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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[+] [-] toast0|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] notatoad|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kartan|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] closeparen|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yason|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] galdosdi|9 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] massysett|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stouset|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eveningcoffee|9 years ago|reply
e) freedom: you are not told by anybody other if you are allowed to travel or not.
I think this is a fundamental property of personal cars.
[+] [-] snovv_crash|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hannob|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeljkoS|9 years ago|reply
Article I wrote for Vice on that topic: http://svedic.org/philosophy/car-sharing-and-the-death-of-pa...
[+] [-] davidw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magnetic|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] u801e|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Evolved|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlogan|9 years ago|reply
a) people have kids
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...
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbabbage|9 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] wanderr|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stouset|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjevans|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sitkack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mz|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrfusion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhauer|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kevinburke|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] salesguy222|9 years ago|reply
I hope it works but I wouldn't be optimistic that it would
[+] [-] tutufan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avar|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noddingham|9 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=M02&yea...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00004700...
[+] [-] seangrogg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Paul-ish|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xorlev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droithomme|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CodeWriter23|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] johan_larson|9 years ago|reply
It surprised the hell out of me when I bought a condo apartment. No parking spot included.
[+] [-] Jerry2|9 years ago|reply
This title is horrible because it uses a double negation. Here's one without it:
>How to create traffic jams: Let people park for free
Doesn't that read much less confusing?
[+] [-] mankash666|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] daodedickinson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] post_break|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] CydeWeys|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooper12|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarri|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jbangert|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|9 years ago|reply
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.