you're going to tell me on a 100F day to ride a bike 15 miles?
Funny, here in Manhattan I have no problems going anywhere without having to drive my own passenger vehicle (that I don't have). Texas made its choice, New York City made a different one, and you can easily compare the outcomes. If you think one is better than the other, then you need to actually take steps in that direction.
New york city has the public transportation and population density of Japan. If Texas made its choice by being the size of Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Austria combined, sure I agree completely...
New York City is actually not a good location for a modern, dense city. The preponderance of rivers is problematic, and makes transit a lot more expensive than it would otherwise be (just look at the cost of new rivers and bridges). Manhattan, Staten Island, and Brooklyn and Queens (on Long Island) are all islands.
Houston and Dallas have much more amenable geography for becoming denser, larger cities with better mass transit. Yet they haven't, because they chose not to.
Which means more wilderness & biodiversity, or more farmland, depending on the area. In Oslo you can ride the subway to the edge of the forest & hiking trails. Some people want to replace the hiking trails with suburbs and detached housing. They're not popular people.
The point of the article is that parking takes up tons of space and costs. These are resources that could go towards more infrastructure, especially public transportation. (buses for example could get their own lane, speeding them up) In my city there are proposals for new bike lanes all the time, but they are never implemented because drivers complain that they would take away parking. In general I feel that the article is mostly talking about cities, but I see no reason why you couldn't have buses and trains in Texas. (sprawl just means that some people might have to walk a bit before accessing these) And I can guarantee you people still cycle in Texas. It just requires bringing ample water and taking precautions from succumbing to the heat.
The rise of punitive solutions is real. I was involved with discussions with local municipalities placing (private) local schools under restrictions for not providing sufficient carpool coverage -- levy fines based on percent of families carpooling.
Would the inverse of these punitive solutions, ie., encouraging carpool / ridesharing, not also work? It always amazes me how relatively unutilized the HOV lanes are.
At least in the east bay, one reason why HOV lanes might run more effectively is that they are also express lanes (limited points at which you can merge in and out). On the other lanes, passing on the right/not passing in the left lanes is ok which slows down merging considerably. Also HOV lanes by definition have twice the (passenger) usage per car, so 2 HOV lanes and 4 regular ones are moving the same amount of people.
It seems to me that you have two choices when dealing with traffic:
1. Make the location less desirable.
2. Make the transportation more efficient.
Obviously nobody wants to do the 1st option, but the 2nd option is more difficult so they stick to the 1st. It seems a little backwards to me, like the goal is simply having less cars regardless of secondary or tertiary negative impact.
I mean the conclusion is already cryptically hidden in the headline. It's just a terrible style. How I, as a non-native writer, would've written it:
Charging money for parking prevents traffic jams
Is there free paying in New York city? I thought parking rates there were astronomical AND the city has a decent public transportation system, and yet traffic is so poor... So there may be more to it than free parking
Depends where you are, but where I live in Queens, and I think in Manhattan, parking is often free on the streets, cheap on the avenues (a buck or two an hr), and the parking garages (privately run) are astronomical in price. So, as you can imagine, drivers spend a very long time circling to find a free spot before biting the bullet and paying for a parking garage. This circling of course adds to the traffic problem. I'm of the opinion that if all street parking spots were metered, and prices were higher than they are now, traffic would be reduced significantly.
Then again, I haven't had a car since living here (10+ years) and don't plan on getting one.
The problem with alternatives to personal cars is that personal cars have many desirable properties:
a) near zero latency to take a trip: if there's not a cab at my curb, I have to request it and wait -- or request it early and hope I'm ready when they are. Buses and trains are usually not waiting for me at the station.
b) proportional penalty for leaving late: if you miss a bus or a train by 10 seconds, you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour. If you leave a couple seconds late in a car, you'll probably arrive a couple seconds late (around rush hour, it gets worse of course). If you don't make it to a requested cab in time, they may leave, and you have to wait for another one to come.
c) availability: a personal car generally provides the same service during the day, at night, and can be used in rain and mild snow (heavy snow, if properly equipped). Busses, trains, and even cabs have less availability at night.
d) flexibility/directness: a personal car can drive to almost everywhere, and can generally take a fairly direct route. Trains only go where there is track, and busses only go where there is a route. Cabs don't always pick up and drop off where you want to go. In case of an urgent change in circumstances, you can change your destination at will in a personal car or cab, but may not be able to easily redirect to where you're going in a bus.