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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

This article tries to make the (weak) point that there is plenty of parking simply because averages show they spots sit empty most of the time.

But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends.

Cut any of these lots by 25% and you cause real problems.

You could apply the same analysis to home occupancy and conclude that since most homes are sitting empty for 8 hrs a day, we could/should reduce the number of homes by 25% and be none the wiser.

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>...averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times.

The word, that not enough technical and non-technical people know, that describes this issue is ergodicty:

> an ergodic dynamical system is one that, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states in its phase space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity

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

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

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

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

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

Let there be a gas particle in a box. Now cut the box in half and if the gas particle can exist in all remaining space in the box, the box has had an ergodic transformation.

Non ergodic: Let there be a car on a major highway in a city. Now cut the roads on the highway in half (say for construction). Congestion results and consequently the cars never again move as fast as before. (equivalent to your house of cards)

  def ergodic(f(),x):
      return f(avg(x)) == avg(f(x))

Ah, yes, traffic is non-ergodic. I thought you were suggesting the opposite.

BTW, it looks like you've got a syntax error in your Python example.

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

But they already mostly do. In far-out suburbs, huge mall parking lots aren't competing with anything else, there's plenty of space.

And in downtown cities, parking garages are alreay expensive. $30-50/day in Manhattan, for example. (I would agree that street parking should match garage rates, and not be effectively subsidized, though.)

That seems pretty cheap. How much is rent on a similar amount of space? Remember all the space needed for accessing the spot, administration (if any), too! Or are there different rules for storing cars than people?

(Incidentally, there very much are different rules, and for the most part US cities have worked very, very hard to make it easier to add cars than people).

Well, at $5/sq ft/mo. for average real estate (Manhattan, e.g. a 600 sq ft apt is $3K/mo), and if a parking space is 180 ft, then that's $900/mo., or $30/day, plus overhead/access.

So $30-50/day seems right, especially considering parking garages tend to be underground, no plumbing, etc., so the space is presumably cheaper than residential/office.

If you build only one story above the parking space...

Where I live (Los Angeles), parts of parking lots are rented out for other things. You often see radio station promotions, paper shredding companies, and things like that renting parts of the parking lots of grocery stores, etc. at off-peak times.

My employer, however, does not rent their parking lot out after hours. They might be able to make some money if they did, though.

If it wasn’t economically efficient, they wouldn’t exist.

My uncle runs a small parking lot in a central business district. He clears a very healthy living working 5:30-9 five days a week, plus events. When he is ready to retire, he can sell it for a couple of million dollars or pass it on to his kid.

Most older central city parking is like that... modest income to cover taxes and expenses to park the property for future speculation or security for loans. Newer ones are usually part of another development and are tax exempt or taxpayer funded.

The malls were very economically viable in the 80s and 90s. In my areas, malls whose bonds are getting paid off are in-filling the outer areas of the property and some lots with the current hot real estate hustle... hotels and giant gas stations.

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

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

Exactly. I'm all for mass transit replacing cars and parking... but this article falls flat on its face trying to argue that not-enough-parking is an illusion.

Even on Black Friday many mall parking lots are far from full. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/27/highlights-fr...

I'm not sure how much that tells you. There are plenty of moribund malls around. I'll probably be able to find plenty of parking outside JC Penney or Toys R Us at the one near me any day of the year. There are other local malls I'm not going anywhere near after about mid November.

Yeah, malls are dying, and they're almost certainly not paying enough for the value of all that empty parking. Land value tax!

The dying malls are mostly in less affluent and more rural areas where land isn't in especially high demand. That's certainly the case with the one fairly near me.

Folks on this board might be familiar with Valco, a mall which has been dying for thirty years. Smack in the middle of Cupertino, which no-one would describe as less-affluent or more-rural.

Paying who enough exactly?

Dying malls get liquidated and repurposed if it's economically viable otherwise they just sit there as a giant husk of "what was" because it hurts no one for them to merely exist.

It hurts society, but when the damage is spread out over tens of thousands of citizens, it can take a lot of effort to distract them from their day of work and taking care of kids to come together and decide to raise enough money to purchase the empty land and turn it into a park or something the community can use like dense living and services people want.

Just because something exists doesn't mean the market is working. Central Park doesn't exist because it was "economically viable", some things are difficult to put in monetary terms and especially when it requires voters to get together to come to a concensus.

The empty mall lot owner can probably keep re-financing the land and using it as a piggy bank since property values are on a tear in the Valley...what do they care how little value it provides to nearby and prospective residents.

source: a few cherrypicked tweets

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